SciLIFT August Newsletter

No Images? Click here

faculty_of_science
 

SciLIFT September Newsletter

 

The Science Education & Learning Innovation Facilitation Team (SciLIFT) exists to enrich the undergraduate learning experience through inspiring and empowering faculty to embrace proven instructional strategies and harness emerging learning technologies, ideologies, and innovations. 

 Feel free to share this newsletter with your colleagues, or ask them to join the e-mail list here.

 
 

Our Blog

If you want to read the latest Blogs, we invite you to visit the SciLIFT website.

Latest Blogs are: Visit to Digital Scholarship Centre,  My Top Two Teaching Tips and The Role of the Instructor

We invite guest bloggers, please send an e-mail with proposed topic of your guest blog! We share exciting news also via Twitter, please follow SciLIFT.

 
 
Presentations

Back to Teaching Week

Thanks to all participants and presenters!!!

SciLIFT offered for the first time a four day event with seminars and presentations to our academic community.  Close to 60 professors, instructors, TAs, Lab coordinators, and other instructional staff participated in seminars with variety of innovative and educational topics such as: The importance of the syllabus presented by our Instructor of the Month Erik Rosolowsky; ePoll & Lock Exam by the IST team;  a demonstration of the Interactive Learning Objects as pedagogical assets for online learning produced by our MOOC facilitators . 

We thank everyone for their participation in this event, and we look forward to working with you in the future on your teaching and learning projects!

The feedback from participants was very positive, and based on this experience we are going to come back next year, a week before classes, with new workshops and seminars for our academic community and in particular for the new members of our Faculty.

 
 

Teaching and Learning Journal Club

The Science Education & Learning Innovation Team (SciLIFT) is organizing a monthly get together for faculty and instructional staff to discuss articles on effective teaching and learning practices from the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), Higher Education, and Science literature. Please join us for these discussions! 

There will be one 1 hour session held each month on Mondays from 12-1 pm at CCIS 3-003 (bring your own lunch). 

Here are the dates for Fall 2019:
September 23
October 21
November 18

Register here for the first session. 

We will update the journal article to be discussed before each session, so attendees can read the article ahead of time and come prepared! 

If you would like to recommend an article or journal for us to discuss, please email mjgreene@alberta.ca 

Hope to see you there!

 

Teaching and Learning Brown Bag

Reminder: The first Faculty of Science Teaching and Learning Brown Bag is Friday, September 13th from 12-1 in Biological Sciences P 116, featuring Alex Brown and Sarah Styler (see details below).

All of the sessions are on Fridays from 12-1pm. Our upcoming sessions include speakers from all seven Science departments. Please note the schedule for the year below (and click on each date to add the event to your Google calendar). We will update the speakers, topics, and locations as they are scheduled. To access the entire Teaching and Learning Brown Bag calendar click here or go to the website here: http://sites.psych.ualberta.ca/jpassey/faculty-of-science-teaching-and-learning-brown-bags/

- September 13th (in Biological Sciences P 116)
Alex Brown: CTL Peer Consultation Program
Sarah Styler: Particulate matters: Exploring air quality in the third-year environmental chemistry classroom

- October 4th 
(location TBA)
Greg Sivakoff: Astronomy & the media: An example module to engage senior undergraduate science students in writing.
Elena Nicoladis: Project management for psychology honours students

- November 1st 
(location TBA)
Erik Rosolowsky: Lab development
Maya Evenden: Development of BUGS 101 a new massive open online course on insect-human interactions

- December 6th   
(location TBA)
Terry Gannon: Multimark exams
Christine McDermott and Alex Brown: Research courses and a focus on student development

- January 17th 
(in Biological Sciences P 116)
John Waldron: Topic TBA
Vladimir Michaelis: Evolving the Undergraduate Research Experience: A look into 3rd and 4th year Chemistry Undergraduate Exposure

- February 7th 
(location TBA)

Eleni Stroulia: Teaching a Team- and Project-based Capstone course with Real-World Clients: Some Do's and Dont's
Mirko van der Baan: PollEverywhere - Interactive powerpoint presentations
TBA

- March 13th 
(location and topics TBA)
Sadaf Ahmed
TBA

- April 17th 
(location, speakers, and topics TBA)

If you would like to present on your own teaching strategies, please email jpassey@ualberta.ca.

Students: If you would like to receive a letter of attendance for the Teaching and Learning Brown Bags (for professional development records, or the FGSR Graduate Teaching and Learning program), we are happy to provide one upon request for anyone who signs in at the sessions. Please contact Jennifer at jpassey@ualberta.ca .

Looking forward to seeing you all there,
Jennifer Passey and Anna Rissanen

 

 
Add your resource here

Learning Repository

Faculty of Science will start a project on collecting and sharing learning resources with all instructors across the Faculty.    

Do you have animations, videos, apps, websites, and other learning objects that might help your colleagues in teaching?
We encourage you to share teaching material that others can use by filling the form.

SciLIFT at Dean's Office will create a Learning Object Repository database.
The goal is to create a repository which can be accessed by all the faculty members that is easily searchable and useful. Please use searchable tag words, and provide context in the object description.
Feel free to share learning objects ranging from interactive images, graphs, pictures, video links, diagrams, etc. to research paper articles and even relevant lecture notes.

 
 
Register Here

Welcome to the Technology & Pedagogy Reading Club

SciLIFT will also offer another journal club called “Technology & Pedagogy Reading Club”. Mauricio proposes this article for the first “Technology & Pedagogy Reading Club” to explore the examples proposed by the article and refers to our own experience here at the Faculty of Science.

The proposed article is:

Best Practices in the Use of Technology to Integrate Core Skills into Course Content, from Contact North, Online learning. They present, in their August newsletter publication, this article about the best practices recorded in other Canadian Higher Education Institutions on the use of technology integration based on a list of core skills that we can find in our teaching practice.

The core skills proposed on the paper are:

• Teamwork and collaboration;
• Critical thinking and problem-solving;
• Independent and continuous learning;
• Communications;
• Innovation and initiative;
• Information and Media Literacy;
• Intercultural skills

We will discuss how those core skills have been integrated into online course content, delivery, and/or assessment in our teaching practice.

When: Friday, Sept. 27
Hour: From 12 to 1 Pm
Where: CCIS 5-204
Register here!

This meeting will be facilitated by Mauricio Rivera-Quijano, educational developer at FoS.

If you would like to recommend an article or journal for us to discuss, please email riveraqu@ualberta.ca

 
 

Test analytics: Are your exams assessing what you think they are?

Are you looking to improve and refine your existing test? Students say your test is too hard, the faculty says it is too easy. How do you find that goldilocks zone? SciLIFT can help by individual consultations to get more out of your learning analytics.

Send us an e-mail to get more information! (john.hoang@ualberta.ca)

 

Dino 101 MOOC

SciLIFT’s Science MOOC Coordinator and paleontologist, Gavin Bradley, was interviewed on CBC radio about the influence of Jurassic Park on the current generation of paleontologists, and how he hopes the FoS Paleontology MOOCs like Dino 101 could similarly inspire a whole new generation to pursue a career in fossil finding! Listen to the in-studio interview on Edmonton AM here, or read the news story at CBC.ca                                                                          

For any questions about the Faculty of Science MOOCs, please contact Gavin Bradley, Science MOOC Coordinator: scimooc@ualberta.ca

 

BUGS MOOC

The department of Biological Sciences has recently launched it's first fully online three credit course, Ent 101 - Insect Human Interactions. One hundred students are taking this course this semester, accessing the course content through Coursera.com (under Bugs 101) and participating in a virtual class via eClass.

The learning experience is supported by a series of supplementary materials, assessments, and activities designed specifically for online students, as well as a complex interactive pest management simulation designed to test a student's knowledge. Almost the entirety of the course is taken online through eClass and Coursera, including readings, discussions forums, video conferences, assignments - everything except examinations. From the pest insects that can decimate our resources to the beneficial predators and parasitoids that control these pests, Ent 101 provides a broad investigation of insect biology and the variety of ways these creatures impact our daily lives.

Bugs 101 on the news!

First one is at this link at ~13:40 https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1587497539742
Second one is at this link at ~22:25 https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1595359299779

For any questions about the Faculty of Science MOOCs, please contact Gavin Bradley, Science MOOC Coordinator: scimooc@ualberta.ca

 
 

iClicker is gone, Welcome to ePoll

ePoll is a new technology tool available for instructors, since this summer at University of Alberta. You can build a survey in advance and delivery direct to the class without a specific device, students can use tablets, phones or laptops to answer and receive automatically the statistics from each response.  

Also, the instructor can decide to make gradable the interaction and send directly to eClass the set of questions almost in a transparent process.

You can access directly the guidelines to learn how to use and deliver questions using ePoll.

Creating and managing Epoll questions

ePoll Basics and Quick Poll Delivery

If you need further assistance, please book your appointment with one of our Educational Developers here:  Book your appointment here!!!

 
 
Click here to access

Update on the University of Alberta´s Opening Up Copyright Instructional Module Series

The team behind the University of Alberta’s Opening Up Copyright instructional modules is pleased to share another update on the series.

This past summer four new instructional modules have been created. The new modules (only one of which stars puppets) are:

·  Finding Open and Creative Commons Content
·  Photocopying in the Library
·  Moral Rights
·  Section 41: Technological Protection Measures

Our “Public Domain” module has been rebuilt and improved, based in part on community feedback

There are now a total of 18 modules available, with over two hours of instructional content.

All of the modules can be found here: https://sites.library.ualberta.ca/copyright/

 

 
FacebookTwitterYouTubeInstagram
Science Education & Learning Innovation Facilitation Team (SciLIFT)
Faculty of Science
University of Alberta
CCIS 5-181
(780) 492-1414
scitl@ualberta.ca
Unsubscribe