SciLIFT September Newsletter

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.

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!

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.

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)

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!!!

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/