McMaster University COED 2008 Update

From OUCEL Wiki

[edit] McMaster University, Centre for Leadership in Learning Nov. 2008

Written, directed, and starring, Paola Borin :^)

[edit] 1. New Directions & Highlights

Dale Roy wins the Christopher Knapper Lifetime achievement award

We are thrilled with the community recognition of the contributions Dale has made to teaching and learning in Canada. As the STLHE award description states, “STLHE created this award to honour individuals who have, over their career, made significant contributions to teaching, learning and educational development in Canadian higher education”. It is wonderful to be recognized by your colleagues.

Dale Roy retires from McMaster

Dale has decided the time was right for a different lifestyle and has retired from McMaster University. Having worked at McMaster for over 25 years, Dale has lead many new initiatives and brought about a considerable evolution of the programs.

Erika Kustra accepts Directorship of the Centre for Teaching & Learning, University of Windsor

McMaster is exporting the talented Erika Kustra to the distant University of Windsor. We fully expect Erika will put her stamp on the programming in her new setting as she did here at McMaster with the provost’s Refining Direction program and the extensive Teaching Assistant development program.

Teaching professors

McMaster is now up to 24 professors with the new class of appointment, “teaching-track”. Known as "Teaching Professors", essentially these are "tenure like" permanent full time faculty positions, where the discipline research expectations have been replaced with something else - educational leadership, more teaching, research on teaching, curriculum development, etc. These are new for us, though there have been a few individuals doing essentially this job for several years. We gathered up all of the recent appointments hired under this title and found the expectations and responsibilities are quite varied. We are now trying to identify other universities in Canada with a similar class of appointment to compare notes on issues such as, expectations, responsibilities, review and assessment procedures.

LMS Review

A major change in LMS is planned for McMaster as we plan for the transition from WebCT 4.0 to the Blackboard/Vista 8 with Community and Content. This will be a huge transition, involving an enormous amount of training and rethinking.

Graham Gibbs: How Assessment affects Learning

How Assessment affects student learning

Universities tend to focus on assessment as measurement and are pre-occupied by issues such as reliability, validity and standards. But all assessment systems have side-effects on how students learn, many of them negative, especially those assessment systems designed primarily to be rigorous and reliable. I am more interested in tolerably good measurement of excellent learning than in good measurement of impoverished learning. The workshop will focus on assessment as teachers' most powerful lever to change and improve student learning. I will describe cases involving dramatic improvements in student performance resulting from changes to assessment methods and invite participants to speculate about why these cases worked. I will articulate a set of ‘conditions under which assessment supports student learning’, based on a range of examples of effective innovations in assessment. The conditions emphasize the role of feedback in learning, the way assessment can capture and orient student effort, and the way assessment changes the quality of student engagement with learning tasks. I’ll illustrate practical assessment tactics that teachers and degree programmes can adopt which embody these principles, at low or zero cost, and participants will be invited to consider the potential of these tactics for their own courses. Finally we will discuss evidence about the effects on student learning of assessment patterns at the level of three year programmes.

Technology Symposium

Our annual Learning Technology Symposium will be held Friday, December 9th. This event, primarily for and by faculty members and instructors, provides an opportunity for instructors from across campus to informally describe interesting ways in which they are using technology to support teaching and learning. You are welcome to join us. Peter Carr, will be our keynote speaker this year, presenting the topic, Rethinking University in the Internet Age. He is the Director of the Masters in Management Sciences in the Management of Technology, delivered online from the University of Waterloo. His research interests are in online collaboration in education, the supply chain and business generally. He has recently been working with World Vision on the introduction of handheld computers to food aid activities in the third world.

[edit] 2. Setting a new course

Down by a director and an educational consultant, the Centre for Leadership in Learning at McMaster will be taking stock and setting a new course in the New Year. The lone survivor, Paola Borin is currently managing to maintain as many as possible of the excellent programs the university has come to expect, manage the unit and provide consulting services to boot. With the input of faculty students and staff from across campus, teaching and learning is being examined by the provost’s “TOTAL”(Task Force on Teaching and Learning) task force.

Review

Graham Gibbs (University of Oxford), Rick Reis (Stanford University), and Julia Christensen-Hughes University of Guelph) will be leading a review/making recommendations for the Centre for Leadership in Learning. What a marvelous opportunity to hear from a very distinguished group. They will be making recommendations to the TOTAL committee who will choose the new path to pursue.