University of Western Ontario COED 2009 Update

From OUCEL Wiki

Teaching Support Centre - COED Meeting, November 2009

Successes

Two new purple guides were published - The Western Guide to Curriculum Review and Mentoring Graduate Students Across Cultures. Both guides can be downloaded from our website at: http://www.uwo.ca/tsc/purpleguides.html

New e-manual was published entitled Communication Strategies for International Graduate Students: Surviving and Thriving on Canadian Academia. Available for purchase from Western’s Book Store. For information, go to: http://www.uwo.ca/tsc/csigs.html

New journal The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning was launched this fall in collaboration with the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE).

Multi-university study of faculty engagement in teaching development was completed. Phase one results are published on the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) web site.

HEQCO funded bioliteracy project in the Faculty of Science was completed.

Women in Academe conference occurred in which over 80 women from graduate students to full professors spent the day discussing critical issues in the lives of female academics.

Expansion of discipline-specific workshops for teaching assistants to seven departments in four faculties.

Demand for our twenty hour, intensive TA Training Programs (TATP) has doubled.

Instructional Skills Workshop for Faculty was offered twice.

New look of our Reflections newsletter http://www.uwo.ca/tsc/pdf/Reflections_61.pdf

Developed many more online resources. In tracking the data from June 2009 to the present (using Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics), we have had close to 18,000 individuals access our web site (about half from the Western community and the other half from the rest of Canada, the US and beyond, such as China, Tanzania).

To increase our interactions with faculty and graduate students, we have recently started a blog (http://www.uwo.ca/tsc) on everything from beginning year dialog on “September what can I change?” to “How I read widely and avoid information overload”. We hope that our blog will allow us to respond in a timely fashion to current teaching issues and also allow folks to spend time with us online when they have the time.

New MOU - This year we have signed a memorandum of understanding with the organization Academics for Higher Education Development (http://www.ahed-upesed.org/) a non-governmental agency that works in developing countries to facilitate the growth of higher education and welcomes faculty and staff from Canadian universities to volunteer.

Goals for Upcoming Year

Develop trainer abilities for several of our staff in teaching how to do the Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW). This will allow us to increase the number of ISWs offered on our campus. We have recently expanded our offerings of the ISW to the graduate students, so this will help us to increase the number of students and faculty who will be served.

Offer Summer Intercultural Training Design Work – a three-day workshop for educational developers who work with international graduate students and faculty on principles and practices of intercultural training design, with microteaching role plays, training tools for faculty development across cultures, and individual consultation on Intercultural Development Inventory.

Continue expansion of the SoTL learning communities. For 2011 we are starting to work on preliminary plans to host a SoTL and Science conference. This is being done in conjunction with the Faculty of Science.

Develop recommended strategies for formative feedback from both undergraduates and faculty members to improve TA performance, and develop online case studies on ethics for TAs that faculty in departments can use in in-house training.

Implement final stage of the 360 Graduate Student Professional Development, identify best practices for the evaluation of TA performance.