Work

I guess that makes it official. I've got a few new episodes planned out. Looks like there's no chickening out now…

D'Arcy Norman dot net the podcast (AKA TILT: Taylor Institute Learning Technologies), in the iTunes directory

We’re getting ready to roll out the new “Daylight” interface for D2L, which will go live on May 4, 2018. The biggest benefit is a responsive design, which will make the experience on mobile devices much, much better. And, it will also make it more usable through screen readers and other accessibility devices. Also, it’s very shiny.

I’ve given versions of this intro many times in committee meetings, and it’s time to have a quick video version so we can just email people a link. So, after spending a few minutes in our beautiful new audio booth, and a couple of hours messing around with Camtasia…

The Pilot Project was announced in March 2017 at UCalgary Open Education Week, with the call for proposals being released in July 2017. Workshops were held for academic staff interested in obtaining an OER grant. In late August 2017, the UCalgary OER research assistant was hired and committee met and decided on the ten pilot project grant recipients. A list of the recipients and details of their projects can be found here. The project runs until June 30, 2018.

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Wiki.ucalgary.ca is the longest-running learning technology platform at the University of Calgary - I launched it back in December 2004, and it's been chugging along for over 13 years. It's a teenager. Generations old, in internet time.

It started with a blank copy of Mediawiki, and an edit button. Over 13 years, 1,871 pages were created (for everything from faculties and departments, to collaboratively published articles for student projects to resources for organizing courses and programs). 71,393 edits were made (many of those were reverting spam attacks, however).

I'm looking to add another member to the Learning Technologies Group in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and learning. It's part of a really amazing team, and will involve consulting with instructors, providing advanced technical and pedagogical support for the integration of learning technologies, and the development of resources and programs to support the work of the team.

It's a limited-term position, and we're looking to hire quickly. If you know someone who would be awesome for this, please share the posting with them. If you are someone who would be awesome for this, please apply!

This is a program we launched in Fall 2017, to coordinate programming offered by the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning for graduate students who are interested in developing expertise in university teaching and learning.

It's run on the badges.ucalgary.ca platform built by my team (go, team!), as well as D2L courses for online content and discussion. As grad students work through the program, they earn badges for completing a set of workshops or sessions in an area of focus:

We've been learning more about Indigenizing the university, and how we might approach that as an Institute. This article by Gabrielle Lindstrom is a great overview.

Indigenous pedagogy, which refers to a way of teaching using Indigenous educational principles, is grounded in creating, fostering and sustaining good relationships between student and teacher. Teaching moments are found in the human-to-human interactions which are reciprocal — my students understand that I have certain knowledge and experience they can learn from and I understand that I, too, can learn from my students.

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This won't be a big mopey retrospective, but I thought it would be useful to document some of the major things that happened this year. It's been a doozy. In roughly chronological order…

• My team continued to be awesome. I'm so fortunate to be a part of such a diverse, thoughtful, and insanely productive team.
• The Taylor Institute hosted the 2017 University of Calgary Conference on Post-secondary Learning and Teaching. I hosted the Ignite sessions. It was fun. We'll be doing that again.
• I was co-author of an article about using a humanoid robot to teach people to assemble mechanical gearboxes, published in ACM HAI 2017.
• We launched an OER pilot program at the UofC. 10 small grants were given out, to help 10 instructors find, adapt, adopt, or create open educational resources in their courses. We deliberately selected courses with a broad range of disciplines and levels - everything from large first-year courses all the way up to small senior grad courses. We'll be using what we learn through the pilot to make decisions about how we can support open education (and OERs) more broadly as a university.
• I got some health news.
• We wrapped up the first round of EDU strategic planning process, as documented in the department's ePortfolio.
• I finished the coursework portion of my PhD program with a 4.0 GPA. Go figure. Now for the easy part. Candidacy, research, dissertation and defence. *cough* The coursework was an amazing experience - working on everything from connecting research methods in performing arts to SoTL, to programming a humanoid robot to reproduce a recorded performance, to playing with data and information visualization.
• We're about to launch a new "Learning Technologies Advisory Group", which will make it much easier to make recommendations for how the learning technologies and platforms offered by the UofC can be adapted and enhanced to make the teaching and learning experiences better.
• Probably a bunch of other stuff that I'm forgetting at the moment. It was a big year.

Adapted from the popular Food Network game show, four teams will battle it out, generating innovative learning designs in real time before the audience and a panel of judges. Course by course, teams are "chopped" until one remains. The challenge? Teams have only minutes to plan amazing student learning experiences with a basket of mystery ingredients. Then at the sound of the buzzer, they head to the chopping block to face our panel of expert judges: Leslie Reid (Vice-Provost Teaching and Learning), Nancy Chick (TI Academic Director and University Chair of Teaching and Learning) and Richard Sigurdson (Dean, Faculty of Arts). On the chopping blockEach team is a dynamic combination of University leadership and TI staff. Come cheer them on!

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Knowledge shared is knowledge gained. Explore how we teach and how we learn and how we bring teachers and learners together in new and engaging ways.

Source: How we teach and how we learn | Explore passing the torch

This is a cool new website that was just launched by the University of Calgary. It points to several really interesting initiatives and articles by leaders across the university. Definitely worth spending some time reading the full website…

These grants facilitate projects through three structural streams:

• Practice grants: This stream of grants supports our pursuit of professional learning about research-informed teaching and learning. Practice grants are one-year grants, individual or collaborative and can receive funding up to $7,500.
• Lesson study: These grants support team-based studies of a single lesson, carefully developed and studied to promote a significant learning goal. Lesson study grants are one or two year grants for teams of three to six members. Teams can receive funding up to $7,500 per year, to a maximum of $15,000 per year, for the entire team.
• Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: These projects are formal, evidence-based studies to better understand or improve student learning. They can be individual or collaborative and one or two years in duration. Individual projects can receive up to $10,000 per year, to a maximum of $20,000 for two years. Collaborative projects can receive up to $20,000 per year, to a maximum of $40,000 for two years.

Source: 2018 University of Calgary Teaching and Learning Grants call for proposals | UToday | University of Calgary

The Teaching Challenge is a website built by the team at the Taylor Institute, partially inspired by the DS106 Daily Create. The goal is to provide a platform - scaffolding - to give instructors concrete projects to try in their courses. Projects can range from building some media - make a video - to more complicated things like incorporating active learning. Participants post reflections on what they've tried, how it worked, and share with the community. Some very cool stuff. It's started basically as a skunkworks prototype, but is growing to become a foundation of how we do things. I believe this forms an important way for people to take risks and try new things - and, when combined with Badges and ePortfolio, provides a meaningful way to document and develop growth as a teacher.