taylor institute for teaching & learning

University Affairs article on active learning classrooms, with a bit about Michael Ullyot's Shakespeare course in the Taylor Institute: He's taught courses in a similar way in regular classrooms using workarounds to deal with obstacles such stationary chairs and more rudimentary technology. "You can do this in just about any classroom, you just need enough imagination," he says, adding one stipulation: "If I had a banked lecture hall, this would not work. [Read More]

The Taylor Institute has 5 learning studios, designed for active and collaborative learning. People who are using the space have access to some great technology to support their work, including 37 “collaboration stations” (we really need to come up with a better name for those…). Here's a quick-ish demo of the basic functionality provided by the stations, recorded using the lecture capture system built into the learning studios. Technologies mentioned and/or used in the video: [Read More]

Fall 2014 Block Week kicked off today, meaning we just pushed into the 2014-2015 academic year. Holy. The last one is basically just a blur. But, we did a surprisingly epic number of major things as a team ((this was a truly multi-department interdisciplinary team, with folks from the Taylor Institute EDU and Information Technologies working flat out together to get stuff done)): Migrating from Blackboard to D2L in about 8 months, including: building and testing the integration with Peoplesoft & Elluminate designing and conducting workshops to support a couple thousand instructors working to help get the 31,000 FTE student body through the move building online resources to help, at the UofC's elearn website Doing an emergency migration from Elluminate to Adobe Connect, in response to the Javapocalypse of January 2014 Probably a bajillion other things that got forgotten in the blur. [Read More]

The job posting for the position of Director, Educational Development at the new Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning was just published. From the posting: Within the vision for the Institute for Teaching and Learning, the EDU Director will play a key leadership role in guiding the transition of the former Teaching and Learning Centre to an integral component of a more comprehensive institute. The Director will manage and promote a collaborative spirit among all staff within the EDU and between the EDU and the University community. [Read More]