Author: Tine Reimers
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Increase Student Engagement and Persistence with Team-Based Course Design
Welcome to the Vancouver Island Team-Based Learning Institute, August 15-16-17, 2023 at Vancouver Island University! Early registration is now closed. If you would like to be added to the waitlist in case a participant withdraws, please contact Tine Reimers at tine.reimers@viu.ca Student engagement and persistence depend on many factors, but a bonding experience with other students…
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Difficult Conversations in the Classroom
We’ve all had (or worried about) that experience where the in-class discussion is lively and productive, until a student says something that upsets everyone. How to respond on the spot? How to mend the community that is your classroom after someone has said something ‘out of line’? Or, if the case allows, how to make…
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UnGrading: What is it? How would you DO it?
A few thoughts on grades by people who think deeply about teaching and learning: Grades are not a good incentive.Grades are not good feedback.Grades encourage competitiveness over collaboration.Grades are not good markers of learning.Grades don’t reflect the idiosyncratic, subjective, emotional character of learning.Grades aren’t “fair”. Grades can dampen existing intrinsic motivation, give rise to extrinsic…
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Early Feedback Service
The Early Feedback Service is a mechanism for gathering feedback from your students around midterm—before it is too late to make changes that might improve your students’ learning experience this semester
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Video Quizzes for Formative Assessment
Have you ever caught yourself thinking “Quizzes are so boring! And if they are boring for me, what about my students? If so, video quizzes may be what you’re looking for! They can help you vary the basic question format, target higher level learning and reinforce your formative assessment options.
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Creating Purpose by Letting Students Frame the Questions
For our final blog post on Purposeful Assignments, we spoke with Sandra Johnstone from VIU’s Earth Science Department. Sandra Johnstone’s fourth year Earth Science class was about climate change, and the first thing she did was to have the whole class brainstorm an inquiry question to focus learning for the duration of the semester. After…
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Purposeful Assignments: Encouraging Choice, Relevance and Creativity through Portfolios
In our first blog post on Purposeful Assignments, we laid out some ways you could know if you had created a purposeful assignment for your students. In this post, we are going to look at two variations on a portfolio assignment. We spoke to two instructors (Sylvie Lafrenière and Beth Mclin) and they shared the…
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Design Purposeful Assignments
As we all navigate new ways of teaching and learning, we at the CIEL are hearing a lot of stress from both students and faculty around major assignments. This isn’t all because of hybrid and online learning. Assignments that carry a large percentage of a grade have always been a source of stress for both…
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Teaching with Empathy in the Time of COVID19
We are in uncharted waters, have been dumped in very suddenly: and the water’s cold! All of us—students, faculty and staff—have had our lives upended by the COVID19 virus: schedules have been revamped; kids are home from school; we’re self-isolating so we have to avoid friends and neighbors ‘just in case’; we’re working from home,…
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August 2019 VIU New Faculty Orientation to Teaching
On August 27th, the Centre for Innovation and Excellence offered its bi-annual New Faculty Orientation to Teaching (NFOT) to 30 new faculty at VIU. This day-long session is offered to “new and kind of new” faculty within their first two years of teaching at VIU who are looking for fresh ideas on how to engage…
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Join us for the New Faculty Orientation to Teaching!
Join us! Meet with VIU colleagues, learn more about the students we have at VIU, and connect with the staff who are ready to help with your teaching questions. The event is built around lively discussions with other new (and “almost new”) faculty about what the hallmarks of successful student engagement are, and what tools…
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What is the BSN Partnership for Student Learning Initiative?
The BSN Partnership consists of Bachelor of Science in Nursing faculty members and students who have formed a collaborative team (representing all four years of the program) focused on finding new ways to engage students in thinking critically about nursing issues. The Partnership is designed for faculty and students to work together to collaboratively design…