Category: Assessment
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Set Up VIULearn to Facilitate Student Choice
Giving students meaningful choices about how they demonstrate their learning can help students become self-directed learners who can apply the skills they learn with us in their future endeavours. However, for instructors in an online learning environment, giving meaningful choices can quickly become a logistical nightmare. Thankfully, there are things you can do to facilitate…
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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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New VIULearn Rubric Creation Experience Available for Opt-In
It’s a new year and we are kicking it off with some big improvements to the Rubrics tool in VIULearn. A new Rubric Creation Experience is now available for instructors who wish to opt in. The new experience makes it easier than ever to put your rubrics online. Keep reading to learn what’s new and…
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Tao of Marking: Caring For Students through Unmarking Your Courses
Photo by David Emrich on Unsplash The Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning at Vancouver Island University is putting on a series of activities this year about marking and grading. We are asking faculty to examine their marking and grading practices, and consider how best to align these processes with perspectives and techniques that make caring for…
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VIU Teaching and Learning Conference: Registration Filling Up Fast!
VIU Teaching and Learning Conference: Celebrating Impactful Assessment Wednesday, May 10 – Friday, May 12 Conference Website: bit.ly/viutlc2017 Program Sessions: Link (online schedule that allows you to bookmark sessions you may wish to attend; adding sessions to your schedule does not mean you are registered – please still complete the registration for each day you wish…
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I have to get an A on this!
by Rob Ferguson, Teaching Faculty Member and Co-Chair, Department of Recreation and Tourism Management, Faculty of Management, VIU Our current higher education system has created a culture where the almighty ‘A’ has somehow lost some of its sheen. I’m confident that most, if not all, university educators have been confronted with the student who asserts…
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What’s the purpose of higher education?
by Andrea Noble, Online Course Support Assistant, Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning (CIEL) 100% Human Connection If the purpose of higher education is to gather information, the Internet would’ve replaced teachers by now. When teachers bring the human element into the classroom, students experience transformational learning. Ideally, we should inspire each other to…
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The Post-Assessment Reflection (PAR)
by Jessie Key, Teaching Faculty Member, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Technology, VIU As an instructor, it is really frustrating and disappointing when students receive back a marked assessment (Quiz, Test, Report etc.), look at the grade and then shove it directly into the back of their backpack; never to see the light…
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Writing Examinations
by Jessie Key, Teaching Faculty Member, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Technology, VIU As a newer teaching faculty member, I find one of the most difficult and time consuming parts of my job is writing and marking exams. By comparison, preparing lecture material seems much easier to me. As a subject matter expert,…
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Group Exams – A Testimonial
by Sandra Johnstone, Teaching Faculty, Faculty of Science and Technology, VIU Finally jumping on the bandwagon I’ve been intrigued by the idea of group exams for a while, but hadn’t got around to testing out the idea in any of my classes. I think that students can learn a lot through discussions with their peers,…
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Think Outside the Dodecahedron Part 1
by Anna Atkinson, Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Vancouver Island University I love the word dodecahedron, and boxes are a bit boring even when you’re thinking outside them. Besides, the term “think outside the box” suggests that to this point, only one model has been tried: the box. Teaching is about always…