Tag: purposeful assignments
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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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Enduring and Public: Blogs as Purposeful Assignments
In today’s post, we’re going to look at two instructors who have used VIUBlogs to facilitate purposeful assignments that both give students meaningful choices and have lasting, public relevance beyond the length of the course.
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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…