News

Greetings Concordia! I’m Daniel Braun, your new Educational Developer, here to help facilitate the sudden shift we’re all experiencing into online and distance teaching and learning. The whirlwind of my first two weeks is almost done, and it’s been wonderful getting to know some of you already. As I meet more of you over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be developing resources – documents, short videos, workshops, and more – about research-based, best practices in online course design and teaching, tailored to the needs of CUE’s communities. In the meantime, I wanted to recommend a few of the excellent resources already available online that address some of the issues and concerns I’ve already heard about. You’ll need to read these judiciously, as they sometimes refer to unfamiliar technologies that aren’t part of CUE’s learning environment, such as D2L and Blackboard. Specific technologies aside, the principles and general guidelines in these resources are excellent and should serve as a useful starting point for many of you!

First up is a far-reaching (but short) document by 3 ground-breaking scholars in online teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, compiled just last month as universities undertook the rapid shift to distance teaching. It does an excellent job of presenting fundamental, research-based principles for high-quality university teaching, and then suggests ways to operationalize them online in our contemporary circumstances. It’s the best place to start. Secondly, I strongly recommend this virtual workshop recently created by Kim Peacock and other members of MacEwan University’s Office of Teaching and Learning Services. It’s an amazing, soup-to-nuts online tutorial that explores the practicalities of almost every aspect of quickly and temporarily shifting your course online. Not all the technologies Kim discusses are available at CUE, but this is still the best, most compact tutorial of its kind I’ve come across. Finally, for those of you just wanting some guidance on online assessment, the Teaching and Learning Centre at the University of Alberta has put together a brief one-pager that outlines some of the most important things to consider and avoid for remote exams.

That’s all for now. Please feel free to contact me directly at otl@concordia.ab.ca any time with questions about your specific courses or plans, and keep an eye on Inside Cue for more announcements and resources. Stay healthy!