Teaching and Learning News

In November 2012 we spoke with Nicky Didicher, a senior lecturer in the Department of English, about her plan to teach a pilot course in Canvas in January 2013. Recently we checked back to see how she was finding the new learning management system (LMS).

Perhaps not surprisingly for someone who has used and felt at home in WebCT for a number of years, she admits to a certain amount of ambivalence. For now, she’s prepared to say that Canvas is “slightly better” than WebCT. “It just has different pluses and minuses.”

What she likes about Canvas

The “pluses” Didicher lists reflect Canvas’s simplicity and ease of use. Among her likes:

- The clean look of the user interface
- The ability to open and work in multiple courses simultaneously
- The ease of linking to files and external resources

Her students have also commented positively on the look of Canvas and the ability it gives them to view all courses in one place and to see their marks as a cumulative percentage.

The challenges she is facing

The “minuses,” for Didicher, tend to be connected to cases in which Canvas requires her to modify practices that she developed and used in WebCT. For example, unlike WebCT, Canvas provides only a single discussion board. That restricts Didicher’s ability to create multiple discussion groups as she has in the past. Another example is the peer review function in Canvas. Didicher likes the function, which allows students to give feedback on one another’s assignments. However, the tool works only with completed assignments, and she would like her students to be able to comment on draft versions.

For SFU’s Canvas implementation team, the feedback from Didicher and other instructors involved in the pilot project has been valuable in determining priorities for system development. The team recently identified options that will allow instructors and students to organize their discussions in more sophisticated ways, and other capabilities are being added on a regular basis.

The conversion process

What about the process of moving her course content from WebCT to Canvas? Didicher’s PowerPoint files transferred smoothly, but a glitch caused the apostrophes in her HTML content to disappear. More significantly, a glossary she created in WebCT to provide definitions of highlighted words in her course material couldn’t be converted. Fortunately, she says she has received excellent support from the learning technology specialists in the Teaching and Learning Centre.

The implementation team will be hiring additional support staff during the summer semester to help instructors who plan to use Canvas for their courses in fall 2013.

Final thoughts

Given the adjustments that she has had to make, Didicher is glad that she had the chance to test Canvas in a class of 11 students before moving her large courses of 250+ students over in the fall semester.

“I’m by no means technology-friendly,” says Didicher, despite her experience with learning management systems. “I use technology for pedagogical reasons, not personal reasons. [But] if I have to do a slight amount of learning in order to make the classroom experience better, that’s okay.”

Related links

One-on-one Canvas help for instructors: Contact Learn Tech in the Teaching and Learning Centre

Canvas support website for instructors and students: www.sfu.ca/canvas

By Vea Banana, TLC Communications Assistant

Even before SFU selected Canvas as its new learning management system (LMS), history professor Elise Chenier (above) had been looking for something to replace WebCT. Her search led her to the cloud-based version of Canvas. (SFU’s Canvas platform will be hosted on SFU servers and will have slightly different features than Canvas Cloud.) According to Chenier, what sets Canvas apart from other LMSs is the greater ability it gives her to customize and modify its modules and components so that they fit well with the courses that she is teaching.

SFU began piloting its own Canvas platform in January, but Chenier’s own experience goes back to fall 2013 when she taught two courses using Canvas Cloud. She used the LMS primarily to provide assignments and for its calendar and grading functions.

“It allows me to provide additional resources within the module of the week,” says Chenier, and that made it easier for students to find the information they needed for specific topics in the class. Since Chenier was using a cloud-based version of the LMS with content stored on servers outside Canada, she had to obtain consent from her students to ensure that no privacy laws were violated. Despite this extra step, she found that using Canvas was useful and rewarding for her students.

Chenier will continue to use Canvas and she’s looking forward to SFU’s LMS migration: “It’s so normal to use an LMS for classes now, it’s really needed. Nowadays, we manage so much information, and it’s almost expected for us to provide extra creative and scholarly materials to students. It’s just the matter of making that information available and readily accessible to students … I chose Canvas because it’s visually clean and both my students and I find that it’s so much easier to use.”

Canvas support at SFU

SFU recently launched a Canvas support website. Instructors interested in learning more about how to work with Canvas may also contact the learning technology specialists within the Teaching and Learning Centre by email at learntech@sfu.ca or by visiting www.sfu.ca/learntech.

Related links:

Canvas support website (www.sfu.ca/canvas)

Replace WebCT Project website

Learning technology specialists (Teaching and Learning Centre)

By Erin Aspenlieder, TLC Educational Consultant

On January 17, instructors from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) gathered to share “one great idea” for encouraging compelling student writing. Faculty members Alec Dawson, Sean Zwagerman, and Adrienne Burk began the discussion by highlighting approaches that have worked well in their classes.

Don’t invent ideas – discover them

Zwagerman, a member of the Department of English, suggested that writers must “discover” ideas rather than invent them. In encouraging his students to discover, he draws on stasis theory, an approach to writing that leads students through four major lines of questioning: fact, definition, quality, and policy. Examples from each respective category include “What are the causes [of this problem]?” “What is threatened by this problem?” “Whom might it affect?” and “What should be done about this problem?” Zwagerman has found that when his students consider these questions either in discussion or as a pre-writing exercise, they “discover” assumptions about a problem/idea and in turn demonstrate richer analyses.

What do you care about?

Alec Dawson’s premise is that to write well, students need to care – or “give a shit” – about the topic. The richest analysis and most compelling writing emerge when students have something they want to share with an audience. Dawson, a history professor and Director of the School for International Studies, encourages his students to reject the staid emphasis on a “thesis” and determine instead what they care about with respect to a particular topic. Once students have found something that excites, troubles, or confuses them, they are able to use their enthusiasm for the topic to direct their research and guide what they want to say. Writing serves as a means for students to come to a greater understanding of both the topic and their reaction to it.

Think about the audience

The idea of inspiring students to find enjoyment and enthusiasm in writing underlies Adrienne Burk’s writing idea too. Burk, a Faculty Teaching Fellow from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, shared an assignment she uses in her anthropology classes that invites students to analyze “found objects” – ordinary objects from everyday life – and to share, in writing, the social, cultural, and visual elements of the objects. Significantly, she requires them to write for an audience simultaneously similar and dissimilar to themselves: “someone your own age, who is also a college student, but who is not known to you and who lives in another culture and so may not understand your cultural assumptions.” Burk has found that thinking about their audience allows students to discover how writing is shaped by its context. She also noted that an assignment like this one – that is, an assignment that differs from the traditional research essay – requires added classroom support in the form of modelling and the provision of early and regular feedback.

More great ideas

Following these three presentations, the assembled instructors engaged in a lively discussion and highlighted some of their own great ideas for encouraging compelling student writing. A brief sampling of the suggested ideas:

• Invite students to write the same content in several different forms (a blog post, an email, a letter to the editor, a tweet, a poem, an advertisement, etc.).
• Assign students the task of writing or editing a Wikipedia article on a course topic.
• As a class, analyze a common media form – for example, a magazine or a blog – and reconstruct the form using course material. Require students to research and write the content, design layout, and produce the media.
• In student oral presentations, require that the oral presenter assign his/her classmates a writing assignment based on the contents of the oral presentation. If the writing assignment is untraditional, also require the presenter to provide marking criteria.
• Model a writing assignment by completing it yourself. Share your mock assignment with your students and ask them to analyze how/why you wrote the way you did.
• Ask students to provide “meta commentary” of their writing assignments before handing them in; that is, require that they point out in the margins the writing strategies they used in the assignment. Encourage students to indicate where they would like feedback. This strategy can be used as a precursor to peer feedback or to feedback from the instructor.
• Identify a blog that relates to your course topic – for example, a French news blog for a French composition class – and require your students to post a response in the blog discussion forum as if they were a part of that community.

Related links

Adrienne Burk’s profile page

Erin Aspenlieder’s profile page

Audio files of faculty members’ “One Great Idea” presentations and comments:

Sean Zwagerman (English) (10:28)

Alec Dawson (History), Part 1 (8:53)

Alec Dawson (History), Part 2 (2:39)

Adrienne Burk, Sociology and Anthropology (7:44)

Catherine XXXXX (French) (12:05)

Erin Aspenlieder (English) (3:10) – Transposing writing into different forms; combining oral presentations with written assignments for listeners; rubrics for novel forms of writing; writing Wikipedia entries

By Erin Aspenlieder, TLC educational consultant

On September 17, Jill McIntosh of the Philosophy Department opened her classroom to other FASS instructors as part of the Faculty’s Open Classroom Series. Instructors were invited to observe her class and her use of iClicker technology.

IClickers are portable, handheld personal response tools that allow students to key in responses to multiple-choice questions and receive immediate, anonymous feedback as the results are projected. Many instructors imagine that they are useful only in science or engineering classes where material might lend itself better to factual responses. However, McIntosh’s lecture clearly demonstrated their efficacy in Arts and Social Sciences classes, too. McIntosh noted that before turning to iClickers she used to ask students what they thought about a question and would receive no response, but that now she knows whether her students understand the material or whether they need a concept clarified.

Following this experience I am intrigued about the possibilities for using iClicker technology in a large English literature class (my home discipline), but what I have also taken away is a recognition that well developed and deeply engaging questions take effort to construct, even if that effort is well repaid by an engaged class.

This article is condensed from the FASS Open Classroom Series web page. Read the full article here.

NOTE: The next FASS Open Classroom will take place on October 31 from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. in Club Ilia. If you are interested in attending, please contact Erin Aspenlieder at easpenli@sfu.ca.

Related links:

Personal response systems: Articles and resources >>

IClicker technology and privacy issues >>

FASS Open Classroom Series web page >>

Jill McIntosh’s profile page >>

Erin Aspenlieder’s profile page >>

By Erin Aspenlieder, TLC educational consultant

A new set of self-directed online modules allows SFU students to improve their grammar skills outside the classroom.

Frustrated that her students didn’t seem to be learning grammar before enrolling in her 100-level, writing-intensive class, World Literature professor Melek Ortabasi (right) sought a teaching tool to help them brush up on their language skills.

Ortabasi wanted a fast and efficient way to assess students’ understanding of English grammar and to remind them of the importance of using grammar properly. Although she claims to have learned English grammar “by osmosis and excessive reading,” she maintains that there is a crucial need to teach language skills to SFU students so that they can communicate effectively enough to grapple with the complex and pressing issues encountered in their curriculum and in their communities.

When she couldn’t find an appropriate resource, she decided to create her own. The result is a series of online modules developed with English graduate student Cam Fediuk and Christina Drabik of the Teaching and Learning Centre. Each module presents a grammar or usage rule and then quizzes students on that rule. By correcting sample sentences written especially for the project, students not only learn the rules, but also get a taste of the types of sentences that are appropriate to university-level essays. The modules were developed over the past year, and next spring will be Ortabasi’s first occasion to test them with her students.

While similar tools already exist, Ortabasi’s is unique in that it uses examples relevant to SFU students. The examples were created by Cam Fediuk, who drew on the kinds of mistakes students might make in disciplines ranging from literature to anthropology to linguistics. The relevance of these examples and their currency as “real” mistakes make them a particularly valuable resource for SFU students. For instructors, a key benefit of the self-directed tool is that it will permit them to focus on teaching the more complex elements of rich, effective writing during class time.

Ortabasi envisions the quizzes being used in disciplines across the university. Her plan is to assign 5% of the course grade for the quizzes, but she notes that they can be incorporated in any number of ways. The modules are freely available to any SFU instructor; the Teaching and Learning Centre (TLC) will assist interested instructors in importing the modules into the learning management system, and TLC educational consultants will be available to discuss how the quizzes can be integrated into a given curriculum. The TLC has also committed to providing annual updates of content.

If you are interested in incorporating these modules into your own class, or if you have any questions, please contact Erin Aspenlieder, TLC educational consultant, at easpenli@sfu.ca. For help in adding the grammar modules to your WebCT course, please contact Christina Drabik, TLC instructional support technician, at cdrabik@sfu.ca.

Related links:

Description of grammar modules >>

Melek Ortabasi’s profile page >>

Erin Aspenlieder’s profile page >>

TLC website >>

By Erin Aspenlieder, Teaching and Learning Centre (TLC) educational consultant for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

When we think about teaching, we often think of teachers providing students with knowledge or skills, passing on what they know to students’ (ideally) receptive minds. Constructivist understandings of learning attack this idea of teaching and learning as a “transmission” by arguing instead that learning is about students constructing knowledge for themselves. Then the teacher’s job becomes more about setting up the conditions under which students can learn than about transmitting any particular knowledge – sort of like the teacher being responsible for putting out the toys in the sandbox, but the students being responsible for building the sandcastle.

In Teaching for Quality Learning at University: What the Student Does (1999), John Biggs argues, “If students are to learn desired outcomes in a reasonably effective manner, then the teacher’s fundamental task is to get students to engage in learning activities that are likely to result in achieving those outcomes.” His method, termed “constructive alignment,” proposes four steps to encourage students to construct their own learning: describing objectives, articulating levels of understanding, designing activities to achieve those levels of understanding, and developing appropriate assessment tasks that measure the initial outcomes.

The book has been highly influential and has gone through four editions (with the addition of co-author Catherine Tang). If you are interested in how to deepen your students’ learning experiences, this is a resource worth looking at.

Related links:

Access print or online versions of the fourth edition (2011) through the SFU Library >>

Access a print version of the fourth edition at the Teaching and Learning Centre >>

Read the book description (fourth edition) on Amazon >>

View Erin Aspenlieder’s profile page >>

Are comic books literature? Can tweets be treated as poetry? And if so, how do you teach them? Those are the sorts of questions that led Paul Budra and Clint Burnham to write and co-edit From Text to Txting: New Media in the Classroom, a just-released compilation of essays published by Indiana University Press.

Budra is an associate dean in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Burnham is director of the Master of Arts for Teachers of English program. Both are faculty members in the Department of English. They have a solid background in traditional literary scholarship – Budra, for example, is a Shakespeare specialist – but in recent years they have observed that the narratives and stories that engage their students often come from video games, social media, and music rather than books.

Their new book is an attempt to extend the practices of literary criticism, such as considerations of genre and narrative form, to the content of new media. To that end, they invited academics whose work they knew and admired – “cool young literary scholars,” explains Budra with a grin – to contribute essays on particular media ranging from graphic novels to Facebook. Budra and Burnham co-wrote the introduction and contributed chapters.

The theoretical treatments are interesting and provocative, but what gives the book an added dimension is its consideration of pedagogy – the question of how to integrate this new content in the classroom. Each contributor was asked to address that question explicitly. After all, says Budra, “When push comes to shove, you want to be able to teach the stuff.”

To demonstrate the pedagogical emphasis, Burnham cites a chapter titled “ ‘Let the Rhythm Hit ’Em’: Hip-Hop, Prosody, and Meaning” by Alessandro Porco, in which the author compares the beat structure of hip-hop lyrics to traditional poetic forms such as the iambic pentameter that Shakespeare frequently employed. For students, this analysis establishes a bridge to other forms of poetry and provides them with a familiar context for understanding rhyme, metrics, and prosody.

Ultimately, the goal is to understand – and to help students understand – the way new media work. Burnham recalls the growing insight he observed in students during a course in which they considered Facebook posts as a form of memoir. And Budra cites a course in which he challenged students to come up with a definition of literature by presenting them with “a bunch of weird stuff” that challenged the boundaries they set. “The students loved it,” he says emphatically.

“This is the world that our students are living in,” says Burnham. “There’s something going on there. Let’s think about it critically.”

Related links:

Book description and reviews (Indiana University Press) >>

Paul Budra’s website >>

Paul Budra on Twitter >>

Clint Burnham on Twitter >>

From left to right: Kate Slaney, John Bogardus, and Nicole Jackson, three of the four recipients of Cormack Teaching Awards for 2012 …

… and John Harriss, this year's fourth winner.

He’s talking about the process of determining recipients of the faculty’s Cormack Awards for Teaching Excellence, given each year to outstanding instructors within FASS. Fortunately, this year’s awards committee was able to meet the challenge, and Craig recently announced the names of four “truly outstanding instructors” who will receive the honour at the next FASS annual general meeting in fall. The list includes, by design, a lecturer, an assistant professor, an associate professor, and a professor:

• John Bogardus, senior lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology, is an educator wholeheartedly dedicated to creating self-reflective and collaborative learning environments. The former sawmill and steel foundry worker, first aid attendant, journeyman carpenter, and psychiatric nurse focuses on producing ethical, productive, analytically sound, and deeply engaged work that resonates far beyond the classroom.
• John Harriss, professor and director, International Studies, has taught at least twice the required course load since starting to teach at SFU in 2006. He also redesigned the undergraduate major and the MA program in International Studies. According to one student, Harriss is “intimidating in his intellectual accomplishment and approachable in his warm and personable manner.”
• Nicole Jackson, associate professor, International Studies, creates a dynamic and highly interactve classroom by using structured debates, short videos, guest speakers, a core “introductory reader,” and various multi-media sources. One of her most successful teaching approaches involves having students act as a mock UN subcommittee to respond to a scenario drawn from current events.
• Kate Slaney, assistant professor, Psychology, joined the department in 2006 and quickly took on the task of teaching five of the department’s most difficult undergraduate courses. Although students are often apprehensive about large lower-division classes, they have given her exceptionally high ratings, along with praise for “excellent assignments, handouts, and communication skills” and for her ability to “make the boring interesting.”

This post is based on information from the FASS website. Read the full story at FASS Faculty Profiles – Awards and Honours.

John Bogardus’s faculty profile page: www.socanth.sfu.ca/people/john_bogardus/

John Harriss’s faculty profile page: www.sfu.ca/internationalstudies/harriss.html

Nicole Jackson’s faculty web page: www.sfu.ca/internationalstudies/jackson.html

Kate Slaney’s faculty profile page: www.psyc.sfu.ca/people/index.php?topic=finf&id=112

Kate Slaney’s lab website: www.sfu.ca/psyc/faculty/slaney/

Read about the nomination process for the Cormack Awards for Excellence in Teaching.

When Gurpreet Sian and Raakhi Sinha launched their “Popular dance – Introduction to modern and traditional Bhangra” course in September 2010, one challenge was to teach Punjabi dance moves to students with no previous experience. A bigger challenge was to find ways to afford students opportunities to understand Bhangra’s origins and meaning in traditional Punjabi culture, to grasp how Bhangra has morphed from a traditional art form into a worldwide popular dance craze, and to immerse themselves in Vancouver’s vibrant Bhangra scene.

Sinha summarizes the teaching challenge this way: “How do you teach authenticity? How is it that a student can be genuine in doing an art form [when] they don’t understand the culture, they haven’t been brought up in this environment, they don’t eat the food … ?”

Their instructional framework integrated four elements:

• Studio practice
• A course Facebook group with videos to demonstrate choreography
• Community immersion through attendance at Bhangra community events
• A final performance as part of a Bhangra flash mob in downtown Vancouver

In the following interview, Sian and Sinha talk about how they integrated these elements to create a transformational learning experience for their students:

What’s especially interesting is how these instructors moved beyond choreography to offer students an opportunity to explore questions of history, culture, and context while having fun.

What instructional frameworks do you use to assist students to learn about popular culture? How might you use these instructional elements in your own setting?

By Jenn McRae

A faculty member recently said to me, “We keep hearing ‘experiential learning, experiential learning’…as if we’re not doing it…but my gut reaction always is, I think we already do some of that.” I sat across from her, nodding my head, smiling. “Yeah, yeah you do!”

ENVS 491 students collect samples in Kanaka Creek

Nearly half of Faculty of Environment courses provide students the opportunity to learn through doing—the pedagogical approach she refers to as “experiential learning.” This isn’t just because of the applied nature of FENV’s subject matter either; it’s a reflection of the outstanding efforts of faculty, their commitment to innovation in course design and experimenting with pedagogy.

For example, Sustainable Community Development 401 sees students design, develop and pitch ideas for sustainable social enterprises to a mock panel of financiers. In Resource and Environmental Management 656, graduate students study international environment and development in Baja, Mexico. Environmental Science offers their fourth year students the opportunity to conduct collaborative field research and report their findings to local and provincial governments. Undergraduates enrolled in Geography 356 apply skills from the emerging field of geovisulization to manifest their inner worlds in 3-D virtual space via self-directed projects.

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