Review EdTech Workshop 2023 Sessions

• Sebastian Goodfellow
• Joseph Sebastian
• Katia Ossetchkina
• Benjamin Kinsella

This presentation will present a framework for the use of course data from several sources to drive iterative course improvement throughout a semester. Results from a pilot project for a large first-year introduction to computer programming course are used to illustrate the use case.

• Annie Hua
• Donny Wong

Join us for an interactive session in which session attendees may get an initial demo and use of the comparative judgement tool, Compare2Learn (C2L). The Application Development Team within Academic, Research & Collaborative (ARC) Technologies has developed C2L to engage learners through leveraging social constructivism using the “think, pair, share” method. This encourages learners to explain, critically analyze and question concepts from their peers.

If possible, Attendees should bring a laptop, tablet or mobile phone to fully participate in this session.

• Justin Fletcher
• Kelly Gordon
• Elias Barboza Polcheira
• Derek Hunt

The Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation has been developing a set of online learning modules that are intended to provide pedagogical guidance and resources for instructors who are teaching in Active Learning Classrooms (ALCs) at U of T called the ALC Hub. In this session, participants will reflect on their current comfort level and experience with teaching in ALCs and have the opportunity to participate in an active learning activity that leverages the affordances available in the classroom. This will be followed by a demo of the ALC Hub modules with an opportunity for Q & A and discussion.

• Prof. Pierre Sullivan

First-year engineering students must complete two in-class assessments for each of their five courses, which means almost one assessment per week for the entire 13-week term. This demanding schedule can cause students to overlook crucial components of other courses while preparing for their assessments. While MIE100 (Dynamics) had initiated support mechanisms before the pandemic, what additional steps can be taken to help these students now? Should we disregard the pandemic’s lessons?

• Prof. Naomi Steenhof

In this session, we will explore how to utilize testing as a tool to promote learning, challenging the traditional perception of testing solely as an evaluation tool. Drawing from research in cognitive psychology, we will investigate how stimulating memory retrieval through testing can enhance the long-term retention of concepts and facts. We will also explore how pretesting can direct attention during later study and promote the encoding of related information. Participants will leave with practical strategies for incorporating test-enhanced learning in the classroom and promoting student success.

• Prajwal Channaiah

1. What is Power Automate?
2. Building blocks of Power Automate
3. Type of Cloud flows
4. Access and self-support resources

If possible, sttendees should bring a laptop to fully participate in this session.

• Prof. Ariel Chan
• Prof. Jennifer Farmer

Health and Safety (H&S) are one of the major components of the Engineering Education, both inherently and directly. In a normal academic year, Chemical Engineering students at the University of Toronto learn chemical and process safety and risk management through hands-on laboratory education, local/on-campus field trips, and case studies. However, during the pandemic, many in-person learnings ceased and were moved to online learning, adding extra challenges and considerations to the delivery methodology and measurement of learning effectiveness. This talk will showcase approaches taken at the UofT to enhance health and safety education in academia during the pandemic and moving forward.

• Steven Bailey
• Michael Nicholson
• Swati Naidu
• Anna Menezes

• Prof. Kamran Esmaeili

Online courses are becoming one of the most popular trends in today’s educational technology. This talk will present the challenges surrounding the design and development of an online graduate-level program along with lessons learned from the process perspective.

• Prof. Karen Smith

Climate change poses an imminent threat to humanity through its increased stress on infrastructure (among other stresses), leading to increasingly deadly natural disasters, food shortages, and the failure of our built environment. Despite the clear need for collaboration between climate scientists and civil engineers to address and adapt to this threat, there are limited post-secondary educational and training resources available to students at the climate science-engineering interface. To address this gap, the University of Toronto’s Centre for Climate Science and Engineering in collaboration with the University of Western Ontario developed a short-duration, online learning opportunity targeted at senior undergraduate and graduate engineering and climate science students at this educational interface. In this presentation, I will discuss the the challenges and successes of this collaborative endeavour.

• Prof. Elham Marzi
• Prof. Philip Asare

This session is about finding shortcuts and easy options to transform classrooms and curriculum into global learning opportunities for students. We will provide attendees an opportunity to learn and explore how every classroom can be global!

The session will provide examples, tools, and opportunities for educators to advance student access to global education and increase student competencies by creating a dynamic, inclusive learning environment. We will discuss and invite attendees to explore the possibilities of adapting their classroom learning environments to include global learning opportunities.

• Alexander Olson

This presentation will delve into the world of large language models (LLMs), such as GPT, highlighting their transformative potential in educational settings while addressing concerns around bias and academic misconduct. In this talk, we will explore the myriad applications of LLMs in education, discuss the ethical implications of their use, and consider strategies for ensuring responsible integration of this powerful AI technology into teaching and learning environments.

• Dr. Susan McCahan

Generative artificial intelligence is altering our relationship with information and agency in ways that have, or will have, a substantial impact on teaching and learning. There are a number of talks at the workshop that will focus on aspects of this impact, such as assessment design. To get this conversation started, I will review the likely types of functionality that either already exist or are likely to come into being in the near term. I will also discuss the steps being taken at the institutional level to support instructors as we navigate this rapidly emerging reality.

Have questions? Prof. McCahan will be available during Session Block 01 (in MY150) for post-session questions and follow up discussion.

• Dr. Nidhi Sachdeva

When students feel overwhelmed, lost and cognitively overloaded, learning is negatively impacted. In fact, it impedes any long-term learning from happening.  So, in the spirit of CTRL +shift and to remove the extraneous, I will be focussing on reducing the cognitive overload on our students as we design instruction. I will do this by sharing some of the fundamental theories to design effective instruction and how we can integrate these theories into practice, especially as we navigate through numerous EdTech tools available to us. I will also share evidence-informed principles of instruction that one can easily integrate for both face-to-face and online learning.

• Kathleen Scheaffer

Each of us are involved in developing, teaching, researching, learning, and leveraging technology to mediate and facilitate our academic, professional, and personal lives.  Drawing upon the work of Dr. David Levy and on-going research, this workshop is designed to provide participants with practical tools and strategies to disconnect from digital distractions, enhance relationships with ourselves and others, and incorporate mindful practices into our technology-rich offices, meetings, classrooms, and day-to-day lives.

• Dr. Steve Treiber
• James Nightingale
• Marc Therrien

Covid19 has permanently upended the way we will learn and work. This presentation presents the results of an experiment in teaching that EdTech and I have been conducting in my entrepreneurship courses in the 2021,2022 academic years.

• Prof. Lydia Wilkinson
• Prof. Ted Nolan

Team-based assignments are valuable opportunities for professional skill development, but they are a challenge to implement. Ensuring equitable work distribution, assessing team process in addition to product, and ensuring students learn about how to structure effective teams (and not just learn that they don’t like them) are key to team project success; however, these become increasingly difficult to achieve when a significant portion of team communication and collaboration is taking place online and outside the supervised classroom environment.

In this interactive workshop, we will share our expertise in team-based project design and assessment from our years of experience designing and running team-based projects in-person and online. We will work with participants to identify and address common obstacles to effective team project design, share tools to support hybrid teaming, help improve course and project administration and reduce instructional overhead, and enable participants to create better environments for team success.”

• Prof. David Suarez
• Alexandra Gustafson

LLMs such as ChatGPT, are widely available, cheap, and have been packaged for use by the general public. This has implications for the writing projects we assign our students. We want to explore those implications, in both practical and theoretical dimensions, with an emphasis on pedagogical issues—in particular, thinking through the very point of writing assignments, and what we hope to teach using them.

• Steve Cox

We learned many things from the recent Pandemic, amongst these was having the ability to record events while also enabling instructors to choose what to record and when/if to release it to students. We also wanted  to eliminate any set up to record.

At the Office of Learning Space Management (LSM), we implemented a system (integrated into Quercus) that allows instructors to record their screens and audio without any extra legwork to set up. OCCS is available in LSM-managed rooms with a full teaching station.

During this session, you’ll see a demonstration of OCCS and review how to enable it in your course.

To use OCCS, the instructors:

1. Opt in to the system
2. Turn up to the space
3. Review the recording
4. Choose to publish (the media produced subsequently is available to members of their course via their Quercus course shell)

• Dr. Bree McEwan

Virtual and augmented reality offer new opportunities to engage in learning experiences. McEwan will discuss her experiences designing coursework that takes advantage of the affordances of these technologies to deliver lessons about communication and technology as well as social theory, movements, and experiences of place.