EdTech 2021 Recorded Sessions

Virtual/online components of a course seem to have value and advantages that cannot be replicated by in-person components. Having had experience with virtual work before the pandemic, I think the pandemic presents an opportunity to motivate the utility of online components. I'll be talking about a class I'm planning along these lines and what I have learned during the forced online mode of operation that could be useful.

What have we learned from our experience in teaching online? What worked, and what did not? What can we use to improve teaching even as we go back to in person lectures? What would an online-course look like in the future, given time and resources to prepare?

This presentation discusses the pedagogical challenges and rewards of adapting a large-enrolment undergraduate music theory course for the online environment. The pre-COVID model of two in-person lectures a week was converted to a model of asynchronous material plus one synchronous online lecture. This new hybrid approach (a flipped classroom) will be carried forward into Winter 2022, even when we return to in-person teaching

The recent shift to online learning, while stressful, may have been a necessary step in the overall improvement of how we conduct assessments. Students have been doing handwritten examinations for hundreds of years, but are they really the best way to gauge a student's understanding of a topic in modern times? In this talk, I will be discussing the limitations of paper-based and existing solutions for online exams and how Examify has become a valuable tool in many courses on campus to improve this experience. I will demonstrate how Examify is also being used as a learning tool to help students get a better understanding of course material outside of the exam room.

The practice of "ungrading," that is, equipping students to evaluate their own work according to instructor-designed guidelines and rubrics, has be gaining some momentum. In this presentation, I will present an example of using "ungrading" in a seminar this past year to illustrate its benefits and limitations.

I will present how I created lecture videos that are as close to the real thing as possible. I will provide examples of the lectures and describe how they were created, including the technology used. Before the session, check out an example video: ECE353 F1 Synchronization Introduction from the course or play the video below (please note that you will need to be logged into MyMedia with your UTORid and password to view the video).

Online learning in 2020 inspired some new thinking on the best ways for students to share their knowledge, and how to engage technology in new ways to create a meaningful learning experience. In this session, we'll share our experience in designing and facilitating a paired podcast assignment, and how we plan to "recycle" this as a teaching and learning practice!

I want to show you how you might use Miro to achieve your own collaborative learning activities. For example: I used dot voting to understand the rhetorical approach used in written proposals. More importantly, I can tell you how to avoid making the same mistakes I made in creating these whiteboard workshops.

I am going to talk about aspects of online teaching I learned about in the last year that I plan to keep once I move back to a TEAL classroom. Our TEAL classroom in the Bissell building is equipped with wireless touch screen technology and I want to show how additional equipment and online tools I acquired to teaching online during the pandemic will be beneficial for TEAL teaching in hybrid or in-person courses.

What's it like to welcome the first all-online class of First-year Engineering students to UofT? What's it like to do so having near-zero experience in online teaching, especially when you're doing so from your living room? Going from 0-to-1100 real quick also means meticulous planning, from tech equipment to course design and pedagogy. Here's what it was like, and what we learned... and unmuting oneself is just the tip of the iceberg.