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?
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.
Opening Keynote: I will discuss the overall trends in higher education and what we are likely to see post-pandemic. This will include trends such as blended learning, microcredentials, and a rise in learning analytics.
The move to online delivery meant that the curriculum for CIV550 Water Resources Engineering needed to undergo substantial restructuring. Throughout the course, a Group Floodplain Mapping project served as a teaching tool that linked Lecture materials all term. Students were introduced to numerous GIS webtools, R (a statistical package), OTTHYMO (a hydrologic modelling program) and HEC-RAS (a hydraulic modelling project) through asynchronous modules and applied these analysis tools to evaluate flood risks to an Ontario community.
When you have to continually pivot, is it possible to plan with uncertainty in mind? I have found ways to teach online more effectively using 5 steps - using a teaching team, having students as partners, re-assessing learning outcomes, understanding academic integrity issues and leveraging existing edtech. These 5 steps were applied to every assessment in a variety of courses and allowed me to streamline how to reduce the time on assessment creation (i.e.
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.
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.
Transitioning to remote teaching is hard, delivering a hands-on design course remotely could be harder. This year we redeveloped a hands-on project course - MSE398 Materials Manufacturing and Design Lab - to include both virtual and physical components. I will be sharing how we ran the course and some lessons learnt.
The EdTech Workshop is a free event for faculty, staff and other members of the University of Toronto community. We invite you to join us for an informal but jam packed day of sharing ideas, learning from each other, and yes, doing a little commiseration after a pretty challenging year. While we wouldn't say this is an "unconference," we do focus on conversation, connections, and interaction and are working hard to take our in person event online in the same spirit!
Which virtual background fits you best? You can go the route of theme - are you a recycler, a reuser, or a reducer? Or perhaps this is your very first EdTech Workshop (or your fifth!)? Let fellow attendees know a little bit more about you with a virtual background. While it's not one of our fancy (and dare I say institutionally-famous) nametags, it is something to mark the day! (Bit harder to hang up without a lanyard though...) Bnous points if you customize your own!
