Does participation in a reflective teaching development program transform educators? In a three-year teaching development program, faculty met in small interdisciplinary groups with peer facilitators and used online resources to complement their learning activities. The first two cohorts of participants found that involvement in a teaching…

Concussion is a functional brain injury that can produce physical, cognitive, emotional and sleep-related symptoms that impede student learning. The Return-to-Learn protocol is effective for elementary and high school-aged students, but it is difficult to implement in a postsecondary setting as it requires a level of monitoring not generally…

In this expository essay, four faculty members co-reflect on the pedagogy used within one first-year course at a small Canadian university. We discuss the responsibility of facilitating five process-based pedagogical approaches. These complex and interrelated processes include: i) self-directed learning, ii) reflexive intra-personal learning, iii)…

Course instructors often rely on student participation to increase interaction and learning in the classroom. However, while verbalizing thoughts can help students learn, students in this study felt that frequency of contributions was often rewarded over quality. They called this "verbal diarrhea" and explained how prominent it was in…

This study at a small Canadian university describes the student-centered re-design of a course about social entrepreneurship. The project was aimed at improving students' engagement and satisfaction. Our data suggests that the course redesign improved students' learning experience, clarity of course requirements, and students' self-directed…

Organic chemistry has its own representational language and as with any language, any barrier with the language makes understanding the message difficult. In this article, we describe the design of an open education resource that empowers students to master this language. We also describe the structure and findings of a pilot study designed to…

Podcast assignments in higher education foster students' deep engagement in course content, knowledge construction, technical skills, and problem-solving abilities. We designed a podcast assignment in a First Year Seminar course based on student-led interviews comparing theoretical concepts to lived experiences of the interviewees. Students were…

Educational developers in universities and colleges design, develop, and deliver courses and programs for professors and teaching assistants (TAs) to support teaching and learning in postsecondary institutions. These courses and programs, however, are often not accredited, so the Educational Developers Caucus (EDC) created a working group to…

This paper examines levers or drivers that have influenced the direction of educational development in Canada over the last 40 years and also tries to predict what will be the impact of some current levers on changing the work of developers in the next 20 years. Reflecting on those years, it is apparent our work in the 1980s was very focused on…

In 2016 the 3M National Teaching Fellowship reached a milestone in celebrating the 30th anniversary of the first fellowship in 1986. The fellowship is the premier award of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and each year up to 10 fellows are announced. Thus far, there has not been a systematic review or evaluation of the…

The University of British Columbia-Vancouver (UBC-V) implemented a campus-wide survey of faculty teaching practices and perceptions. All 11 Faculties participated, resulting in a total of 1177 responses for an overall response rate of 24%. We compared response patterns of faculty who reported spending less than 25%, between 26-50%, between 51-75%,…

The aim of this study is to present a narrative literature review of advantages, challenges, and conditions for the success of blended synchronous course delivery mode. For this purpose, we searched the database EditLib and analyzed 16 existing papers from 2001 to 2016. The conditions for success were operationalized in the Master Teacher Program…

The rapid and widespread adoption of competency-based education (CBE) has brought into sharp focus long-standing tensions built into education systems, particularly for graduate and professional schools. We all share the desire to produce graduates equipped to respond capably in a rapidly changing world. However, many of us struggle with the…

Curriculum mapping can be used to document, align, visualize, and assess curricular data, such as learning outcomes, assessment materials, instructional techniques, and student pre- and post-testing scores. A cross-disciplinary Curriculum Mapping Initiative currently underway at the University of Toronto Mississauga aims to: (1) develop guidelines…

Stemming from increased levels of participation and diversity of the student base and from growing scrutiny on the quality of university degrees, governments have begun establishing mechanisms to monitor and support quality in higher education. Faced with administrative quality assurance structures, academics often complain that little is…