Upcoming ADC Workshops

Join us for one or all of these short sessions designed to increase your comfort with Universal Design for Learning.
 
Upcoming session: Perfectly Pitched (February 9) Although Universal Design for Learning principles are designed to be universally applied, different contexts certainly call for different approaches. In this session, we'll discuss pitching UDL for the level of the course and stage of student development.

Facilitators: Janalee Morris (Accessibility Services)
                   and Andrea Phillipson (ADC)
When: Tuesday, February 9, 10:00 - 11:00 am -- Read more & Register
            Tuesday, March 9, 10:00 - 11:00 am -- Read more & Register
            Tuesday, March 30, 10:00 - 11:00 am -- Read more & Register

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

With another term of remote teaching ahead, you may have questions about applying student accommodations in this unique environment and teaching online in an accessible way. You’re in luck! ADC and Accessibility have teamed up to offer a range of asynchronous resources and a synchronous Q&A session (30 minutes). 

Facilitators: Juliana Walker (Accessibility Services)
                   and Andrea Phillipson (ADC)
When: Thursday, February 11, 10:00 - 10:30 am      

In this discussion series, we will learn from each other's strategies and approaches to succeed in teaching your courses remotely. Each session will focus on a particular topic; register for each one as you see fit.

Facilitator: Luciano Santos
When:  Session 3: Fostering Collaboration among Students
            Thursday, February 11, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm 

Are you interested in learning how GIFs and memes can be used to enliven online communication or help students to bring to life their analysis skills? In this session, we’ll explore a variety of ways to integrate GIFs and/or memes in remote teaching and learning.

Facilitator: Erika Smith
When: Friday, February 12, 11:30 am - 1:00 pm                      

Are you looking for ways to enliven your real-time online classes? “Liberating Structures are easy-to-learn strategies... They quickly foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone”  (McKandessm 2015, liberatingstructures.com, CC BY).  Join us for an immersive experience, where you will experiment with up to four Liberating Structures. 

Facilitator(s): Pattie Mascaro and Amanda Veinotte

You can sign up for an individual session or all in the series:
Session 1: Tuesday, February 16, 9:30 - 11:20 am -- Read more + Register
Session 2: Wednesday, February 17, 2:30 - 4:20 pm -- Read more + Register
Session 3: Thursday, February 18, 9:30 - 11:20 am -- Read more + Register

Despite being isolated in our homes, this program will bring faculty together virtually to set them up for writing success during the winter reading break. Registrants will work independently to achieve their writing goals, with access to resources, a writing specialist, and short, daily peer group meetings to discuss their projects and progress.

Feeling the online blues? Would you like to be more engaged with your students? Come join us for this session, where we will apply active learning principles and explore approaches for designing activities that can be quickly implemented into your courses to increase student engagement.  Please bring your course outline with you to the session.

How can I provide quality feedback on student writing with my limited time? How can I get students to read it? What tools should I use? These common questions feel even more pressing in the current remote environment, so join us to explore how you can apply tried-and-true effective feedback principles to keep your workload manageable and support student learning.

Turn hump day into the “write” day to keep your scholarship on track! During each 3-hour writing session, the first 30 minutes will be dedicated to an online, synchronous peer discussion. In the remaining time, participants will write in a location of their choice, and will have the opportunity to book a consultation with a writing specialist.

Additional MRU Offerings

This session explores why students don’t read required texts and common strategies for encouraging reading compliance before suggesting we reframe the question of why students don’t read to focus on why they do. Participants will be asked to consider how to increase reading motivation in face-to-face and alternate delivery contexts. 

Facilitator: Karen Manarin, PhD
Professor and Board of Governors Teaching Chair in Advanced Literacy

Getting Past the Tip of the Iceberg With Student Feedback

When grammar is a focus of student learning, we might take a (copy) editing-oriented approach to feedback, pointing out sentence-level errors. But when we are primarily interested in arguments and ideas, these errors are usually the tip of the iceberg. And when we expend a great deal of red ink on them, students mistakenly believe that making a few simple corrections will improve         
their grades dramatically. 
 
Taking a revision-oriented approach means encouraging students to “re-vision” their work and make substantive changes. John C. Bean (2011) recommends organizing feedback around a hierarchy of questions:

• Does the assignment address a question or problem? Does it have
  a thesis statement?
• What is the overall quality of the argument?
• Is the argument well organized?

If the answer to any of these is “no,” that is a good place to prioritize feedback. If it is “yes” on all counts, then it’s time to focus on sentence-level concerns. 
 
It’s not less work to read through a student’s paper, decide where to prioritize feedback, and provide guidance. But it’s not necessarily more work than pointing out errors. As for the good news--research shows that as students make substantial revisions to their work, the surface-level errors start to disappear!


                                                                                                         Image by Josep Monter Martinez from Pixabay

If You are Using SafeAssign in Blackboard: 
It is Policy to Make a SafeAssign Draft (non-graded) Assignment Available.

According to the MATCHING SOFTWARE policy (section 2.6) “Wherever possible, students should have the opportunity to access Matching Software”. If you use SafeAssign in your course, it is important to make a SafeAssign draft (non-graded) assignment for students, so that a student is able to check their own work before submitting.

The following video shows how to set up a SafeAssign draft assignment for students, as well as a separate SafeAssign assignment for graded submission: Create assignment using SafeAssign (plagiarism detection) and view report in Blackboard.

Share this video, about how to use the SafeAssign draft assignment, with your students: Submitting a SafeAssign draft.

                                                                                                                         Image by Racool_studio from freepik

Providing Feedback That Gets Students' Attention

By: Andrea Phillipson (Faculty Development Consultant, ADC),
      Angela Waldie (Faculty member, General Education),
      and Silvia Rossi (Writing and Learning Strategist, SLS)
 
“Students don’t read my feedback. I feel like I’ve wasted my time.” We hear this grievance time and again in workshops about providing feedback on student writing. And the move into a remote teaching and learning environment certainly hasn’t improved things. 
 
Long-standing questions--How do I provide quality feedback with limited time? How do I get students to read it?--feel even more pressing now that many of us are assigning more open-book written assessments, providing feedback using digital tools, and feeling as though we just can’t spend one minute longer at our computer screens.
 
Two years ago, Silvia, Angela, and Andrea teamed up to help faculty address these and other questions about teaching student writing. Although we have differing roles at MRU, we all share a background working in university writing centres. In the process of supporting students, we’ve gained insight into their writing experiences, from decoding assignment instructions to deciphering the red marks on their graded papers. And with Angela and Andrea both currently teaching MRU students, we also understand how it feels to be on the assigning and grading side of things! 
 
Our effective feedback workshop draws on composition studies research to suggest three main shifts faculty can make in their feedback:

      1. From an editing-oriented to revision-oriented approach
      2. From judge to coach
      3. From summative to formative feedback

We’ve found that the first change alone can make a world of difference to students, getting their attention because they perceive the feedback as relevant to their future work. This need not translate to more faculty time spent grading. 
 
Now that we’ve reformulated our workshop for the remote teaching and learning context, we’ve discovered that the principles stand. See today’s ADC Newsletter Teaching Tip, Getting Past the Tip of the Iceberg With Student Feedback, for a bite-sized version of the first principle, and register for our upcoming Providing Feedback That Gets Students’ Attention workshop (March 2) to explore all three principles.
 
Stay tuned for future programming about teaching student writing. We continue to listen to faculty needs and are currently collaborating with a librarian colleague to develop an annotated bibliography workshop. Finally, let us know if you have any requests!