SCoPE: Seminars: Welcome to our March seminar!

Developing a National Framework of Teaching Expectations in Higher Education is facilitated by Gary Hunt and Vivian Neal. Gary teaches in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences at Thompson Rivers University and is very involved in initiatives dealing with scholarly teaching and the scholarship of teaching and learning, student ratings of instruction, and promotion and tenure for teaching faculty.

Many of you will remember Vivian Neal who has co-facilitated SCoPE seminars for us in the past on the role of instructional designers and teaching & learning centres. Vivian is currently on secondment to University of Plymouth where she is teaching in the Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, a manditory program for all new lecturers.

Please join us Tuesday, March 3 at 19:00 GMT, 11:00 a.m. PST for the seminar kick off session via Elluminate.

Deirdre Bonnycastle has started a new thread for introductions here. (Thank you Deirdre!) Gary has sketched out the seminar structure for our 3 weeks together, and we have a wiki set up to gather seminar highlights and resources. Please feel free to contribute to the wiki! Alice Macpherson has gratiously volunteered to help keep the wiki organized and healthy. (Thank you Alice!)

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We would like to extend a special welcome to the new SCoPE members who will be joining us during this seminar, and hopefully many more times in the future!

Re: Welcome to our March seminar!

by Vivian Neal - Monday, 2 March 2009, 9:14 AM

Welcome everyone to this seminar! I am very pleased to be co-facilitating over the next three weeks! I am with the University of Plymouth, UK, for this year, teaching on their program for new lecturers, the Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. I am taking a year away from Simon Fraser University in Canada, so I have worked in both a credentialed higher education environment as well as a non-credentialed.

I will be sharing some of my insights and experiences during this seminar, and I hope to learn a lot also from everyone who contributes. Please share your thoughts - I hope we will all take away some new ideas to move this whole area forward.

Re: Welcome to our March seminar!

by Nick Noakes - Tuesday, 3 March 2009, 2:17 AM

Vivian, are you going to link to the UK framework (the one through the HEA)?

Re: Welcome to our March seminar!

by Vivian Neal - Tuesday, 3 March 2009, 5:26 AM

The UK's Higher Education Academy (HEA) supports institutions in their professional development of HE teachers through their accreditation program and Professional Standards Framework, as well as supporting HE teachers directly by offering a variety of programs and resources. Almost all HE institutions in the UK have manditory teaching and learning programs that are accredited by the HEA.

At the University of Plymouth all new lecturers are required to take the program consisting of three "M" level modules - in Canadian language, this is three Masters level courses taken by new faculty. At Plymouth the first module is quite broad and covers both institutional and national policies/issues as well as teaching and learning theory. The second module is an action research project where lecturers research a small peice of their own practice. For the third module, participants select between a module in Learning Technologies or Teaching Research (Linking Teaching and Discipline-Based Research). The program can be taken over a period of one, two or three years, though most people take it all in one year.

Re: Welcome to our March seminar!

by Nick Noakes - Tuesday, 3 March 2009, 4:03 PM

Many thanks Vivien. Are the outlines of these 3 modules online on the UoP website?

Elluminate recording from our kick off session

by Sylvia Currie - Tuesday, 3 March 2009, 1:16 PM

We had a very interesting presentation by Gary earlier today and a great start on a conversation around developing a national framework of teaching expectations. Here is the link to the recording. I also added the transcript from our text chat as a separate page on our wiki. There are some great comments and questions in there so be sure to bring them forward to our discussion!