Vivian Neal

Welcome to this one week seminar that will revisit and investigate ideas about the range of programs and services offered by our teaching and learning centres. I'm sure you will find the discussion relevant and informative, and I hope you'll find the time to share your ideas and experiences with others.

Last summer Alice, Amy and I were part of a two week SCoPE seminar in which participants shared information and ideas about their centres and the various configurations, missions, and services they provide. Concurrently, I visited 5 universities in the UK to learn about the various components of their teaching and learning centres and how they go about offering support within their institutions. Some interesting issues came to light, and in this week's seminar we'll revisit these along with new issues I'm sure. These are three highlights from last summer's discussion:
• the broad range of roles, such as researcher, project manager, instructional designer and workshop facilitator
• the interplay between conducting research and leading practice-based seminars
• the extent to which we serve undergraduate students.

On Friday this week, Alice, Amy and I will host a live workshop from 11am to noon that will include an in-person session at the EDC Conference, and an online component using Elluminate. We hope that the SCoPE seminar will focus our ideas resulting in even richer discussion of the issues during the live session.

Elluminate session Friday February 22, 11am to noon (see world clock)
Access to Elluminate session directly
To make sure your computer is set up, visit here. and follow the instructions.

First, please introduce yourselves - where do you work, what is your connection to a teaching and learning centre, what is your role, background and interests? Also, did you participate in the SCoPE seminar last summer? What are your thoughts about the issues facing teaching and learning centres?

Hello to all the participants of this seminar on Teaching and Learning Centres.  The last two weeks have been a marvelous exchange of information and insights into the various structures of our centres and the wide variety of activities we do.  (and thanks so much Judy for your recent and interesting post about your Malaspina Teaching and Learning Centre....) 

We've had descriptions of 9 centres in the UK, Australia and Canada and it's been wonderful to learn about and ponder the similarities and differences.

This will be my last post with this seminar, but feel free to continue to the discussion if you wish.  Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful contributions!

Vivian

Perhaps we could start this discussion with some introductions by saying a little about ourselves and why we are interested in teaching and learning (T&L) centres.   

I work with the Educational Support and Innovation division of the Learning and Instructional Development Centre at SFU, and I've been here for almost 3 years.  I'm currently visiting the T&L centres at several universities in the UK. Last week I visited the University of Sussex and will soon be visiting the Universities of Dundee, Strathclyde and Glasgow. I hope to learn about each of these centres and the types of work that they do. 

In this seminar, I hope you'll share information about your centres/units and learn about centres eslewhere and what they do and how they do it.

Please introduce yourself, and once we've done that I'd like to look at three elements in particular:

1.  The phlosophical foundations, or learning theories, that underlying and shape the activities of T&L centres.

2.  The sort of faculty development activities in T&L centres.

3.  The kinds of programs or projects that are offered in T&L centres.

Please feel free to contribute a brief about your own T&L centre - if you would like to do this, I suggest that you start of new discussion thread - just like Norm did.

[Bruce, I have moved your notes from the Greatest Insights wiki to this new topic as it is an important contribution for improving and defining SCoPE and future seminars. I encourage others to comment also. Vivian]

"BJ: 11/18__ Several items of interest have been brought forth. Not how to design or why ... but whether or not the ID and the SME get along. As important as this is I am still not sure it is relevant to the actual design process. The communication process is essential for ID/SME, ID/Facilitator, ID/Student and each is different and should be discussed separately.

IMHO the topic indicated a discussion on those things we use to effectively present content in a learning environment. I went back and reviewed the missives posted and found few relating to theory, strategy, tools, etc. These are the things we use to design and what I was expecting.

I guess I have heard the topics presented here too many times on too many forums, discussions and lists not to have heard each argument at least a dozen times.

Is it possible this is a symptom of problems within the practice of Instructional Design indicating that as IDs we are clueless? We perform a very important function but can not pass along or discuss the hows and whys? "

Several participants have discussed the importance of building evaluation into the process of instructional design with, at least at this point, more questions than answers. Robbie, Cindy and Sarah discussed student evaluations of a course, and both Cindy and Sarah pointed out the importance of identifying exactly what we mean by evaluation and what is being evaluated. http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=61&parent=294, http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=61&parent=332, http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=61&parent=299 For example, do you want to assess what students have learned and to what extent they have achieved the learning outcomes, or do we want to assess the student?s satisfaction with the course and the instruction they received?

Barb described a turning point in the design process when the learners? evaluations of her course spurred the instructors to make necessary revisions. http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=61&parent=324.

Finally, Sarah said, ?I hope we can focus a bit on how to assess what students have learned and to what extent they have achieved the learning objectives. How do you/we as designers do that?? http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=61&parent=332