Beth Cougler Blom

Thanks for this advice to deepen that activity Heather, I appreciate it! I'll let Tracy know that we've crossed paths, you and I, in this course. ;-)

Hi Shawna,

Ooh I love me a good faculty development scenario! It's near and dear to my heart. ;-)

I really like where you're going with this, the only thing I'm wondering about is if your Step 1 ideas are too grand. It's a lot of work to rewrite learning outcomes for an entire course, or "introduce a series" of learning activities. Could you narrow their focus a bit, to make each possible change more of a "baby step" approach? I am very used to working with faculty members who are stretched, stretched, stretched, so the more you can make the steps "doable" the more I think you might be able to get uptake on people actually doing them.

I like your idea of using an online site to support this process. To this end I wanted to share with you an online site (that is now an OER) that shows a microcourse that I led the creation of a couple of years ago at Royal Roads. It was a week-long fully online session that we created to help RRU faculty test out tools they could use to meet the "technology-enhanced" element of the (now old version of the) RRU learning and teaching model. If you dive into one of the "Learn about..." pages, you'll see the structure we used. First we showed the faculty learner the tool (e.g. Padlet), then we told them about how it was used at RRU (to help them see that other faculty were using it), then we talked about the result of what happened when the faculty used it, and then we gave them tools to "try it out" (the online tool) for themselves. I was wondering if you could set up a similar approach with engaged teaching strategies, such as is your focus. It might help faculty to see examples of what other faculty are doing/have done, why they did it and how it was received...

Hope this helps!

Hi Heather,

It was great to read through your activity idea in your attached doc; you've done some detailed thinking on this already!

I like where Derek is going with suggesting being more open with your prompt to students and finding categories from what they have generated after. I actually thought of the Liberating Structures process called Min Specs when I was reading through your writeup. Do you know Liberating Structures and do you think Min Specs could work? It could help you and your students come up with the "absolute must dos" and "must not dos" for reading an academic article. It might be easier to get them started with this than a large group brainstorm.

I'm curious about the template itself. Is this an authentic learning-based tool that you might encourage students to use every time they read an academic article? It feels somewhat tedious and might not be something very exciting for them to do. Is there a way you can have the students use social media during this process instead? You could get them to the same end result--posting about thesis statements, key arguments, 'so what' pieces and so on--but you could invite them in a way that they might actually more often do it in real life. Could they post on Twitter? On Instagram? Goodreads? Just a thought. I like where you're going, I just wondering if you can get more authentic to their real-life experience. What tools do they use when they are excited about something and they want to share the gist of it with friends? Could they do that here?

Hi Janna,

Thanks for sharing these forms. Here are a few things I'm thinking about:

• I like that your institution is paying attention to metacognition and trying to develop tools to help learners think more about how they are learning.
  
• I wish that a more positive term was used than 'autopsy'! ;-) Sort of feels like there's been a death...
• What if only the longer form was used and not the simplified one? I worry with the simplified one that there is no room to talk about next steps, only the admission of wrongdoing.

Hi Neil,

I like the idea of seeing if you can time-limit the self-paced course to encourage learners to head into the forums over the same duration of time.

If this is not possible, two other ideas are:

• Encourage the learner to start a reflective journal or "notes area" (if you think the word journal might elicit some groans!) in which they should write reflections in response to those beginning, middle and end prompts
• Invite the learner (or require them) to find someone outside the course to go out and ask questions of and share information with at key points in the course (e.g., beginning, middle and end) that can serve as a check and balance for them to make sure they actually do the work. This could be a colleague or a supervisor or a volunteer if you have them in that environment?