Spring Institute Events

The 2024 CTLT Spring Institute will take place online and in-person from June 3–6, 2024. The CTLT Spring Institute focuses on purposeful innovation in teaching practices, educational research, student services, and learning technology to support student success and experiences. The Spring Institute also serves as a forum for members of the teaching and learning community to collaborate, network and engage in knowledge exchange.

Reducing Ableism One PowerPoint at a Time

11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | In-person (Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, 2.22)

In this workshop, we will show you how to create PowerPoint presentations that are accessible to most of your audience, whether you have a small group of 10 in a tutorial or 300 in an auditorium. We will work together to learn the basics, and if you bring your own presentation, we will help you make it accessible. When we plan with access in mind, we remove the majority of retrofitting needed on the other side, and most of all we actively work against academic ableism.

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Designing Safer, More Effective Teamwork Activities in the Classroom

1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. | In-person (Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, Chilcotin Room 256)

Do you use teamwork to make your class more interactive? Teamwork has been shown to be very supportive of student learning and development, however, students share mixed feelings about working in groups. Using the principles of UDL and trauma-aware approaches, you will learn to increase your understanding of students’ experience of teamwork, and reflect on how we can create an experience that is more productive and useful to students.

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Interdisciplinary Sustainability Education at UBC

3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. | Online

In this session, a panel of UBC faculty members will share their experiences and motivations in bringing meaningful interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning opportunities to students. We’ll discuss different approaches to this work and new ways of looking at postgraduate education that fit increasingly complex work demands.

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Supporting Climate Education Through a Novel Framework of Climate Kind Pedagogy

9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. | Online

The climate crisis, the pandemic, and related social inequities indicate the need for education that teaches compassion and care towards the planet. Climate change and the related social impacts have necessitated a re-think of traditional pedagogies. University educators are faced with the challenge to not only engage learners in these conversations, but to support and address the range of emotions and pedagogical complexities that involve socio-scientific realities. Climate Kind Pedagogy (CKP) cultivates climate and justice informed approaches, and promotes the practice of kindness within educational settings.

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Sharing Back Our Knowledge: Development of the Indigenous Learning Pathways Training Program

10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. | Online

Launching in Summer 2024, Indigenous Learning Pathways (ILP) is a multi-course online training program led by CTLT Indigenous Initiatives and the Orientations & Onboarding program in Central HR, and involving collaboration and support from numerous staff, faculty, and programs across UBC. Through carefully curated spotlights of in-person and online resources for Indigenous-focused learning already available at UBC Vancouver, ILP supports new employees with meaningfully and respectfully engaging with Indigenous histories, knowledges, perspectives, and realities, in their role.

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CEL at Scale: Developing Community Engaged Learning Beyond the Individual Classroom

11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | In-person (Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, 2.22)

This panel brings together faculty members from across the university to discuss work they have done to develop Community Engaged Learning (CEL) initiatives at scale. CEL is an increasingly popular and celebrated pedagogy–known for increasing ethical and civic awareness among students–and yet, just as the rewards of CEL are well-established, so are the challenges. CEL is dynamic, labour-intensive and logistically complex. These challenges are most acute in contexts beyond the individual classroom. How can CEL be scaled across multiple course sections? How can it be delivered to cohorts with hundreds of students? How can it be scaffolded across a multi-year degree program? Speakers on this panel will share CEL initiatives they have developed in these challenging contexts–including the pedagogical and logistical designs of their projects, and lessons learned.

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Embedding Practical Learning in Curriculum: Experiences in Three Arts Courses

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. | In-person (Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, Chilcotin Room 256)

In this panel session, you’ll hear from faculty members in Arts about how they created innovative Practical Learning curriculum to help students connect disciplinary learning and their futures, by helping students to see how their classroom learning could be applied in the workplace and the community.

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A Tabletop Role-Playing Game for Building Interpersonal Skills: Demonstration and Feedback

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. | In-person (Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, 2.22)

This session will focus on demonstrating the use of a tabletop role-playing game (RPG) as a training-tool-in-progress to support the development of empathy in student support roles. In the proposed RPG game, participants are invited to take on the role of a student character to experience and make difficult decisions while balancing courses and other academic and non-academic experiences and obligations. After playing the game, players debrief by discussing the difficult decisions their characters made, demands on their character’s time, insights for their professional practice, and exploring further areas of learning to support students in their staff roles. Learning outcomes include: identifying demands students may have on their time, discussing common student experiences, identifying the impact of privilege on academic success, and questioning common myths regarding student academic performance.

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Disrupting Time and Space: Considerations in Community-Centred Evaluation

9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. | In-person (Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, 2.22)

Join CTLT Indigenous Initiatives team members Paulina Semenec, Educational and Evaluation Consultant, and Samantha Nock, Educational Consultant, Campus and Classroom Climate, in an exploration around the ways in which timelines impact community-centred evaluation processes. Together, we will dream beyond the boundaries of institutional concepts of time and space, creating strategies that support co-developing community-centred project evaluation that support respectful relationships between communities and project partners.

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Adopting a Wholistic Approach to Teaching and Learning in Laboratory Courses

10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. | Online

This session will explore the transformation of a third-year food science laboratory course, where a holistic approach was adopted to foster student learning and skill development. The redesigned course prioritizes supportive instruction, offers diverse representations of experimental protocols, promotes independent learning experiences, provides comprehensive feedback, and encourages introspection. Insights gleaned from a recent class survey will be shared to highlight the effectiveness of this framework in establishing a supportive and impactful learning environment in laboratory courses. Join us as we explore innovative strategies to enhance student engagement and confidence in laboratory settings!

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Roots of Communication: Enhancing Technical Writing Through Putting our Hands in the Dirt

11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. | In-person (Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, 2.22)

In this session, attendees will explore the transformative potential of integrating experiential learning with technical writing, using the development of hydroponics tanks by engineering students as a primary case study. This hands-on project not only facilitated practical engineering skills, but also honed students’ abilities to communicate complex ideas effectively. The learning outcomes are designed to highlight the multifaceted benefits of such an approach, including enhanced student engagement, improved writing skills in technical contexts and the promotion of active learning strategies.

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Students as Partners in Course Re-Design: Reflections from Students, Faculty and Staff Partners on Learning through Partnership

11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Online

In this panel session, which will highlight the voices of students, faculty, and staff who have been involved in funded UBC SaP course re-design projects, we will explore the individual and collective learning that has occurred through the process of working in partnership. Specifically, panelists will reflect on the concept of partnership, where students, faculty, and staff have “the opportunity to contribute equally, although not necessarily in the same ways, to curricular or pedagogical conceptualization, decision-making, implementation, investigation, or analysis” (Cook-Sather et al., 2014, pp. 6-7). Through this panel, participants will explore the impact of the partnerships on transforming teaching, curricular practices, student learning and educational development.

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Co-Creating the Future: Amplifying Student Voices to Inform Course Design

1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. | Online

Building on the foundational insights shared during a past panel discussion, Students as Partners in Course Re-design: Reflections from Student, Faculty, and Staff Partners on Learning through Partnership, this interactive workshop aims to dive deeper into the practical aspects of actively seeking and embedding the student voice into course design. This workshop will explore the purposeful innovation of teaching practices through the lens of student-faculty partnerships. Participants will engage in hands-on activities that illustrate how to effectively incorporate student feedback and collaboration in the redesign of course materials, activities and assessments. By the end of this session, participants will have developed strategies for creating more inclusive and engaging teaching and learning experiences that lead to better learning outcomes.

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Data Informed Teaching Practices with Learning Analytics

9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. | In-person (Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, 2.22)

This workshop aims to introduce Learning Analytics (LA) concepts, showcase relevant UBC data sources for teaching and learning (with a focus on Canvas-related data), and facilitate hands-on exploration of these data sources with the use of Jupyter notebooks (no prior experience necessary). Data-informed decisions can help your teaching practice by providing evidence to guide changes in your practice and offer an avenue to evaluate those changes. For instance, if you have content that you believe students should be engaging with early and often, learning analytics could provide a method of examining if your intuition aligns with students’ behavior.

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Meaningful Community Engaged Learning Experiences for International Students: Introducing an Inclusive Toolkit

11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. | Online

In this session, Dr. Shadi Mehrabi and Mirella Livoti from the Centre for Community Engaged Learning will introduce a Faculty Toolkit with a focus on Inclusive CEL Courses for International Students. The toolkit serves as a guide for faculty members to develop CEL courses through three recommended stages: Design, Development, and Delivery.

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Learning Activity Development Through an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Lens

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. | In-person (Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, 2.22)

The Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences has developed a tool to assist learning activity designers who seek guidance on ensuring activities are designed with an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) perspective in mind. The initial application was to an asynchronous online module for entry-to-practice pharmacy students. The tool is not meant to be an exhaustive repository of items to “check off the list”, but rather a suite of important considerations to keep in mind when creating scenarios, cases, and/or examples to elucidate your lecture topics. As this will be an interactive session, learners are asked to bring learning activity materials with them to the session, to share with their peers and use to draw examples from.

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