The 2024 CTLT Summer Institute will take place online from August 19–22. These workshops will focus on the fundamentals of teaching and learning for new instructors and teaching assistants. The Summer Institute serves as a forum for new members of the teaching and learning community to collaborate, network and engage in knowledge exchange.
Please see below for a detailed schedule and to register for sessions.
Schedule of Events (PDF)
Starting Strong: Preparing For Day 1
August 19, 2024 | 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. | In-person (Irving K Barber Learning Centre, Seminar Room 2.22)
Want to start your semester off strong? In this interactive 60-minute workshop, we’ll reimagine the first day of class. Through group discussion and a mapping activity, you’ll create a plan to align day 1 student experiences with your course goals, content, and learning activities. Come prepared to share your experiences and tips, and to focus on a specific course you’ll be teaching.
Facilitators:
- Zoe Morris, Associate Director, Teaching & Learning Professional Development, CTLT
- Ainsley Camps, Educational Developer, CTLT
The TA-Faculty Relationship (For TAs)
August 19, 2024 | 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. | Online
As a Teaching Assistant, you will be working closely in different roles with an experienced instructor to teach. When this relationship goes well, it can be rewarding, educational and fun. When it does not, it can be frustrating and overwhelming. In this session, we will explore the various needs and expectations (including the TA contract) that structure the TA-Instructor relationship, develop effective communication strategies, including feedback and building professional interpersonal skills, all with the aim of helping you to build a harmonious and rewarding professional relationship with the instructors you work with.
Facilitator: Shaya Golparian, Educational Developer, TA Training Programs, CTLT
The Faculty-TA Relationship (For Faculty)
August 19, 2024 | 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. | Online
Teaching Assistants (TA) play a significant role in students’ learning. They are often expected to teach in face-to-face classrooms, facilitate discussions, conduct tutorials and labs in-person and/or online, grade electronically submitted papers, and perform many other duties to assist instructors and inspire students. As instructors, we need to provide support and guidance so that TAs can perform their best.
In this session, we will explore what instructors and students expect from their TAs, key elements of the TA contract, and how we can enhance the teaching and learning experiences of our TAs.
Facilitator: Judy Chan, Faculty Associate and Faculty Liaison CTLT, Land and Food Systems, UBCV
Building Authentic Assessment for Learning
August 19, 2024 | 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. | In-person (Irving K Barber Learning Centre, Seminar Room 2.22)
Teaching online during the pandemic forced us to re-examine our assessment practices and re-imagine ways to assess students’ true ability in the real-world environment. In the past years, faculty members explored many authentic assessment methods to assess students remotely during Covid.
In this session, we will revisit our existing assessment strategies, review the general principles for assessments, explore some authentic assessment examples used by colleagues across campus, share our own perceived challenges in the ‘new normal’, and learn tips from each other. What are the principles for assessment? What types of assessment are better for the ‘new normal’? We hope that you will walk away with a couple of new ideas on how to tweak your existing practices for teaching.
Facilitators:
- Judy Chan, Faculty Associate and Faculty Liason CTLT, Land and Food Systems, UBC
- Hailan Chen, Learning Design Consultant, CTLT
Written Assessment in the Era of Generative AI
August 19, 2024 | 2:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. | In-person (Irving K Barber Learning Centre, Seminar Room 2.22)
Join your peers in an interactive workshop where you will reflect, assess and re-imagine a writing assignment from one of your courses.
AI’s emergence presents serious challenges for many of our written assessments. Collaborate with your peers to understand and unpack these challenges and reevaluate the learning goals, design and assessment of student writing in this new context.
Facilitators:
- Laurie MacNeill, Associate Dean and Professor of Teaching Department of English Language and Literatures, UBC
- Andrew Owen, Associate Professor of Teaching, Department of Political Science
Accessibility is Not a Feature: Simple Steps to Support Students’ Access to Course Materials
August 20, 2024 | 9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. | Multi-access (Irving K Barber Learning Centre, Seminar Room 2.22)
Technology is incredible and greatly enhances access, but it isn’t always reliable. Have you ever had a Monday where everything that could go wrong with your computer did? Learning management systems (LMS) like Canvas are a great way to disseminate materials, but they are only as accessible as the materials we upload to them.
Facilitator: Erika Fundelius, Assistant Professor, Special Education, UBC
Building Community Across Campuses: Preparing to Teach a Multi-Campus (Distributed Learning) Course
August 20, 2024 | 10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. | Online
Multi-campus instruction (MCI), also known as distributed learning, is a course format that involves a single instructor in a classroom at one location (the “local” cohort) synchronously teaching “local” and “remote” cohorts of students situated at other campuses. Students in the “remote” cohorts attend through Information and Communications Technology (ICT) such as video conferencing equipment.
Facilitator:
- Christoph Seilmann, Assistant Professor of Teaching Mechanical Engineering, UBC
- Casey Keulen, Assistant Professor of Teaching Material Engineering, UBC
- Elly Park, Assistant Professor of Teaching Occuational Science and Occuaptional Therapy, UBC
Designing Inclusive and Engaging Collaborative (Writing) Assignments
August 20, 2024 | 2:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. | Online
This workshop introduces you to current research on the benefits and drawbacks of assigning collaborative writing, and introduces you to prevailing models and scripts you can use to navigate assignment design and better support students. You will reflect on strategies you’ve used in the past — that have failed or succeeded — and leave with resources you can use to design collaborative writing assignments that build trust and support learning among diverse students.
Facilitator: Rebecca Carrurthers den Hoed, Assistant Professor of Teaching, School of Journalism Writing and Media, UBC
Engaging Activities for Learners: Active Learning Techniques in the Classroom
August 21, 2024 | 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. | In-person (Irving K Barber Learning Centre, Seminar Room 2.22)
Join us for a session dedicated to enhancing classroom engagement through active learning techniques. This workshop will delve into practical strategies and activities designed to foster student participation and enhance learning outcomes. Whether you’re looking to invigorate your lectures, facilitate dynamic discussions, or implement hands-on learning experiences, you’ll leave with a toolkit of ideas that can be immediately applied to your teaching. This session is ideal for educators in all disciplines seeking to create more interactive and student-centered learning environments.
Facilitator: Lucas Wright, Senor Educational Consultant CTLT
Renewed What I Learned in Class Today Facilitation Guide and Toolkit Exploration
August 21, 2024 | 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. | Online
Join CTLT Indigenous Initiatives in a guided exploration of the What I Learned in Class Today Project. During this session, the project team is excited to offer a demo of the Renewed What I Learned in Class Today Facilitation Guide and Toolkit. Participants will have the chance to ask questions and to reflect on ways to apply the What I Learned in Class Today resources to their specific learning contexts.
Facilitator: Hannah Coderre, Educational Consultant, Curriculum and Student Development, CTLT
Open Your Teaching: Enhancing Student Learning through Open Education Resources, Pedagogies and Practices
August 21, 2024 | 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. | In-person (Irving K Barber Learning Centre, Seminar Room 2.22)
Open Education is a teaching and learning approach that utilizes unrestricted access to learning materials, collaborative knowledge creation and inclusive pedagogical practices in order to increase access to knowledge. In this workshop, we’ll explore the strategies that instructors at UBC are using to open their classrooms, incorporate new resources and perspectives in their learning environments, and contribute to their students’ learning beyond the classroom. We’ll define what makes an educational resource or practice open, identify ways of finding and reusing open materials for your courses, and explore approaches to developing open assignments that empowers students to contribute to public knowledge.
Facilitator:
- Will Engle, Strategist, Open Education Initiatives
- Rie Namba, Educational Resources Developer – Open Resources, CTLT, UBCV
Making Sense of Student Feedback: Metrics for a More Meaningful Interrogation of SEI Data
August 21, 2024 | 2:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. | Online
At UBC, Student Experience of Instruction (SEI) quantitative data consists of responses on a 5-point Likert scale. An interactive dashboard is currently being developed to assist instructors, as well as administrators, to visualize the reported metrics (interpolated median, percent favorable and dispersion index) within context.
This workshop will demonstrate how the metrics and dashboard support instructors to make sense of the student feedback they receive. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss, in small groups, how to interpret both the metrics and textual comments in instructor reports.
Facilitator:
- Abdel Azim Zumrawi, Statistician, Planning & Institutional Research (PAIR) & former Adjunct professor in Forest Resources
- Tizitash Mohammed, Programmer Analyst, Planning & Institutional Research
- Alison Wong, Project Manager II, Planning & Institutional Research
The UBC Early Alert Program: Orientation
August 22, 2024 | 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. | In-person (Irving K Barber Learning Centre, Seminar Room 2.22)
UBC strives to foster a supportive and inclusive campus community that prioritizes student growth, resilience, and achievement through collaboration, empathy and a commitment to student empowerment. Early Alert allows faculty, staff, and TAs to intervene early and identify concerns about students in a coordinated way in order to connect UBC students with the support they need, when they need it. Join this session to learn when, how, and why to access and use the Early Alert system to best support students.
Facilitator: Magali Chevalier, Manager, Student Support Services Office of the Vice-President, Students, UBC
Introduction to the Indigenous Learning Pathways Training Program
August 22, 2024 | 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. | Online
Indigenous Learning Pathways (ILP) is a new multi-course online training program led by CTLT Indigenous Initiatives and the Orientations & Onboarding program in Central HR, and involves 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 staff to meaningfully and respectfully engage with Indigenous histories, knowledges, perspectives and realities in their role. Courses are self-directed and can be taken by individual learners or by entire teams/cohorts as part of their collective professional development goals.
Facilitator:
- Kyle Shaughnessy, Indigenous Educational Consultant, CTLT Indigenous Initiatives & HR Talent Development and Engagement
- Amy Miedzwiecki, Instructional Designer, HR Talent Development and Engagement
- Nick Yee, Program Manager for Employee Experience, HR Talent Development and Engagement
- Shanaya Kumar, Indigenous Learning Pathways Project Support, HR Talent Development and Engagement
Can I Use This? Working with Copyright and OER
August 22, 2024 | 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. | Online
If you are preparing resources for your teaching, from PowerPoint slides to online modules, chances are you’ll want to incorporate readings, images, video clips, problem sets or other materials from different sources. This session will focus on the pragmatic elements of reuse, the essentials of copyright, and the basics of working with open educational resources (OER) that are licensed to allow revision and reuse. Please bring your questions and join us in exploring UBC’s Copyright and Fair-Dealing guidelines and how copyright intersects with effective teaching practices.
Facilitator:
- Will Engle, Strategist, Open Education Initiatives
- Marjorie Mitchell, Copyright, Scholarly Communication and Research Data Management Librarian, Okanagan Library, UBCO
Cultivating the Wellbeing of Students and Educators through Simple but Effective Wellbeing Pedagogies and Practices
August 22, 2024 | 2:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. | In-person (Irving K Barber Learning Centre, Seminar Room 2.22)
Join members of the Teaching and Wellbeing Community of Practice to explore simple but effective ways to incorporate wellbeing pedagogy and resources in learning settings. We also actively welcome your involvement in identifying strengths, gaps and areas of opportunity to further embed wellbeing into teaching and learning settings at an individual, interpersonal, organizational and policy level at UBC. Ideas shared will inform a campus wellbeing plan to accelerate action in mental health and wellbeing policies, and practices in teaching and learning settings.
Facilitator:
- Gail Hammond, Associate Professor of Teaching in Food, Nutrition and Health
- Louella Monaghan, Health Promotion Specialist, Health Equity, Promotion and Education Unit
- Sara Kozicky, Wellbeing Strategic Initiatives Project Manager, Office of Wellbeing Strategy