Fall is a Great Time for Instructional Professional Development at UPEI

On the UPEI Campus, the leaves may soon be falling from the trees but opportunities to learn will be rising. I will be putting on a number of workshops for faculty and staff at the University over the next two months.

There will be 1-hour workshops on topics like:

· How to web conference with learners using BlackBoard Collaborate

· Gamifying the online course

· Tools that can be used for peer assessment

· Creating interactive content for online courses

These workshops will each be offered once during October 2018 and once again in November 2018.

_____

Reflection is such a critical part of learning and I will be putting on a 30-day challenge on reflection for faculty and sessional instructors starting in October 2018. Participants will be asked to reflect on a topic that deals with something from and is important to the post-secondary environment. They will write out their reflections online, which will be shared with all other workshop participants. Participants will then provide each other with comments so as to encourage further and deeper reflection.

This is a large commitment but it’s a lot of fun and those that have already taken part in this workshop previously have commented how useful an experience it was.

_____

My E-Learning Office colleague Jason Hogan and Gerald Wandio from the Faculty Development Office are working on a panel discussion. The title is Finding the Right Blend and our five excellent panelists will get to discuss what they are doing in their instructional environments to combine both face-to-face and online learning modalities. Panelists include Gerald Wandio, Hayden Woodley, Carolyn Peach Brown, Marva Sweeney-Nixon and Andrew Carrothers. We hope that people attending will find great inspiration, great connections and great ideas to try blending more their own teaching and learning environments. This event will take place in early October.

_____

Finally, quality teaching is a big part of the UPEI experience and we all know that teachers get better at teaching by teaching. I’ve written previously about our blind spots, which we all have. As much as we may reflect on our performance and try to improve ourselves, there will always be things we do that need improvement that we don’t see. Therefore, feedback from others is so important to our continued development.

In November 2018 I will be putting on a one-day practice teaching workshop. It is an opportunity for anyone instructing in some capacity at UPEI to teach some short lessons in front of their peers and get feedback on their performance. The goal is to leave feeling a more competent and/or confident instructor. The environment for this event is to be a collegial one. We’re all in this together — no egos — in the process of making UPEI a great place for people to learn.

Further information on these workshops and how to register can be found here or you can contact me directly.