Teaching & Learning Day Fall 2020 | Academic Newsletter | Seneca Polytechnic

by Amy Lin and Karen Spiers, the Teaching & Learning Centre

in the December 2020 issue

On October 26, the Teaching & Learning Centre held their virtual Teaching & Learning Day Fall 2020 with a focus on assessment strategies. With more than 500 participants, this was the largest attended event organized by the Teaching & Learning Centre Team.

The day started with a keynote presentation from Flower Darby. Flower is the co-author with James Lang of the book Small Teaching Online. The title of her talk was “Small Teaching Online: Improving Student Engagement, Learning, and Assessment.” Flower introduced to us to frameworks to foster connections and community in our online classrooms. She discussed the importance of the community of inquiry framework promoting cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. She also discussed the universal design for learning framework and how to create assessments that foster academic integrity. Flower is working on a new book which will be about harnessing the science of emotion and educational technology affordances to engage our students and to help them learn in meaningful ways.

^{Community of inquiry model” by Matbury is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0}

"Small Teaching Online: Improving Student Engagement, Learning, and Assessment" keynote by Flower Darby

We’ve highlighted our key takeaways from Flower Darby’s keynote presentation and offered some follow-up resources in the A Review of Flower Darby’s Key Takeaways article in this issue of the Academic Newsletter.

Following the keynote address, a session on Authentic Assessments was presented by Angela Ripley from Bow Valley College and Linda Facchini and Amy Lin from Seneca’s Teaching & Learning Centre. The presentation offered the audience an opportunity to reflect on their assessment practices, grading cultures, and the value of using authentic assessments.

The session provided suggestions on how to get started on creating authentic assessments and provided exemplars and resources.

"Authentic Assessment: A genuine evaluation of student learning"
by Angela Ripley from Bow Valley College, Linda Facchini from Seneca's Teaching & Learning Centre, and Amy Lin from Seneca's Teaching & Learning Centre

A student panel, moderated by Holly Cybulski, opened up the discussion on assessments, challenges with online assessments, academic integrity, and accessibility of online assessments for students.

Student Panel Discussion on Assessment

The final section of the day was a choice of workshops that delved deeper into assessment practices:

• ABC’s of CBA’s (Competency-based Assessments)
• Alternative Assessments in Math
• Managing Student Groups Online
• Mentimeter Magic
• Online and Inline: Making marking marvelous

Recordings of most workshops and additional resources are available on the Teaching & Learning Day website.

During the lunch break, we held an online Teaching & Learning Centre Website Scavenger Hunt. The winners are Bill Giannos (School of International Business and Management), Aura McCluskey (School of Early Childhood Education), and Kimberly St. James (School of Fashion).

We were honoured to have guest attendees join us from Durham College, Fleming College, Humber College, and Bow Valley College.

Save the date: Teaching & Learning Day Winter 2021 will be fully-online on March 1, 2021. The theme will be Educational Technology.

Icon source: “Add To Calendar” by Factoricons from the Noun Project

View the December 2020 issue of the Academic Newsletter.