Senior Instructional Developer, Blended Learning
Jane Holbrook, the Senior Instructional Developer, Blended Learning, offers workshops and consultations to support faculty development in the area of blended learning course design facilitates blended learning initiatives in collaboration with DCE and ITMS, and initiates and supports research studies related to teaching and learning through technology. The SID-BL works in conjunction with the liaisons to assist instructors who are undertaking major blended course redesigns.
CTE Faculty Liaisons
The CTE Faculty Liaisons consult with individual instructors to assist them in improving course and learning task designs. CTE liaisons can develop the design and conceptual integration of course material into our online course management system (LEARN), design or redesign learning tasks based on the instructor’s learning objectives and help evaluate these tasks, and provide support for the implementation of blended learning to the teaching team of a course.
Teaching Excellence Academy
The Teaching Excellence Academy provides faculty with an opportunity to re-design a “traditional” face-to-face course into a blended course in a retreat-like setting. The instructor works with other faculty members, as well as the Senior Instructional Developer for Blended Learning and other Instructional Developers from the Centre for Teaching Excellence. See (the link to the description of the TEA) for more details.
Instructor Resources Repository
The Instructor Resources Repository (IRR) is a collection of reusable learning activities, page layout templates and instructor tools and tips for teaching, and is easily accessed from the LEARN course home page. The main section of the repository houses a number of online learning activities developed by UW instructors who offer blended courses. These activities, or learning sequences, can be modified to suit specific disciplines, content and course requirements. The IRR also functions as an “idea generator”, so if the learning sequence embodied in an activity needs to be modified before it will work in a course it can be imported and changed as necessary.
Teaching Assistant Training
Teaching assistants often play an integral role in support and success of blended courses. The Senior Instructional Developer for Blended Learning and CTE Faculty Liaisons can assist instructors in defining the role of teaching assistants in a blended courses and can provide support to train teaching assistants to be effective in their various duties: facilitating of online discussions, interacting with students in a way that creates a sense of community in the course, providing formative feedback to learning tasks, and grading assessments. Sessions that concentrate on the role of the teaching assistant in online and blended courses are also offered through the CUT program (the link to the description of the CUT program) throughout the year.
Assessing the Impact of Your Blended Course
The Centre for Teaching Excellence has developed a questionnaire that can be used to evaluate students’ enthusiasm for blended learning and their perceived learning gains with respect to the course objectives. This instrument is flexible so that an instructor can modify questions to gather feedback on specific course activities and collect students’ comments on the aspects of the course that are important to them. This anonymous questionnaire has received approval from the Office of Research Ethics and results collected from it can be analyzed and published for the advancement of the scholarship of teaching and learning.
