Report-back: Common opportunities and challenges for 2013-2014
Opportunities
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Growth in attention and respect for teaching and learning; not always backed up with funding. Wanting evidence-based activities yet no support of teaching and learning research.
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Increased collaborations across: universities; colleges and universities; could there be an opportunity to info share these collaborations?
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Finding balance between new opportunities and quality of what we do.
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Strategic Mandate Agreements: teaching and learning components; can we help institutions shape and track this?
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Inroads into institutional nooks and crannies we haven’t been able to access before (thanks to curriculum work); links to Quality Assurance–this has workload implications. How do we manage within a centred in a distributed way? Especially given we often don’t “drive” the process.
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Media
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COED involved in the planning of COU Learning Outcomes Symposium? Could help influence the agenda?
Challenges “in every challenge is an opportunity”
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Sessionals: under-serviced group; how do we know who we are? Ideas; just in time training, speaking with union, different information is needed (basic through advanced), developing guides for new sessionals; connecting with chairs (could provide information on who has been hired)
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Assessing the impact of our centres. Could we collectively identify methods for doing this? Is there an approach we can take to identify the quality of our work?
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Prescriptivness and policing around good pedagogical practices. How do we address the concern of “homogeneous” practice. SoTL could be an opportunity to offer the plurality of practices.
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Increasing number of EDs; increasing contracts. Does it lead to inequity amongst our peers?
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Drop out rate. Do we re-visit the workshop model?
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Ontario Online initiative. Very demanding timelines and yet a lack of clarity on the bigger picture, timelines, and quality expectations. Curiously, this has caused a greater scrutiny on quality in the online realm without expectations of same attention to F2F