2014 AGM: Meeting Notes

Report-back: Common opportunities and challenges for 2013-2014

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.
Increased collaborations across: universities; colleges and universities; could there be an opportunity to info share these collaborations?
Finding balance between new opportunities and quality of what we do.
Strategic Mandate Agreements: teaching and learning components; can we help institutions shape and track this?
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.
Media
COED involved in the planning of COU Learning Outcomes Symposium? Could help influence the agenda?

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)
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?
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.
Increasing number of EDs; increasing contracts. Does it lead to inequity amongst our peers?
Drop out rate. Do we re-visit the workshop model?
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