Workshop Catalogue

Welcome to our workshop catalogue! Here you will find a list of all the workshops our instructional designers have developed and offered for faculty at Acadia. In addition to detailed descriptions of what to expect from each workshop, you'll also find a condensed list of benefits faculty may experience from attending.

If you'd like to see one of our workshops offered again, or if you have ideas about a new workshop you'd like to see developed for a future campus offering, please contact us at ltid@acadiau.ca.

Big Ideas: Teaching for Understanding

Stories and the right kinds of questions go a long way to ensuring your students are learning what they need to learn. This session will help you understand what the big ideas of your topic are and how essential questions can make them come alive.

Benefits:

Discover why stories are so critical for learning
Learn how big ideas can help you structure your course
Find out why we need to teach for transfer
Discover how essential questions help your students remember the course material

Course Design: Using Outcomes to Design Better Courses

Utilizing an outcomes approach to course design results in more effective learning for students. This workshop will explain how an outcomes approach works and how it could benefit your classes. In particular it will look at how you could implement Backwards Design and Significant Learning Models.

Benefits:

Learn why an outcomes approach to course design is effective
Discover why Backwards Design ensures that real learning takes place
Find out why Significant learning helps you build a course structure that works

The Creative Classroom

Creativity is a skill deemed of the utmost importance by employers around the world, but it is not a skill that is often explicitly taught. Thinking outside the box in assessments is one way of encouraging students to be creative with their learning and its expression. In this session, we review why creativity is important, consider how to foster it in our classroom environments, and how to encourage students to be creative by providing them with opportunities to express themselves in their course work.

Benefits

Learn how to foster an environment that improves student creativity in your classroom
Discover why creativity is important in today’s job market and how it can transform your classroom
Learn how to build creative summative assessments
Find out how these types of evaluations are beneficial and enjoyable for students

Efficiency in Teaching: How Moodle can Help

Moodle is a powerful learning management system which has much more functionality than most instructors use. This session will provide an overview of a number of Moodle features that will enable instructors to make their teaching more efficient and suggest techniques for saving time and improving the experience for both the instructor and the students.

Benefits:

Find out the best formats to share content with students
Learn about the features of quizzes and assignments
Find out how groups and forums can improve electronic communication in your class
Discover how the schedular can make setting up appointments a snap

Engagement and Assessment

Assessing for learning, or formative assessments, are a great way to keep students engaged in learning. Formative assessments also allow instructors to monitor student progress and provide feedback or corrections prior to major assessments. Lecture activities, which can often be adapted to play the role of formative assessments, are also instrumental in maintaining student interest and give students an opportunity to engage with the material in ways that lead to greater long-term retention. We will discuss how these relatively small activities can have a big impact on student learning.

Benefits:

Discuss how to incorporate formative assessments into your course design
Learn about practical things you can do to help improve student engagement in your classrooms
Leave with a handout of easy-to-implement lecture activities to try out in your own classroom

Engaging Presentations: Next Level Instructor Communication Using Presentation Tools, Feedback and Games

Every great presentation starts with an engaged and self-aware presenter, but to kick it up to the next level you need to know how to use technology tools effectively. This session will start with a reminder of what great presenters do well and then focus on tools in PowerPoint that can make your next presentation shine.

Benefits

Find out about presentation techniques everyone should use
Discover PowerPoint tools you will want to use when you present
Learn how feedback in Moodle can keep your students engaged
Find out about how presentation games can make a class fun

Essential Questions: Designing Questions That Make Concepts Come Alive

The right kinds of questions go a long way to ensuring your students are learning what they need to learn. This session will help you understand what the core ideas of your topic are and how essential questions can make them come alive.

Benefits

Discover the difference between knowledge and understanding
Learn how core ideas can help you structure your course
Find out why we need to teach for transfer
Discover how essential questions help your students remember the course material

Flipped Classroom: What It Is and Techniques Including Tools to Deliver Content

Shifting instruction outside class time enables you to focus on important concepts in class and add activities that promote learning. This session will talk about the theory of flipped classes and tools like PowerPoint that can help you flip your class.

Benefits

Find out what a flipped class is
Discover how to encourage students to review the pre-class material
Learn how to use PowerPoint to record portions of your lecture
Find out some of the in-class activities that make a flipped class effective

Formative Checkup: Assessing for Learning

Formative assessments provide both instructors and students with opportunities to discover what their current level of comprehension is. Providing students with low-stakes assessments along the way to their major assignments and exams also ensures that students get to test their knowledge before it’s a make-or-break situation. This workshop will talk about how to incorporate formative assessments within your classes, and how to gather evidence from these to ensure that student learning is on track.

Benefits

Learn why formative assessments are valuable
Discover different types of formative evaluation techniques and how to incorporate them into your classes
Learn how to create formative activities that will build understanding
Find out how to use the information you gather to improve your teaching

Instructional Videos: Learn How to Create and Edit Videos For Your Course

Creating videos that students can view outside of class does not have to be difficult. Come to this session to learn how you can create different types of videos (instructor, screen capture and presentation) and how you can edit them using Davinci Resolve.

Benefits

Discover the basics of setting up lighting and shooting a video
Learn how to create a presentation video that includes pen marks
Find out how you can do a screen capture with Office 365
Learn about basic video editing

The Learning Mind

Sometimes it seems that what we teach our students goes in one ear and out the other. This workshop will explain in simple terms how the brain remembers things and how you can use teaching techniques that will cause content to stick in students' minds.

Benefits:

Learn about the power of predictions to build brain connections
Find out why making content slightly harder to understand can be a good thing
Discover why interleaving makes an impact on student memory
Learn why testing is always better than review

Planning for Student Success

Lesson planning helps with a course’s overall organization, and having a plan is beneficial to both students and instructors. We will discuss how to write simple, effective lesson plans and how to improve student engagement through various lecture strategies, all of which are easily implemented and require little to no preparation.

This will be an interactive workshop which models the instructional strategies it endorses – as such, there will be many handouts for faculty to consider and take away, as well as opportunities for discussion amongst faculty about organization and best teaching practices.

Benefits:

Review a variety of lesson plan templates which will inform you on how to create your own custom template
Learn about practical things you can do to help improve student engagement in your classrooms
Leave with a handout of easy-to-implement lecture activities to try out in your own classroom

The Power of Prediction

Incorporating the power of prediction into your classes can change the culture of your classroom by giving students permission, again and again, to try and fail without consequence. Asking students to make predictions stimulates learning by prompting them to access their prior knowledge and formulate a hypothesis based on any information they have. The resulting curiosity that arises from this process keeps students engaged and motivated to learn the answers you’ve asked them to predict. In addition to expanding on the power of prediction, this workshop will also look at specific teaching strategies to help you implement prediction activities in your classes, discuss how deep-learning occurs, and provide suggestions on how to guide students towards better study habits.

Benefits:

Learn how to leverage the power of prediction to engage students in deep learning
Consider how consistency in implementing prediction strategies can shift the culture of classrooms away from lectures that rely on students’ passive listening
Discuss some of the common pitfalls students fall into with their study habits and learn how to guide them towards more effective strategies

Powerful Questions: The Most Useful Moodle Quiz Questions

Learn about the many new exciting quiz question types that you can use in your course. This session will demonstrate a variety of questions including: media, text, numeric and dragging.

Benefits:

Learn how to create media questions like drawing, audio and video
Find out how to make text questions like multiple choice, select missing words and short answer
Discover how to create numeric questions like numerical and variable numeric set
Learn how to build dragging questions like image, markers and text

Quiz Basics: Set Up Your Quizzes and Questions Right the First Time

Moodle quizzes are powerful tools that can both assess and instruct students. If you want to maximize their usefulness in your course(s) a good place to start is by organizing the quiz question bank and then carefully building your questions. This workshop will demonstrate step-by-step how to build a question bank, create questions, construct quizzes and create overrides which add time exceptions for individual students.

Benefits:

Learn how using the question bank expands the usefulness of your quizzes for review and other student-based activities.
Discover why adding feedback and other resources improves student learning.
Learn how to implement single and multiple attempt quizzes; expanding the quiz features into a learning tool.
Learn how to override quiz options to allow for exceptions to standard quiz settings (example: more time)

Quizzes Unleashed: Move Beyond Simple Evaluation to Powerful Teaching Tools

Moodle quizzes can be an effective way to evaluate students, but this tool really starts to shine when it is used to help your students learn. This session will cover how you can create quizzes that will teach material, help students master content, and even make testing a fun learning experience.

Benefits:

Learn how to create a quiz that will teach material
Find out how to build a quiz that lets students master content
Learn how to create a quiz that provides a learning experience for students
Discover how a Team quiz can make test taking fun

Rebar Readings: Why Readings Matter and How to Get Students to Read for Understanding

Do your students come to class without doing the readings? Come and find out ways you can increase your student reading participation rate and learn techniques to improve student comprehension of the material they read. It will cover how instructor examples and audio assignments can help students improve critical reading skills and how Moodle quizzes can increase the reading completion rate.

Benefits

Discover why it is critical to include some type of reading comprehension test
Find out how Moodle quizzes can be used to encourage student interaction with the readings
Discover how recordings can teach students to read effectively
Learn how to get higher levels of reading participation

Rubrics: How to Create Them & How to Use Them

Rubrics are a valuable assessment tool that make your expectations for students clear and provide them with a guide to success. In addition to making objective grading easier, rubrics can also be used during instruction to engage students in their own learning. This session is designed to guide faculty through the step-by-step process of designing a rubric and provide them with the resources to create their own.

Benefits

Find out how rubrics can lead to more objective and equitable marking for all students
Discover how rubrics can make marking easier and quicker
Consider how identifying an assignment’s expectations using a rubric can benefit students
Learn how to engage students in the rubric creation process, how to use rubrics for peer and self-assessment, and how rubrics can engage students in their own learning

Sticky Teaching: Making Your Topic Memorable

If what you are teaching seems to be bouncing off your students' heads you might find the sticky teaching workshop helpful. It will cover some techniques and tools you can use to help your students' brains remember what you are telling them. These will include leveraging stories, the use of questionnaires, feedback, two-step assignments, frequent testing, interleaving, learning quizzes, exemplars, guides, and rubrics.

Benefits

Discover techniques that prepare your students to learn and retain information
Find out why asking questions is so critical
Learn what Moodle tools can help your students remember content better
Increase the quality of student work by utilizing guides and exemplars

Teaching with Moodle: Key Activities that Support Your Course and Students

Moodle has so much functionality it can be hard to know where to start. This workshop will highlight key activities that can really make a difference in your class. It provides an overview of important Moodle tools including: uploading documents, web pages, assignments, quizzes, polling, forums and progress reports.

Benefits

Learn how to share documents and articles with your class
Gather feedback from your students both in and outside class time
Discover how groups can make online discussions work better
Find out how to get progress reports on how your students are doing