News

September 17 to 21 is National Postdoc Appreciation Week! In 2017, 115 institutions in the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdon, and Asia & Oceania participated and organized 398 events to recognize postdoctoral researchers. The Centre for Teaching Excellence has a well-developed program for postdoctoral fellows at Waterloo. Additionally, these events will be taking place on campus throughout the week:

The Office of the Associate Vice President, Academic and the Centre for Teaching Excellence are pleased to announce the recipients of this term’s Learning Innovation and Teaching Enhancement (LITE) Seed Grants.

Since 2012, 80 LITE Seed Grants of up to $5,000 have been awarded to instructors and staff investigating innovative approaches to enhancing teaching and fostering deep student learning at Waterloo. Recipients across campus have explored topics ranging from transcultural learning to ePortfolios, Communities of Practice to undergraduate teamwork development workshops, and more. We are excited to announce the funding of five new projects this year:

CTE's offices have moved from EV1 to East Campus 3 (EC3), where we will be sharing the second floor with the Centre for Extended Learning (CEL). We look forward to continuing to serve our campus community by offering our regular programs and services from our temporary space in EC3 and workshop rooms (locations to be announced) over the next year. Visitors can access CTE’s offices on the second floor of EC3 through the south entrance (stairs only) or through the front entrance, where the elevators are located. CTE’s Faculty Liaisons will remain in their current locations. The search for a permanent home for our Centre is underway, and we expect to move to a permanent location in August 2019. Read more about CTE's temporary location. 

James Skidmore, Germanic and Slavic Studies, has won the Innovate German Award at the 2018 Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences. The national award recognizes innovative teaching.

Recipients of a 2017 Learning Innovation and Teaching Enhancement (LITE) Full Grant have launched a YouTube channel featuring 18 instructional videos with the support of the grant's funds. The channel, Engineering Models, was created in 2015; the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering's Wayne Brodland, Rania Al-Hammoud, and Kayleanna Giesigner recently added 10 LITE-grant funded videos to the channel to augment key experiential learning activities that students undertake in CIVE 104.

Laura Williams, CTE Graduate Instructional Developer and PhD Candidate in the Department of Kinesiology, has been awarded a 2018 Applied Health Sciences Teaching Assistant Award. The award recognizes Laura's efforts to enhance student learning in her work as Teaching Assistant and Tutorial Coordinator for KIN 232: Research Design and Statistics in Kinesiology.

As of August 1, 2018, CTE will be temporarily relocated to East Campus 3 (EC3), where we will be sharing the second floor with the Centre for Extended Learning (CEL). While the locations of offices and workshops will change, we look forward to continuing to serve our campus community by offering our regular programs and services. If you have any questions or concerns about the move, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

The Faculty of Environment's growth has necessitated this relocation; the search for a permanent home for our Centre is underway. Learn more about the move in the Daily Bulletin announcement from Mario Coniglio, Associate Vice-President, Academic, and Susan Tighe, Deputy Provost and Associate Vice-President, Integrated Planning and Budgeting: Centre for Teaching Excellence on the Move.

CTE is excited to share the latest publication in the Educational Development Guide Series, Centre Reviews: Strategies for Success, which is now available on the Educational Developers Caucus website. CTE’s Director, Donna Ellis, led the development of the Guide, with six co-authors from institutions across Canada. Centre reviews are becoming increasingly common in the field of educational development. They offer an important opportunity for members of a teaching and learning Centre to reflect critically on the direction and work of their Centre and to invite feedback from the communities and clients they serve. CTE undertook a Centre review in 2017; the Self-Study we developed for that external review distills several years of data as well as feedback solicited from numerous partners and stakeholders, and our Final Assessment Report responds to each of the recommendations made in the external review.

On April 26^th, faculty, staff, and students from across campus and beyond gathered to explore the roles motivation plays in how we learn and teach at the University of Waterloo’s 10^th annual Teaching and Learning Conference: Motivating Our Students and Ourselves.

CTE is pleased to announce that Dr. Kristin Brown has been offered and accepted a permanent position as our centre's Educational Research Associate.