Support for Blended Learning

Senior Instructional Developer, Blended Learning

Mary Power, the Senior Educational Developer, Blended Learning (SED-BL), offers workshops and consultations to support faculty development in the area of blended learning course design, facilitates blended learning initiatives in collaboration with Centre for Extended Learning (CEL) and Instructional Technologies and Multimedia Services (ITMS), and initiates and supports research studies related to teaching and learning through technology. The SED-BL works in conjunction with the liaisons to assist instructors who are undertaking major blended course redesigns.

Centre for Teaching Excellence Faculty Liaisons

The Centre for Teaching Excellence (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 (TEA) 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.

Looking for activities for your blended course?

Your CTE liaison can help you design activities for your blended course. We have a repository of online learning activities developed by Waterloo instructors who offer blended courses.  These activities, or learning sequences, can be modified to suit specific disciplines, content and course requirements. Examples of these activities are: a critical reading activity; a case study analysis; a plagiarism quiz.

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 Centre for Teaching Excellence 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 Certificate in University Teaching program throughout the year.