Thursday, August 13, 2020

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• President to host virtual town halls for students
• Announcing LITE Seed Grant recipients and a new round of LITE Seed Grants
• The making of a virtual lab

President to host virtual town halls for students

President Feridun Hamdullahpur will be hosting special virtual town hall events for undergraduate and graduate students later this month.

"Our community came together back in May for a special Virtual Town Hall amid a great deal of uncertainty," wrote Hamdullahpur in a recent blog post. "We continue to face a near future that is ever-changing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the University of Waterloo community has never stopped planning and acting."

"The Fall Term is fast approaching with new and returning students starting classes. You likely have a number of questions from classes, campus access, research, co-op, student supports and more on the minds of you, our students."

"To help answer some of those questions, I will be hosting two upcoming Virtual Town Hall events, one for our undergraduate students and one for graduate students," the president's blog post continues. "I will be joined by leaders from across our university to listen to your concerns and answer your important questions."

These events, scheduled for August 25 and 26, are intended for students only. Undergraduate and graduate students will receive an email with registration details shortly.

Undergraduate Student Town Hall

• Tuesday, August 25 at 1:30 p.m. 

Graduate Student Town Hall

• Wednesday, August 26 at 1:30 p.m.

"As with our past Town Hall event, this event is an opportunity for me to hear from you," President Hamdullahpur writes. "I have had the pleasure to speak with hundreds of students over the last few months and hear their concerns, questions and ideas on a range of topics. I want to hear yours too. I welcome your questions or concerns before the event by pre-registering for the event and also during the live Q&A session."

"I truly want these Town Halls to be an opportunity for our entire community to learn through open dialogue. We are moving forward as we look to ensure your needs as students are met given the challenging environment in which we are living. And, I know that we can only truly move forward together."

Announcing LITE Seed Grant recipients and a new round of LITE Seed Grants

Since 2012, 95 Learning Innovation and Teaching Enhancement (LITE) Seed Grants have been awarded to instructors and staff investigating innovative approaches to enhancing teaching and learning at Waterloo. The Office of the Associate Vice-President, Academic, and the Centre for Teaching Excellence have announced the recipients of the Winter and Spring rounds of LITE Seed Grants.

Winter 2020

• Assessing the effectiveness of a novel wellness check-in activity among third-year pharmacy students, Sherilyn Houle, Heidi Fernandes, Cynthia Richard, Kaitlin Bynkoski and Becky Ewan
• Development and Implementation of a Universal Augmented Reality (AR) App to Enhance Classroom Teaching in Chemistry and Biochemistry, Thorsten Dieckmann and Steve Forsey
• Evaluating and Extending the Reach of the Canadian Design Workshop, Steve Lambert, Ada Hurst and Chris Rennick
• Learning Together: Building Connections between the University of Waterloo and the Walls to Bridges Program, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart

Spring 2020

• Welcome to Canadian Politics: A Student-Generated Open-Access Digital Textbook, Alana Cattapan
• Navigating Choices: Developing an Instructor’s Guide for Introducing Choices into Students’ Learning Activities, Elena Neiterman, Reem Mulla, and Martin Holmes
• A Picture Book is Worth a Thousand Equations: Fostering Mathematical Communication Through Children’s Book Design Projects, Nickolas Rollick
• Examining the Relationship between Undergraduate Students’ Writing Habits, Writing Apprehension, and Writing Self-Efficacy, Nicole Westlund Stewart, Wade Wilson, and Nadine Fladd

A complete list of funded LITE Grant projects is available on the CTE website.

The Centre for Teaching Excellence would also like to announce that an additional LITE Seed Grant round will be held this fall instead of the traditional LITE Full Grant round. This additional round of LITE Seed Grants will be due October 1, 2020 and will adhere to the already established LITE Seed Grant guidelines. 

LITE Seed Grants can help you investigate small-scale teaching and learning research projects and attend activities to develop your instructional skills. Please get in touch with Kyle Scholz (kwscholz@uwaterloo.ca) or Kristen Archbell (kristen.archbell@uwaterloo.ca) to discuss a LITE Seed Grant idea you

The making of a virtual lab

By Eugenia Xenos Anderson. This article was originally featured on Waterloo Stories.

When Devon Asemota was a second-year Kinesiology student, he took the Introduction to Exercise Physiology lab and experienced through hands-on learning how to assess an individual’s cardiovascular fitness.

Now in his fourth year, Asemota is preparing that same lab for incoming second-year students who will experience it virtually.

Working as an online learning assistant (OLA), part of a special government program that provided partial funding for co-op students to help transition courses into an online format, Asemota and a team of OLAs are creating videos to mimic real, in-lab experiences.

“The more work I put into this, the better I make the videos, the more the second-years will get from this experience,” Asemota says. “It’s actually been a more fun process than I had expected.”

Asemota predicts the videos will have long-lasting benefits when it comes to making pre-labs more engaging and could continue to be used even when back on campus.

“Before COVID, students had to read a lab manual and complete pre-lab documents before going in to see how things are done for the first time. It obviously took a while to figure out what was what and how things are set up — especially if they hadn’t taken the time to do their readings before the lab.

“This will open it up for visual learners who can watch the video and understand what they have to do in the lab, as well as students who are good at following the lab manual.”

Bringing the lab home

Other Kinesiology students, like those in Bill McIlroy’s lab class on wearable technologies, will receive wearable equipment so they can collect data remotely and run labs using web-based applications to process the information.

This new approach will allow the fourth-year class to physically put into practice the knowledge they are learning in class from the comfort of their homes.

A medical kit called "Kin Kits" will be mailed to more than 250 registered students.

Similarly, the first-year Fundamentals of Kinesiology lab will mail “Kin Kits” to their more than 250 registered students — medical kits equipped with a blood pressure cuff, stethoscope and a goniometer (to measure the body’s joint angles), among other things. The equipment will allow students to conduct tests with those in their immediate “bubbles.” They’ll also have to complement videos to help students through each lesson.

“We’re working hard to try and make this the best learning opportunity that we can,” says Laurie Jones, the class instructor. “These videos will probably be used even once we are back on campus. They’ll be helpful for students to review so they know exactly what’s happening before they go into the lab. They will be a good learning tool.”

She also adds that by working remotely and having access to equipment around the clock, the opportunity for students to strengthen their interpretation and analysis skills will increase.

“They might be far better at interpreting the values and understanding the implications of changing variables because there will be more focus on this.”

It will be unique

Rob Burns, who teaches a fourth-year Kinesiology lab on sports injury evaluation, realizes that while these online lab experiences come with the unchartered territory, the path forward has uncovered learning opportunities to integrate soft-learning skills into hard-data lessons.

“We have developed some new situation analysis tools to help students practice their critical reasoning: the ability to think through informative assessments that they can practice on their own with no stakes or marks, which they can do on their own time.”

These unique learning practices will also offer professors and instructors a new method of connecting with and evaluating students.

“Students will have to do hands-on exercises that we will assess virtually, trying to pick up any issues they might have while doing the testing on individuals in their bubbles.

“It might be more challenging for us professors or instructors to correct techniques they have to perform, but it will give students the ability to view and review videos we’ve provided so that they can go back and correct themselves,” he says. “It will also give them the opportunity to test on people they are comfortable with. That is unique as well.”

In the end, Asemota has some advice for students taking online labs. “See which topics interest you that you didn’t know about before. Keep an open mind, and you will get a lot out of this experience.”