The Instructional Skills Workshops (ISWs) is one of CTLT’s professional development programs that has been adjusted to support opportunities for faculty to explore ways to bring innovation into their teaching practice and to prepare potential TLEF applicants for upcoming proposal development.
ISWs – aimed at graduate students, faculty, and staff interested in developing and enhancing their instructional skills, and incorporating both theory and practice, and facilitated peer feedback – have existed in various formats since 1978, and certainly at UBC for over twenty years. However it was only in July 2014 that for the very first time, Flexible Learning activities were incorporated.
“As UBC is encouraging instructors to use Flexible Learning in their teaching, we developed flexible components giving ISW participants opportunity to participate in Flexible Learning, rather than just being told about it,” says CTLT’s Jason McAlister, Lead Facilitator for Graduate Student Programs.
Traditionally, the workshops consist of three eight-hour face-to-face sessions, but Flexible Learning was incorporated in the form of five online lessons, developed by facilitators, for participants to complete before and during the ISW. These included posting objectives, activities and assessments, and watching videos, which workshop participants are encouraged to discuss and evaluate with one another, and discuss how they might incorporate some of the techniques they’ve just learned in their own teaching practices.
Flexible Learning currently accounts for three hours of the 24 hour workshop (12.5 % of the total time), and means that each day is slightly shorter, allowing participants more time to prepare for the next day, which has been welcomed.
“We’ve been very pleasantly surprised at the feedback we’ve had already,” says Jason, with two additional ISWs having since been completed. “Participants have gotten a great deal out of it, and workshop facilitators have reported how useful it is to have the information online ahead of time, which has seen a huge improvement in attendee learning from Day 1. It’s also allowed them to delve deeper into the material during face-to-face time because the introductory material has already been covered.”
“A major focus is that we don’t just want to teach participants how to use the technology in their teaching – we’re always here to help with “how-tos” and answer questions – but we want to teach them why they should,” he adds.
“We try to model all ISW material on current workshop practices of teaching and “plant seeds” for workshop participants to hopefully expand on in the future.”
CTLT plans to continue including Flexible Learning components in future ISWs, with future plans including introducing tablets to support some of the face-to-face activities and lessons.
Jason credits the hard-working team for the program’s success, in particular Lucas Wright and facilitators Shaya Golparian, Serbulent Turan, Jan Lüdert and Jens Vent-Schmidt.
More information on ISWs and Flexible Learning can be found here: http://flexible-isw-new.sites.olt.ubc.ca/
For more information about TLEF proposal development support, please see: http://tlef.ubc.ca/workshop/
