Hey all of you Instructional Designers, Educational Developers, Distance Education Online Learning Specialists! It is time to lay off with the complaints that the emergency response to online learning as a result of Covid-19 is not real online learning. Because it is. There has been a lot of gnashing of teeth regarding definitions and nomenclature, […]
Was it a memo coming from the ministry five or six years ago? It seems that all the post-secondaries have either created or re-fashioned existing units into ‘innovation’ departments: Educational Support and Innovation, Centre of Teaching, Learning and Innovation, Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning….etc.. But what is innovation in education? From where I […]
Here’s what I did with one set of trade instructors to turn competencies into learning outcomes: Re-translating the program outline We started with the provincial program outline for their trade (owned by the BC Industry Training Authority, here’s an example for Carpenter). This outline is deceiving: it is originally intended to communicate performance competencies for […]
There’s buzz growing around competency-based learning and something called “competency-based pedagogy”. Much of it appears muddled, particularly when someone wants to throw in a technology to enable this “competency-based pedagogy”. Perhaps it’s important to make sure we are all speaking the same language. Fallacy 1: Competencies are equivalent to learning outcomes Fallacy 2: A series […]
Teaching Squares and Lesson Study are both facilitated peer-group approaches to improving instructors’ lesson preparation and delivery but both take very different approaches. Teaching Squares lends itself well to heterogeneous groups who come from different disciplines while Lesson Study is primarily for instructors coming from the same discipline or wanting to integrate the same theme […]