Workshop: Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

Details: In this session, participants will learn the guidelines that help educators implement Universal Design for Learning in their courses. These guidelines are a framework to ensure all learners can access and participate in teaching & learning.

Learning Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Understand how implementing UDL can help all learners have meaningful learning opportunities,

• Evaluate courses for how effectively they have implemented UDL recommendations, and

• Provide concrete suggestions on how courses can be improved for all learners.

Details: In this session, participants will learn about how Benjamin Bloom’s framework for categorizing educational goals can help create clear learning objectives. This framework places learning outcomes in six overarching categories: Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create.

Learning Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Assess the extent to which activities and assessments align with learning objectives,

• Classify verbs according to Bloom’s taxonomy, and

• Create learning objectives that clearly describe the skills and knowledge learners should gain from a course.

Details: In this session, participants will be introduced to critical reflective practice as a method of intellectual and emotional growth. Participants will be show methods for assessing and questioning perceptions, feelings, beliefs, and actions.

Learning Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Describe the benefits of critical reflective practice,

• Use critical reflective practice for growth and success in their academic and personal lives, and

• Propose ways in which critical reflective practice can be directly embedded within university courses.

Details: Using Michael Palmer, Dorothe Bach, & Adriana Streifer’s Learner-Centered Syllabus framework, participants in this session will learn how to measure how syllabi can move from being content-focused to student-focused to encourage learner success.

Learning Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Identify the criteria for learner-centered syllabi,

• Analyze a syllabus to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the degree to which a syllabus achieves a learner-centered orientation, and

• Understand how a syllabus audit can help you propose recommendations to improve components of a syllabus

Details: In this session, participants will learn about alternative assessment methods that move beyond the essays, quizzes, and examinations that make up much of our strategies in measuring student learning in higher education. Alternative Assessments give students a flexibility to show they have reached learning goals in creative and innovative ways.

Learning Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Provide examples of different alternative assessment methods for a variety of disciplines, 

• Develop an alternative assessment that measures student’s level of proficiency in a subject rather than their ability to retain and recite knowledge,

• Describe the benefits of alternative assessments for student success.

Details: In this session, participants will learn about the two major types of assessments used in university courses. From the formative assessments that guide students and educators to evaluate learning as it is happening to the culminating summative assessments that typically make up the majority of our grades in higher education. Participants will discover how student success requires the blending of both types of assessment throughout a course.

Learning Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Understand the difference between formative and summative assessment,

• Assess the value of aligning course materials and assessments with their stated learning objective, and

• Propose an assessment style to meet course learning objectives.

Details: This session challenges participants to reimagine their university. What would their undergraduate careers look like if it was rebuilt from a space of critical empathy? How can our universities fulfil their missions to be visionary and aspirational publicly-funded social institutions?

Learning Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Understand how critical empathy can be a toll of radical change,

• Contribute to an ongoing philosophical and practical research project, and

• Propose principles that must be considered as we reimagine and reshape a 21st-century liberal education.

Workshop: Understanding Your Privilege (and What To Do With It)

Details: In this session, participants will learn about how power and privilege intersect with our pedagogy and academic lives. Through informative activities and self-reflection exercises, participants interrogate the bias that are embedded in our academic institutions. 

Learning Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Illustrate how power and privilege has impacted your own academic work,

• Seek ways in which we overcome bias in our institutions, and

• Support change in your universities to ensure all students are supported.

Details: In this session, participants will learn how a visual syllabus can be an engaging supplement to a traditional, more formal syllabus. 

Learning Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Adapt important syllabus content into engaging graphics,

• Design visual syllabi to meet the accessibility needs of students, and

• Identify free tools to create effective visual syllabi.

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Details: In this session, participants will learn about the use and impact of educational technologies (including, learning management systems), that support online, in-person, and hybrid courses. 

Learning Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Discuss the benefits of different educational technologies for synchronous and asychronous course delivery,

• Assess educational technologies for support learning objectives, and

• Propose new educational technologies to be adopted by faculty and teaching staff.

Details: In this session, participants will learn how university faculty, staff, and administrators can learn to “design to the edges,” to ensure university is accessible both in and out of the classroom about how power and privilege intersect with our pedagogy and academic lives. Through informative activities and self-reflection exercises, participants interrogate the bias that are embedded in our academic institutions.

Learning Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Illustrate how power and privilege has impacted your own academic work,

• Seek ways in which we overcome bias in our institutions, and

• Support change in your universities to ensure all students are supported.