9-12 September, 2008

The UC Learning and Teaching Week events will provide an opportunity to share good practice across faculties and to interact with Learning and Teaching Scholars. It will also be an opportunity to hear about the range of Learning Support Programs that UC has introduced to support students.

Learning and Teaching Week will also include the ceremony to present our winners of the Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for Teaching Excellence (VCATE) and Citations for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning.

For more information about these events, please contact the Teaching & Learning Centre directly.
Email: tlc@canberra.edu.au
Phone: (02) 6201 5290
 

Learning and Teaching Week keynote presenters:

Professor Thomas Anthony Angelo

Tom Angelo is Pro Vice-Chancellor (Curriculum & Academic Planning), Director of the Curriculum, Teaching & Learning Centre, and Professor of Higher Education at La Trobe University. He has a doctorate from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

Prior to joining La Trobe, he had served as an academic staff member, academic developer, administrator and/or researcher at several US institutions, including the University of Miami, The American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), Boston College, the University of California at Berkeley, and Harvard University – and, most recently, four years at Victoria University of Wellington.

Tom Angelo’s best-known publication is Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers (with K. Patricia Cross, 1993), with more than 80,000 copies in print. A greatly revised 3rd edition of the book is due in 2009. Other publications include Classroom Research: Early Lessons from Success (1991), Classroom Assessment and Classroom Research: An Update on Uses, Approaches, and Research Findings (1998), and more than thirty articles and chapters. His current research projects focus on inquiry-based learning and research-led teaching.

Tom Angelo has consulted on teaching, assessment, evaluation, and learning improvement in seventeen countries, in all 50 of the United States, for more than 60 higher education associations/ systems, and in 250 post-secondary institutions. He has also served as keynote speaker at more than 75 higher education conferences internationally.

Professor Angelo has held fellowships in Italy with the Fulbright Program (1983), in Portugal with the Gulbenkian Foundation (1978). In 1998, he served as Visiting Scholar for the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA) and, in 2007, as an Honorary Visiting Scholar with Australia’s Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.

Professor Geoffrey Crisp

Geoff Crisp is the Director, Centre for Learning and Professional Development at the University of Adelaide (http://www.adelaide.edu.au/clpd). Geoff completed his PhD in Chemistry at the Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University.

He completed a Humboldt Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute fur Kohlenforschung in Mulheim an der Ruhr and has held postdoctoral positions at Colorado State University and the Australian National University. His first academic appointment was at the University of Melbourne, later moving to the University of Adelaide where he developed his passion for learning and teaching. He was appointed the Director of the Online Learning and Teaching Unit in 2001 to oversee the implementation of the university online system (MyUni). Geoff made the permanent move to educational and staff development and online learning when he was appointed the Director of the Centre for Learning and Professional Development in 2002.

Recent Education Related Publications and Presentations
1. e-Assessment Handbook. Geoffrey Crisp, Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd 2007
2. Crisp, G. T., Interactive e-Assessments. Demonstration presented at ALT-C 2007 Annual Conference 4-6 July, Nottingham, UK.
3. Crisp, G. T., Preparing interactive e-assessments. Workshop presented at ASCILITE 2007 Conference, 2-5 December, Singapore.

Learning and Teaching Week session abstracts:

Seven Levers for Higher and Deeper Learning: Research-based Guidelines and Strategies for Improving Teaching, Assessment, and Learning 

How much would you trust a physician, engineer, athletic coach, or nurse who didn't keep up with and apply lessons from relevant research in his/her field? Or one who couldn't apply basic principles of good practice to new situations, with new client populations, or in using new technologies? Probably not much. Yet many faculty and academic administrators remain (relatively) unaware of current research -- in psychology, cognitive science, and education -- on teaching, learning, and assessment and on its relevance to our daily practice. This interactive workshop will explore seven research-based guidelines and provide examples of simple, powerful applications to improve teaching, assessment, and student learning in and beyond our (virtual and actual) classrooms.

Successful Learning by Design: Making Courses Clear, Coherent, Connected, and Consequential

While effective teaching is clearly important, good course design may ultimately matter more in supporting learning. In a well-designed course, even an inexperienced but willing teacher can help average students achieve above-average learning. In a poorly designed course, on the other hand, even experienced, excellent teachers and above-average students struggle simply to survive. This workshop provides several simple, practical strategies for designing/redesigning undergraduate courses to promote learning outcomes effectively and efficiently. Key concepts demonstrated include: strategic alignment, backward design, cognitive loading – as well as the “parrot” and “bus” tests for course design quality. Please bring the syllabus, outline, or description of a course you hope to design or redesign.

e-Assessment: more than just a grade

This session explores some of the opportunities offered by online assessment to improve student outcomes and the quality of the assessment tasks. The work is based on the Carrick Associate Fellowship project and describes how academics can prepare interactive, computer-based assessments using helper tools such as browser plugins, java applets, QuickTime VR and Flash. The aim of the project is to assist teachers to move beyond simple multiple choice questions in an online environment to provide much richer, authentic and meaningful assessment tasks for students. Discipline examples may be viewed at http://andy.services.adelaide.edu.au/moodle/