July is Here

July 1 this year marked my official start as Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream at UTM. I took a few days off last week to celebrate and wind down, though Pocholo and I just stayed home for the most part. (Fine, I was still working..a little bit.)

This week is the TLC Summer Camp for Instructors, Monday to Thursday mornings. While I’ve attended some webinars before, it definitely helps to attend a more structured sequence of sessions. What I found most useful is the idea of having your own course map, which is kind of like an instructor-facing syllabus, outlining everything there is to know about the course: how it’s run, what the desired learning outcomes are, student modules, specific strategies for fostering student engagement, and so on. Yes, there were a lot of boxes to fill in! But having a document like this as a reference will be extremely helpful during the coming semester, especially since I tend to bog myself down in the tiny day-to-day details of course administration, sometimes forgetting the big picture.

Something I’ve been thinking about more is how many videos I actually need to create for MAT202. At one point I wrote down a list of topics and estimated a total of 32 videos to cover all of those topics. But now I’m thinking that I should let my course notes dictate what the videos should be about (depending where I want to insert them in the website, or which exercises I want to talk about specifically that they may have a harder time just reading).

One important tip from the Summer Camp today to guide creation of asynchronous material was to think about the question is this something that would be useful for students to have for review? and is this something they can actually do before class? This reinforces my earlier thoughts about using flipped pedagogy for my courses (which I’ve already done for MAT202 last year).

Looking forward to the final two days of the Summer Camp!