This qualitative study surfaced beliefs around reading instruction and reading development at the onset of an elementary literacy methods course. Prior understandings and knowledge around reading instruction and reading acquisition emerge through various experiences and have the potential to contradict notions presented by teacher educators. This…

Learning spaces in higher education are fraught with colonial barriers such as teacher-centered, front facing, stark, feelingless, and unwelcoming classrooms that diminish students' feelings of well-being. For pre-service teachers, these are also the types of classrooms that they often inherit as they foray into the profession. Three Bachelor of…

The COVID-19 pandemic has been called an educational catastrophe. It caused massive disruptions in education, learning loss for students, and massive increases in teacher workloads, stress, and health-related issues. There were significant issues of student disengagement and rampant cheating on assessments. This paper looks not at the huge…

While the use of Twitter for communication and assessment activities in online courses is not new, it has not been without its challenges. This is increasingly true of high enrolment courses. The use of a Twitter Evaluation application which leverages a Learning Management System's (LMS's) application programming interface (API) provides a…

A first year non-majors biology course, with an enrollment of around 440 students, has been redesigned from a course of traditional content and teaching style to one that emphasizes biological concepts in current global issues and incorporates active learning strategies. We were informed by the education literature incorporating many aspects of…

In delivering chemistry courses by distance, a key challenge is to offer the learner an authentic and meaningful laboratory experience that still provides the rigour required to continue on in science. To satisfy this need, two distance general chemistry laboratory courses appropriate for Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) students, including chemistry…

The Workshop on Instructional Development was one of a number of workshops organized on various issues concerning teaching and learning in the Ontario universities. It was held in an attempt to provide some exchange of information among the Ontario universities on the organized activities initiated on their campuses concerned with improving…

This paper discusses methods used to differentiate the presentation of mathematics to gifted students in Ontario, Canada. Activities are described that help students to develop structured inquiry, reinforce categorization skills, develop efficient study habits, and encourage probing and divergent questions. (JDD)

Discusses use of computer graphics to enhance instruction presented via audio-teleconferencing in University of Calgary distance education courses. System design is reviewed; instructional roles of the graphics utilized are discussed; and development of two inservice teacher education courses used to assess the system's effectiveness is described.…

Summarizes findings of a survey of selected members of the Association for Media and Technology in Education (Canada) to identify which instructional development field techniques they utilize and the extent of their use; presents conclusions concerning instructional development's state of the art in Canada; and discusses implications for future of…

Examines how the forms used by teachers to document planning and assess children's progress affect three child care center teachers' practice and expectations for young children. Narratives are constructed using qualitative methods to show how requirements for documentation may lead teachers to override goals of developmentally appropriate…

Within a constructivist philosophy of learning, teachers, as students, are introduced to different perspectives of teaching with robotic technology while immersed in what Papert called a "constructionist" environment. Robotics allows students to creatively explore computer programming, mechanical design and construction, problem solving,…

This booklet is designed to help teachers integrate curriculum, strategies, evaluation, and learners' needs within the context of the larger education picture and to encourage teachers to revisit the fundamentals of education in light of professional teaching experience. The booklet includes places for the reader to record his/her own thoughts and…

Our department has redesigned its electrical engineering and computer engineering programs completely by adopting a learning methodology based on competence development, problem solving, and the realization of design projects. In this article, we show how this pedagogical approach has been successfully used for learning compiler design.

Development of post-secondary curriculum in emerging interdisciplinary fields presents particular challenges in course design and resource utilization, especially when the field is interdisciplinary by nature of its inherent breadth. A new course at the University of Calgary, designed to introduce undergraduate students to the methods and…