ITPF-001 Instructional Design and Planning

Frustrated with students who don't seem to engage in your lessons? Looking for new ideas to refresh your teaching strategies? This module, specifically designed for our ZU and higher education context, will help you. Through collaborative work with colleagues, participants will learn how to: engage students in research-proven best teaching and learning practices, use instructional design methodology to develop lessons that align outcomes with teaching and learning activities, plan and evaluate active learning techniques as methods to enhance student outcomes and identify methods for evaluation of teaching effectiveness. The module is ideal for discipline-specific instructors with classroom experience but an informal background in teaching and learning and whose goals are to become more effective educators.

ITPF-002 Assessment of Student Learning

Designing and developing effective assessments for our ZU courses can enhance the course for both faculty and students. This module is built around Principles of Assessment and Feedback and will leverage evidence-based practice to create better assessments. It will introduce assessment alignment within a variety of formative and summative methods as well as rubrics with meaningful criteria. Participants will choose one assessment technique and complete a reflective critique of their own course’s assessment. Participants will finish this module with an understanding of designing effective and transparent assessments for their ZU courses.

ITPF-003 Enhancing Teaching and Learning though Educational Technology

Finding technology to use in the classroom isn’t hard; knowing if and how to integrate it is where students and you will find most value. This module affords the opportunity to follow an instructional design approach to hands-on experimentation and implementation of educational technology. Faculty will start by reflecting on their own uses and ways of implementing and then explore, appraise, implement and evaluate new educational technology using practical implementation steps in which to effectively integrate technology. Importantly, faculty will explore this within a context of active learning strategies while meeting course learning outcomes and student/course/content needs. Faculty will produce a Guided Reflection Digital Media Object as their deliverable. 

ITPF-004 Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

This module introduces participants to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning as an effective professional development model for long-term change in teaching practice. The module engages participants in an exploration of SoTL related research, an evaluation of the effectiveness of different SoTL research methodologies and designs, a discussion of tools available for analyzing qualitative and quantitative data, and an understanding of the ZU processes and procedures for conducting systematic and rigorous classroom-based inquiries and engaging human subjects in research projects. Participants will be expected to design a research project and submit an ethics clearance form by the end of the module.

ITPF-005 Developing Meaningful Assessments 

Participants will be introduced to formative, summative and authentic assessment through an inquiry-based, collaborative approach. Participants will review pertinent educational literature and participate in discussions with a view to critiquing a current assessment challenge. Some practical exercises will emphasize the creation of rubrics and the alignment of assessment to course learning outcomes. Participants will also create a digital media object that will summarize their learning. 

ITPF-006 Enhancing Student Academic Literacy

This module will introduce faculty members to strategies to help students improve their academic literacy in college level courses. It will provide participants with a set of practical strategies to engage their students in reading, vocabulary and writing. Through discussion and hands-on sessions, participants will work to integrate those strategies into their teaching. This module also encourages participants to reflect on best practices of teaching and learning in a second language context.

ITPF-007 Evidence-based approaches to developing students’ critical thinking skills

This module explores ways for teachers to develop students’ critical thinking skills using evidence-based approaches. Participants investigate a variety of critical thinking pedagogical models, assessments, and interventions, and use those, which are appropriate to their own students. Participants use a scholarly research approach to rigorously and systematically evaluate student development of critical thinking skills. 

ITPF-008 Advancing Academic Integrity

In this module we will build a critical dialogue about factors that positively and negatively influence academic integrity. Participants will explore methods and issues in prevention, detection and regulation of academic integrity. As a part of the deliverable, we will implement classroom-based changes to the learning environment to address academic integrity through designing activities and assessments that discourage cheating. Further, we will build a recurring opportunity for faculty to review ZU and college policy, and to actively engage in proposing improvements to it.

ITPF-010 Online Interactive Activities 

Some common problems for ZU under- and post-graduate courses are that there is too much content to teach and often students don’t seem to work outside of the face-to-face classroom. This module focuses on the instructional design and development of Online Interactive Activities: the time between face-to-face classes. Students can be engaged in multiple ways with the instructor, other students, digital or paper resources to continue learning and developing skills and knowledge. With appropriate instructional design, students will no longer see learning in this timeframe as homework. Numerous faculty have quickly added the homework of “Read Chapter X and answer the questions” at the end of the class. How many students do this homework? Online Interactive Activities are designed intentionally to be seen as an extension of the face-to-face classroom: a seamless weaving of learning through online interactive activities. Faculty will explore different strategies to target various forms of interaction and engagement for our ZU courses. They will plan and develop an online interactive activity for a future course.