NSSE questions in Canada and the U.S.

Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro PDF comparison

In my research today I compared the Canadian and American versions of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) instrument for 2010.

This is the survey that over 1 million university students across North America are invited to take in their 1st and 4th year.

The NSSE survey page calls the Canadian version the “Canadian English” version.  But the version is not just different in terms of its “Canadian English” vocabulary (such as “school/college” in the US versus “university” in Canada). 

The Canadian version is different in terms of its cultural content and rhetorical approaches.

This post provides comparative screenshots of survey content to help us ponder why these differences exist.

Arts Peer Mentoring program @ U of C

Higher education innovation

Peer Mentoring featured on the front page of OnCampus, 2007

As I complete a book on peer mentoring in undergraduate courses, this theme is quite fresh in my mind and well worth a blog post.

At the University of Calgary in 2005 I founded our Faculty of Arts Peer Mentoring program.  I still coordinate it, although others now teach our peer mentors.  I have just completed my 2nd year as the Director of our university’s SU-funded Curricular Peer Mentoring Network located at our Teaching and Learning Center.

What are peer mentors?

In a nutshell, undergraduate students become peer mentors who collaborate with instructors and teaching assistants to enrich peer-based learning within their courses.  They may also design and lead learning activities outside of class time and online.  Normally they return to a course they have already taken and work with a professor they are familiar with. They apply for this honor, and are supported and educated by taking a 4th year course in peer mentoring and collaborative learning.

Teaching a web-design service-learning course

Image: T. Smith, 2009. With subject's consent.

Nearing the end of an adventure

In a few days my students in Communications Studies 463 will be completing their final websites and collected experiences and reflections.

Their thoughts will be presented publicly on campus on April 14th to an audience of approximately 30 people in addition to their class of 27 students and 4 instructional team members.

My post today responds to several of the common themes of their reflections:

• transformed expectations about what the course should/would be like
• the unexpected workload that comes with increased accountability to stakeholders in addition to the usual fear/respect for the grade
• the technology challenges and learning
• the teamwork challenges and learning
• the unusual roles of the instructional team members as collaborators
• the unfamiliar assignments that are a “hybrid” of academic, public, and organizational genres suiting our hybrid partnership and bridge-building aims.
• the joys and fears of producing a real website for a real public while being evaluated by one another and supporting one another.

Google Sites as Course Websites

Screen shot close-up of my Google Site for the course

An increasing number of teachers are becoming web-savvy and are looking for ways to efficiently organize their course information for students through communication technology.

I’m one of them.

For many years now I’ve created a public course website for each course I teach.   Essentially, I have created an area within my own site, an area with 8-20 pages of material: a course home page with subpages for assignment descriptions, a schedule, links, and course-specific research or writing advice.

I’ve done this in combination with the “Blackboard” course management technology that has been adopted at my university, preferring the ability to craft the site the way I want, and display the non-confidential information publicly.

This blog post uses my own course website to explore the benefits and limitations of using Google Sites technology, especially in combination with Blackboard, a technology used for course management at many universities.

Cause and Effect in Rhetoric (Part 5)

fragment of "WW1 Causes." (Harris Morgan 2007, Sep. 21, Wikimedia Commons)

This section of the blog article “Cause and effect in rhetoric” discusses how cause and effect arguments enter into Rhetorical Praxis and Pedagogy.

It discusses the value of rhetorical cause & effect reasoning to the concsciousness of those who practice rhetoric, and to those who teach and learn rhetorical practice

For the introduction to the article, go to Cause and Effect in Rhetoric Part 1.