At the University of British Columbia, “Educational Leadership” can be understood very briefly as “activity taken at UBC and elsewhere to advance innovation in teaching and learning with impact beyond one’s classroom” (from section 4.04 of the UBC-Faculty Association Collective Agreement).
Below I list some of the areas of my educational leadership work. Historical information on each of these (up to 2015) can be found in my Teaching and Learning Portfolio.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
I have undertaken several SoTL research projects. One focuses on peer feedback in writing, attempting to discover an optimum number of peer feedback sessions in a course for peer comments (given and received) to contribute to improvement in writing. I also conduct research in the use of open textbooks and other open educational resources.
Please see my CV, sections on publications and conference presentations, as well as the research page on this website.
Open Education
Open education encompasses many activities, from making one’s courses “open” in the sense that anyone can join them without cost (such as with MOOCs: Massive, Open, Online Courses), to opening up one’s teaching materials to anyone else to freely view and possibly use and redistribute (i.e., creating “open educational resources” (OER) including open textbooks), to asking one’s students to do some of their coursework openly and publicly, and more.
Nearly all of my teaching materials are shared on course websites that are public. I have also recently worked hard to use as many open, public and freely available resources in my own courses as possible, such as online texts, videos, and podcasts. In this way I not only have been able to save students money, but also to include numerous kinds of works in my courses, rather than only written texts. In Arts One we recorded many of our lectures and posted them on YouTube, and student and professor blog posts were collected and posted (along with the lecture videos) on the Arts One Open website.
I received a fellowship from BCcampus to be a “Faculty Fellow” with the BCcampus Open Textbook program from 2014-2015, through which I engaged in advocacy, raising awareness, and doing research around open textbooks and other OER. Please see this article for reports from the faculty fellows after our year was completed. I also received an OER Research Fellowship from the Open Education Group for 2015-2017, to do research on open textbooks. Please see the publications section of my CV for articles published in 2017 as a result of this fellowship.
I am also the series editor for a set of nine open textbooks for Introduction to Philosophy courses. Four have been published as of early 2021. You can see more information about this project on the Rebus Community discussion pages for this series.
Most recently, I have worked with colleagues at four other post-secondary institutions in British Columbia to develop and refine an Institutional Self-Assessment Tool for open educational practice initiatives. This self-assessment tool is based on research on institutional change, particularly in relation to blended learning projects, and has been refined through testing with people from our five institutions. It can be used to assess strengths and areas for growth in support for open education initiatives at an institutional level. We have presented on this tool at several conferences and have submitted an article for publication about it as well. Please see the conference presentations section of my CV.
Please see my CV for workshops and other presentations I have done on open education at UBC and beyond.
Teaching and learning workshops and courses facilitated
I have designed and facilitated several workshops on open education at UBC and beyond, and have also been involved in planning and facilitating workshops on other topics, including accessibility and Universal Design for Learning.
More broadly, I have co-designed and co-facilitated several open online courses on teaching and learning that are available to anyone with an internet connection to take for free, including courses on educational technology, openness generally (including open education), and teaching with WordPress.
Please see the teaching and learning workshops section of my CV for a list of teaching and learning workshops facilitated, including partnering with others to co-design and co-facilitated longer courses on Teaching with WordPress (2015) and a Program for Open Scholarship and Education (2021).