News+Items

**News**...
We are deeply saddened to hear that our colleague at McMaster, Sue Vajoczki, has passed away. We will miss Sue, and are thinking of her family and friends in this difficult time. A tribute was posted today on the McMaster website: @http://dailynews.mcmaster.ca/article/remembering-sue-vajoczki/
 * October 9 2012**

Our meeting for 2012 will take place at the University of Toronto once again. Details to follow.
 * October 5 2012**

Western U colleague Deb Dawson has moved on up to Chair the Educational Developers Caucus of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Dr. Dawson, while capable of leading two organisations at once, has agreed to stay sane by vacating her upcoming COED Chairship. Our loss is EDC's gain of course. This also implies more positions for the October elections. Stay tuned!
 * July 2012**


 * November 2010**

We are pleased to announce the acclamation of Carol Miles (Carleton University) as the Chair-Elect from December 2010-November 2011, at which point she will become Chair, and then Past-Chair the following year. Thank you Carol for stepping forward! A link to the Executive Biographies will be up shortly.

The annual meeting is at the University of Toronto this year; registration is open!


 * May 2010**

Upcoming event at McMaster University (June 10th, 2010) to explore implementation of Undergraduate and Graduate Degree Level Expectations (UDLEs and GDLEs) Click for a PDF of the Agenda


 * COED updates for COU/OCAV**
 * Assessment Working Group presented on EDC Research at the EDC conference, and one group consisting of developers from across Canada asked to join the COED wiki.
 * The AODA Working Group surveyed members regarding the implementation of the AODA guidelines. Generally, it appears that HR has taken the lead at most schools to implement and report the AODA directives. A couple of universities have their teaching and learning centres delivering the faculty training, but not all. Most faculty, it appears, have received the training well, but are expressing concern about the proposed Information and Communications guidelines. Full comments are posted on the wiki.
 * The College-University Relations Working Group awaits ethics approval for a planned brief survey
 * Members of the Curriculum Working Group are bookmarking resources with Delicious, creating and testing a database of Program Learning Outcomes, writing an editable and annotated list of resources, and circulating draft guidelines for supporting OCAV Degree Level Expectations
 * Members of OUCEL and the e-Learning Working Group were invited to a teleconference with Erica Simmons at COU to brief her on the state of e-learning in Ontario.


 * November 2009**

We now have a leadership team:

Trevor Holmes (Waterloo): Chair Michael K. Potter (Windsor): Chair-Elect

Our Constitution is settled. We are awaiting approval for Affiliate status from COU.

We meet Nov 27th at Ryerson! And we have a Twitter hashtag #COEDmtg09 (howzabout a Facebook group while we're at it?)

Call for nominees for positions on COED executive:
 * October 2009**
 * //Elections time! Finally!//**

Dear Educational Developers of Ontario,

COED needs you! Consider nominating yourself or a colleague for one of two available positions on the COED Executive for 2009-2011 or 2009-2012:

Chair: a two-year commitment (becomes Past Chair for 2010-2011) Chair-elect: a three-year commitment (becomes Chair for 2010-2011, Past Chair for 2011-2012

To nominate yourself or a colleague, copy/paste the following into a new email and send it to Michael K. Potter (pottermk@uwindsor.ca by October 16th 2009): "With the nominee's consent, I hereby nominate [firstname lastname] of [institution] for the role of [Chair OR Chair-elect]." Please include a brief (`300 words) biography and a consent email from the nominee (well, unless you're nominating yourself).

Voting will take place electronically beginning October 19th and ending October 30th 2009. We will send out two more reminders about the nomination process, and explain the voting after October 16.

If you would like to contribute to COED in a leadership role but do not wish to take on the commitments of Executive positions, remember that "Vice-Chairs" can be created any time to run working groups on particular topics or areas of focus (such as eLearning, College-University interactions, curriculum reform, etc.).

Yours in educational development,

Wendy Hardman (UOIT) and Michael K. Potter (UWin) Nominating and Elections subcommittee 2009

See Meetings page for details and the Agenda page for this year's agenda (give input!)
 * //November meeting//**

(email from Trevor Holmes to COED discussion list) I have a co-op student working with me this term on matters curricular. His name is Kelvin Siu, and he'll be gathering information based on web searches -- information directly pertaining to the implementation of Undergraduate Degree Level Expectations UDLEs at Ontario Universities. The goal is to get a snapshot of what's happened since last June's unfolding in Program Review processes (specifically in terms of web-based support). Then we can share it back to the group and identify strengths, best practices, etc.
 * June 2009**

In addition to this work, we're also looking for College and University curriculum mapping tools (thanks so much to those who have contributed items or draft items already, based on my last call). We'd like to create a sort of inventory and matrix of what each tool can and can't do.

So, my "ask" in this email, to be direct:

1. Please send Kelvin kklsiu@uwaterloo.ca any links to your own University OCAV- or UDLE- or curriculum-related websites (from Senate, AVP, VP, teaching centre, or library, or anywhere else you might house stuff) in case he misses something in his searching. 2. Please let Kelvin know if you are doing the same kind of work already (an environmental scan of the Ontario universities' resource responses to UDLE support) so that we can collaborate, not duplicate. 3. If you have curriculum mapping software in the works at your COLLEGE or UNIVERSITY, commercial or homegrown, sophisticated or basic, please let Kelvin know if we can try it, see it, share it, just review it, collect a review of it from you, whatever you like. Those who forwarded stuff already, thanks -- no need to do so again unless you've tweaked it since. 4. visit our wiki and think about running for a position, think about constitutional matters, and await further instructions re: timelines and electronic polls etc. http://ontarioedudevelopers.wikispaces.com

April 2009
Peter Wolf, Judy Britnell, and Joy Mighty (from a distance) were invited to present to COU about what Centres do. The powerpoint is archived here.

February 2009
Elections are delayed as we iron out final details of the Constitution; OCAV suggests new wording in two sections. Consensus is not reached that these are "minor" changes, and so I'm posting them here in order to have ready access to them for members.

**December 2008**
Well, Trevor Holmes is still Interim Chair. Nobody's kicked him out yet. Don't forget about the upcoming national [|EDC Conference] in Oshawa, February 2008!

**November 2008**
We have a Constitution! We also have an Interim Chair. Hooray, us! Details to follow. We picked Governance Model 1, for those who are counting. :)

**October 2008**
Two governance models -- moved to Archives...

**September 2008**
Trevor Holmes addressed the OUCEL (e-Learning) group in August; the goal was to have a conversation about the pros and cons of joining forces (OUCEL plus COED) and many opinions were expressed on the Wednesday afternoon of the conference. By Friday, the sense was that we should continue to explore relationships and models of collaboration. An important report from COU confirmed that there is work to be done by the e-Learning group. We all wonder what OCAV's response might be to this report. See the first News Item (Aug 7) at http://www.cou.on.ca/

June 2008
We met face-to-face Thursday June 19 2008, 7:30 - 8:30 a.m. at the University of Windsor during the STLHE conference.

 Trevor's rough/ready timeline was a refresher for the meeting... download a PDF here:

 We decided to go ahead and affiliate with OCAV -- this process has begun more formally and should be firmed up in Fall 2008.

 Next meeting will be our usual annual meeting at Ryerson, November 14 2008. Further details will come from Judy Britnell on the mailing list.

May 2008
Something I dug up in a 2006 COU report on quality -- our role might be a "pre-established" version of the planned network...

 Improving Teaching Support  While the quality of student learning depends upon many things, central among these factors is the quality of university teaching. All Ontario universities support faculty teaching development, and all regularly review the quality of undergraduate programs. The Ontario Council of Academic Vice-Presidents is considering the creation of a province-wide university faculty teaching development network that would help co-ordinate and reinforce these quality-improvement efforts. The key objective is to improve the quality of university teaching and, to that end, to gather and increase the knowledge available on university teaching and learning; to disseminate that knowledge to all universities; to set benchmarks for the adoption of best practices across universities; to make available the latest and most advanced teaching development materials; and to recognize teaching excellence. The network could include the following elements: scholarly research into teaching and learning; workshops and forums; an inventory of best practices and a setting of benchmarks; provincial collaboration and a centre to maximize the benefits of information technology in support of teaching and learning; creation of teaching development resources; dissemination of knowledge to the universities; and recognition of teaching excellence to complement  institutional initiatives in this regard.

 The quality of university teaching will be reflected in the quality of student learning. Student views of the quality of teaching will be reflected through appropriate surveys and internal institutional sources. The network’s potential contribution to this goal would be reflected in several indicators: the growing volume of scholarship on university teaching; the number of workshops and forums at which new knowledge on university teaching is presented; the  teaching development materials