An effective course syllabus is much more than a schedule of assignments and description of grading criteria—it can be a teacher’s best friend. In this workshop, John Blando and Kitty Millet will discuss and share the thought, care and planning that are behind effective course and syllabus design.

Rubrics—or standard criteria models—are crucial in defining and communicating specific assignment expectations to your students, particularly in creative work like papers, presentations, and artistic endeavors. By focusing on learning outcomes, rubrics bring clarity to the assessment process. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll develop or improve a rubric and share useful, cross-discipline criteria. PLEASE BRING a course syllabus and an assignment description.

How different languages signal meaning and what those differences imply for teaching multiple language students are crucial studies in an increasingly international university. Masahiko Minami has spent many years researching how bilingual children and adults understand and communicate in two or more languages. In this session, he will explore and explicate the language and learning relationship, by revealing how bilingual children use temporal, adversative and causal connectives, and what features of each language they emphasize in narrative.

Workbooks are often used to introduce and assess students’ understanding of fundamental topics, but even the most effective workbooks have drawbacks. Students find them costly and often just skim over them. More significantly, instructors must correct the exercises and return them later, taking up valuable time, denying students the type of immediate feedback that promotes learning.

Online quizzes offer a better alternative. They are free for the student, provide immediate feedback and have no limit on the number of exercises. While their initial development takes time, once deployed, they free instructors from hours of grading. Furthermore, they provided the means to analyze the responses of all students, so the instructor can identify confusing concepts for further work.

In this showcase, Amy Love will show the development of iLearn quizzes designed to replace the English department’s proofreading skills workbook Fog City Fundamentals. She will demonstrate successfully translated sections, sharing lessons learned and student response to the product.

The average 17-old now spends 71 hours per week on electronic media and less than one hour reading. Given that fact, how can we engage them in complex texts? This workshop examines practical methods to answer that question.