Teaching Online:

Resources.

Online Teaching Series

• Overview of my approach to online teaching

• Structuring and curating

• Learning through discussion

• Tasks and assignments

• FAQs

• Resources

• Webinar

• Webinar - Grad Student Edition

• Webinar Series - Examples and Tips

Disclaimer Haiku

This is what I’ve done
It won’t work for everyone
The students like it.

eCampusOntario

eCampusOntario is a centre of excellence in online and technology-enabled learning. They’ve put together a really useful site to support remote teaching and learning during COVID-19.

UW Keep Learning

Keep Learning is a website developed by the University of Waterloo in response to the university-wide shutdown necessitated by the CORVID-19 pandemic. Its original intent was to provide some quick advice and resources as instructors scrambled to put the remaining two weeks of their courses online. It is being maintained now as UW plans an entire online Spring Term.

Website: UW Keep Learning

In addition, there are some useful resources that have been put together by other groups and individuals at the University of Waterloo. Check out:

• Fostering Engagement: Facilitating Online Courses in Higher Education

• Some (largely Waterloo-specific) information on developing content for online courses

• Teaching Tips from the Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo

• Going Virtual by Zara Rafferty (Applied Health Sciences, University of Waterloo)

• Guide to Online Learning Resources and Tools by Tony Tin (Renison University College)

Webinar Resources

Each of the webinars listed on this page contains resource lists related to that webinar’s topics. Check them out!

Open Educational Resources (OERs)

Open educational resources (OERs) are are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. The most common form of OERs are textbooks that have been developed for standard courses that are taught at most universities and colleges in addition to textbooks for more niche courses.

The beauty of OERs is that they are designed to reused, remixed, revised, redistributed. In short, these resources are customizable and can be made to fit your particular course context. You can take a chapter from one OER textbook and combine with a chapter from another OER textbook. You can add your own material to the mix. The combinations are practically unlimited thanks to the use of Creative Commons licensing which allows for this kind of freedom. These resources are also wonderful for students because they’re usually free, and student will have access to them from the first day of the course.

Here is a list of some extensive OER libraries:

eCampusOntario Open Library

BCcampus Open Textbooks

Open Textbook Library

OpenStax

And, if you’re interested, I’ve written an op-ed piece about OERs and even been interviewed by the University of Waterloo’s Beyond the Bulletin podcast. Both of these provide good introductions to OERs and their place in university education.

Some Other Resources Worth Noting

• The ACE (Adaptability, Connection, and Equity) Framework from the Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University

• Universal Design for Learning Guidelines

• King’s University College (an affiliate of Western University in London, Ontario) has created the Moving Online Project. Although some of these are King’s/Western-centric, there’s lots here for everyone. Check it out!