Promoting Innovation: 2016 SALTISE Mini-grant Recipients Announced
Once again in 2016, the Supporting Active Learning and Technological Innovation in the Studies of Education (SALTISE) community of practice has attracted a diverse range of projects and awarded them with a mini-grant to support the development of innovative practices.
Each year, the SALTISE community of practice awards mini-grants to educators in Quebec as a means of encouraging the use of new types of pedagogies to promote active learning. The selection committee for the SALTISE mini-grants included members from Champlain Regional College, Dawson College, Vanier College and McGill University. The committee chose 10 projects from English and French CEGEPs, 2 private colleges, a university and a ministerial IT partner. In some cases, grants were awarded to individuals, but many of the awards went to team-based projects this year.
A Sampling of the Diverse Cohort of Award Recipients
The diversity of disciplines represented amongst the projects reflects SALTISE’s commitment to expand their activities to encompass all disciplines and instructors who have an interest in developing Active Learning or new approaches in the classroom. Although the sciences continue to have an important contingent in this year’s cohort, there are also two inter-disciplinary projects, another from Business Administration and a professional development project that will help teachers from any discipline learn new ways to teach.
Two projects from John Abbott College were chosen. Matt Hill from Business Administration will be trying out Google’s new Expeditions Pioneer program, providing immersive experiences for his students as part of his project Incorporating Google for Education and Google Pioneer. As part of the project, students will be using tablets and cloud-based computing. In the second project from John Abbott College, Jean-Michel Sotiron will be helping students across the disciplines develop their debating skills with a Debate-Induced Active Learning (DIAL) Kit. The intention of this project is to “lower the barrier to trying out debates as a tool to engage students.”
Many of the awards’ recipients will be using their mini-grants to help them produce videos this year, including SALTISE’s first inter-level mini-grant winning team. Maria Orjuela-Laverde from McGill University and Robert Cassidy from Dawson College will be developing 360 degree professional development videos to help college and university teachers enhance their instructional design strategies. Yann Brouillette (also from Dawson College) will be producing an additional 10 videos in his ChemCurious series, which you can read about on Profweb. These videos use pop culture to stimulate interest in chemistry. Representing Vanier College, Edward Awad will be producing videos on flipping the classroom in Biology. Edward previously reported on his experiences using clickers and screensharing on Profweb.
From the French side, Caroline Cormier and Véronique Turcotte from Cégep André-Laurendeau will be producing videos for a General Chemistry course, adding to the collection of videos for the flipped classroom that they began in 2015. Another first this year, a team from Cégep à distance (a ministerial IT Partner), with Stéphanie Facchin, Évelyne Abran and Simon Brien will be experimenting with the effectiveness of different types of multimedia feedback (audio and video) in their project Devoir+ within the context of distance education.
More details on these projects, as well as the projects from Champlain Regional College, Lasalle College and Marianopolis will emerge over the next few months. The SALTISE team encourages you to visit their website later in the semester for more info.
2016 SALTISE Conference Announced
The SALTISE team was also very pleased to announce another first this year. Their annual conference will take place at a university for the first time. UQAM will play host to the 2016 edition of the conference, whose theme is ‘Designing Instruction for Learning: Blending Pedagogy, Technology and Space,’ which will take place on June 3rd 2016 in Montreal.
The SALTISE annual conference should be a great opportunity to learn more about this year’s SALITSE mini-grant projects and speak to the alumni from previous years! Should you wish to present at this year’s conference, the call for proposals page is now live on the SALTISE web site. The deadline to submit a proposal is April 4th, 2016.
