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Digital Education Strategies for Zone Learning: Enhancing Flexibility and Accessibility for Continuous Learners

Leveraging educational technologies is integral for enhancing student engagement, accessibility and overall student success. This session will focus on a recent collaboration between Zone Learning and The Chang School to expand accessibility and flexibility of ZON100 by developing the course for a full online delivery. Providing a window into the Digital Education Strategies (DES) development process, the course’s subject-matter expert (SME) and Learning Experience Designer will engage attendees with the purposeful design and application of a technology-supported Zone learning environment, aimed at bridging the gap between education and real-world problems. The session will touch on constructivist and participatory learning theories as well as best practices in learning experience design.

Presenters

Teaching Academic Integrity in a World Without the Beatles

This presentation details experiences of using popular media (specifically, the movie Yesterday) to connect with students in order to enhance their understanding of the importance and relevance of academic integrity. We will discuss the reasons behind selecting Yesterday, including its exploration of authorship, the choices made in resolving the central conflict, and the parallels that can be drawn between the main character’s journey and the situations that students might encounter in their own academic careers where they might be tempted to engage in academic misconduct. We will cover the planning and execution of the event, and reflect on the outcomes. In addition, we will discuss the benefits, challenges, and precedents of using popular media as a teaching tool. Attendees will gain practical insights into how popular media can be leveraged to create engaging, thought-provoking educational experiences that resonate with students.

Presenters

Past Is Pedagogy: Partnering with Archives in a Large Lecture Class

Rising class sizes within the neoliberal university often result in less student-professor interaction, less opportunity for innovative assignments, less knowing students’ names, and less experiential learning, amongst other such barriers. This presentation offers the example of a class-wide collaborative project in a large (200-person) report writing class – not as a workaround but as a coping mechanism.

In this project, the class partnered with TMU Archives & Special Collections, which proposed a real-world problem: how can the archive make connections with student clubs, who may wish to deposit their records for historical preservation but currently are not? Much of the student experience includes student clubs, but these ephemeral events and connections often escape archival preservation.

All 200 students received an individual report-writing role investigating what barriers exist for student clubs to leave their materials with the archive. Each student exited the class with one specific skill (i.e., conducting an REB-approved interview; copyediting; formatting page numbers in Adobe InDesign; analyzing archival materials; original photography; writing a press release; translating an executive summary into French, and so much more!), contributing one small task to a larger, portfolio-worthy piece of writing.

This project is informed by critical understandings of archives, which “read” the archive not as a neutral repository but as constructed, as a site of power, and as a potential site for liberatory futures (Hartman, 2008; Mbembe, 2002; McCracken, 2015; Trouillot, 2012). This project is further informed by the theories of inquiry-based learning, which centre inquiring, researching, evaluating, and reflecting (Archer-Kuhn et al., 2022).

This paper will be presented by the professor of the class and the TMU archivist as well as several students from the class, who will share the impacts of this class-wide project on student experience, discussing their specific roles and the opportunities and challenges with this project.

This presentation will further postulate future impacts on the student experience vis a vis preserving student club histories. In this way, this presentation is focused on student experience within the class but also 1) within the archive and 2) within student club histories and futures.

Presenters