In the first weeks of term, before tutors get busy marking, they can be a great help to assist setting up your course with activities and teams for a lively learning experience.
The UW-ACE team tool can set up multiple teams for the class. Teams can last the whole term or change over the term. Projects, study-groups and team-instructor discussions can make good use of UW-ACE teams.
Teams can also help with student questions. Instead of all the individuals in a class corresponding with the lecturer or tutor, discussions/questions/etc are addressed first within the team. Students learn from one another. Questions from the teams are then forwarded on to the class staff, if necessary. Many simple questions need never take up staff time, while really good questions are given a chance to incubate in the team before the staff is asked. This prepares students for answers and can fashion better questions too. Teams can also be asked to prepare questions for discussion boards and class.
Teams can be led by tutors, or selected course mentors (the better students in the class, or upper level students - whatever resources are available) or be run by students on a rotating set of roles (moderator/leader/planner /writer/etc).
Communication among team members can be set up easily within UW-ACE. Discussion boards can be set up, associating them with individual teams, or a whole class. Boards are also a good organization tool for separate topic discussions or weekly discussions.
Another useful UW-ACE feature is the quiz tool. With some preparation, tutors can help set up automatically marked quizzes in the following areas:
Immediate feedback is possible from the automatically marked quizzes, letting students and staff know what progress is being made and where difficulties arise.
Finally, the class tutors can help set up the presentation of online course content, naming the UW-ACE folders by topic or by week. There are also web page templates available to help design a think/do/reflect sequence of learning topics.
Tutors are a great resource to draw upon, especially if their workload is light at the the start of term.
Paul Kates Mathematics Faculty CTE Liaison, x37047, pkates@uwaterloo.ca