Using social constructivism as a theoretical paradigm, and the concept of collaborative learning as the approach, this case study presents the application of a student-generated wiki as a learning tool in a graduate-level professional ethics course taught online. Practical and pedagogical considerations are presented and recommendations for further applications of social media are offered. conference participants will be invited to visit the wiki and consider how they might contribute to it.

In Curricular Peer Mentoring, students enroll in a senior-level course that teaches peer mentorship and engagement theories and skills. Their knowledge also develops through a mentorship practicum hosted by an instructor and his/her course. The result is a cost effective partnership among a cohort of undergraduate peer mentors with faculty members, TAs, and students that mutually enhances their collaborative learning, inquiry, and engagement both within and outside of class time.

Through the poster participants will learn about the foundational principles and unique benefits that differentiate Curricular Peer Mentoring from other 'peer mentoring' programs. Furthermore, they will gain a concrete understanding of how this program is implemented and the immediate and measurable impact it has on the academic environment. This poster will showcase a visual and graphical portrayal of research results, concepts, roles and program structure.

This innovative program is currently being piloted at the University of Calgary in a Liberal Arts Faculty, a business program and also within the Faculty of Nursing. Thus far, the program has yielded exciting research results and a Curricular Peer Mentoring Handbook. A scholarly edited book is also in progress.

The Teaching Master Class was hosted in January 2009 with the objective of having instructors improve the learning outcomes of their students through observing teaching styles of a sampling of their faculty peers. The demonstrator instructors were all formally recognized for their excellence in the classroom. This initiative was intended to inspire the faculty of the School of Business Administration to reflect on their own teaching styles and seek ways to improve. The intended beneficiaries were the students of Dalhousie Universty. It is likely that these students will experience a higher level of engagement in their classes when they have effective instructors who inspire them to work towards achievement of learning outcomes.

The Teaching Master Class was considered to be a success by the participants and organizers. Participants indicated that valuable lessons were learned from the experience and that they went away better equipped to engage their students. They also offered promising sugggestions for future endeavours. Sharing the experiences of the Teaching Master Class at the Dalhousie Conference on University Teaching and Learning will hopefully encourage university communities to undertake similar professional development opportunities that will enhance student learning.

Introductory courses in universities present a unique challenge to student engagement. Some of the impediments to student engagement in these courses include large class sizes, the diversity of the students' motivations for taking the course and academic backgrounds, the broad spectrum of material to be covered, and the constraints of external influences such as departmental curriculums and budgets. All of these can change how we would prefer to teach and reduce our ability to engage with students as individuals. We have attempted over the last few years to modify our approach to overcome these limitations and increase student engagement. We have focused especially in the area of developing writing and research skills, driven by both our own ideas and student feedback, while still working within the aforementioned constraints. The presentation will outline the barriers we have identified to student engagement, the different measures we have taken to try and increase student engagement; including use of web-based interaction and the addition of self-defined and goal-oriented group term projects, and the feedback we have received from students on our attempts. We will then facilitate a discussion on barriers to student engagement in introductory courses and novel approaches to mitigating those barriers.

We want students to start thinking of study skills as something that they will take with them long after they graduate because they are many of the soft skills that their future employers are looking for in their employees.

One hour workshops have been the cornerstone for demonstrating general study skills strategies in the past, however, we have found that over the years, this is no longer the most efficient way to reach students. This has a serious impact on helping students develop those skills.

This presentation will begin by outlining the Study Skills Program here at Dalhousie University. It is rather unique in that it is staffed by graduate students from nine different areas of specialty, and funded by our Student Employment Program. We will review two specific projects that allowed us to integrate study skills into the classroom, and will discuss that experience and its impact on students.

We'd then like to break into smaller groups to identify relevant study skills and brainstorm ideas for integrating these study skills into courses, as a first step in engaging students in developing study skills to foster their success.

Individuals born between 1982 and 2000 are most popularly known as millennials. They are currently or soon to be in post secondary institutions. Due to the size of the cohort and the distinct environment in which they grew up, the millennials bring with them a diverse set of characteristics, motivations, and skills which pose challenges to the institutions.

The basis of this proposed session is that the preconceived impressions that we have of the new generation affects the way we interact with them. Therefore, the goal of the session will be an initial discovery into understanding millennials on our campuses so that we are able to support them in their academic careers.

The session will be divided into three different portions. The first part will explore the demographic characteristics of the millennials. It is important to acknowledge that the millennials are young adults and students first; their distinct personalities are by-products of the environment in which they grew up. The second portion will be an interactive discussion about the several popular myths that we have about millennials. Are helicopter parents a hindrance to the academic environment? Are millennials truly individualistic, instant gratification seeking people? The final portion of the session will be to link their characteristics into improving our interactions and strategies to engage them on campus.

Self-authorship, as defined by Marcia Baxter Magolda, is a developmental state characterized by finding and trusting one's inner voice, building an inner foundation that guides one's reactions to life events, and internally determining one's beliefs, identity and relations with others. Researchers have recently explored the extent to which advising interventions can help students progress in this development. Indeed, academic advising and more broad student success initiatives across North America have begun to use the concept of self-authorship as the grounding framework for helping students become empowered as they chart their course in life and respond to academic struggles. This is in contrast to an approach reliant on identifying students' deficits and providing solutions stemming from external authority. In this round table, we will begin by a brief overview of the conceptual framework and of initiatives grounded in it, and then discuss the ways in which it might inform our practice as advisors.

According to Kathleen McKinney (2007), students are most often involved in the Scholarship of Teaching as subjects of research: professors and educational developers investigate and document how changes and innovations in teaching affect student learning. Less common is the active participation of undergraduate students in SoTL as research partners.

Presented with examples of successful partnerships, session participants will explore undergraduates' involvement in SoTL from two perspectives: first, how merely having student assistance can encourage professors to initiate an innovative or scholarly teaching project; second, how such student participation enriches the professor's experience, while at the same time increasing students' engagement in their own learning. Such partnerships create a positive, productive teaching and learning environment for all.

Through small group and general discussion, participants will compare and generate ideas for projects that will engage undergraduate students and change how Scholarship of Teaching projects are conceived and undertaken at their own institutions.

In this session, we will use the development of CONNECTIONS: Acadia's First-Year Option as an example of how curriculum development requires the participation of many sectors of campus. In January of 2008, the Learning Commons hosted a symposium designed to examine the first year experience at Acadia. Four months later a group of faculty from across the campus got together to explore possible approaches to first-year studies that would impart a passion for learning. hroughout the summer of 2008, the group met to discuss the essential elements of an approach that would build on the strengths the institution while, at the same time, instilling a love and ownership of learning. The group was coordinated by the Learning Commons and consisted of a student and professors, librarians, and instructors in arts, science, and professional studies. Throughout the fall, course proposals were developed, and meetings were held with curriculum committees, Faculty Councils, and Senate approved the addition of 6 transdisciplinary courses. CONNECTIONS students will take three block-scheduled, team-taught courses in addition to two courses to fulfill program requirements. We will encourage participants to reflect on the challenges associated with teaching first year courses and to consider how development of innovative curriculum can be facilitated by the cooperation of multiple sectors of a campus.

Engaging students in learning is becoming more and more difficult. There is no question that as educators, we are in competition for students' attention, from YouTube to online chatting and other forms of entertainment and edutainment. It is not just the content but also the medium with which we are in competition. To address this challenge, technology and pedagogical strategies must be deployed. In this session, we will discuss strategies and tools we can employ to optimize the engagement of students that we require. From using and creating videos to low tech options such as "Pair, Share, Square," this very practical session will have participants working together to come up with strategies for their own courses.

In 2008-2009, 150 students in two critical thinking classes participated in an experiment designed to foster both skills of reason assessment and a disposition to engage in critical inquiry. The students were required to write course journals in which they reflected on and discussed what they were learning in the class, what it meant to them, and how it connected or failed to connect to their past, present, and future lives. The students were supported in this reflective/analytical exercise by way of a template of critical questions, which they were to ask themselves and answer. In this presentation we will discuss our findings, focusing particularly on the potential of the student journals to foster student engagement in the course material and in self-reflective thought. The presentation will include interactive discussion of the methodology and goals of the course journal project and an examination of examples of students' reflections from the course journals.