References: The People Behind the Pedagogy Vantage College

Through her years working with English additional language learners from all over the world, Jennifer Walsh Marr has seen both students and instructors struggle with paraphrasing; it’s difficult to do and difficult to teach, and yet the stakes can be so high. In today’s episode, we do a deep dive into paraphrasing, what it means, how it’s misunderstood, and its implications in the landscape of higher education. We also discuss what grammatical metaphor is and how it can help students in...

Academic integrity is of vital importance in academia, and unfortunately, this is not something that comes naturally to students, regardless of their background. As Suzie Lavallee, Vantage College’s Academic Director, put it: “Academic integrity isn’t added onto the curriculum—it is the curriculum.”In this episode of References, we sit down with Dr. Alys Avalos-Rivera, an AEP Lecturer with Vantage Engineering, and Dr. Suzie Lavallee, to discuss the importance of academic integrity in the stud...

“Teaching to an extent, is a performance across disciplines, whether it’s dance, theatre, or any other course.” – Gabriel Potvin We are back with our 2nd and final episode for our 2-part series about the sudden transition to emergency online teaching that took place in late March 2020. In this episode, we sit down with Katja Thieme, Assistant Professor of Teaching in Arts Studies in Research & Writing, and Gabriel Potvin, Associate Professor of Teaching in Chemical & Biological E...

Good teaching is good teaching, whether it's face to face or online.In this first of a 2-part episode series, Jodie Martin speaks with Brian Wilson about the sudden transition to emergency online teaching that took place in late March 2020 here at UBC. Brian is the Curriculum Manager and Faculty Liaison at Vantage College, and prior to this role, he worked as an instructional designer and project manager with the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology. From his experience, Brian has a w...

Do you use multiple choice questions for tests, mid-terms and exams? The advantage of technology today means that we can do all sorts of marvellous things, like create question banks, gather analytics on responses, and perhaps most importantly, mark automatically. But how many times have you had a question which most students got wrong, even though you know they knew the content? Often we see that as teachers, how we phrase questions isn’t as obvious to our students as it is to us! In t...