There are plenty of reasons to schedule interactions with students. Office hours are one reason, and student presentations are another. The Moodle scheduler allows you to set up these meetings, as shown in the figure below. once the student has looked at the schedule, she can then select a time slot. Once she has "booked […]
During my sabbatical year in Strasbourg, France, I took both German and French language classes. This blog entry is about the French course I took. Before getting into the details about how I took French lessons during my sabbatical, here is some background. We chose to raise our kids as francophones in Toronto. They went […]
Many professors in Canadian universities get a "sabbatical year" once every few years. My first sabbatical year was from July 2018 to June 2019 and I spent most of it in Strasbourg, France, with my wife and kids. Unlike what many people outside of academia think, it's not a vacation, but is generally considered a […]
During my 2018-19 sabbatical year I worked with colleagues at engineering schools in Strasbourg, France and Karlsruhe, Germany. These schools have well-developed exchange programs and wished to establish an exchange program with York University. I had many productive and insightful conversations about ideas, challenges and opportunities for exchanges with Angelika Hammann and the staff in the […]
While I was on sabbatical from York University I had the opportunity to teach twice at the University of Applied Sciences in Karlsruhe, Germany (Hochschule Karlsruhe, a.k.a HsKa). I had been invited to do so by Professor Klemens Gintner, a colleague and friend who I had hosted during his sabbatical in Toronto in 2015. It […]
As part of my sabbatical activities I took on the "Temps Pratiques" microcontroller laboratory sessions for electrical engineering and mechatronics students at INSA Strasbourg. In pre-sabbatical discussions with faculty and staff at INSA Strasbourg I found out that the students were learning using what I considered to be outdated technologies. The PIC16F84A microcontroller chip used […]
While on sabbatical I started getting serious about writing a book. In spite of having wanted to write a book for years, writing one while on sabbatical wasn't my primary goal. But as visa issues in France became more difficult and made more traditional research work harder the book writing became a bigger focus for […]
[This is a reposting of my original blog post at the York University Teaching Commons' Blog.] Peer-to-Peer Teaching Feedback Done Right: The YorkU Teaching Wheels There are typically two ways to get feedback on teaching: through anonymous student feedback and through your colleagues on the tenure and promotion committee. But both of these mechanisms are […]