Welcome!

A strong teaching and learning culture relies on active engagement with teaching as a professional activity that is open to self-reflection, dialogue, research, and critique.

- A Model for Engaged Teaching at York, p. 2

Teaching in Focus is here! We are glad to have you here.

This year’s theme, Engaged Teaching Wherever We Are, encourages us to think about teaching far beyond the constraints of physical locations. The community is coming together to share their experiences of the last year with a particular focus on remote teaching. It will be a time for reflection about the hardship of teaching through a scary time and what we hope to carry forward.

In the Schedule tab, you will see that you have pre-recorded sessions you can browse at any time (all collated for your convenience in our Recorded Presentations tab) and parallel live sessions to choose from throughout the day.

Just a quick note: don't worry about whether an event is classified as 'Panel', 'Poster session', 'Other' etc. Due to the nature of our conference platform application from Fourwaves, we had a limited number and types of pre-assigned categories to work with, which may not always reflect the true nature of our events as opposed to a 'traditional' face-to-face conference. This is our first fully online Teaching in Focus Conference: we are still learning things, developing new tools and solutions, and trying to adjust to a new virtual world ourselves!

The only important distinction between the TiF2021 conference events is whether they are live or pre-recorded.

Live Sessions

In Welcome to my online classroom, you will have the opportunity to listen to two presenters as they offer a tour of their eClass environment, showcase a course activity, or talk about a technique, strategy, software application, or other pedagogical solution they have used. Some of these presentations focus on a teaching practice implemented in the virtual classroom that shows promise for future, post-pandemic teaching.

In Teaching in a time of a pandemic, the presenters will share teaching ideas that pushed their students to tackle their learning with an alternative or artistic lens.

In Something-worth-pondering-upon, you will find engaging panels around different themes as proposed by the presenters. Check the panel descriptions for more details!

Last, in AIF Featured Talks Academic Innovation Fund grant recipients share the outcomes of their project.

Abstracts for all live events are available in the Abstracts (Live Events) tab.

Pre-recorded presentations

Pre-recorded content is available in the Recorded Presentations, as well as linked from the Schedule. The same presentation types described in the live presentations were created, as well as New Practices I Will Carry Forward, in which conference presenters focus on a teaching practice implemented in the virtual classroom they intend to continue post-pandemic.

Abstracts for the pre-recorded presentations are included in their description in the Recorded Presentations tab.

Networking & Chat

We also created a Chat & Coffee Zoom room (different links for different days) incorporated into our Schedule for your convenience. You are welcome to use it any time during the program to have a quick chat with your colleagues. Nothing formal, no obligations: bring your favourite beverage, network with others, come and go as you wish!

We are excited to share with you the best work of our colleagues and partners across all of York University.

Thank you for joining us!