As Senior Instructional Developer in the University of Waterloo's Centre for Teaching Excellence, I manage projects and disseminate knowledge pertaining to new learning technologies. Prior to joining the Centre for Teaching Excellence, I taught for twelve years in the English Department at the University of Winnipeg. I received my PhD in 1992 from the University of Toronto, and am the author of four award-winning books. I have three dogs, two children, and one wife. 

In February of 2010, I was invited by Concordia University to give a presentation on learning technologies to about 150 faculty members and graduate students. Upon my return, a staff member from Concordia's Centre for Teaching and Learning Services emailed with this positive feedback: "A wonderful presentation. It was honestly one of the best I've ever attended -- useful, informative, visually appealing, and fun." After giving that presentation "live," my Concordia hosts also asked me to give it again in front of a video camera, so that they could turn it into a screencast. That screencast is available here. 

In 2008, I recognized that the Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE) needed a more dynamic vehicle for disseminating ideas about teaching and learning than what our traditional (paper-based) newsletter was capable of achieving. I proposed to CTE management that I establish a CTE blog that would publish a post every Tuesday and Thursday. I persuaded all 15 CTE staff members to contribute a Thursday posting on a rotating basis, while my colleauge Trevor Holmes (who I had invited to be co-editor) would write the Thursdays postings or occasionally ask UW faculty members to post. The blog recently had its second anniversary, and has become an integral part of our communication and dissemination strategy with the UW community and beyond. Over 150 well-written, well-edited, and thought-provoking posts have been made to date, including 37 by me. The blog has been visited (according to Google Analytics) over 17,000 times; visits have tripled in the last year. Some blog postings have been picked up by other institutions, such as Tufts University, and some of my postings have been praised in other academic blogs:

“There's a great post by Mark Morton of the U of Waterloo that skewers vapid student ratings of professors – and offers some great advice for co-opting those perceptions and turning them into ‘teachable moments’. Thank you, Mark!” – Joseph Clark, Center for Teaching and Learning, Florida State University

Incidentally, CTE now prints only a few dozen copies of our paper-based newsletter (for Department Chairs), resulting in significant savings.

Shortly after arriving at UW, I realized that staff and instructors needed a “go to” person with regard to learning technologies. I gradually established myself – in the eyes of my CTE colleagues, UW faculty, and staff at other teaching centres – as a creative, practical, and informed problem solver, innovator, and leader in the field of learning technologies.

“We needed advice from someone with a creative and innovative mind, and I immediately thought of you.” -- Leanne Romane, UW Librarian.

“This has been wonderful – it’s opened my eyes to some new ways of teaching. I should get you to teach my course!” – Dr.  Mary Louise Mcallister, Associate Professor, Department of Environment, UW.

“Thank you so much for all this info – truly.  All good advice and things to look into. “ – Dr. Doris Jakobsh, Department of Religious Studies, UW.

“A wonderful presentation. It was honestly one of the best I've ever attended – useful, informative, visually appealing, and fun.” – Janette Barrington, Teaching Consultant, CTLS, Concordia University.

“Looks like Mark was, as usual, ahead of his time.”  – Trevor Holmes, Centre for Teaching Excellence, UW

“This is a perfect ‘crack’, Mark.  You found a way to express my concern that I just couldn’t seem to get to myself.  Thanks for the learning!” – Donna Ellis, Interim Director, Centre for Teaching Excellence, UW

My curriculum vitae is available as a six-page PDF here. 

In this two-and-a-half-minute screencast, I describe my role in the Centre for Teaching Excellence, my educational background, my publications, and more.

In order to leverage the technologies that students possess or have access to, instructors (and their university) need to know what those technologies are and how students are using them. For example, what percentage of students own a laptop or netbook? Of those that do, what percentage use it in class? What percentage of students use Facebook? Twitter? How many own a smart phone that can connect to the web? Would they be willing to use that smart phone to access learning activities in class, even if that meant paying a fee to their phone service provider? These and dozens of other questions pertaining to student use of learning technologies need to be answered in order to make informed pedagogical and IT decisions. To this end, I'm in the process of developing an online technology survey which will be distributed to students early in 2011. This initiative has garnered support from the Director of the Centre for Teaching Excellence, as well as the Director of Instructional Technology and Multimedia Services (ITMS), the Associate Director (Systems) in the Centre for Extended Learning, and UW's Vice-President Academic & Provost. I'll be presenting on this initiative at the 2010 WatITis conference. 

When the Centre for Teaching Excellence was formed through a merger of three pre-existing units in 2007, it needed a new web presence. However, there were several challenges in creating a new website. First, the three units that merged into CTE had different “cultures,” meaning that opinions about what our new web presence should include and how it should look were diverse. As well, we needed a website that was not a static archive, like the previous websites, but rather a dynamic “go to” resource for instructors. Most challenging of all, in the process of merging the various units, our IT staff member and our web designer had moved to other units. Although I had no prior experience in creating websites, I agreed to go beyond my job description and tackle the project with the help of a co-op student. I developed a coherent “vision” for the new website and engaged in a process of inviting CTE’s fifteen staff members to provide input on successive “drafts” of the website. Whenever possible, I integrated that input while at the same standing firm on the need for the website to be coherent and uniform in terms of look, feel, and structure. The website was launched on schedule, and response was enthusiastic, even from other universities:

“I want to congratulate you on the amazing quality of your new website. It is an absolute gold mine of easy to navigate resources. Every T&L centre in Canada should link to it. Thanks to you and your team for what must have been a huge project in getting all this together.” – Gary Hunt, Thompson Rivers University

“Congrats on the fabulous new CTE website! Have spent some time surfing around it today, and all looks great.” – Susan E. Elliott-Johns, Chair, Teaching and Learning Committee, Nipissing University

Google Analytics confirms that our new website is working effectively as a teaching and learning resource, as traffic to our site (and time on pages) has consistently and significantly increased. For example, from September 1 to November 17, 2009 we received an average of just under 2000 visits to our site per week; one year later (i.e. from September 1 to November 17, 2010) this increased to an average of over 4000 visits per week.

In 2006, I recognized that LT3 (the teaching centre that preceded CTE) needed to better promote itself to our university community, to other universities, and to the public at large. Accordingly, I invented Loving to Learn Day, an annual event celebrating our love of learning. By means of a contest, it encourages everyone – including students (from kindergarten to university), teachers and faculty members, and the general public – to write a reflection on some aspect of their learning (the specific theme changes each year). Participation in the event has been excellent: each year hundreds of submissions are received from all targeted demographics.The public profile of LT3 (and later CTE) was increased via excellent coverage in UW’s online newspaper and in The Record (circulation ~100,000), with full-page stories appeared in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2012. Since its inception in 2006, Loving to Learn Day has spread to the University of Manitoba, the University of Windsor, the University of Saskatchewan, and several Canadian colleges. To my mind, the spirit of Loving to Learn Day was best captured by Tommy Hunkeler, a grade-five student who won the 2009 Loving to Learn day "Slogan Contest" with this statement: "If you keep an open mind, stuff will fall in!"

I've developed a number of screencasts on new educational technologies in order to provide resources to faculty members whose schedules prevent them from attending face-to-face workshops. I used Camtasia to record and edit the screencasts and then uploaded them to the University of Waterloo's YouTube University Channel so that they are available to everyone.The screencasts range from five minutes to forty minutes in length. Click each title below to view it. 

1. Data Visualization Tools
2. TAPoR: Text Analysis Tools
3. How to Use Audacity to Record and Edit Audio
4. Six Different Types of Podcasts
5. Video Content: After You've Made It, Where Can You Put It?
6. Concept Maps: How Instructors Can Use Them to Support Student Learning
7. Three Concept Map Tools: CmapTools, VUE, and Mindmeister
8. Hyperlinked Auto-Text: Save Time Grading Assignments

After joining the University of Waterloo in 2005, I realized that two things help to define that institution: namely, its co-op program and its great number of international students. It subsequently occurred to me that international students in the co-op program might face challenges not experienced by their domestic Canadian counterparts. Accordingly, I asked a colleague – Dr. Svitlana Taraban-Gordon, who oversees CTE’s Internationalization program – if she would join me in a research project investigating those unique challenges, a topic that had previously received little study at any institution. Svitlana and I applied for and received a $13,000 grant which we used to hire a research assistant for two terms. We collected data by means of online questionnaires, focus groups, and interviews with students and with staff. From the data, we identified numerous challenges facing international students in the co-op program, and recommended changes and solutions that UW’s Co-op Program could implement. We also presented our data and conclusions at several conferences and workshops, and are in the process of writing an article for publication. I've made available the slides from one of our conference presentations in a Glogster poster, which is available here. 

In Fall of 2009, I was contacted by Professor Andrew Maxwell, who wanted to use Twitter as a "back channel" communication tool in one of his Management Sciences courses. I provided Dr. Maxwell with some of the available literature on using Twitter in the classroom, and he then set about using it in this manner: at the beginning of every class, one of Dr. Maxwell's teaching assistants would set up a Twitter group; students would then "tweet" questions and comments which were monitored in real time by a teaching assistant, and which were also reviewed after the class by Dr. Maxwell. Moreover, whenever students made a small-group presentation, their 90 classmates tweeted questions and comments, the best of which were responded to verbally by the small group at the end of their presentation; the small group also responded to all the other tweeted comments or questions via Twitter or by email within one week of giving their group presentation. Overall, Twitter was useful in facilitating and streamlining the questions and comments that arose in such a large class; additionally, some students preferred tweeting their questions and comments, rather than making them verbally. After the course finished, Dr. Maxwell and I, with the assistance of his teaching assistants, surveyed his students by means of an online form, which we then followed up with interviews with individual students. We then turned the data that we collected into a presentation which Dr. Maxwell, as the lead investigator, made at the 2010 Conference of the Teaching Society for Management Educators at the University of New Mexico. 

In 2006, I recognized that some instructors had difficulty precisely identifying the issues that hindered their students’ learning. Accordingly, I developed a paper-based Instructional Challenges Inventory, containing about 70 challenges – such as “My students come to class unprepared” or “My students don't like group work" – that many instructors had identified during consultations or workshops with me. The form was useful because it allowed instructors to quickly and accurately identify the top three or five issues that they were facing, which in turn allowed us to identify and develop solutions for those issues. Recently I turned my Instructional Challenges Survey into an online form (both for instructors’ ease of use, and so that I can collect data for a future research project). My Instructional Challenges Survey has become an integral part of our work at CTE. For example, our Centre used it with 22 faculty members from King Saud University during a two-week professional development program, and it was used just last week by one of my colleagues in a one-day workshop on blended learning.

In July of 2010, the Centre for Teaching Excellence offered a two-week professional development program to 22 faculty members from King Saud University (KSU). I played a significant role in coordinating that event (the largest of its kind that our Centre has offered), and also in providing many of the workshops that made up the first week of programming. My workshops included the following:

• An Instructional Challenges Inventory (a diagnostic tool that I developed, available here)
• A Survey of Learning Technologies (available as a dynamic concept map here)
• Best practices for using Clickers (relevant resources that I developed include this concept map and this document.  
• Solving Instructional Challenges with Learning Technologies (the resource I developed is here)
• Top Five Educational Technologies, as recommended by me for KSU. My top five list, with explanations, are available here. 

Working with the wonderful faculty members from KSU was extremely rewarding, and pulling together the program with my talented CTE colleagues was a great experience. I'm looking forward to our Centre having the opportunity to offer similar programming to faculty members from other countries in the future. 

Since 2007, I've offered a workshop series called Technology Tuesdays. At each of those 90-minute workshops, I introduce faculty and staff members to a new learning technology, such as concept map software, data visualization tools, screencasting, Twitter, Prezi, Animoto, Personal Brain, clickers, and more.