I will be giving a seminar Wednesday morning (Jan. 19) at the University of Ottawa for the Centre of University Teaching, as part of their lecture series on innovative practices in teaching.  I will be talking about the creation of my online French-language glossary of biological terms and related topics.  The lecture will be from 11-12 at 311 MacDonald Hall and a lunch will be offered afterwards.  For more information, see the abstract below or visit their website.  Please come on out!

The Creation of Online Learning Resources to Complement the Teaching of Specialized Topics in University Courses in French

Dr. Adam Brown
Department of Biology, Faculty of Science

Teaching University courses in French comes with its own set of challenges. One of the most significant challenges is associated with the lack of supplementary resources such as textbooks, glossaries and online websites. This becomes particularly problematic in the instruction of highly specialized introductory courses, in which large amounts of specific terminology and concepts must be learned by students. In order to address this shortage of resource material in the biological disciplines, we used an internal research grant to compile a list of more than 1200 specialized terms (in this case for Ecology, Evolution and Zoology) to create an online glossary during the Winter 2010 semester. The students’ use and appreciation of this tool were assessed using an anonymous online survey. We also surveyed for indicators relating to students’ improvement in learning. Over the course of this presentation, we will discuss the results of these surveys as well as visit the online glossary in order to demonstrate its full functionality.