Teaching and Learning Advisory Group (TLAG)

The mission of the Teaching and Learning Advisory Group (TLAG) is to guide Learning and Teaching Services (LTS) on how to foster teaching excellence at Algonquin College.

The group focuses on identifying and addressing faculty training and professional development needs by:

  • Consulting with students and faculty for feedback on their teaching and learning experiences
  • Defining key terms and concepts related to teaching and learning at the college
  • Researching educational practices at other institutes
  • Communicating LTS services to departments and faculty members
  • Investigating the professional development needs of faculty
  • Advising LTS on the creation of comprehensive and targeted teaching development opportunities
  • Examining niche teaching and learning needs
  • Encouraging enthusiasm for teaching and learning

Ongoing Projects

Background and Results

In the winter of 2019, the Teaching and Learning Advisory Group (TLAG) was created, and one of their first recommendations was the development of a college-wide teaching training needs survey to capture the voices of LTS’s clientele. The survey was launched in August 2019. A formal report was published in December, 2019. You can read the report and recommendations here. 

We thank everyone for their contributions to this project. We are still working on implementing what you told us. Here’s an overview of what we’ve accomplished, and what we still have to do:

What you told us… What we’ve done… What we still have to do…
We need more awareness of training opportunities.
  • Worked on streamlining our programs and services into one “menu” with clear learning paths for all faculty
  • Update website to make services more visible and easy-to-access
  • We need to complete this work in light of the pandemic and launch it
  • We need to continue to update our website to make it more user-friendly
Improve the PD experience of ‘other-than-full-time’ faculty.
  • Expanded our service times to include more evening sessions
  • Build a culture of continuous learning for other-than-full-time faculty across the organization’s culture.
Include more relevant training themes to the different types of learning that occurs.
  • Expanded our offerings to include a broader range or more targeted set of training programs/sessions including shifting to remote teaching and online teaching programs
  • Continue to expand relevant training into teaching in labs/shops and other types of learning
More diverse topics.
  • We have expanded our training experiences to include critical pedagogy intercultural teaching and Universal Design for Learning (UDL).
  • Continue to create more diverse offerings, focusing on teaching students with disabilities, authentic assessment, etc.
Introduce new modalities and more broad scheduling.
  • Have expanded our range of modalities (due to the pandemic) and opened scheduling to evening sessions
  • Create more asynchronous opportunities for participants to learn

 

If you have any questions about this group, please reach out to Farbod Karimi at karimif@algonquincollege.com.