To:          Dalhousie faculty and staff

From:     Frank Harvey, Provost and Vice-President Academic (Acting)

Date:      Thursday, July 16, 2020

Re:         Introducing Dalhousie’s new online teaching website

As we move closer to Fall 2020 classes and as faculty re-design their courses for online learning and teaching, I’m happy to introduce our new online teaching site, dal.ca/onlineteaching.

We are fortunate to have two exceptional teams dedicated to supporting online teaching across the university: Academic Technology Services (a unit of the Dal Libraries and known as ATS) and the Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT). This new site will provide information and resources from both of these teams (in addition to much more) in one convenient and easy-to-access place, replacing the eLearning website and the temporary Remote Teaching and Learning site that was developed in March 2020.

This one-stop, web-based resource will be our go-to place for online teaching and learning at Dalhousie, by:

• Providing full and part-time faculty and course instructors at Dal and King’s with access to both technical and pedagogical information and assistance
• Establishing a level of transparency for current and prospective students (and their families), teaching assistants, as well as other post-secondary institutions regarding Dalhousie’s approaches to online teaching and learning
• Highlighting examples of summer teaching success stories across Dalhousie, serving as a place for ideas, inspiration and leadership
• Providing a single access point to Educational Developers and live chat with Instructional Technologists, in addition to resources like Connected Classrooms — a weekly newsletter about online teaching for the Dalhousie community (Subscribe to Connected Classrooms)
• Complementing Dal’s Brightspace site Going Online Together: Dalhousie Teaching Community, where faculty and course instructors can access online teaching resources, participate in discussion forums and watch online teaching-related webinar recordings

While many Faculties have their own excellent teaching support staff, those of you on our Agricultural Campus are also able to access support through Educational Technology and Design, one of our outstanding in-house support units and a first point of contact for anyone who has queries or issues related to online delivery. In collaboration with academic departments and/or the Extended Learning group, they provide instructional design expertise and determine the best solution for technology integration based on the needs of both the students and curriculum. They are currently supporting the design/development of 150+ courses for September. You can learn more or contact them through their website.

I also wanted to share that Dal will be launching an online learning website for students (complementing the online teaching, instructor-focused resource), currently under development with a mid-August launch date.

Please take this opportunity to explore the new online teaching site for yourself. There’s a place on the site to provide your feedback and we’d love to hear from you!

Frank P. Harvey
Provost and Vice-President Academic (Acting)
Eric Dennis Memorial Chair of Government and Politics
Dalhousie University