Professor Sandra Bassendowski has been dedicated to improving the education of nurses both in Canada and in St. Lucia through her reflective, thoughtful and methodical integration of technology in her teaching and learning practices.

Her key innovation, “Concept Capture,” consolidates pedagogical frameworks with web-based e-learning tools to maximize her students’ learning experience.

This innovation encourages students to engage in new and meaningful approaches to advance their knowledge. With her own enthusiasm for learning, she conveys high expectations with a genuine belief in students’ abilities to succeed.

Through Concept Capture’s virtual space, Prof. Bassendowski has brought together many highly successful communities of learners from across the globe. She contributes extensively to the scholarship of teaching and learning and to the development of her peers and colleagues.

Her students move beyond just engagement in her classes; she moves them to action.

Professor Shawn Graham has been able to weave together an incredible tapestry of innovations that include course design, assessment, and teaching and learning approaches. He had students partner together and produce an augmented reality book with the Canadian Museum of Civilization and he developed an interactive online virtual archeological dig so that students could experiment and experience activities beyond the physical classroom. Other innovations include game-based learning approaches that acknowledged student work, and he simulated ancient roman civilization to help students understand context, time and space.

Key to these innovations is Prof. Graham’s ability to guide students to achieve beyond their own expectations. Whether in their first year or at the graduate level, learners experimented, thought critically, contributed to original research, and developed a passion for learning.

Prof. Graham cares deeply about students and encourages every learner’s potential by providing engaging and powerful learning experiences both at Carleton University and beyond.

“I learned so much and really felt like I was making a difference in the world,” aptly summarizes Professor Jacqueline Murray’s impact on teaching and learning.

Prof. Murray is a passionate teacher who genuinely cares about fostering a love for learning at a deep and meaningful level within her students. In 2004, she initiated First-Year Seminars at the University of Guelph. Since then, she has continually developed the overall design and delivery of these seminars following an enquiry-based learning approach. Her implementation of enquiry-based learning at the first-year level has shown that an intensive, learner-centered experience at the beginning of a student’s career provides transferable skills that demonstratively enhance learning.

In addition to her face-to-face teaching and learning innovations, she has adapted her enquiry-based learning models to the online environment to create a rich, highly engaging and effective online course. This new model of online enquiry-based learning is transformative.

She is exceedingly generous with sharing her research findings and pedagogical ideas across the University of Guelph and with colleagues around the world.

Following Miss Frizzle’s advice from The Magic School Bus –

“Take chances, get messy, make mistakes!”

– Professor Trent Tucker has experimented, tweaked and reflected on many different innovations in his teaching and learning career. Passionate about providing different opportunities for students to learn, he has incorporated toys, learning technologies, enquiry-based learning, and real world applied learning scenarios into all of his teaching, from very large first-year business classes to fourth-year seminar classes.

Following an iterative process, Prof. Tucker evaluates every innovation that he brings to his classes with the goal of understanding how it has contributed to student learning and how it could be improved. He broadly and enthusiastically shares his findings with colleagues and is genuinely passionate about providing a challenging, engaging and highly interactive environment for all learners.

His students fondly state that his “innovation knows no bounds!”

Professor Ellen Zweibel has a long and extensive history of creating meaningful and sustainable innovations in teaching and learning practices that extend beyond the University of Ottawa that are used by colleagues across North America. She has identified gaps in the Faculty of Law’s core curriculum and improved student engagement by introducing experiential and blended learning to teach core legal competencies in dispute resolution, professional responsibility and, most recently, legal writing.

She has taken a leadership role and collaborated extensively with colleagues from the faculties of medicine at two different institutions to design an award-winning blended learning program for health professionals. Through the generous use of her time, Prof. Zweibel mentors her colleagues in curricular design activities and teaching and learning initiatives.

All of her students and colleagues enthusiastically note how useful her activities are to their learning and development.