Over the last year, I have been co-leading a MOOC (massive open online course) with my colleague Marina Harvey. Contemporary Approaches to University Teaching is a free higher education teaching induction open to all. You may be interested if you are:

• new to university teaching
• would like to review topics to advance your teaching, e.g. scholarly teaching
• interested in scoping modules for your institution’s professional development program (MOOC content is available to universities to share and adapt under a CC Attribution Share Alike license)
• a sessional, contracted or continuing academic or higher degree student.

You can enrol for the current semester here.

The course was developed as part of an Australian National Learning and Teaching Fellowship led by Kym Fraser. Kym was inspired to create the course after her research found approximately a quarter of Australian universities provided a day or less teaching induction for new academics. It is a collaborative effort with over fifty contributors as authors and reviewers. Kym retired in 2021 and handed over leadership of the MOOC to Marina and me.

Since its launch in 2018, the course has had over 7000 participants from 106 countries. Here is a map of the coverage — please share with colleagues in countries we have not reached!

This international coverage is one of my favourite things about it — I have learnt about new countries (hello to the cohort from Suriname, the smallest independent country in South America!) and I have seen commonalities in how new teachers approach the challenges of higher education classrooms, especially the transition to teaching online during the pandemic. The title of this post, Teaching connects the world, was inspired by one of the participants this semester.

I have been impressed by participants’ engagement with scholarly teaching and student-centred practice. I particularly enjoy reading reflections on teaching in response to prompts such as Ellen Liang’s The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad first day and sharing of favourite ice breaker activities. Here are some ideas:

• I found a blog on ‘13 fail-safe icebreakers to use in class today‘ and enjoyed reading the ‘Blobs and lines’ activity.
• I’m always mindful of students who are a little shy or introverted. I like the ‘Three things in common’ activity. I think done one-to-one, it might be good.
• I had a slide of 9 different positions of a rubber duck from upright to drowning and asked them which represented how they were feeling.
• I have found the ‘Found the Pair’ icebreaker, which I think will be really fun to try next: https://tophat.com/blog/classroom-icebreakers/
• I prefer an icebreaker related to the course content, or at least the discipline. Maybe one thing they are excited about, one thing they are nervous about for the subject or why they want to study the discipline.
• If there’s no space for an icebreaker that will get people moving around the room and talking to each other, the simple “introduce yourself with your name and a thing about yourself” is a classic for a reason. I think it’s more fun to ask for a boring fact about yourself than an interesting one.
• I don’t really like icebreakers myself, so I avoid them in teaching. However, I liked [the idea] … of using groupwork as an initial activity to get to know each other and reduce information overload in the first classes.

Thank you to the participants for sharing these ideas!

Join us here.