Director of Middlebury's French School receives prize for research project
Middlebury College News and Events - VT, USA - June 13, 2007
Aline Germain-Rutherford, the director of the Middlebury College French School and associate professor at the University of Ottawa, ...

Germain-Rutherford wins international award for developing innovative ways to integrate culture and language in online education.

Teaching has always been a work of heart to me. It imbues me with joy and energy and vitality. It is not my life, but constitutes a good part of it. While searching the Internet recently for teaching materials, I came across an interesting site.

Two important developments have changed university-level teaching in Canada over the past 20 years. First, teaching and learning centres have opened and expanded on many Canadian campuses, offering resources that faculty and graduate students can turn to for support. Secondly, the Internet and other kinds of information technology have evolved over roughly the same period, giving postsecondary instructors some of their most complex challenges in teaching, as well as some of the most valuable resources.

One of the key attributes of our activities and steps forward together is our active collaboration between institutions across the country. And, as captured in the planning of the STLHE Steering Committee, this also includes strategic partnerships. We are engaging stakeholders from diverse domains as part of a community of practice around the scholarship of teaching and learning. 

Facultydevelopment.ca is an introductory and continuous training website on university teaching that is as much for the new or future teachers as it is for experienced teachers who are eager to explore other approaches or strategies in their teaching.

Canadian universities are anticipated to be hiring new faculty at a pace that has not been seen in a decade, thanks to increased student enrolment and the looming retirements of more than half of the nation's faculty members this decade. Yet these new faculty, like new faculty everywhere, do not necessarily come prepared with the full set of tools they'll need to succeed.

University of Ottawa is a lead contractor for a new project that focuses on developing universities' educational abilities online. The project has received $1.2 million from a non-profit organization.