Instructor Resources

The Faculty of Education's Instructor Guidelines can be downloaded here [.pdf].

This document contains useful information for instructors about the rules and regulations surrounding teaching in the Faculty of Education at McGill University.

Amongst those topics covered are ordering textbooks, creating custom course packs, planning visual aids, WebCT, arranging for library reserves, Minerva for Instructors, guidance reagrding attendance, Mercury online course evaluations, grading, plagiarism and cheating, and other topics.

For any additional information about teaching in ECP, please feel free to contact ECP's Administrative Officer, Samantha [dot] ryan [at] mcgill [dot] ca (Samantha Ryan) .

The course outline serves as a contract between the instructor and their students. Considering this, there are many important components that an instructor must include as well as those they should consider including in their outline.

ECP advises all instructors to carefully reviewing McGill's Teaching and Learning Service's (TLS) website to consult the many online resources available to prepare for teaching a course in the Department and at McGill. The TLS Course Outline: Brief Guide [.pdf] is a useful overview to building a course outline. The Department does however have particular statements that all course lecturers are required to include in their course outlines. These statements are outlined below:

• McGill University values academic integrity. Therefore, all students must understand the meaning and consequences of cheating, plagiarism and other academic offences under the Code of Student Conduct and Disciplinary Procedures (see http://www.mcgill.ca/integrityfor more information).

• If you have a disability please contact the instructor to arrange a time to discuss your situation. It would be helpful if you contact the Office for Students with Disabilities at 398-6009 or online at http://www.mcgill.ca/osd) before you do this.”

• Additional policies governing academic issues which affect students can be found in the Handbook on Student Rights and Responsibilities, Charter of Students’ Rights (online at http://www.mcgill.ca/deanofstudents/rights/).

• In accord with McGill University’s Charter of Students’ Rights, students in this course have the right to submit in English or in French any written work that is to be graded.

• Students are strongly encouraged to fill out the MERCURY ONLINE EVALUATION for this course at the end of term. Online course evaluations serve primarily as a tool towards teaching improvement, informing students about courses, and as one of the elements for evaluating the teaching performance of staff for reappointment, tenure and promotion purposes. For more information consult the following link: http://www.mcgill.ca/tls/courseevaluations/mercury/.

• Instructors teaching courses in both the School/Applied Child Psychology and Counselling Psychology Programs must also include to Required Competency Statements. Further information can be found in next two section on this webpage.


Submitting your outline for review:

Please note that all course lecturers are required to send an electronic version of their course outline to ECP's Administrative Officer, Samantha [dot] ryan [at] mcgill [dot] ca (Samantha Ryan), in order for a review of the content to be done by a Program Director and the Chair. Instructors must submit their outline via email no later than one month prior to the start of classes of any given term in order to ensure adequate time for both a review and potential amendments.

Instructors of B.Ed courses are now required to include statements addressing the CAPFE Professional Competencies and indicate how they are assessed in the course. The following is a list of the courses that require these statements: EDPE 300, EDPE 304, EDPI 309, EDPI 341, EDPE 208, EDPT 200, EDPT 204.

Course outlines must:

1. Indicate the selected professional competencies (and their appropriate features) that are being developed in the course
2. Explain how these professional competencies (and their appropriate features) will be developed during the course (content, approach, methodology etc.)
3. Make clear how evidence of development of the selected competencies will be gathered (learning outcomes/assignments, assessment tools etc.)

Click here to view the 12 Professional Competences, extracted from a MELS teacher training document. The full documents can be found at: http://www.mels.gouv.qc.ca/dftps/interieur/PDF/formation_ens_a.pdf

Below are two examples of course outlines which include the CAPFL Professional Competencies required statements. These are provided, in the hopes, to help in the process while revising course outlines.

• Example 1
• Example 2

Instructors of any Counselling Psychology program courses are required to add a specific statement to those courses. The statement addresses the competencies and training required of Counselling Psychology courses.

Please see the Competency Statement for Counselling Psychology Course Outlines [.pdf] for more information and the statement to be included in all outlines.

Please see attached for an categorical and hourly breakdown of competencies to be met for all Counselling Psychology program courses and a breakdown of the competencies for autonomous research activities.
Courses Competencies Summary Table [.pdf]
Autonomous Research Competencies Summary Table [.pdf]

Instructors of any School/Applied Child Psychology program courses are required to add a specific statement to those courses. The statement addresses the competencies and training required of School Psychology students.

Please refer to the document below for a categorical and hourly breakdown of competencies to be met for all School/Applied Child Psychology program courses.

School/Applied Child Psychology Competencies Breakdown [.pdf]

The Classroom Audiovisual Instructions tool is accessible from the myMcGill portal. This tool allows you to choose a building and a specific classroom in order to view images images of the room and layout of AV equipment, a listing of each piece of equipment present, operating instructions, and video demonstrations.

Instructors are encouraged to consult this tool and make sure they know how to set up their equipment before the term begins.

To access the tool: IT Knowledge Base Article

1. Log into myMcgill using your McGill Username and McGill Password.
2. Click on the IT Tool tab.
3. Under Quick Links to IT Sites, select Classroom Audiovisual Instructions.
4. Select a building and a room.

Please note that room capacity is unfortunately not available on this site. You can find capacity information for rooms within the Faculty of Education here: Classroom Information. For other rooms please contact us at ecpinfo [dot] education [at] mcgill [dot] ca (ECP Info) .

Need equipment installed?
For more information on equipping classrooms with technology for teaching, contact the support [dot] ist [at] mcgill [dot] ca (ICS Service Desk) .

Your liaison librarian:

• Is your contact for all library and research services. Megan Fitzgibbons is the ECP liaison for the 2011-2012 year. Feel free to contact her! 
• Provides customized information and research skills training for your students designed to meet the learning outcomes of your courses. The goal is to facilitate students’ development of skills needed to understand and develop effective search strategies, critically evaluate information, and locate appropriate materials for assignments and learning. 
• Provides one-on-one research consultations for students and researchers at all levels.
• Assists you in locating materials to support your teaching, and will assist you in creating links from your course reading lists into our online holdings. 
• Creates subject guides highlighting key databases and other resources related to your courses.

Obtaining materials
The Library has extensive holdings of journals, books, data, and more in print and digital formats, which can be located through the Catalogue and our specialized databases.

When McGill doesn't have what you're looking for…

• We can buy it for you. Fill out our online form to suggest a purchase.
• The Library’s Interlibrary Loan Service will locate materials you need that are not held by the Library.
• Pick up a CREPUQ card at the Library, which entitles you to borrow books directly from many other universities in Canada.

Course reserves

• Course readings, copies of course packs, DVDs, and other high-demand items can all be made available on short-term loan in the Reserve collections located in the Education Library to ensure all students have access to important library materials.
• You can submit requests for Course Reserves online.
• Your students can search for reserve material by course number or by the instructor's name in the Library Catalogue.

Publishing your research
The Library provides training for the citation management programs EndNote and RefWorks to help you collect, organize, and format your references.

You will wish to publish your research in journals which are well-read and highly cited. Many researchers are now publishing their work in open access venues, either on blogs, in refereed journals that are available on the internet or making their articles available either pre- or post-publication in institutional repositories. Librarians can help you locate the most appropriate editors to approach.

Secure your rights as the author when publishing by using the Creative Commons license or the SPARC Canadian Author Addendum.

The McGill Library stores, preserves and promotes the scholarship of McGill faculty and students through the University’s digital repository, eScholarship@McGill. Deposit your research publications or thesis in this open access repository to ensure the scholarly output is made available to researchers and peers all over the world.

Citation analysis
Who is citing you? Track the impact of individual articles (number of times cited by other researchers, who's citing them).

• Web of Science (ISI Web of Knowledge)
• Scopus
• Google Scholar

See the number of citations for the average article in a given journal.

• Journal Citation Reports are used to establish the impact factors of journals in your field.
• EigenFactor measures a journal's prestige based on per article citations as well as the overall value provided by all of the articles published in a given journal in a year.

For more information about the Library, visit these pages:
Support for teaching: http://www.mcgill.ca/library/library-support/teaching/
Support for research: http://www.mcgill.ca/library/library-support/research

The deadlines for students to complete online course evaluations through Minerva can be found on the Teaching and Learning Services web site. It is crucial for students to know these dates if we want them to submit an evaluation. Please remind students of these deadlines.

How easy is it for students to complete their evaluations?

It only takes 5-10 minutes for students to fill out their course evaluations and is a great way for their voices to be heard and to impact positive change in the program.

To access their course evaluation(s), students simply need to log into their Minerva account where a pop-up window will appear prompting students to fill out their evaluations.

If no pop-up window appears, they can access the course evaluations by :

• Selecting Student Menu
• Clicking on Mercury Online Course Evaluation Menu
• Then on Submit your course evaluations

Increasing response rates from students

As an instructor, there are a number of things you can do to help increase students' response rates for course evaluations. Making a note of the evaluation dates in the course outline, allowing students to bring in their laptops and fill them out during class time, and sending emails to students and posting on WebCT reminding them to do so are great starting points.

Of course, there is no better way of getting students to take a few minutes of their day to evaluate a course than to simply talk to them about the importance of doing so and how they can actually cause real positive change in the program for both current and future students.

Another tip to encourage participation in course evaluations

As an instructor, you may now grant or deny permission to allow students access to the results of all their course evaluations. This has been found to help increase response rates. If permission is granted, the numerical results will be posted on MINERVA, restricted to members of the McGill community. Written comments are always treated as confidential and are never disseminated.

If you would like to grant students that permission, simply complete the online form through Mercury using the following steps:

1. Log in to Minerva by visiting http://www.mcgill.ca/minerva.
2. Select Faculty Menu
3. Scroll down and click on Mercury Online Course Evaluation Menu
4. Click on Results - for the Instructor
5. Scroll to the bottom of the page for Grant/Deny to Disseminate Course Evaluation Results
6. Follow the instructions carefully before making your decision.

Please visit the Teaching and Learning Services web site to see the policy on Course Evaluations.

For more ideas/information on course evaluations and promoting responses, please take a look at the attached Strategies to Increase Response Rates [.pdf] document. Many of the main points have been summarized above already, but there are even more creative ideas on how to encourage participation included in the document.

McGill University course lecturers are expected to know about their Students' Rights and Responsibilities in order to ensure that reciprocal respect and a positive learning environment are fostered.

Please pay particular attention to policies specified in the Green Book, especially those policies which relate to teaching and learning.

Please refer to the Student Rights and Responsibilities handbook: The Green Book for information.

The following is an abridged list of important dates and deadlines for the 2010-2011 academic year. For a complete list please consult the Graduate and Post-doctoral Studies 2010 - 2011 Calendar.

Should you need to make photocopies for the course you have been assigned to teach, ECP has made a photocopier available outside of our ECP Administrative office, room 614.

Please drop by the office during office hours (9:00am - 5:00pm) and ask any member of the support staff for your copy code, or sally [dot] crawford [at] mcgill [dot] ca (click here) to email the Departmental Secretary directly to request the code for your course.

ECP currently offers its course lecturers two large office spaces to be shared by course lecturers and their teaching assistants (if applicable).

Each room is equipped with several work areas, a small conference area, as well as a desktop computer which is available for all to use by signing in with your McGill username and password.

At the beginning of each semester instructors will be contacted by email with more information about their assigned office. Should you require access to the space sooner, please contact our Departmental Secretary directly to make arrangements.

Please note that it is the responsibility of individual instructors to place orders for textbooks or custom course packs that they require their students to use through the duration of the course. In an effort to be as "green" as we can be, ECP encourages all professors to consider using myCourses WebCT as a mechanism for distribution of required readings to students - You can read more about WebCT in the section below.

Ordering textbooks for your courses via the McGill Bookstore is easy. The following options are available:

• Complete the online textbook requisition form and return it electronically to the Bookstore. Simply log on to the textbook requisition page and complete the form.
• Send your textbook requisition by email to the texts [dot] bookstore [at] mcgill [dot] ca (textbook department)
• Complete the paper requisition form and bring or fax it to the Bookstore
• Come to the Bookstore and give the textbook department staff your textbook requirements.

To ensure that the books are on the shelf for the first day of classes, textbook orders need to be submitted in a timely fashion. Requisitions for textbooks need to be submitted by July 15 for the Fall semester, by October 15 for the Winter semester, and by March 15 for summer courses. Professors using books published overseas or foreign language books should order even earlier, as delays are often encountered.

Ordering custom course packs is also made easy by an online order form that you can fill out by visiting the following web page.

What is myCourses?

myCourses is McGill's learning management system used by most courses as a supplement to classroom-based instruction and can also be seen as an alternative to expensive course packs and textbooks. The McGill Library website provides a vast array of additional access points to teaching and learning content and research materials, including over 50,000 e-journal titles and 2 million e-books. Links directly to instructor defined readings can be easily included in myCourses WebCT as the primary source for student reading materials. Liaison librarians in each branch library can provide further assistance.

The NEW myCourses Learning Management System (still called myCourses) contains many of the same features as WebCT, but the underlying system looks and behaves differently. Please click on the following link for an overview of the differences and to see the comparisons between the NEW myCourses and WebCT.

We encourage instructors to return assignments/tests during class hours, however, in cases where assignments are submitted after the end of classes, the following options are strongly recommended:

1. You may ask students to submit self-addressed, stamped envelopes with their assignments such that they can be mailed out at the end of term.
2. When returning assignments after the last day of class, you may drop assignments off to the main ECP office in alphabetical order, and a clearly labeled envelope or box (Course No. & section - Course Name - Instruction Name - Term). We will keep the assignments for students to pick up for 1 month only. At that time, any assignments not yet picked up will be moved down to the shared offices.
3. Once assignments are moved to the share offices, students will need to make arrangements with the instructor or the ECP Department Secretary to retrieve them.

The Faculty's Instructor Guidelines [.pdf] provide information about how to deal with cheating and/or plagiarism.

Instructors can also consult McGill's Academic Integrity website to review various strategies that instructors can implement to reduce these occurences.

Any suspicion of plagarism or cheating is to be reported to the disciplinary officer of the Faculty of Education along with collaborating evidence.

The Faculty's Instructor Guidelines [.pdf] provide information about how to deal with cheating and/or plagiarism.

Instructors can also consult McGill's Academic Integrity website to review various strategies that instructors can implement to reduce these occurences.

What is Turnitin®?
Turnitin® is software that allows instructors to detect plagiarism by matching text from a student's assignment with text from various sources, such as; previously submitted papers to Turnitin®, current and archived web pages, and commercial databases of journal articles and periodicals.

How to request or access this software?
If you would like to use this software for your course(s), a request should be submitted via email to the support [dot] ist [at] mcgill [dot] ca (ICS Service Desk) .

Please note that the decision to use text-matching software must be made before the start of classes, and the intention to use such software must be identified in the course outline before distributed.

Please consult the Policy on Text-Matching Software [.pdf] in order to follow the proper procedures before using.

For More information on text-matching software please visit the McGill IT Knowledge Base article: Text-matching (Turnitin®) for Instructors

The "Focus on Teaching" e-bulletin from Content & Collaborations Solutions and Teaching & Learning Services is designed to inform all instructors of upcoming events, available resources, and classroom innovations to enhance teaching at McGill.

This concise resource, which has had a very positive reception since its launch last term, strives to address instructors’ interests and needs by aggregating featured pedagogical and technological offerings at McGill. It includes links to timely information about workshops on course design, using clickers in the classroom, creating and managing exams, creating safer, more inclusive environments for learning, as well as instructors’ reflections on their teaching, library resources for your classroom, and more. I encourage you to draw your colleagues’ attention to this publication, which is sent to all instructors at McGill around the 1st and 15th of each month.

Past “Focus on Teaching” e-bulletins are available for consultation at http://www.mcgill.ca/tls/teaching/focus/archives. Any questions or suggestions about this e-bulletin may be addressed to teaching [dot] tls [at] mcgill [dot] ca.