SoTl Snapshot YouTube video transcript

Hi my name is Jenn Reniers and I'm an Educational  Developer in the Office of Teaching and Learning.  And I'm Aron Fazekas I'm also an Educational  Developer in the Office of Teaching and Learning. And my name is Shehroze Saharan and I'm currently an Educational Resource Developer at the Office of Teaching and Learning. 

A SoTL Snapshot is a clear language summary of a published article related to the scholarship of teaching and learning or SoTL. As Educational Developers, part of our role is to increase the visibility and use of evidence-based teaching strategies at our institution. We developed a collection of clear language summaries of SoTL literature for use by educational developers, instructors and faculty members. This collection is based on other clear language summary databases and on the Annotated Literature SoTL database collection. We've extended these collections by focusing on how the instructor or faculty member can use the evidence-based teaching strategy in their classroom.

We've also incorporated the SoTL Snapshot collection into our work with students across campus. Graduate students in our university-level teaching course complete a SoTL Snapshot as part of their assessments. In addition, we have work-study and co-op students and undergraduate research assistants who are also trained in writing Snapshots. Writing SoTL Snapshots helps the students develop the ability to identify key research findings from a paper. Students also benefit from having a published piece of work online.

I have had the amazing opportunity to work on the SoTL Snapshot project since the very beginning at the Office of Teaching and Learning. Previously, as an Undergraduate Research Assistant and Work Study student, I had the opportunity to actually contribute and write some of these SoTL Snapshots. And by drafting and revising my work, I was able to build and enhance my written communication skills, while also learning how to write for an academic audience, and arguably and most importantly I was exposed to Scholarship of Teaching and  Learning Literature which was so so interesting.

Each SoTL Snapshot consists of four sections: What This Research is About, What The Researchers Did, What The Researchers Found, and How to  Implement this Research in Your Classroom. As clear language summaries, the Snapshots focus on what the reader needs to know. We hope that the Snapshots give instructors new ideas to incorporate into their teaching, and also give them enough detail about how the teaching strategy was tested to trust that it will be effective.

The SoTL Snapshots are available as a webpage or as accessible PDFs.The Snapshots are organized into nine categories,  based on the type of teaching recommendation. Users can search the Snapshot database by keyword or can browse each of the categories for inspiration.

The SoTL Snapshot collection can be found at the Office of Teaching and Learning website at the University of Guelph at www.otl.uoguelph.ca. We encourage you to browse these SoTL Snapshots and use them and implement them in your teaching and learning centers. We hope you find the SoTL Snapshots useful. You can contact us at otl@uoguelph.ca. Thank you so much.