Robin lives in Toronto with her two children, a 8 year old boy and a 12 year old girl, and her husband. She finished her PhD in 2000 and started teaching at Schulich School of Business at York University right after. She is a popular professor among students, because of her enthusiastic teaching style, knowledge, and sense of humor. She has won best teaching awards in the past, and hopes to win more in the future. Her schedule is crazy. Not only is she busy with her teaching and writing a book, but she also owns a business consulting firm on the side. She typically hires her grad students in the summer as interns.
Though she doesn't think she is particularly tech-savvy, Robin uses a great deal of new technology in her teaching. She likes to be innovative and wants the students to self-teach. She uses Sakai quite extensively, for data storage, a communication tool, an assignment dropbox and more. She believes in giving her students access to course material from anywhere and uploads all of her course contents, including the lecture notes, assignments, readings, to her course site to make them readily available. She wouldn't know what she would do without her faculty support staff. She works with an instructional designer to set up course sites online, upload and manage course contents, and monitor students' actitivities on the course sites. As well, she has admin staffs in the business faculty.
She is very organized. She keeps her office, the file space on her computer, and the online course contents very neat and organized. On her PC, all documents are organized in My Documents, with folders for each course. Within each course folder, she has Admin, Assignments, LectureNotes, and Readings folders. She also has folders on her computer for her book and for her students theses. The contents on her Moodle sites are similarly organized, hierarchically in folders.
Robin spends a lot of time preparing for lectures. She uses Keynote to prepare her lecture slides and prepares "condensed" version of lecture notes to go with the slides. Sometimes she'll put the tables in the classroom into a U-shape to better facilitate student involvement. She tries to make her lectures as interactive and dynamic as possible. She walks around the room with a microphone or sits among the students while she lectures to keep students engaged in class. Robin cares a great deal about her students. She works hard to keep them coming to classes, and keep them engaged in classes. She tends to post a condensed version of her lecture notes, which is "just a skeleton of the lecture," to encourage students to come to class and fill in the gaps in the notes. During the lectures, she walks around the room and asks students questions to keep them on their toes. |