Hello all,
welcome back 🙂
We hope you all had a relaxing break, fruitful prep days and are ready for the new academic year. We’ll continue keeping you updated through weekly ScOLa News as we did last year. Here are some of this week’s highlights:

  • Our new colleagues

This year nine new instructors joined our family.

1 BİLLUR ATAN
2 CAN DANIŞMANT
3 ÖZGE FİDAN
4 SEDEF NUR YAMAN
5 TUĞBA YILDIRIM
6 SHAHAB RAEISI
7 MARIJA VELLA
8 JAMES CARNEY
9 TİJEN BAYAR KULİĞ (ML)

The orientation week started with a “welcome breakfast” and Nergis Uyan’s presentation.

Then, our new colleagues learned about the campus through a scavenger hunt.

They also joined sessions about the university and the system of the ScOLa.

 

They will continue getting support throughout the year in their induction programme but we know that you are all there whenever they need support or guidance.

Once again we would like to say WELCOME to them and wish them all the best in their new journey.

SCOLA Picnic

We had a great start to the academic year with a picnic where we had the opportunity to come together as a big family and catch up with each other. We hope to have other socializing opportunities throughout the year 🙂

You can find some photos from the event. We would like to thank Safak for the photos.


Focus Group Update

MCD Focus Group:

In our multiple focus group meetings on MCD, we set out to revisit the rationale behind this course component. As the tasks within MCD are mostly regarded as exams to be prepared for by students and thus increase their anxiety level, we discussed the necessity of raising students’ awareness by emphasizing that MCD tasks test the objectives that are taught throughout the semester for both students and teachers to see the progress of learning over time.

We further continued by discussing the need for input standardization. As different input materials with different objectives would create problems in the expected outcome, being standard while giving input to our students is crucial to all of us.

As for the administration and grading of the tasks, the importance of following each and every step in the guidelines was underlined. To keep the records of the task grades safe, we agreed to announce them through LMS by creating a grade category called MCD while also keeping an updated copy of MCD Grade Sheet on Z-drive.

Formative & Summative Evaluation and CPG Focus Groups:

Based on the feedback shared in focus group meetings held by Nergis U during the summer term, the issues of Formative &Summative Evaluation and CPG were determined to be worked on in two different focus groups during the prep days.

The first group whose members are Cem Kaya, Özlem Akbaş, Mine Yalçın and Özge Özgen worked on Formative and Summative Evaluations updating the evaluation questions, and offering suggestions regarding how to increase the response rates in classes.

The second group including Aysel Kalcıoğlu, Nuray Güleç, Nazan Özçınar, Mehmet Cemal Ekinci and Arzu Nihan Kaya worked together in CPG focus group. They went over the feedback received from the instructors, tried to find solutions for CPG issues, and they updated the CPG criteria accordingly.

After their meetings, some representatives of both groups presented what they came up with to the management and got their suggestions. And then, the final decisions were presented to ScOLa instructors in the level meetings.

 

This is all for Week 1. Wish you all a fruitful new Academic Year.