Dear All,

Welcome back!

Please find the updates and news for this week below:

1. Our new colleagues

This year fifteen new instructors joined our ScOLa family and completed the orientation programme started on September 1.

PREP ML
Ayşe Gizem Çiftçi Fabiana Carina Zalazar
Esra Topaloğlu Anna Ekici
Günizi Tarar Rukiye Doğa Yazıcıoğlu
Nazire Fulya Ün Kuburlu
Mine Gülcan Demir
Rahime Buhur Hazar
Nesrin Atak
Dilan Atila
Nurhayat Kavrak
Yağmur Ersoy Özer
Tibet Elmalık
Ülkü Güleşçe

The orientation was fully online and started with Nergis Uyan’s presentation.

During ScOLa Orientation Program, our new colleagues learned about the university and the system of the ScOLa through different activities such as participating in an online scavenger hunt and joining sessions given by different parties in our school.

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 WELCOME them and wish them all the best in their new journey.

2. ScOLa Virtual Get-together

Last week, we got together as ScOLa English Prep Program to share our experiences regarding online education period to gain new insights for the upcoming semester. The first session of the day was given by Özyeğin University – Office for Learning and Teaching Enhancement.  They shared in which ways they had been supporting Özyeğin University community and informed us about two specific tools that can be used to make our lessons more interactive and student-centred. For more information, you can refer to their website:

https://olte.ozyegin.edu.tr/en/instructors/more/which-applications-i-will-use-distance-education 

In the first session of the afternoon, one of our colleagues, Mohammad Khari, shared his reflections regarding Summer Highschool Program, during which he had the chance to give the same content both face-to-face on campus and online.  Thanks to his reflections, we had the chance to get the glimpse of what it would mean to get back to campus for blended instruction.

In the second session of the afternoon, another colleague, Özge Fidan, shared her research on Flipped Learning; the rationale behind, how to incorporate this method into our regular classes, the challenges experienced and the implications.

In the last session, we welcomed one of our former ScOLa student, Burak Asker, to listen to the student perspective of online and face-to-face language learning experiences so that we can also take their suggestions into consideration when we are planning our blended lessons.

We would like to thank all the presenters and participants for making this event a fruitful and an insightful one.

3. Common Time Professional Development Sessions

We are planning to continue having our developmental sessions with the help of our voluntary instructors who would like to share good practices with ScOLa members. If you are interested in giving a session/series of sessions this fall semester, please send an email to Kezban Altuntaş Özben by 22.09.2021 until 17:00.

kezban.altuntas@ozyegin.edu.tr

4. September Brithdays