“Chris has a unique and engaging approach to warm up every lecture. He uses interactive software to enhance student’s participation. His assignments are real life scenarios for students to practice what they learned. He is still my favorite; well, there are still more, but he is on the top.”
Chris is another new faculty member at Camosun, teaching in the Sport Management program. As a recipient of a Teacher Recognition award, I asked if he would chat with me about his experiences as an instructor.
While Chris is new to Camosun, he is not new to teaching, having taught at Niagara College for ten years before coming to Victoria. “I was hired as a field placement coordinator, but after two years had become a full-time faculty member teaching sport management courses. When I was at Niagara College, I created about 23 different courses and developed my teaching skills through a southern Ontario program called the College Educator Development Program. Fellow faculty members from six Ontario colleges would go to Fanshaw College for three or four days over the course of three years to learn teaching techniques, from creating rubrics to using technology in the classroom to developing teaching portfolios. After I finished the program, they asked me to come on as a facilitator which I did for the next four or five years, working with faculty from many different disciplines.”
After being at Niagara College for ten years, Chris wanted to expand his horizons. “I saw an opportunity at Camosun College to work with degree students in sport management. I was excited to work with a different type of student and expand my teaching skills.” In December 2022, Chris began teaching here – preparing four new courses for the Winter 2023 term. “It was reinvigorating, starting almost from scratch again, but now I’ve built up a tool kit and I love the students.” So far, he has taught Introduction to Sport Business, as well as courses in sport technology, kinesiology leadership, sport law, sport analytics, and computer applications in sport. “The only ones that I had experience with were the leadership and the intro to sport business course, so it was a learning experience for me.”
As you can imagine from reading these Camosun stories, I wanted to know what Chris enjoys most about teaching. “I really love the teaching process. I get enthused trying to help students and when I see students engaging, asking interesting and probing questions, and when they are engaging with the material. And what I love the most is when they have that Aha moment, when a concept you introduced at the beginning of the term suddenly, towards the end, clicks and they can see the pieces fit together. And most satisfying is watching students transition through the course of their academic careers: from their first-year course, progressing throughout the years, and seeing them grow into successful sport management professionals.”
Chris mentioned a few times how important applied learning is in his teaching, so I asked a bit about how that shows up in his courses. “In class students engage in practical hands-on activities useful in the industry. For example, in the sport technology class, I’ll introduce certain categories of technology like wearables or sensor technology. Because there are so many kinds of technology used in different sports, I’ll provide parameters and have the students choose technologies from sports they’re interested in, and then have them share it with the class. They need to explain what it is, how it’s being used, how it was developed, and how it could be improved.” And then in another class a basketball teaches the concepts of analytics. “We have a class basketball game and use the concepts of analytics to create two teams that will produce the most competitive outcome for our class game. We film the game, collect all the data from the game, then use techniques we learned in class to tell the story, make correlations and comparisons, and answer questions like: Why did someone have a good game? What could be improved on? What were someone’s strengths and weaknesses.”
Chris says that within the topic of sport management, finding a diversity of topics is not a problem. “One way I learn what students are interested in is through a warm-up exercise where I use a technology called Nearpod to ask students open-ended questions about what’s going on in the world of sports business. Students enter the topics they’re interested in, I’ll put it up on the screen and ask: How is this relevant for the sport manager? How does this connect to our course? How does this connect to other courses that you’ve had? I had a student in my class this year who was into cycling, which is not a topic I know too much about. So, every week I’d see a cycling topic and would ask her to flesh it out. The more questions I asked, the more I could draw out the cycling business topics that are common in other sport areas, showing them the connections.” In addition, Chris pulls out the topics students are already engaged with and uses them throughout the term. “Some international students in my classes engaged in sports that I had very little experience with including judo and cricket. I know a little about cricket and I’m trying to learn more so I can incorporate some cricket data sets into my analytics class, which makes for an interesting class.” Over the years, Chris says he’s become comfortable with setting some guard rails and letting students drive the bus. “This keeps students’ interest up, but it’s also more exciting for me, especially if it’s something I haven’t seen before. And when students see that I’m excited, they also become excited.”
Chris was teaching at Niagara College when COVID hit, but I was curious how he adapted to that experience of moving his teaching online. “It was a bit easier for me, because the classes I taught at Niagara College were already hybrid, so I had some experience delivering online education. However, I hadn’t taught online synchronous classes, and quickly learned you can’t teach an online synchronous class the same way you would teach in person. When we started, I sent out all my content, trying to make it as detailed as possible, then ran an abbreviated class with activities we would go over together. I also created hundreds if not thousands of videos, chunking each class into anywhere between four to ten micro lectures. You don’t have the same vibrant classroom connections you would in person, but it was a good experience to develop some new techniques.”
One important thing Chris has carried forward from that time is how he does assessments and evaluations. “Since being online, I don’t do in-person paper exams – almost all my exams are applied.” In one format he gives students the questions a week ahead of time, where each question relates to an entire unit. “Then students will, for example, find a dataset, produce an Excel spreadsheet, show me their statistics, create some graphs, create some charts, etc. Rather than asking them to memorize things, I’m testing them on what and how they’ve applied what they’ve learned, what they can produce, and the connections to the course content.” And now, Chris is trying to figure out how he can incorporate Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) into his tests. “I’m spending a lot of time this spring considering the best way to introduce GenAI to students, as well as how can I teach them to use it ethically. It’s been on my radar for a while and I’m slowly starting to implement it because chances are when my students are out in industry, they’re going to be using it.”
I asked Chris if he had memories of past courses that stood out for him. His first memory was from a Sport Management Research course he taught at Niagara College. “I was teaching students the basics of research methods by having them develop a research proposal in the field of sport management. We went through all the steps of developing research questions, learning basic research methods, completing a literature review, refining research questions, and then ultimately putting together a proposal. When we got to the end, I was blown away by the quality of some of the research proposals, and students were excited about research – something I never would have expected.” And he had a similar experience with his Camosun analytics class, where students started out knowing nothing about analytics (and maybe being afraid of them), “but when you see final products where students can explain outcomes based on the data they gathered – those are the most enjoyable moments.”
As we reached the end of our conversation, I asked Chris if he had any advice for new faculty members coming to teach at Camosun. “Be enthused about what you’re doing and know that it’s not going to be perfect the first time – in fact, it’s never going to be perfect. Students are not expecting perfection. What they’re expecting is that you work hard for them, so be as prepared as possible and be open and honest with your students. If students see that you are advocates for them, that you’re working to provide the best experience for them, they’re going to be more accepting of any mistakes you might make. So, be vulnerable – it’s okay.”