Dr. Cynthia Korpan is an adjunct professor in Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies at the University of Victoria (former Director of Teaching Excellence). Cynthia has 20 years of experience, expertise, and research into the learning process of graduate students and early career faculty learning how to teach in the academic workplace.
In those 20 years, Cynthia developed a robust curriculum for teaching assistants (TA) that spanned their graduate career. This began with support for their first TA assignment with centrally based programming that was augmented by department-specific peer mentors. Now in its 10th year, Cynthia developed the curriculum for the two-year graduate certificate credit program for PhD students called Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (LATHE), teaching the second-year two-term capstone course of the program, since its inception. Most recently, Cynthia designed and taught the curriculum for the President’s Fellowship in Research-Enriched Teaching, whereby ABD PhD students receive $10,000.00 to research-enrich a course in their discipline and subsequently teach it. For instructors, Cynthia developed a flexible multi-modal curriculum that included many programs, such as the Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) program, and a three-part faculty program called Faculty Institute of Teaching that addressed all aspects of course design, teaching documentation, scholarship of teaching and learning, peer observations, and educational leadership.
Cynthia currently holds the role of coordinator for the 3M National Student Fellowship, and sits on the executive of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Canada group, both affiliated with the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE). Currently, she is the lead on an international research collective called Beyond the Obvious, investigating what was learned from the pandemic about in-person and online spaces that can be applied to meetings and conferences. Lastly, in 2016, Cynthia was honoured with the inaugural Educational Developer’s Leadership Award.