This month’s interesting read provides evidence-based considerations and tips for creating and using videos to promote student engagement and learning. Key recommendations include: Keep videos brief and targeted on learning goals Use audio and visual elements to convey appropriate parts of an explanation; consider how to make these elements complementary rather than redundant Use signaling …
Monthly Archives: May 2020
Instructor Spotlight – Vivienne Lam
Vivienne is a Lecturer in the Departments of Botany and Zoology. She has a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from UBC, a B.Ed. (Secondary School) from UBC, and a Ph.D in Botany from UBC, where she studied the phylogeny and comparative genomics of mycoheterotrophic plants. Vivienne has taught a variety of courses at UBC, including BIOL 121 …
TA Spotlight – James Marchant
I completed my undergraduate degree in general biology at the University of Western Brittany, Brest, France. I then completed a Master’s in marine biology at the European Institute of marine studies, Plouzané, France, where my research focused on calcium flux in cardiac cells for studying the cellular basis of fish cardiac performance. This first …
Reflecting on Remote Teaching: What Have You Learned?
By Christine Goedhart Congratulations on surviving the 2020 mass migration to emergency remote teaching! Now that the dust has settled and final grades are submitted, it’s a good time to reflect on the past term and consider what lessons you might want to take with you moving forward. Here are four simple, yet powerful questions …
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Online educators’ recommendations for teaching online: Crowdsourcing in action
What makes for effective online teaching? In this month’s interesting read, a crowd-sourcing methodology was used to pose this question to a large number of experienced online instructors from a variety of disciplines. Their collective answers were coded and four overarching themes emerged: 1) supporting student success, 2) providing clarity and relevance through content structure …
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Staff Spotlight – Maki Sumitani
Maki Sumitani is the Learning Technology Support for UBC Biology, where she supports instructors and the Biology Program with tools for teaching and learning. What do you enjoy most about your current role? There is a lot of problem solving in this role, and working with people to tackle those challenges and building relationships make that work so rewarding. …