As summer 2018 begins, the UBC/UBC curriculum development partnership is gearing up for the busiest month we’ve had to date.
Summer support: First, we welcome three UBC students to our team for summer jobs as undergraduate academic assistants. We aim to support all of the 19 core EES courses as equitably as possible.
- Fatima Mannapbokova has just finished her Geography degree (congratulations!) and is working full time for the summer.
- Qingyang Liu, 3rd year Geography, is starting mid-May in a UBC WorkLearn position, working roughly 1/2 time for the summer.
- Iram Malik, entering 3rd year chemical and biological engineering, also starting mid-May in a half-time WorkLearn position.
They will help conduct background research on important issues related to Earth and Environmental Sciences in Central Asia. Our course development team is looking forward to using the information, resources, case histories, data sets and so on, that our summer team finds. We will also benefit from some support with project reporting, background information gathering and documentation (on this blog and elsewhere), testing and maybe some development of learning tasks, and likely some other contributions
Travel to Central Asia: Chris, Phil, Tara and Brendan (see Personnel) are visiting Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan between May 4-24. They will meet with NGO, government, academic and AKDN affiliates to discuss educational opportunities. They will also spend a few days exploring the southern Pamirs, and observing some field work being conducted by Kobil Shokirov and Jordan Lavine related to wildlife and conservation programs. Kobil and Jordan have been amazingly welcoming and helpful in arranging for our team to shadow their work.
UCA instructors at UBC: Four UCA instructors from Khorog and Naryn campuses will visit UBC in late May to work with our three prerequisite course developers. These courses will be taught for the first time starting September 2018 and January 2019, and we are looking forward to collaborating with our colleagues to ensure these challenging science courses are as effective and efficient as possible.
Course development: Meanwhile, course developers who are not traveling are working on syllabi and lessons.
Whew! Lots happening! There should be updates on these and other project activities throughout the summer.