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August 29th 2017, a lunch time meeting with 9 EEGS faculty (two sending regrets) served to introduce UBC-O faculty and the UCA/UBC curriculum project coordinator to each other. Many thanks to Raina Reddecliff and Craig Nichol for their kind and efficient help in setting up and running the meeting.

In a nutshell, our goal is to generate 22 courses for the University of Central Asia’s new Earth and Environmental Sciences EES degree. The first students at UCA have already begun their 5-year program, and they will be taking our EES courses starting in September 2019 (or 2018 for 3 basic science prerequisites).

The slides used to introduce the project and explain details are available here as a PDF: UBCO-UCAproject-slides. Further details can be seen on pages at our project blog https://blogs.ubc.ca/eescourses/

We hope faculty will be able to engage as consulting subject experts, and to share teaching and learning resources or strategies with our team of 11 course authors (who are themselves experts in their own geoscience or environmental science subject areas).

Course authors (or science education specialists – SESs) will be doing all the work, and faculty subject experts need only meet or exchange communications occasionally (perhaps an hour per week or less on average) over the 2-year duration of this project. And yes, there are some monetary incentives – please ask for details.

Next steps:

• Details about how faculty can engage with, and benefit from, this project are loosely outlined at https://blogs.ubc.ca/eescourses/files/2017/07/Faculty-expectations.pdf.
• Project personnel may contact you with a request for an initial conversation sometime in the Fall of 2017. Of course there are no obligations, but we believe this may be an awesome opportunity to connect with researchers working in Central Asia, and to make a significant contribution to education in the Earth and environmental sciences, both at UCA, and here in BC, for our own students.
• If you have graduate students and/or post-docs or RAs with an interest, by all means please put them in touch with Francis Jones, <fjones@eoas.ubc.ca>
• AND, if you have questions or ideas, again, please contact Francis by email.

Thank you everyone for your interest and the friendly welcome. Hopefully we can move forward with further interactions between UBC-V and UBC-O faculty who have common interests in Earth, Environmental and Geographical Sciences.

By the way, if you have concerns about intellectual property (or any other formalities), please ask for details – we have a contract covering all such concerns that was carefully crafted by UBC’s legal council and signed by President Ono and UCA’s chairman of the board of trustees, Dr. Kassim-Lakha on Jan. 10, 2017.

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With the kind support from Andrea Han of CTLT, 8 team-members met to begin an ongoing discussion about program-level curriculum. Two principal objectives were (1) to kick-start the project as a whole by getting as many team-members as possible together at the start of the 2017 school year, and (2) to begin mapping common conceptual or skills-related learning threads that will occur throughout the 3-year EES program.

Here we see the group attempting to articulate learning outcomes for specific courses under the banner of individual “program level outcomes”. This proved challenging, and led to several useful discussions. For example, it may be that this kind of mapping may be more appropriate for curriculum “review” rather than what we are doing here which is curriculum “design” – from scratch.

At this early stage of curriculum design, we do not yet have anything specific to map onto those program-level outcomes. In contrast, in a program “review” situation, there is an existing suite of courses that can be mapped onto the objectives, or pedagogic strategies, or assessment practices, or whatever.

As a next step, we will try having course authors (as experts in their disciplines) articulate key concepts and skills for each course WITHOUT regard for overarching goals. Then we can look for threads, and begin mapping results onto overarching outcomes later. This could be thought of as “bottom up” as opposed to “top down” thinking. Both will be important, and this first workshop was very helpful for getting the thinking started. We will most likely benefit from a sort of “yin and yang” approach that incorporates both perspectives.

Andrea also exposed us to several different types of “mappings” and provided an excellent “curriculum mapping primer” written by staff at CTLT. It’s contents are:

• What is curriculum mapping and why do it?
• Data which can be included in curriculum mapping
• Approaches for collecting the data
• Questions to ask yourself to help organize the curriculum mapping process
• Relevant Resources (a short bibliography)
• Appendix 1: Curriculum map examples
• Appendix 2: Example of a survey to instructors, less details
• Appendix 3: Example of a survey to instructors, more details

Most of the course development team will have begun by the time September roles around. Then between October 6 and 16, the first UBC delegation will visit UCA’s brand new campus in Khorog, Tajikistan to meet faculty, administrators, students, and local, industry & government sponsors, partners and stake holders.

This short visit will focus on building relationships between the wide range of participants, especially students and faculty. Success at developing the Earth and Environmental curriculum most certainly depends upon incorporating their needs, priorities and interests!

More details will be provided, probably in September, once the team is well-engaged in overarching iterative development of program-scale curriculum.

As of mid-summer we have established the majority of the science education specialists who will build courses. Now we must begin to use existing UCA Core Literacies and the EES program’s key learning objectives to lay down the scope and outline of the EES curriculum. UBC’s Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology is helping with curriculum-level thinking, and collaborative work among team members has begun.

Next steps are to identify UBC courses in EOAS, Geography and UBC-Okanagan, and establish relationships with corresponding faculty. Their roles and opportunities are summarized in the 1-pg faculty expectations document here.

We are also beginning to plan UBC’s first visit to Khorog in the first half of October.

As of May 30th, we have a fantastic team at UBC of 11 (so far), all of whom are keen to start working on curriculum and courses. See the personnel page. We are still looking for one or two more for senior electives.

The best part about this team is that, while each has PhD or other extensive disciplinary expertise,  nearly everyone knows each other as colleagues who have worked in various science education development roles within their respective departments at UBC.

Some minor logistical details are still being resolved but we are meeting as a team for the first time on June 7th. Curriculum and course design and development will begin then, with several SESs starting work immediately, or as soon as they have met prior commitments for this summer.

After a highly effective and efficient two-day meeting at UBC March 16th ad 17th, we are moving forward with hiring Science Education Specialists (SESs) to take responsibility for specific courses.

We thank all of the following for making the long trip from Kyrgyzstan to UBC. We met for 2 full days to fine tune project details and to meet as many of the UBC Faculty and SESs as possible. The energy, enthusiasm and organization of this team is infectious!

• Diana Pauna, Dean of Arts and Science, UCA,
• Dietrich Schmidt-Vogt, Director Mountain Societies Research Institute,
• Marc Foggin, Associate Director, Mountain Societies Research Institute, and
• Fayzan Gowan, Manager of Planning and Development, School of Arts and Sciences

As of April 4th 2017, we have very strong interest from existing UBC faculty and staff for roughly half the courses, and possible interest for several others. Once we have commitments for existing people (hopefully by mid-late April) we will advertise for SESs to take responsibility for remaining courses (listed with updated titles on our EES program course list page.

As we get ready to begin, who will do the actual work of constructing, testing and professional development?

The UBC-UCA course development project model involves:

• UBC faculty acting as subject experts, contributing advise & materials for courses they teach.
• Faculty and advisors at UCA providing guidance and local wisdom about the cultural, academic, geographical and employment (of future graduates) context.
• At UBC, the project will be managed from within EOAS and Geography by UBC faculty who will providing oversight, logistical coordination and communications.
• Most of the hard work will be done by “teaching and learning fellows” (TLF) or “science education experts” (SES).

What are TLFs or SESs?

These people are Masters or PhD level subject experts, who also have demonstrable expertise in “discipline-based pedagogy”. I.E. they are knowledgeable about,  and experience in, currently known best-practices. They are well-informed about the state-of-the art in “how people learn”, and relevant empirical research about optimal teaching and learning strategies for science and geography.

Here are specific TLF job characteristics

• Typical responsibilities:
  • Develop each course with syllabi, assignments and assessments that are consistent with current best-practices and UCA’s goals and guidelines;
  • Design professional development materials and tutorials, and lead workshops for new UCA faculty both at UBC and possibly during visits to UCA in Central Asia;
  • Contribute to EES program planning in collaboration with existing and new instructors, UCA program coordinators and the UBC project coordinator;
  • Support initial deployments and evaluation of courses by observing and/or coaching new instructing faculty at UCA.
• Decision making: Make decisions about suitability of teaching and learning strategies and materials. Also participate in program planning and project outcomes evaluation.
• Supervision received: Work under general direction of project coordinators at UBC and UCA as well as UBC faculty subject-experts. Work will be reviewed for overall effectiveness and achievement of program objectives.
• Supervision exercised:  Manage, hire and evaluate student assistants.
• Minimum qualifications: Applicants must have two or more years of experience in at least two of the following areas, and within the context of either environmental sciences, geosciences, chemistry or ecology: teaching as instructor-in-charge, instructional design, faculty development, or science education research, all at post-secondary levels. Successful candidates must have excellent written and oral English communication skills, and be capable of working independently, as collaborative members of the project team, and with UBC and UCA faculty and other collaborating partners.

Now – the search is on for suitable individuals with this special skill-set!

Contact the project coordinator for more information.

The signing between Dr. Santa J. Ono, president of UBC and Dr Shamsh Kassim-Lakha, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of UCA, in Vancouver January 10th is announced with photographs at http://ucentralasia.org/Resources/Item/1295.

The journey begins!

UCA representatives visited UBC Tuesday Jan 10th, and agreements were signed by UBC’s President, Dr. S. Ono and UCA’s Chairman of the Board, Dr. S. Kassim-Lakha.

UCA attendees at the signing included:

• Shamsh Kassim Lakha, Chairman of the Board UCA
• Diana Pauna, Dean of Arts and Sciences UCA
• Ariff Kachra, Founding Dean of Arts and Sciences UCA
• Farzana Karim Haji, Director of Partnerships Aga Khan University
• Nasir Pirani, Director of Advancement and Public Affairs UCA

UBC attendees included:

• Santa J. Ono, President
• Marwan Hassan, Head of Geography Dept
• Roger Beckie, Head of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences Dept
• Loch Brown, Instructor Department of Geography
• Francis Jones, Science Teaching and Learning Fellow, EOAS Dept
• Adel El Zaim, Executive Director International
• Bob Korzeniowski, International Relations Officer

Proud to sign collaborative agreements with University of Central Asia today pic.twitter.com/WLjemYfs8i

— Benoit-Antoine Bacon (@ubcprez) January 11, 2017

After a year of discussion, negotiation, budgeting and contract development, UBC’s departments of EOAS and Geography are embarking upon a partnership with the University of Central Asia (UCA) to develop, produce and transfer the 22 courses making up UCA’s new undergraduate B.Sc. program in Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES).

Initial project information is provided on several new pages. See the main menu under “Project Details”.

Why are we in EOAS and Geography so thrilled to be embarking on this journey? See our “why we’re excited” page for some thoughts on benefits to individuals, departments, UBC and our partners.

We hope you can become equally keen. There are some constraints on who and when contributions can be made. UCA already has students who will take these courses registered in the first of their 5-year degree program. Our courses start in September 2018 and 2019. The journey begins now, and we will be contacting individuals regarding specific courses. Do please let us know if you have questions, concerns or comments. Hopefully this blog will serve as a means of updating progress. We’ll try to keep it up to date!