My area of special interest is Open Educational Resources (OER) Development. I am also interested in curriculum development/renewal.
Open Educational Resources
I have taught the following courses:
For each course, I developed an open-access exercise book/workbook to help students achieve mastery of the material and improve their performance in the courses. What sets my exercise books apart from other workbooks, such as those provided by publishers, is the very high level of detail of the solutions (concept summaries and all detailed steps, including basic algebra, are provided).
The most important way to learn calculus is through problem-solving. While going through the solution to a problem, students are often faced with several issues. They may not see the connection between the theory and the solution. Others may not understand the solution because a step is missing or there are not enough explanations. Or because they have weak algebra skills. I think that nearly everybody agrees that the latter issue is the main reason many students struggle with calculus.
To address these issues, I included the following features in my exercise books (for MATH 103, 116, and 142):
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- Concept Summaries Boxes: They allow students to review the theory and make the book self-contained. Each concept involved in a problem is summarized in a box right before the solution. The relevant information needed to solve the problem is given. And the solution clearly shows how that information is used.
- Very Detailed Solutions: They provide an “easy-to-understand” approach. Each problem has a complete step-by-step solution with careful explanations for better comprehension. Alternate solutions (to some problems) are also given.
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“Help Texts”: They are located to the right of the solution sequence and help students recognize which rule, property, or procedure is being applied.
- Algebra Review: They help students understand the solution, especially those with weaker algebra skills. Basic algebra rules and procedures (exponent rules, adding fractions, factoring, etc.) are listed next to the steps within solutions. In addition to including all of the calculus steps in the solution, I also include all of the required algebraic steps. The idea is that even students with weak algebra backgrounds can follow along and strengthen their skills.
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The exercise book for the Matrix Algebra course (MATH 221) includes all the features above except the last one because it is not needed.
Each exercise book is divided into two parts. The first part includes a wide variety of problems as well as applications. The idea is not to have as many problems as in a traditional textbook but a fair amount of problems that cover all the essential/basic skills. The second part includes full solutions as well as reviews of the relevant theories. Hyperlinks are added to ease the navigation of the books – they are mainly used to go back and forth between the two parts.
I published all my exercise books as OER in the UBC Library-cIRcle:
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- Calculus I for Management and Economics Exercise Book, 2022, 375 pages. This can be found here.
- Calculus II for Management and Economics Exercise Book, 2022, 413 pages. This can be found here.
- Integral Calculus with Applications to Life Sciences Exercise Book. 2023, 490 pages. This can be found here.
- Matrix Algebra Exercise Book, 2022, 341 pages. This can be found here.
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Curriculum Development/Renewal
MATH 103 – Integral Calculus with Applications to Life Sciences. I developed the course and taught it for the first time in W2021-T2 (Jan — Apr 2022). The goal of this course is to give students a broad range of mathematical concepts which are foundational to biology and data analysis in biology. This course is unique because it covers not only topics in integral calculus, but also topics in differential equations, linear algebra, probability, and statistics with applications to life sciences.