Students’ unprecedented access to content on the Web is providing a unique opportunity to transform the role of lectures in education, moving the focus from content delivery to helping students synthesize content into knowledge. The University of Illinois Physics department has introduced a variety of activities to facilitate this transformation, including Web-based preflight assessments of student understanding before lecture, Web-based multimedia pre-lectures designed to provide students with content before lecture, and peer instruction (clickers) to assess and facilitate student understanding during lecture. In this presentation, Dr. Selen will discuss the pedagogical motivation for introducing these activities, and the impact they have had at their courses, including published outcomes data that demonstrate the effectiveness of using Web-based activities to enhance learning. We encourage your active participation. Ample time will be provided for discussion and building cross-discipline connections.

Speaker Bio

Mats Selen, Professor of Physics, earned a B.S. in Physics from the University of Guelph (1982), an M.Sc. in Physics from Guelph (1983), and an M.A. in Physics from Princeton University in 1985. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton in 1989. He was a research associate at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) at Cornell University from 1989-1993. He joined the Department of Physics at Illinois in 1993 as an assistant professor, was promoted to associate professor in 1997, and to full professor in 2001. Since coming to Illinois, Dr. Selen has been a prime mover behind the massive curriculum revision of the calculus-based introductory Physics courses (Physics 211-214), and he was the first lecturer in the new sequence. He developed Physics 123, a hands-on Physics course taken by about 100 elementary education students each spring. He also started the Physics Van, an award-winning community outreach program that introduces grade school children to the fun and excitement of Physics, and is a regular on local morning television as “The Whys Guy.” As an experimental high-energy physicist, Dr. Selen has made significant contributions in several research areas including the study of charmed meson production and decay, and the design and construction of high-speed electronics.

Session Resources

Transforming Student Learning Through Technology

Join us at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting 2013, online. This year CTLT will be hosting a selection of these online events and setting up an interactive space where members of the UBC community can view them. Please feel free to stay for all three-days or attend specific sessions that interest you.

Session 1: Feb 4th, 12:00pm – 4:45pm, IKBLC Seminar Room

Day 1 Schedule

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Session 2: Feb 5th, 8:15am-3:30pm

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Session 3: Feb 6th, 8:15am-3:30pm

Day 3 Schedule

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Event: The Flipped Classroom in Higher Education 

Distraction has become a common reality in the teaching and learning with a growing number of students bringing laptops, mobile phones and tablets into the classroom. One approach to dealing with this issue is consider strategies and ways for students to engage with content outside of classroom time, leaving classroom time to focus on interactive approaches to teaching and learning. How can we engage learners with this content? How can we deliver this content to learners? How can we make this content sticky. Join us for this presentation and discussion around the flipped classroom and creating content to engage students.

Session Resources

Drew Paulin the Manager of Learning Design and Innovation at the Sauder School of Business

Paul Cubbon is a Marketing Instructor in the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver: Canada.

Jan 2013, Flipped Class, Paul Cubbon and Drew Paulin

Matt Yedlin, Associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia

Matt Yedlin Presentation: Engaging Students through Bologna

Katie Gimbar Flipped Classroom Video (YouTube)

Wordle Tag Cloud Generator

There has been a growing interest in Higher Education is using online game-based and research continues to show its effectiveness in motivating students and enhancing learning. The application of games in teaching and learning ranges from massive multiplayer online games, to business simulations to trading card games and board games. Game-based learning is providing new ways of engaging students in online environments.

Join us on November 13th from 11:30 to 1:00pm for an interactive presentation about game-based learning and the role of game-design in teaching and learning. In this session we will explore the context and potentials of game-based learning, the application of game-based learning in the classroom.

Natasha Boskic, Manager of Educational Technologies, External Programs and Learning Technologies

Natasha Boskic designs innovative learning spaces and offers consultations on best teaching and learning practices. Her interest is in online collaborative and communication strategies, student engagement and culturally responsive instruction. Natasha manages various projects in the area of eLearning, locally and intentionally, such as ePortfolio implementation, accessibility issues, Aboriginal education, Faculty development and training, Mobile technologies, and others. She obtained her Masters in Distance Education from Athabasca University (Canada) and a Ph.D. degree in Language and Literacy Education at UBC (Canada), focusing on ethics in gameworlds.

David Ng, Director and Senior Instructor, Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory

As Director and Senior Instructor at the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory of the Michael Smith Laboratories, David is responsible for providing science learning experiences for both general public and scientific communities. At the CTLT Institute, David will share his experiences of the Phylo project (http://phylogame.org) and Science Creative Quarterly (http://www.scq.ubc.ca), his work with Terry (http://www.terry.ubc.ca), and writing for the wildly popular weblog Boing Boing.

Bonita Bray, Strategist, LMS Professional Development, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology

Bonita assists, supports and trains faculty and staff in Connect, UBC’s new learning environment system and other emerging web technologies. She has been involved in e-learning at the post-secondary level – as an instructor and technology teacher – for more than 12 years. She is passionate about the potential of technology to enhance both the teaching and learning experience. She has a long-standing interest in using games to enhance learning and is currently interested in using social media to expand the classroom.

Ranvir Bahl, Educational Technology Solutions Analyst, Faculty of Medicine

Ranvir is a lifelong learner, sometimes a stranded evangelist passionate about technology enabled learning. He is a software engineer, certified project manager and is currently pursuing Master in Educational Technology program at UBC. He is very passionate about gamification of learning and loves to share his ideas and learn at the same time.

Ranvir currently works within the Technology Enabled Learning (TEL) division of the Faculty of Medicine where he enjoys working on innovative instructional design projects for supporting the Medical Undergraduate Curriculum. He has served as a technical lead on a number of strategic projects including integration of Media Streaming Services within the Faculty’s distributed medical program and selection of a technology platform for developing interactive, online virtual patients.

Helping students acquire better self-regulated learning skills bares the promise of promoting future independent learning. However, current educational technologies fall short of interpreting, assessing, and supporting students’ use of self-regulation strategies. While students’ actions in problem-solving environments can reveal their domain knowledge, inferring their strategy use remains a challenging task. In this talk I will discuss how learning analytics and educational data mining can complement other methodologies to design and evaluate support for students’ help-seeking skills.

First, I will describe an iterative process to develop an automated, unobtrusive assessment of students’ help-seeking behaviors in the context of problem-solving environments. Second, I will describe a series of studies that showed that adaptive feedback triggered by the automated assessment helped students to acquire better help-seeking skills in a manner that transfers to novel, unsupported, learning activities. Last, I will reflect on the use of educational data mining and learning analytics to support research in the Pasteur Quadrant (Stokes, 1997), that is, help students to acquire better metacognitive skills and improve our understanding of the nature of learning.

Ido Roll is a research associate in the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative, the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology and special education in the University of British Columbia. Ido graduated from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the Program for Interdisciplinary Education Research in Carnegie Mellon University.

Ido’s research focuses on helping students to become more capable, curious, creative, and collaborative learners, using interactive learning environments. He is particularly interested in using fine-grain data to understand and promote self-regulation and scientific-inquiry skills in the context of authentic environments and tasks. Ido has published numerous papers in the fields of science education, the learning sciences, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, learning analytics, educational data mining, and human-computer interaction. His work has received numerous awards in peer-reviewed conferences.

The focus of this presentation is an approach to increasing student engagement in online environments using multimedia flash presentations as part of a blended learning environment.  Such presentations can be used to provide context to assist with student motivation (e.g. practical applications, news / current affairs, industry case studies), as well as an active learning environment, both of which are vital for student engagement, and hence student learning experiences and outcomes.  The approach is illustrated for an Environmental Engineering course at the University of Adelaide, where it is used aspart of a hybrid Justin-Time Teaching / Project Based Learning approach.

E-learning is much more than the use of an online learning system. It comes with a full package of social as well as technological innovations and a set of new practices associated with online, group and collaborative practice. In adopting new practices of online learning, we take on and adopt new concepts about what it means to be a learner including new roles, presence in multiple communities, new literacies, mobility across locations and platforms, and the practices of collaborative and participatory learning. To fully understand and manage in the midst of this transformation, we need to take an expanded view of e-learning, seeing it as interconnected with changes in where we learn, from whom, and from what resources.

This presentation discusses what is involved in learning ‘to be’ an e-learner, including the ability to learn in and with communities in the development of identity, new roles and relationships, and how to be distributed, technology supported and knowledge creating communities. Ideas of collaborative learning, expansive learning, communities of practice, social capital, and entrepreneurial learning inform this talk, as do the many studies of online learners. These perspectives contribute to understanding the dimensions of activity that encompass learning on and through the Internet, and the processes involved in becoming a fluent, engaged and ubiquitous e-learner.

Presenter Bio

Caroline Haythornthwaite is Director and Professor at SLAIS, The iSchool at UBC. She joined UBC in 2010 after 14 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she was Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. In 2009-10, she was Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education, University of London presenting and writing on ‘Learning Networks’. Her research concentrates on information and knowledge sharing through social networks and the impact of computer media and the Internet on work, learning and social interaction. Her research includes empirical and theoretical work on social networks and media use, the development and nature of community online, and distributed knowledge processes. Recent work includes exploration of motivations for participation in crowds and communities, and the development of automated processes for analysis of online learning activity. Her major publications include E-learning Theory and Practice (Sage, 2011, with Richard Andrews), the Handbook of E-learning Research (Sage, 2007, with Richard Andrews), Learning, Culture and Community in Online Education: Research and Practice (Peter Lang publishers, 2004, with Michelle M. Kazmer), and The Internet in Everyday Life (Blackwell, 2002, with Barry Wellman).

The presentation will elaborate on the benefits of lecture recordings from teacher’s and student’s point of view. It will also show the distribution of videos to web pages with the embedded Matterhorn player as well as to iTunes U.

Opencast Matterhorn is a lecture recording system, that automates the process of recording, editing and distributing of videos captured in the classroom. It has been developed by 13 American and European universities. The major contributions came from Berkeley (USA), Cambridge (England), Zürich (Switzerland) and Osnabrück (Germany). With regard to hardware, there has to be a remote controlled camera in the lecture hall, a conventionel PC with a mpeg-2 encoder card, a wireless microphone, and a VGA2USB-converter, attached to a VGA splitter between teacher’s laptop and beamer. Installed on one or more servers somewhere in the network is the Matterhorn software, that controls the post processing, which may be individually tailered to the needs of the institution.

This session addresses students as creators of content and producers knowledge at the University of British Columbia. This concept provides an alternative view to students as consumers of knowledge and places an emphasis on students contributing to the teaching, learning and research at the University as well as actively creating content with value beyond only the university context.

We will look at examples of courses where graduate and undergraduate students have an active role as knowledge creators and contribute to teaching and learning at the University.

The Presenters are:

Eric Jandciu is the course Coordinator for Communicating Science (SCIE 300), a new highly interactive course in the Faculty of Science that aims to promote the development of scientific communication skills.

The course focuses on communicating with the scientific community through papers and conference presentation. For a portion of the course students are asked to consider broader audiences.

Students employed a variety of technologies to create and share science stories. For example students interviewed UBC researchers and produced videos and podcasts intended for non-expert audiences. Students also contributed to a course blog about science communication

Dr. David Vogt is Director of Digital Learning Projects for the UBC Faculty of Education and Director of Innovation Strategy for the UBC MAGIC Lab.

David has created and conducts an online graduate course, ETEC 522 Ventures in Learning Technology that is embedded in WordPress, and where the students collectively determine the focus of our attention, and also design, compose and moderate the great majority of our shared learning experience.”

Erin Biddlecombe, Student Development Officer, Learning and coordinates the Student Directed Seminars programs at the University of British Columbia.

The Student Directed Seminars program allows senior undergraduate students from all Faculties/Schools to initiate and facilitate 3-credit upper level seminar courses with the support of a Faculty Sponsor and the SDS staff member.

More information: www.studentdirectedseminars.ubc.ca