At university level the common understanding is that we used scheduled contact time – lectures, tutorials, seminars, recitation, and blessed laboratories – to share with students whatever content we think is important about our topic. That time will typically account for anything between 25 – 50% of the workload we think students will spend on their topic. The remainder is generally classified something like “independent study time” where students are meant to learn their topic – eh – independently. I have had a long fascination with what actually happens in that “independent study time”. Busy Work The answer is complex…
Category: Pedagogy
Reflections on delivering my first academic development module
My new role involves contributing to academic development including our PG Cert in Teaching and Learning. Given my focus it made sense for me to take up the module on “Technology Enhanced Learning”. It’s been a long time since I have been “new” to teaching in terms of putting a module together. Of course there have been ongoing iterations of chemistry modules over the last two decades (eeek!) where I have had to teach a variety of sub-topics in my discipline. But I brought to that the norms that build up over time to form an implicit understanding of what,…
The pedagogy of (showing you) care
WonkHE had an article last week about pedagogy of care, and it prompted the strongest memory from back in the day of being a first year undergrad. One of my professors paused in the middle of his 50-55 minute sprint and stated that he had been reading in an education journal about the value of taking a short break in the middle of a lecture. We were thus given a few minutes to discuss anything we liked, before returning to our lecture on… the aromaticity of pyrroles. I recall being so impressed that my professor cared enough to think about…
AI and academic plagiarism: cause for concern?
The future of the essay as an assignment type is reportedly increasingly in doubt as new AI bots are becoming cleverer. The Guardian reported that academics were “stunned” by the latest outputs and opined that academics, journalists, and programmers’ job security were in doubt (not the programmers… won’t someone think of the programmers?!). As someone who has had to write more than enough essays on various topics in history in the last few years, I have a selfish interest in hoping that the demise of this format is rapidly accelerated. I decided to try the latest one getting attention (Chat…
Thoughts on the OfS’ “Blended Learning Review” Panel Report
The OfS have published their Blended Learning Review; comprising both the independent panel report, as well as the OfS response on things they think have regulatory implications. The panel report is very good, and is the first that I have seen that really tries to look at the landscape post COVID (while acknowledging that responses are still very much COVD influenced). So many reports and research on the pandemic to date have focussed on what students “liked” and “didn’t like” in COVID (with what seems to be a common finding that 66% of students “like” something that “33% “don’t like”)….
Design considerations for video as a learning resource
There is obviously a long history of incorporation of video as a learning tool in higher education, and of course over the last two years during the P-word, the use of video as a teaching resource has exploded. I had started a preamble on whether this was a good thing or not, but that became so long that’s going to be a separate post. (Hint: it probably isn’t.) Here the focus is on the use of video in a way that benefits learning. The challenge of video of course, is that while it’s a very good teaching tool – we…
What do we mean by “student engagement”?
It’s not possible to walk through a (virtual or physical) corridor in university these days and not hear someone mention “student engagement”. We worry that students are “not engaged” or we want to “increase engagement”. I sometimes think of students sitting in the lecture, and imagine them sitting up or opening their eyes even wider, smiling as hard as they can, eventually to a point when we can relax and sigh; they are engaged. Because the phrase is nebulous, isn’t it? And while I am about to share some of my own understanding of it, it is a challenge because…
Five Ground-Rules for Laboratory Reform
In preparation for my Nyholm lecture tour beginning next year I have been working on the idea of a package that chemistry departments interested in reform of their laboratory curriculum could take and use in their own setting. The intention is to take our paper on laboratory curriculum reform which presented an overarching framework for a laboratory curriculum1 and use that as a basis for tangible actions. In some useful conversations over the summer I came to the conclusion that this paper could act as a better catalyst if supplemented in (at least!) two ways: firstly, in the attempt to…
A Festschrift in honour of Professor Marcy Hamby Towns
The Journal of Chemical Education has published a Festschrift in honour of one of the great champions of chemistry education and of chemistry educators, Professor Marcy Towns. Just as I was about to board a plane to go to the Biennial Conference in Chemistry Education last month – for which Marcy was General Chair – an alert about the Festschrift being published came in. 30,000 feet higher (and $36 lighter for airplane wifi), I got stuck into reading it. It doesn’t disappoint. In his warm introduction, Jeff Raker notes some of Marcy’s achievements including the supervision of 25 graduate students…
A new PhD graduand in chemistry education
Congratulations to Xinchi Zhang for passing her PhD viva this week. Xinchi’s work explored the student voice in laboratory learning; looking at their experiences in relation to learning as well as their concepts of lab goals. Her work furthered current literature by placing these findings within a theoretical framework, and she brought in Maslow’s hierarchy in an innovative way to do this. Xinchi is a thoughtful and innovative scholar. I still remember meeting her before she undertook her research when she made a strong case for incorporating student needs into the conversation regarding lab design, and her scholarship has heavily…