Category: O-U

Tõnu Oja

This research is about how to better facilitate student learning in subjects assuming creative attitude (modelling, programming, photogrammetry).

Questions and Rationale

Courses aim to help students to combine knowledge about programming and skills in different GIS software use, logical thinking and model design, and to encourage them towards ability to create individualized GIS solutions. For better learning in the subjects students need support to work on their own; this can be developed by better engagement of students into specification and realization of learning process. Jang et al. (2016) found that students tend towards a semester-long trajectory of rising engagement when they perceive teachers to be autonomy supportive. Read More …

Nina R Olsen, Susanne G Johnson, Grete O Hole, Kristine B Titlestad, Ilona Heldal, Lillebeth Larun

Background: In this proposal, we address the challenges associated with the use of a mobile application to support learning of evidence-based practice (EBP) among students in health and social care education. Research show that students typically struggle to apply EBP in clinical settings. In partnership with students, we developed a mobile application (app), the EBPsteps, to better equip students to meet the expectations of practicing evidence-based. The app guides students through the five EBP steps (ask, search, appraise, integrate and evaluate), enables documentation of the process, and provides links to internet-based learning resource. Read More …

Charina Ong

The Centre for Development of Teaching and Learning (CDTL), the professional development arm of the National University of Singapore (NUS), exists to “advance cutting-edge, evidence-based, impactful teaching and learning practices in ways that support the educational vision of NUS”. Consistent with CDTL’s mission, this study investigates the potential of fully online professional development workshops to support engaging, meaningful professional development for academics, while accommodating their needs for convenience and flexibility – given the advances in learning technologies and platforms and latest research on effective online pedagogies. Read More …

George Paravantes, Adam Thomas

Learning how to code can be challenging (Gomes & Mendes, 2007). Teaching code to students who are not interested in learning code can be even more challenging. Having students who are not engaged in a course topic or are only enrolled in a course as it is a requirement is something all post secondary instructors experience. I have been teaching code at a college in Toronto, Canada for over ten years and I have observed several consistent barriers to success that students face: a) they often believe that learning to code is out of their reach; b) they intend to put in “just enough” effort to pass; and/or c) they are only enrolled because the course is a requirement. Read More …

Jocelyn Paul, Elizabeth Bowering

Service Learning (SL) is a high impact educational practice in which students work on “real world” activities with a community partner (i.e., the service component) and then reflect on that experience (i.e., the learning component). The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the influence of a SL experience on the development of empathy in university students. Here, students registered in an Introductory Psychology course at a Canadian university engaged with international students new to Canada and reflected on how culture mediates human behavior. Specifically, we randomly assigned students to experiential or non-experiential (control) learning formats, with the groups otherwise treated equivalently. Read More …

Tim Peeples, Paula Rosinski

Five years ago, our university embarked on a wide-reaching Writing Excellence Initiative in an effort to transform the culture of writing across our entire campus. This endeavor is innovative in its scope and its goals, which are to alter student, faculty, and staff attitudes and behaviors toward and practices of writing broadly conceived, valuing equally writing-to-learn, writing in a discipline/profession, and writing as a citizen. The major goals aim to build and sustain a writing culture that recognizes that learning to teach writing and gaining writing expertise is an iterative, reflective, practice; that there is potential to transfer writing strategies and practices across contexts and disciplines; and that transforming a campus culture of writing is long-term and requires the dedicated work of all faculty, staff and students. Read More …

Nichole Powell

Our collaborative laboratory environment is designed using a social constructivism model, and students work in groups to decide on the best ways to achieve the goals for each laboratory session. This often involves discussion to decide on the best method for collecting the necessary data as well as division of labor. We piloted the use of electronic laboratory notebooks as a cost saving and sustainability measure. Our observations that students working in these pilot lab sections behave differently (and develop a different learning culture) from those in paper-notebook course sections, have led us to question what is happening when students use an electronic laboratory notebook in a collaborative learning laboratory environment. We will present observations of student behaviors as well as student perspectives gained from interviews. Read More …

Yihong Qiu, Lijuan Wang

Student rating of teaching is popular in colleges and universities. From the administrative perspective, the aim of student rating is to help instructors improve teaching. However, due to the fact that rating is a kind of summative evaluation and usually has time lag, instructors often believe that ratings do not help to improve teaching, and they are indifferent or even disgusted with student rating. Although instructors do not recognize the value of student rating, they acknowledge that students’ feedback based on learning experience can contribute to improving teaching. Researchers have found that instructors acting upon midterm course evaluation, especially with the help of professional consultants, can actually improve the quality of teaching, because midterm course evaluation is a formative evaluation, which is essentially with “diagnosis” characteristics and a good timeliness. Read More …

Kiruthika Ragupathi, Johan Geertsema, Adrian Lee

Student feedback for instructors (or student evaluation of teaching, SET) is widely used to make personnel decisions, yet its strength lies in the instructors’ systematic interpretation of data. The National University of Singapore (NUS) introduced SET in 1992, and a new system with richer data analysis and reporting capabilities was implemented in 2016.

Though the purpose of SET is primarily to improve teaching by informing and stimulating instructor’s reflection about the strengths and weaknesses of their teaching practice (Alhija, 2017), it has been challenging for instructors and academic leaders to systematically engage in and use SET data to inform teaching development, and thereby student learning. And yet, they receive little or no guidance from the university on this process. Read More …

Amy Rogers

In this poster session, the influence instructor communication has on student success is reinforced. Practical instructional strategies are shared from a recent study in which instructors connect graduate students in the online classroom with institutional supports, in this case, the writing center’s tutoring service known as Paper Review.

Preliminary results are shared, revealing effective communication strategies that foster a culture for learning and an inclusive learning culture that participants may find applicable to their own instructional practice. Connections may be made between the writing support featured in this study with participants’ own resources, emphasizing the value of generating learning across departments. Read More …

Edorta Santos-Vizcaino, Rosa Berraondo Juaristi, María Yolanda Fernández de Aránguiz Guridi, Águeda Fernández de Aránguiz Guridi, José Ángel Ruiz Ortega, Mirari Ayerbe Díaz, Begoña Lecea Arana, Edorta Martínez de Marigorta Izaga, Rosa María Hernández Martín, Manoli Igartua Olaechea, Aiala Salvador Martínez, Karmele Colom Aristondo

Final Degree Project (FDP) is an activity that students carry out at the end of their training process, being the opportune moment for them to demonstrate their professional qualification. However, during the last years, some important aspects to be improved have been detected in the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). By means of a statistical analysis (multivariate logistic regression) of the most important characteristics in FDPs, we found that most of FDPs contained knowledge of a single module of the curriculum, usually barely connected to any of the professional possibilities of the degree. Therefore, the present paper proposes an intervention to solve observed deficiencies and improve the execution dynamics of the FDP. Read More …

Claire Saunders, Tansy Jessop

This poster addresses the conference theme of building a culture for learning. We argue that developing a stronger writing culture amongst academic staff can have far-reaching impact on the wider learning culture of the university through the integration of teaching, research and writing in the academic role. Two writing interventions were implemented in our institution. Each was underpinned by a view of writing as a process rather than simply a final product, and each recognised the daily realities and pressures of academic life. Both were designed to carve out a space where there was time to think, write and share. Read More …

Petger Schaberg

While the field of Rhetoric & Composition has demonstrated a robust scholarly commitment to the implementation of pedagogies that harness a learner’s motivations and insights (Elbow and Belanoff, 1999), Writing & Rhetoric instructors can benefit from curricular insight generated in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL). SOTL researchers have made significant strides in understanding the paradox of the teacher/learner relationship, as evident in areas of inquiry as varied as Reading Compliance (Burchfield & Sappington 2000); Integrated Scholarship (Hubball and Clarke 2010); Design-Based Learning (Nelson 1984; Nelson & Sundt 1994; Ablin 2015); and Writing-to-Learn (Rivard 1994, Archer-Kuhn 2017). Read More …

Lauren Scharff, John Draeger, Arshad Ahmad, Jennifer Friberg

SoTL research has grown over the past three decades with a majority of the work motivated by questions focused within specific course or institutional contexts. This type of work is at the heart of SoTL. The Culture for Learning theme asks, How do we generate and sustain meaningful teaching and learning that have a lasting impact, within and across courses, programs, departments and institutions? Inspired by the success of the globally-relevant Grand Challenges of Engineering (NAE, 2008), members of the ISSoTL Advocacy and Outreach Committee believe that the time has come to establish the Grand Challenges for SoTL. Read More …

Meadow Schroeder, Robin Mueller

Post-secondary institutions in Canada are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of quality instruction for student learning (Fraser & Ling, 2014). What was traditionally considered secondary to research, instruction has found increased prominence within academia. Universities have started to provide professional development for faculty in the areas of teaching and assessment (Fraser & Ling, 2014). To create a culture of learning, our University created a teaching academy made up of faculty recognized for their teaching excellence. The academy was asked to generate ways to encourage other faculty members to participate in teaching development opportunities. Read More …

Kelly Schrum

“There’s a life after this class,” wrote a scholarly digital storytelling student. “We are creating content that is useable, valuable, shareable.”

Digital storytelling can be many things: narrative . . . interactive . . . linear . . . nonlinear . . . ethnographic. . . artistic. It can also be scholarly. In higher education, it can provide a compelling approach to reimagining academic research, intended audiences, and scholarly communication and to teaching practical digital skills. It can create authentic, meaningful learning with a lasting impact beyond the classroom.

This poster presents research on scholarly digital storytelling addressing the following questions. Read More …

Kim Senger, Ivar Nordmo

Geology is a study of spatial and temporal evolution of a wide range of processes through studying the geological record. By definition, geological studies thus inherently involve the use of sub-optimal and incomplete data sets, and thus geologically meaningful intra- and extrapolation is required between the exposed outcrops within a 3D spatial framework. In this experiment, we hypothesize that digital field notebooks can improve students’ learning in the context of field education onshore the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. The digital notebooks comprise a ruggedized iPad with relevant applications, notably the FieldMove app, and were handed out to each student group prior to the fieldwork. Read More …

Celeste Sharpe, Sarah Calhoun, Melissa Eblen-Zayas, Iris Jastram, Kristin Partlo, Janet Russell

Learning often blurs curricular and co-curricular lines, and scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) needs to encompass learning in all the ways that it happens and in all places that it happens. At the same time, what constitutes teaching practice has increasingly expanded beyond the sole instructor model (Iannuzzi, 2007; Bernstein and Greenhoot, 2014). In our small liberal arts college context, groups like the learning and teaching center (LTC), academic technology (AT), and reference and instruction librarians (R&I) do reflective practice and assessment during, around, and in-between courses. Read More …

Susan Smith

The reasons for the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students’ poorer learning experience, the degree attainment gap and their reduced employability are complex and multifactorial (Richardson, 2008 a & b; Allen, 2016; Newbold et al, 2011). This inequality may be compounded in the case of those disproportionately high numbers of BAME students who also commute to the LBU campus (Thomas & Jones, 2017).

This poster outlines findings from a qualitative project at Leeds Beckett University (LBU) focusing on the commuting experience of BAME undergraduates and explores how their articulated needs have been addressed through a range of cultural, infrastructural and curricular interventions generated from ideas from the students themselves. Read More …

Nachamma Sockalingam

Educational development differs across nations – often steered by national policies. This paper presents a snapshot of the educational development landscape in Singapore by studying Educational Development Centres (EDCs) from five Singaporean universities.

Universities in Singapore top various global rankings. The question is if this emphasis on research and rankings is paralleled in educational development efforts reflecting a culture that learns. Also, there is a lack of documentation on educational development work in Asia and in particular, Singapore. This paper is the first to scan and document the educational development landscape, as far as the Singapore context is concerned. Read More …

Harald Sodemann

Interdisciplinary problems in natural sciences can be challenging to teach. A series of innovative teaching exercises was conducted in a Master’s level course in the field of Meteorology at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Bergen, Norway. Embracing the concept of student-active learning, students were assigned expert roles in a mockup board meeting. The students performed a role play in which they were asked to solve a challenging professional situation that touched upon different aspects they had learned about before in the lectures and from the syllabus. The role play was repeated again at the end of the course, but this time the characters in the role play were also assigned personalities which gave rise to dilemmas in terms of finding the optimal solution. Read More …

Jonathan Soulé, Øystein Varpe, Sigrunn Eliassen

Biology is a discipline that makes extensive use of mathematical models, numerical tools, data management, and statistical analysis. In the course of their curriculum, biology students must acquire numerical skills and quantitative competence to better comprehend biological theories, systems and problems (‘Vision and Change’; AAAS 2011). However, many students do not appear to successfully translate these skills into their subject context. In the classroom, educators face the challenge to keep their audience engaged and confident when trying to apply quantitative reasoning. Even if courses in mathematics and statistical analysis are compulsory in the curriculum, they either seem maladapted to biological problems, or fail to put numerical knowledge into the biological context (Touchon et al., 2016). Read More …

Kristi Straus, Wei Zuo

The “international extended flipped classroom” was conceived as part of the University of Washington (UW) Teaching & Learning Initiative. The goal was to increase global engagement for UW students through a two part process: 1) collaborative online international learning between UW and Tsinghua University in China (THU) followed by 2) a short-term study abroad program to THU. This program was designed to be accessible to students unable to participate in a longer study abroad program, promoting access and equity at UW.

In first steps, Dr. Kristi Straus modified her ENVIR 239 (Sustainability: Personal Choices, Broad Impacts) course together with faculty members teaching sustainability at THU to create shared material for our students to complete online. Read More …

Amanda Sturgill

Understanding teaching and learning is mission-critical for academics. While we have the ability to extend our skills in inquiry to our work with and for students, academics sometimes lack the incentives to do so. This poster will present the impacts on the career path for choosing SoTL work from the perspective of disciplines in the liberal arts and professional schools, with a focus on the impacts on the short-term and longer-term implications for faculty, looking at SoTL conducted in a multi-institutional context. Read More …

Briony Supple, Laura Lee

Teaching and learning spaces have been identified as integral to innovative pedagogies and to creative, student-centred curriculum design. Space is neither neutral nor innocent (McCarthy, 2015). As Winston Churchill once said during a presentation to the House of Lords: “We shape our buildings and afterwards the buildings shape us” (Churchill, 1943).

In the traditional, hierarchical construct of space, “teaching rooms and media are deliberately designed for one-way delivery” (Biggs, 2003, p. 21). However, conceptualisations of space need to consider its centrality as an overall part of the student learning experience.

While new learning spaces become proving grounds for innovative approaches to research, teaching and learning, opening up a critique of ‘older’ and more traditional spaces also provide a baseline from which critical questions can be asked about teaching approaches. Read More …

Rahmat Talukder, Yumi So, Mohammed Islam

SoTL is a systematic research grounded in the literature, peer-reviewed, and disseminated through publication or presentation (Secret et al., 2011; McKinney, 2004). Today, the scope of SoTL has expanded beyond classroom practices and includes instructional design, curriculum development, and assessment of student learning at curriculum and programmatic level (Hubbal et al., 2013). Literature identified a gap in the understanding of what is considered as SoTL between faculty with varying experience and disciplines (Secret et al., 2011; Gurung et al., 2008). While SoTL possesses the recognized attributes of research, it is not universally accepted and faculty may not be rewarded for SoTL activities in higher education. Read More …

Cathrine Tellefsen, Kristin Glørstad Tsigaridas, Andreas Görgen

Science teacher education can be a key to change toward a learning culture in higher education disciplinary departments. We show how science teacher students working as facilitators for teaching assistants can contribute to creating a culture for learning in introductory courses in mathematics, physics and biology. We use the student evaluations along with feedback from teaching assistants to show how the work has developed since 2015. We also show how the master theses of student teachers, when focused on teaching and learning in undergraduate courses, can foster development and growth in higher education. Read More …

Seth Thompson, Meaghan Stein

Research over the last decade has indicated that a diverse student population can positively contribute to better learning outcomes in undergraduate biology courses. Transforming the instructional methods at the undergraduate level to incorporate diversity and inclusion is vital for promoting an inclusive culture of student learning (Handelsman, J., Miller, S., & Pfund, C., 2007). This is particularly true in science laboratory courses, where there is often an emphasis on collaborative work. In North America, the primary instructor of laboratory classes is often a graduate or undergraduate student teaching assistant (Adams, D. J., 2009). Read More …

Rie Troelsen

Churchill once said: “We shape the buildings, and then the buildings shape us”, indicating the interplay between space and its occupants. Until now, researching this interplay has concentrated on the design of spaces for a new generation of students according to “new” views on learning (Bennett, 2006; Grummon, 2009; Jamieson, 2003; Laing & Sörö, 2016; Villano, 2010). In this exploratory, small-scale project we set out to explore how teachers are in dialogue with the learning space they are going to use for teaching – that is, how teachers shape the room and how the room then shapes their teaching.
Read More …

Ere Uibu

The University of Tartu is the only institution of higher education in Estonia which offers a postgraduate level curriculum in Nursing Science. The study form is open university part-time studies, because the student of nursing science is often a working nurse/midwife, a nurse manager or a teacher of a Health Care College, often married, with children or about to start a family. This background makes the students more likely to be at risk of poor commitment to studying, and even though the compulsory subjects will be passed, writing a master’s thesis may turn out to be “a mission impossible”. Read More …