Category: V-Å

Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler, Enrico Cecconi

Educators have increasingly recognized the need to provide opportunities that foster students’ intercultural understanding and prepare them for work in a complex, interconnected world (Hovland, 2014). Study abroad is one of the high-impact practices associated with powerful educational benefits such as cultural awareness, intercultural competence, and appreciation for diversity (Engberg, 2013; Kuh, 2008; Stebleton, Soria & Cherney, 2013). Studying abroad fosters exploration of linguistic and cultural traditions through academics and community engagement.

Sociocultural theories emphasize the importance of social interactions in culturally relevant activities for learning and development (e.g., Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978). When students interact with others in community-embedded programs, they learn to apply knowledge and utilize developing language skills in real-world contexts (Kinginger, 2008). Read More …

Ann Marie VanDerZanden, Laura Bestler, Sara Marcketti

How do the course format and course content support, or limit, accessibility? This is a critical framing question to consider when designing or redesigning a course. Accessible courses and course content anticipate the potential needs of diverse learners, and remove barriers or provide alternatives so all learners can be successful. Embedding accessibility in courses is becoming increasingly more important as the population of college students becomes more diverse and these students are arriving at the university with more diverse backgrounds and abilities. A report from the U.S. Department of Education (2016) shows that in 2007-2008 and again in 2011-2012, eleven percent of college age individuals reported a disability. Read More …

Mikel Villamañe, Ainhoa Alvarez, Mikel Larrañaga

This poster is related to the thread “A culture of learners”, more specifically, on supporting teachers and students on their assessment processes. Assessment is often the key element used to decide whether implemented actions and techniques are being effective or not, as it allows measuring the teaching and learning outcomes (Dunn et al., 2011) and to analyze how to adequately improve it. However, to be able to use the assessment as a reliable measure, a fair marking that truly reflects the student performance must be guaranteed. The first step to obtain this fairness is the standardization of the criteria (Chan, 2001) what can be obtained, for example, through the use of rubrics. Read More …

Franziska Widmer

Bachelor students in social work at a university of applied sciences have diverse educational backgrounds. As a consequence, during a lecture, one group may feel overwhelmed whereas the other group is bored and not challenged enough.

The hypothesis of the SoTL project is thus the following: What can be done in the process of lesson preparation and during the actual lecture to address the heterogeneity of the students in order to best serve their needs and interests so that as many students as possible feel challenged, neither bored nor overwhelmed?

The goal of the project is to take material from an already existing course and rework the course based on theory. Read More …

Shawn M Willis, Randall E Carlson, Jessica H Dwyer

The United States Air Force Academy Department of Physics incorporates a supplemental journal to complement the calculus-based physics textbook used in each of its introductory physics courses. The journals are designed to promote deeper student examination of the material and to identify areas of student difficulty. Integrating worked examples and explanatory question sets into the journal is a teaching strategy the department implemented to encourage students to think more critically about physics concepts and establish or strengthen scaffolding. The feedback gleaned from student answers informs an instructor’s process for selecting appropriate lesson activities aimed at helping resolve student misconceptions. Read More …

Michelle Yeo, Mark Lafave, Jeffery Owen

Based upon an evolving culture and recent changes to professional standards in Athletic Therapy (AT) in Canada, calling for implementation of competency-based curriculum by the year 2020 (Lafave et al., 2016), the AT faculty at our institution agreed to implement a clinical presentation (CP) approach to facilitate competency-based curriculum requirements (Dornan, Boshuizen, King, & Scherpbier, 2007). This innovation to pedagogy required a re-imagination of how teaching, learning and assessment is approached (Yeo et al., 2017). Our team is currently in the midst of a longitudinal study, focusing both on student learning as well as faculty development within this curriculum transformation. Read More …

Ya Zhou, Yao Hu, Yuejin Zhao, Liquan Dong, Ming Liu, Lingqin Kong

Unlike traditional, teacher-led classroom activities, students often must organize their own work and manage their own time in a project-based class. Project-based instruction differs from traditional inquiry by its emphasis on students’ collaborative or individual artifact construction to represent what is being learned. It also gives students the opportunity to explore problems and challenges that have real-world applications, increasing the possibility of long-term retention of skills and concepts. Unlike traditional course in which gaining the professional knowledge is the highest priority, there are a lot of personal and interpersonal skills involved in a project-base course. Read More …

Lotta Åbjörnsson, Lars Uhlin, Alastair Creelman, Maria Kvarnström

The Open Networked Learning course is organised collaboratively by educational developers at Lund University, Karolinska Institutet and Linnaeus University, Sweden, with several collaborating institutions in Sweden and abroad, including The Independent Institute of Education/Varsity College, South Africa. Inviting anyone with an interest in the area, the course mixes participants from the collaborating institutions with non-affiliated learners in small groups, working online assisted by facilitators from either of the institutions and co-facilitators who are previous course participants. This structure means each group contains a mixture of people from different cultures and contexts, providing “internationalisation at home” – a great opportunity for all. Read More …