1. Prioritize Learning
2. Expect Success
3. Make Your Class a Safe Place
4. Encourage Community
5. Offer Choices
6. Be a Role Model

UBC MIX is a project that creates new learning experiences for UBC students by developing cross-discipline and cross-faculty partnerships between courses already taught at UBC. UBC MIX brings together faculty members interested in making small adjustments to their class curriculum that can MIX, or bring together, students from two different courses. Examples of innovative teaching partnerships include joint lectures, electronic discussions between the classes, joint field trips, and mixed-class group projects. The idea behind UBC MIX is to compliment the curriculum of both classes by exploring links between subjects, exposing the students to new ideas, and encouraging students to explore their own subject areas from a different point of view. By facilitating connections, developing resources, and supporting MIX activities, the UBC MIX project aims to offer UBC undergraduate students access to unique opportunities for exploring interdisciplinary connections in their education.

Being a scientist in Nigeria means being very resourceful in finding solutions to barriers… the power goes out 2-4x per day or some days does not come on at all. Scientists here are very practiced at being practical & creative at the same time, a recipe for good science. Only one day did I start to think that the barriers were too big… but then the attitude of the students brought me back around. They work very very hard and are very excited about what they are learning. There are ~20 graduate students, medical doctors, and technicians taking our course. The people that I have met here in Nigeria is what I have enjoyed most. They are full of hope that their country will become one of the top 20 countries in the world. (The goverment has a plan called the 20:20 vision – that hopes to use education, science and technology to raise the profile of Nigeria by 2020). It has been interesting to talk to these young graduate students, to get their own views on the corrupt government and the political problems in the North, and the wars in the Delta (the oil rich region of the country). It is a country with many problems. For example, Nigeria’s children account for 18% of the global under-5 mortality rate. The UN has identified Nigeria as one African country that, if it were to improve and aim to meet the Millienium Development Goals, could make the most impact.

Project #1: University of British Columbia International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) team, submitted with Dr. Eric Lagally & Dr. David Ng

We seek to initiate a team of undergraduate students to compete in the current year’s International Genetically Engineered Machines competition.  The iGEM competition draws teams of undergraduates from the top universities all over the world to try to answer the question:  “Can simple biological systems be built from interchangeable parts and operated in living cells, or is biology simply too complex to be engineered in this way?”

The team will work for a summer on the assigned project and submit their findings to an international conference, the iGEM Jamboree, held annually in mid-November at MIT. This funding request covers part of the costs of entering and running a UBC team, as well as travel costs to the conference to present their findings. Other required funds will be provided by in-kind and cash donations from UBC academic units and industrial partners.

Project #2: TERRY TALKS – INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDENT JAM` – Ideas that Inspire Action, submitted with Dr. David Ng, Dr. Allens Sens, Chad Hyson, Jamil Rhajiak, Nabila Pirani

“Terry talks” is an annual event where students are given a high profile platform to communicate their passions and desires. It essentially borrows a template from a well-established conference known as the TED conference, and modifies it for delivery within the UBC community.

Here, the general intent is to bring together the University’s “most fascinating (student) thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives.” Under this context, a single day conference can accommodate 9 student speakers from a wide range of interests and backgrounds. The talks will be held at a large venue, where one can engage a significant number of audience members. The talks will also be video archived for online viewing after the event.

This would provide stimulating content, relevant to a variety of globally relevant issues, and would ultimately foster collaborative efforts and idea sharing amongst the conference attendees. In all, this will strengthen the existing networks responsible for student led initiatives, and in doing so act as a significant catalyst in creating a stronger socially responsible student community.

Woo hoo!

Here’s the full report.

Stay tuned for a more detailed analysis…

I was originally exposed to this simple, but amazingly “outside-the-box” idea, by Ellen Aho, a professor at Concordia College in Moorhead, MN. I met Ellen at the ASMCUE 2008 conference where she presented, “The student-led conference style symposia as a technique for developing oral presentation skills in a moderately sized Microbiology course.” Ellen posed the question, “What do scientists do?” and then made the point that our teaching activities should be related to these activities. An interesting idea… The program that she teaches in at Concordia College is designed with this paradigm in mind (i.e., this won’t be the first time students have seen it). In addition to the in-class conference idea, other classes in her program have writing assignments, peer review, posters, etc. etc.

In keeping with my last post, of take what works and put it to work, Ellen’s idea had been percolating in the back of my mind for some time as a possibility for new content for MICB405. As part of this course, students carry out a self-directed research project (in groups of 4 students). The MICB405 group research project already contains a proposal submission, a final report, and a presentation of results at an in-class poster session. By treating these groups of students like graduate students embarking on their own research projects, and then preparing to attend their first conference with results, we hope to give students an authentic research experience. Thus far, the research component of MICB405 has worked well, but we thought that we could improve it by expanding on this idea of “what do scientists really do…”

Early in the semester, in collaboration with my co-instructor M. Murphy, we talked about ways into which we could inject new energy into the research project component of MICB405. Our real goal was to raise the overall quality of research projects by increasing student engagement and providing more opportunities for feedback (both peer and instructor).

For the 2008 offering of MICB405, we added several new in-class activities to this component of the course. 6 lectures in total were dedicated to the group research project. Students were asked to: 1) submit a proposal, 2) carry out a peer review of submitted proposals**, 3) attend a feedback session on their proposal with the instructor, 4) submit a progress report**, 5) participate in an in-class discussion of critical evaluation of research results from their progress reports**, 6) prepare a poster for two-day in-class conference, 7) peer evaluate posters presented in-class and 8 ) prepare a final report. Peer evaluation and self-evaluation of individuals from student groups was also carried out.

**2,4,5 are new activities for 2008, and the in-class time dedicated to this project was increased from 4hr (in 2007) to 9hrs (in 2008). Highlights of these new lecture time included in-class peer review activities as well as lecture content explaining the peer review process in science. Michael talked about his experiences participating in CIHR review panels, and students responded very well to this new content.

More formally, here are the new learning objectives that Murphy and I introduced alongside these new research project based activities for the 2008 offering of MICB405:

Section 5: Research methods and critical assessment.
38.    You will be able to define a biological hypothesis that can be tested by bioinformatics methods.
39.    You will be able to critically evaluate a bioinformatics tool based on the assessment features available.
40.    You will be able to critically assess the degree to which the bioinformatics method supports a biological hypothesis
41.    You will be able to describe the methods, results and conclusions of a bioinformatics research project in a written report and as a poster presentation.

Anecdotally, these new activities achieved our goal of raising the overall quality of research carried out by students. During the poster session, I noticed that the average depth of research achieved by each group was higher as compared to last year, especially at the bottom end. I think that increased opportunities for feedback and more in-class dedicated time were responsible for this shift. I did carry out an in-class survey with respect to the research project components, so next up is analysis of those evaluations.

One of the easiest things to do to improve as an educator is to watch others and take what you can to use in your own classrooms.

Recently, we hosted a professional development conference for BC high school teachers called, “It’s Your Experiment!” The workshop was part of our two day conference and aimed to develop new curricula based lesson plans for use in the classroom.  This was a chance for teachers to work with each other to generate teaching materials, link these teaching items to the BC high school IRPs and generally be creative.  We collaborated with Connie Cirkony, previously from the Engaging Science program at Science World – now with the BC ministry of education to facilitate the workshop.  Connie has lots of experience at facilitating workshops for teachers, and as an educator myself, I was interested in the process as much as I was interested in the outcomes.  Here’s a couple tricks of the “workshop facilitation” trade that Connie used that were good teaching tools.

The activity that we used to wrap up the workshop was to generate an action plan.  With this task, we gave teachers 1) a chance to think about it, 2) a chance

to write it down, and 3) a chance to share their action plan with other teachers in the group.  With each step in this activity the likelihood of actually completing the items on your list goes up.  Think about it, write it down, and tell someone… a real recipe for success!  Here’s an example of another implementation of this activity (from another conference that I participated in recently), a card provided to participants so that they can collect their ideas from the day.  Another great idea that we can use for our future teacher workshops/conferences.

The activities that we started off the day with included A) a reflection + B) a brainstorming session.  Both activities are real staples of an effective workshop.  With the brainstorming activity, we asked teachers to brainstorm ideas for lesson plans.  Which subjects did they have troubles teaching?  Which subjects would they like help with?  Which items did they really need a good lesson plan for?  We asked each teacher to write 5 ideas down, each item on a different colored recipe card.  Next, we turned this brainstorming activity into an organizing exercise by asking teachers to group the items together.  The final stage of the activity was to link these ideas to the BC curricula – as supplied by the list of PLO (prescribed learning outcomes) that the ministry of education published.   In the end, this exercise provided a good metacognition activity that captured ideas plus offered a chance for reflection.

Teachers Brainstorming and Organizing Ideas

Another reflection activity that Connie introduced, and I plan on using often with teachers, was what I’ll call the “Take your Hat off” activity.  In this activity, Connie invited the teachers “to take their workshop participants hats off and put on their teacher hats.”  With this invitation, she was asking the teachers to reflect on the logistics and design of the workshop as educators.  Use the model of the workshop as a model for what works in the classroom.  Observe what works, and put it to work. I’ve since used this “take your hat off” activity with a group of teachers with success.  I invited the group of teachers to “take your teacher hats off, put on your students hats.”  An invitation to reflect on what running this activity would be like in their classrooms, and how it would be received by their students.  It worked great too, because as soon as I asked the teachers to “put on your student hat” he started to goof off like a 14year old.  We had a lot of fun with that!  In addition to a setting a good tone, it worked as a perfect icebreaker activity.

Many of us know Robert Gateman as the flamboyant, somewhat bizarre, yet somehow appealing ECON 101 prof we had, or wish we had, in first-year. But how much do we really know about the most talked about UBC instructor on ratemyprofessors.com?  Click here for the full Ubyssey Gateman interview

I attended because I was interested in seeing Dr. Gateman in action.  He’s the most popular prof at UBC on ratemyprofessor.com.  What does he do that appeals to students?  His appeal is real at UBC.  400 students came out on a Monday night to hear an extra-curricular talk … that’s really quite amazing!  The energy in the room was excited.  Some students didn’t even know what he was going to be talking about, they just knew that this was supposed to be good.  And Gateman delivered.  He had some serious crowd control going and managed to use the group energy to capture the attention of the students.  For example, he started his lecture with his apparently typical, “Every body UP!” stretching routine to loud music.  I say apparently typical – because many students seemed to be expecting the routine.  Students were happy to shed typical routines, get up out of their seats, and do something different, together.  Watching Gateman deliver his lecture, I picked up on a few things that he does to capture the attention of his audiences in these large classroom settings.

• know your audience, build on what they know already, relate your teaching materials to what they can do
• connect personally, maintain eye contact as you move around, talk to individuals
• use theatrics, even props, his lecture wasn’t particulary polished — but you did feel like you were watching an actor in a play
• move around, never stay at the bottom of a big lecture hall
• have a simple message that keeps coming up the whole way through
• use humor, for example offbeat humor can make the message stick — i.e. tie it in a knot vs. global population control

Who knows?  I may find myself dropping in to see an Econ101 lecture to see if Dr. Gateman is as offbeat in a typical classroom.  I bet he is… and I can see why getting “something different” appeals to undergraduate students.  Thanks, Dr. Gateman, for the real life example of how it is possible to use these large classroom settings to capture the energy of large groups and connect with students.

Building effective learning goals is a corner stone for increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the teaching / learning experiences for both you and your students.

Also at this workshop was Beth Simon, a Science and Teaching Learning Fellow with the CWSEI. I’ve interacted with her a lot via email and over the phone about science education initiatives happening over in Computer Science, so it was nice to finally meet her in person. As for the workshop itself, I participated in some brainstorming activities and discussion about learning goals. Nothing really that new, but it was a good opportunity for reflection. In particular, we reflected on the nature of learning goals and how they can be classified into different types: cognitive, skills, and attitude. I also thought it was good how the workshop highlighted the importance of having learning goals at different levels, for example generalized goals that relate to the whole course, as well as specific goals for each lecture. All in all, it was time well spent.

The Summer Bioinformatics Institute, Enhancing the Undergraduate Curriculum through Bioinformatics, aims to meet the need for more undergraduate faculty in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines to understand, interpret, and use molecular sequence information to solve problems. The program features the analysis of microbial genomes, molecular sequences, and structural data, providing a framework for developing classroom activities and research projects for undergraduate students.

Check out facultyprograms.org for more information.

Programs like this one offer great opportunities but have limited spots available. A complementary solution would be for a small groups of faculty to come together and develop portable training programs that deal with bioinformatics content as well as how to teach bioinformatics that could be offered locally at multiple institutions.

A common set of guiding principals about “What to teach?” could be very useful for this kind of “train the trainers” type of endeavor. I’ll be following the outcomes of this Workshop on Computational Education for Scientists with much interest as it deals with that very question.