Future Lunch and Learn Topics

We want to give everybody an opportunity to let us know what you would like to see for future Lunch and Learn topics. We have listed a few possible topics below–let us know (either by phone, email, or using the comment box) whether these topics interest you, or to suggest other topics.

Using digital tools for assessment and feedback

Grading and providing feedback is an important part of teaching, but can be time consuming and challenging. In this Lunch and Learn we will showcase a few UBC supported or freely available digital tools that can help make the assessment process easier and quicker for the instructors. These include: WebCT quiz/exam tools, assessment rubrics, Wimba voice tools, and e-portfolios.

Enhancing interaction and communication in your courses

Instructors are continually faced with trying to cover a considerable amount of topics in a short semester, while balancing this with providing students with opportunities for student-instructor and student-student interaction. This Lunch and Learn will showcase some electronic communication tools that can be used to enhance or facilitate classroom interaction. We will provide examples of how discussion forums, voice forums, weblog spaces, and chat tools are be used within the Faculty and in other UBC courses, with some discussion as to their pedagogical value.

Enhancing course content with multimedia

The arrival of digital multimedia to education has been both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it allows students to experience a different presentation of content that could not be conveyed as easily in a more traditional format. However, it has also resulted in the emergence of expensive reproductions that do little to enhance teaching or learning.

This Lunch and Learn will focus on showcasing simple and inexpensive multimedia tools that can achieve a high impact if used appropriately. We will introduce tools such as Flikr and podcasting, which are both easily accessible to both Faculty and students.

Social bookmarking tools for Faculty and students

As academic research publishing increasingly moves to digital formats, managing numerous downloaded articles, bookmarks/favorites, and citations can be challenging. This Lunch and Learn will introduce Faculty to web-based bookmarking tools such as Cite-U-Like, Delicious, and Furl, demonstrating how these tools can help you organize, find, manage, and pull academic research into a virtual space that can be accessed from everywhere, while also allow you to view what other people with similar interests are bookmarking.

*This Lunch and Learn will likely involve an expert from the UBC Office of Learning Technologies

Use the comment box after this post to let Jessica or myself know if there are any other topics that you would like to see in a Lunch and Learn, or if you would like to be involved in the planning of future Lunch and Learns. You can also contact Jessica for more information on hosting your own Lunch & Learn or to provide other topics of interest at 604.822.6746 or jmueller@interchange.ubc.ca.

Followup Lunch and Learn #1

Thanks to everybody who attended last week’s Lunch and Learn with Alan Hannam and David Tobias–we had a great turnout with approximately 25 people and also had some great questions that followed the presentation. The session was video-recorded, and we’ll be providing a link to the session in case you weren’t able to attend.

Alan and David deserve to be commended on their very innovative use of WebCT, in conjunction with their use of other multimedia tools such as Flash and 3D Studio Max. I love their open approach to what they have created, and having them share their work so enthusiastically is such a benefit to the Faculty community.

Meanwhile, Jessica and I have collected your feedback on future sessions, and we’ll be announcing future sessions in the next couple of weeks. I’ll also post the feedback form here, to give those of you who couldn’t attend and opportunity to tell us your ideas.

Lunch and Learn #1

This event has already been posted on the intranet, but here it is again. We are quite excited about this event, and look forward to a great turnout (27 registered so far). For those of you who can’t make it, we will be videotaping it and making it available on the intranet and this blog, and I’ll also post a brief summary of the talk here.

LUNCH AND LEARN: A MULTI-USER, OPEN LEARNING RESOURCE, AND CASE DELIVERY WITH WEBCT

Dr. Alan Hannam and Dr. David Tobias invite you to share their experiences with the development and use of two novel WEBCT educational projects.

The first is an open Occlusion and Articulation site shared by undergraduates, graduates and faculty. It is used by students in three separate courses, and is continuously available to them throughout their entire UBC program. Its content ranges from basic to graduate levels, and is organized to allow browsers not only to find the material they need, but to explore allied material if they wish. The site includes Flash movies, animations, interactive 3D manipulations, sound bites, electronic referencing, links, tests etc., and is constantly being updated. It has replaced Powerpoint as a presentation medium during lectures, in addition to its use in the clinic and at home. The resource has proved popular with students, and is a valuable, single repository for managing and upgrading teaching material.

The second demonstration is an on-line PBL case focusing on acute dental pain. Based on a classical format, it is delivered over a shorter time-frame than the typical DENT PBL case, and is specifically designed for remotely-located, part-time faculty tutors. The case includes audio interviews, activated graphics, a tutor guide and tutor-controlled chat rooms.

Both resources have been used for several years, and much has been learned the hard way about optimum design tools, site maintenance and management. Future applications along the same lines could include access by UBC’s Alumni, students in Continuing Dental Education, and other national and international Faculties of Dentistry using WEBCT.

Date: Tuesday, November 8th

Time: 12:00 – 1:30pm

Location: JBM 132 A&B

A delicious lunch will be provided!!

Conversate

One of the contributions technology has made to education is that it has provided us with new tools that have allowed us to reconceptualise instructor-student and student-student interaction in our courses. Email is still a highly valued tool for many faculty, who use it to communicate with students individually or through a class listserv. Most faculty have the knowledge and skill to set up an email listserv quickly, but other interaction tools are a little more out of reach. Here at UBC, the discussion forum tool in WebCT is sometimes the only part of WebCT that is being used in conjunction with a face to face class, but it requires going through a process of obtaining a WebCT shell, which then needs to be populated by somebody (here in the Faculty of Dentistry you would contact myself or James Pagnotta in TST. This isn’t difficult, but it is sometimes a few more steps than some instructors would like.

Conversate is a handy tool that can quickly allow an instructor to set up a discussion space for course topics. It functions a bit like email, in that the emails of the students would need to be entered for them to be notified of the ‘conversation’ but adopts some of the nice features of threaded discussions, providing a visual structure of nesting individual replies, allowing RSS saavy students to subscribe to the conversation, and a few other features that allow everybody to stay on top of the discussion through notification.

Instructors might also find it useful to suggest this tool as a place for groupwork and collaboration. In many courses, group work takes place in group section of WebCT forums, and the instructor has access to monitor the process and step in if need. With Conversate, this feature isn’t lost–even though the conversation is located outside of WebCT, as long as the instructor is given access to the discussion as a member, he or she will be able monitor the group work if needed.

Finally, I like tools that don’t draw me into a long registration process–you can try it out without a login, but setting up your own takes less than 30 seconds.