'Module Design and Delivery: challenges and opportunities': 'New to Teaching Workshop'

excellent right so I'll just do a very brief introduction to Michael and then I'll let him um let him take over so Michael's a senior lecturer in the history of science at the University of Edinburgh um and he's going to talk to us around issues to do with kind of curriculum design really um and I think it's particularly interesting to hear from Michael because for two reasons one because he recently um won a prize from the Royal Historical Society for his teaching um teaching activities so he's an award-winning teacher in higher education so that's great and secondly I think interestingly he um he's a historian but he isn't situated in a history department so he's he's kind of engaging with teaching history outside of History how do you kind of um uh cross those kind of boundaries that sometimes exist kind of administratively within within universities and I'm going to shut up it's much more interesting to hear what Michael has to say so I'll hand over to him now great uh thanks so much Jamie um this is a real pleasure to have a chance to um to talk with this group and I know how much uh work goes on behind the scenes to bring something like this together and it's a really tremendous resource I really enjoyed yesterday's sessions um and uh hope we can we can keep the keep things moving and uh keep things interesting um as Jamie mentioned I'm a historian of science um and I'm in a social science department rather than the history Department um and history of science is kind of a a weird feel in that um very few of the people in history of science come out of an undergraduate history background um so I think we did a tally in in my department among uh historians of science and um there were I think something like a dozen different first degrees uh that we all that we had going into the field none of which was history um the first introductory history class I was involved with was the one that I um had to design from scratch and teach as a postgraduate student so I'm coming to this field and this sort of question of how you design a module and how you think about teaching in history um with a little bit of a different perspective that I think has helped to ask a couple different kinds of questions that hopefully will be useful to you whether you're teaching in a history department or not and whether your students are primarily history students or not um so those are the kinds of questions and the kinds of contexts that I want to ask about I just want to um flag this this image here I don't have a lot of illustrations for this um but I think this is a really cool image um this is one of the earliest iconographic depictions of teaching at a Blackboard so as someone who started in mathematics um blackboards have a special place in my in my pedagogical heart um and I think the history of blackboards tells us a lot about out the changing contexts and Technologies and modes and expectations of education and I think it really bears in mind when you think of Blackboard as this like very science oriented formal deductive kind of medium but Blackboard is for hundreds of years before they were ever associated with mathematics were tools of of Choral training of teaching um teaching people in religious settings to sing together and I really love that idea of um of educational Technologies being oriented around what you need to be able to to join together in some kind of harmonious devotional activity so that's kind of my framing idea for this for this presentation um I want to start with a warm-up question um as we did yesterday just throw your answers in the chat whenever whenever you like to so our warm-up question um which uh we'll draw on some of the ideas hopefully that you were still thinking about from yesterday is what are history modules for um and I want to frame this by saying uh one of the slogans that I always tell my students is in University settings there are no trick questions the questions designed to make you think of the wrong answer um but there are surprisingly interesting questions so questions where the answer is not necessarily as you expect and understanding the complexity of the question and the richness behind the question um is is part of what we're here for so some kinds of surprisingly interesting questions I asked in my intro ask in my intro History of Science question intro History of Science module or things like what time is it or how can you measure a fart um all sorts of just questions to get you thinking and try to explore um the the big issues raised in history education so go ahead and put in the chat um some of your ideas from yesterday or from your own um from your own experience about what history modules are for um so we have a contribution understanding a theme probably the theme is in the title of the module so that's a good guide when you're trying to understand that um there's a balance of understanding larger Concepts and also understanding specific times and places and that's a real tension in module design that's going to be going to be a constant theme as you're as you're working on your own modules teaching Independent Learning and critical thinking so one thing we're definitely going to focus on in the next 20 minutes or so is how that can be a very different question for different Learners with different backgrounds and needs exposing students to unfamiliar periods teaching particular skills um lots of great answers so far so keep those coming I'm going to give some answers of my own um so there are two basic models of module design um that are reflected in in Jamie's design for um for yesterday and today's sessions so um there's an idea of a module consisting of lectures and discussions and readings and assessments the things that students do are the ways you interact with students there's another principle that was I think even uh it was especially on display in the first presentation yesterday about modules consisting of Concepts and Knowledge and Skills and needs and goals and that's what you really emphasize in your answers in the chat here um I think it's also important to recognize their two different contexts of module design so first um there's the context in the discipline um we teach history modules so whether or not we're in a history Department we are in inducting our students into the field of history and to a methodology into a way of thinking also very much reflected in your answers in the chat um but modules also are components of degrees of curriculums of universities often history modules are taught within an expected pathway for training someone to be a history graduate but often history modules are taught in other settings so when I'm teaching students history students are a um probably the largest single cohort of my students but they're a small minority of the class and um the uh my students come from um they did a tally recently over 100 different degree programs in the university and so thinking about where a history of science module uh sits within the education of an engineer and an artist and a physician and a geographer as well as a historian and how those can intersect in really fruitful ways is something that can really benefit a module design um so our goal here is to think about how these all fit together what kinds of questions you have to ask in order to see how they fit together um and really importantly we want them to fit together in a way that your department and your University and your discipline will value and recognize um so it was a a real honor to have some of this uh some of my own work on this recognized by the Royal Historical Society recently as as Jamie mentioned and you really want to think about what um um how not just your students but your colleagues and your discipline and your University are going to Value what you're going to do because ultimately when you're teaching and when you're designing modules you're doing it as part of a career you're doing it as part of a profession and these are really important aspects of um how you should approach designing a module um so uh we'll ask over the next um 20 minutes or so uh what is a module about uh whom is the module for how will students complete the module and what I'm going to do is ask a lot of questions relatively quickly uh with not a lot of time to to reflect and soak it in um but the idea as Jamie mentioned uh is that there are recordings and slides available afterward um and I want to sort of show you a lot of questions get used to start thinking about them and then you have the opportunity as you're going on into whatever kind of module design you're doing um at this point in your career or later on to revisit the ideas or the questions that are that are useful for you um and this this kind of approach to lecturing I think you'll recognize from from the discussion yesterday one of many possible ones um which is based on the idea that we'll discuss uh that uh often when you are um teaching mixed audiences with lots of different needs um there will only be uh certain parts of your presentation or certain parts of your uh lessons will be more or less useful to different students of yours um and creating a structure and being explicit about that structure for how different students with different needs can take what they need from your presentation is a really useful thing to have in mind when you are um when you're designing not just lectures but entire modules um so here's our next surprisingly interesting question um what is your module about um so we had already um this idea from our last question that um often your module has a title sometimes you get to choose that title um so that's our kind of sort of first level answer for what the module is about um but for something that you're preparing to teach now or that you've taught recently um or that you would like to teach in the future um what are some examples of ways of answering this question what is your module about go ahead and put those in the chat foreign about a module being about how to write history and how to write in an academic setting more generally in some universities an intro history module is the kind of Gateway for a lot of students into scholarly writing which is a great setting and great um goal um digital history is a methodology we have some more thematic topics some more periodizations some contexts um so these are awesome really great examples um just let people soak those in as we go um so here are some questions that I think are useful to ask when you're thinking about what a module is about um so we have some examples here um about this really Gateway question what topics um is the module sort of supposed to be about and then within that what specific topics need to be covered for this to be a credible module in your field so when I'm teaching an introduction to the history of science I know for this to be a credible introductory course I'm going to need the students to learn about the Scientific Revolution about heliocentrism about Evolution as a scientific concept which is one that's very relevant to their um to their lives and their political and social and cultural participation after the course Concepts like atomism relativity these are things that must be in the module one way or another and that's a really good starting point thinking about module design is knowing within the context of your field what students really have to see in order for it to be credible um and often it's useful to think about that specifically in terms of how this compares to the number of weeks in the calendar because often the initial phase of module design is just taking everything students need to have exposure to and seeing how they fit in the different weeks you have available to you um paired to this and already reflected in some other of the responses in the chat is um what should students be able to do what skills or what approaches to contextualization or analysis Should students ideally have by the end but you also need to think about a spectrum of outcomes for um for the course so I think uh for a lot of us the default is to think about teaching what we were like as students and because we are people who have gone on to careers that involve teaching history we're probably pretty unrepresentative of most of the students that um that we'll have uh so um we do want to definitely make a course that we would have wanted to take when we were uh when we were at the appropriate level for that course um but we also need the course to speak to uh students who have different approaches different needs um different backgrounds um that they that they want to derive from the course um and thinking about a spectrum from what you think absolutely every student if they're going to get a passing Mark needs to be able to demonstrate and do and uh all the way up to what our kind of Ideal typical student and also what our ideal exceptional student might want to get to from the course of what we would hope for them to to be able to achieve um is important for thinking about what the module is about um so you think about how those skills and perspectives are developed across the module that was a big theme yesterday and you'll have uh some more discussion of that in in later sessions today but also thinking about what uh you are excited to teach and what they're going to be excited to learn where is the energy where is the interest in the module coming from um every course has a narrative whether you haven't whether you design it intentionally to have one or not so it's very important in module design to make your narrative obvious and intentional and to make that narrative clear to students so talk with the students at the beginning of the course and as you're going in the beginning of the module I'm using that and uh our University we call them courses um we're the American terminology um as you go through the module uh making clear to students um how the narrative is shaping up and fitting together um so in history teaching um and I have History of Science front of mind to this this will apply to a lot of history teaching there are a lot of kind of default narratives that you'll see so there's the the chronological structure of the course in intro History of Science we call this the The Plato to Nato syllabus um where you you have some some linear version of the history um that's a a structure of course design that can work really well it can give students something to latch on to but it's also one that's received a lot of criticism um a lot of well-justified criticism in the field um as uh perhaps too readily embracing uh metanarratives of of progress and of a sort of unidirectional um March of science um so that's something to to be wary of and mindful of uh or the version of that that applies to the field that you're teaching um there are thematic organizations conceptual organizations you can also organize of course historiographically and this is a a popular way to do things and more advanced courses where you talk about the history of how historians have studied a subject start with some classic texts look at ways that has been challenged over time um and that has its own challenges associated with it in terms of how you make things perspicuous what kinds of backgrounds and perspectives um students are expected to know in order to be able to make sense of that historiographical um uh progression um uh it's it's important not to assume that students have the kind of broad view of how the understanding of a topic has fit together that you are using to base your understanding of um of historiographical starting points and and complications and the real risk there is if students don't have that context um they might take your um your starting point for the course as the sort of controlling narrative and see that as the kind of right answer that then has all of these variations rather than seeing that as something that's been superseded by subsequent historiography um and then uh thinking from uh sort of more middle level in terms of course design um as you're assembling your topics and your skills and your Concepts into a sequence thinking about what depends on what other aspects of the course in order to make sense to the material so early in my intro History of Science course there's a sequence of units going from the theme of abstractions where we talk about um uh um features of society like um like accounting and record keeping um and uh and also um sort of techniques of scholarship um like assembling things into books and um and uh doing critical exegesis of a source and that provides the foundation for the next week when we talk about collections in natural history and in um uh in botany and zoology and geology and other sciences that are based on assemblages of large materials which Builds on this idea that there are different ways of organizing and presenting information and analyzing it critically and that provides the foundation for a lot of different concepts that are necessary to understand the history of the life sciences as developing specific kinds of abstractions out of particular kinds of collections of living things so there's a kind of conceptual sequence that builds from from one week to the next and making That explicit to students is really important for them to be able to draw connections across the course um and I'll just I've alluded to um I'll just sort of underscore there's a relation between history and historiography that you're familiar with as Scholars of History um and that's related to the relationship between history teaching and making explicit the historiographical um uh ideas and principles reflected in your course design and how explicit um that is and how much of the historiography you bring into your history teaching will really depend on the level and the goals of the course um but one one thing that um that we do in Edinburgh that um uh that I think has been been really effective that you may have the opportunity to do is um is combine teaching at different levels in a way that um that really develops this dialogue explicitly uh so in my uh History of Science teaching I have one group of students who are first and second year undergraduates and I have one group of students who are first and second year postgraduates and they go through the same sequence in at the same time um and with the undergraduates we're doing the the history lesson and with the postgraduates we're talking about all of the historiography and all of the debates about interpretation and presentation that go into that undergraduate Union unit as a way of learning the historiography but also as a way of thinking about teaching methodology so our next question and you can start typing in the chat already uh is uh whom is your module for I've already mentioned in my case um I have to think about students from basically every sector of the university and it's a kind of unusual course um you know both in my University and I think in the the way higher education tends to be structured in the UK in general um but it's really good to have to be aware of who who potentially takes your your module on who uh who tends to be your students um so already a wide range just in the first two answers of the kinds of fields and disciplines that are relevant to the course this idea of majors and minors so is the history the core topic or is it something that is expanding on what the student's core topic is there's an idea of practice Space versus other other uses and goals of the course so it's already a really good a good range to be thinking about from answers to this um so this first question who are your students is a really important gateway to module design uh so as discussed yesterday you're thinking about uh what do you students know what can they already do um but also what do they need to know and what do they need to do um so whether it's developing specific writing skills uh whether it's learning um the appropriate ways to read historical texts whether they need to know specific historical context how important is it really that students know the key sequence of events from 1789 to 1792 in the French Revolution um is that a methodological interest um from the dogs um is that a primary methodological interest or is there um a purpose in where they're going after your course where they need to have those facts in a really good um a really good um uh order and um and narrative um because that affects what um what information you give students and how you present it and also how you examine it and assess it which is something that I know you're going to be talking about later today um you also have to think about what obstacles might affect your students activity and engagement so are your students um older or younger um what who what who what students come to your University uh more generally on what obstacles might they face we are in uh in an important stage of a cost of living crisis that's affecting students very directly as well as infecting there's role affecting staff um uh students may be um maybe having to work in order to to meet their subsistence needs um that's going to affect how they're able to approach your um your teaching they may have family situations that affect how they can engage with your course what background and preparation they have with their course and the really important principle underlying this is that universities are very strong mechanisms they can be mechanisms of social mobility and social change but they also tend to be uh especially by default mechanisms of ramifying inequality so the students you design for will be better able to succeed and because of all of the kinds of um um you know Regulatory and assessment and um standardization mechanisms especially strongly felt in in the UK um there's a way of making that kind of advantage of being the students you have in mind being the students you design for look like the result of student Merit or an achievement rather than your design decisions um so you have to be very careful about knowing how the effects of your design decisions will play out for students from different backgrounds in different situations and how that relates to um to broader questions about Justice and inequality in universities and and in our wider societies um students will be part of programs and curricula um and programs and curriculum are part of the places that your module will have in a university um so you have to think about do your students have to be there um is it a mandatory course is an elective what kind of elective is it is it if it is an elective um is convincing students to sign up a challenge that you're going to have is convincing students to stay a challenge that's going to be relevant to you because this will affect what you present when and how um and what you can take for granted about students different forms of Engagement um and you also have to think about whether the module is a priority for students and whether it should be so one thing that was very hard for me to um to take on board uh when I was starting as uh as a history teacher is that it's okay for a module not to be your student's top priority um so I you know came through my my education um really feeling like I should put my all into especially modules in in my subjects of special interest including History of Science um and initially I was a little disappointed when students didn't uh weren't as excited or didn't give us higher priority to the public as I did um but I think within the in the broader ecosystem of the university and of students education there's a lot of value to courses that they can relax in that they can reset in that can be a break from a really challenging laboratory class that they have or a really challenging methodology or writing class that they have um and courses that are flexible and even courses that they can safely skip for a couple weeks and come back to and revisit um have a really valuable place in the curriculum and one whose value I think is under um under recognized um but can be part of how you design a course if that's the or a module if that's an appropriate format for yours and really taking pride in being a class that students want to come to anyway even if it's not something that has you know an ax hanging over them they have to do well that's also something to take pride in and something that you can really contribute a lot of value to for your students and your University um and just to say a couple words about teaching multi-disciplinary groups in this in this context um I think one of the defining challenges for my own teaching in history of science has been the many different kinds of um many different kinds of considerations that come from teaching multi-disciplinary groups so not being able to take for granted that students know how to write an essay or a comfortable writing an essay are comfortable reading more than a couple Pages know how to approach those kinds of Topics in a way that's going to be useful for the course but also having students who are very comfortable writing essays who are already starting to do a little bit of historical research who know what a primary source is and how to start reading it and getting students to be able to talk to each other to develop those um those skills in each other and to develop these kinds of critical perspectives on the knowledge they have and the knowledge they want is really valuable but then I also have to think about things like our University is built into the city it has a fairly wide geography students may have to travel up to two or three miles from uh from where they're normally based for most of their modules in order to get to lectures and discussions for mine so how that travel time factors into their ability to take the course how we schedule things um maybe starting the first 15 or 20 minutes of a lecture with material that students can catch up on in a video recording later if they're not able to make it for the initial part of the discussion and building that into the design of the course so students aren't disadvantaged for the back the disciplinary background or the um or just the physical location of the department they're coming from all of these things affect aspects of how the course is structured how we build how we place different kinds of skills at different points in the course so that students are prepared for what they need from the background that they're having um and then also I'll talk about in in a minute or two um a really important thing when you have students with so many different kinds of backgrounds and needs in your course it's especially important to focus early and often on having students articulate their own goals and needs um as part of your um as part of your module and making it clear how students should adapt their approach to the module for uh where they're coming from what they need because that's not the kind of customization that you're going to be able to do explicitly and directly for every single student um I think it's also when you're talking about who the course is for we also have to think about um people who are not your students so if uh if you're teaching in a team who are you teaching with um what kinds of relationships of collaboration mentoring and teamwork are going to be valuable and energizing and productive for the team you're teaching on what your role in the team is whether you're the module organizer or whether you are contributing a couple lectures or whether you're running tutorials these are all considerations that go into the course design um it's also becoming I think increasingly the case uh that in UK higher education are thinking of students themselves as kinds of peer teachers and what kinds of peer pedagogical skills uh you can develop in students and how that can be a part of your approach to education there um you have to think about your interaction with people in supporting roles um in Administration in making the technical facilities available to you uh work as they should um uh assignment submission moving people moving students around between tutorial groups all of those things that are technically and infrastructurally necessary and also your relationship to the kinds of oversight mechanisms that are part of your University and part of the discipline external examiners moderation how that works in your department all are factors that affect how you can design courses and what options are available to you um and within uh and related to that you also have to bear in mind the larger considerations of working in University so um you'll all be familiar with um the extended period of industrial dispute that University staff have um have been engaged in over the last several years over questions like workloads and working conditions the institutional constraints that affect what we can teach and how we can teach it and these are absolutely relevant to module design you're not going to have the most successful module you can if you go into it with the assumption that your teaching team has an infinite amount of time available to it to adapt to students that your students have the kinds of conditions and support that are optimal for their learning you have to be realistic about what your University what position your university has placed both you and your students in in order to be able to make the most of of what you're doing um and finally within this section uh it's really important to pay attention to what's in the course for you um so what's going to make the course exciting and rewarding for you to teach um and how the course fits within your own professional development your career Milestones what you're going to need to be able to demonstrate um for whatever's coming next in your career that you've done in teaching and make that a part of the design of your course use that as an excuse or an opportunity to try different things different teaching techniques different methodologies because those are going to make the course more rewarding for you to teach more enjoyable for you to teach but also more useful for your career so a final section which we'll do quite quickly um starting with a surprisingly interesting question um how did you learn to read and I'll just take a few seconds with this um and please just uh put your answers in the chat I'm going to continue going through the kinds of questions that I think this uh this raises but I want you to see this as a um has a question that opens up some some really important pedagogical questions about um about teaching and particularly teaching in history so one of the core lessons that I try to give my students is um you're constantly relearning to read and learning to read different things so it's not like you learned how to make sounds out of letters um as a child and that was when you're learning to be stopped um when I transitioned from a mathematician to a historian um in um as part of my postgraduate education I felt like a lot of that was relearning how to read in a very different way um and I try to make explicit for my students that reading like a historian is a different kind of skill that they have to explicitly develop um and there are many different kinds of reading that you do as a historian it's important to be explicit in your module design and then in your teaching and delivery um that there are different texts that are part of um your reading list and that students will be engaging in different ways and they have to think about them as different texts require requiring different skills that they need to practice explicitly um you have to demonstrate what to focus on you have to give students permission to Come Away with a partial understanding I think a lot of students come into history courses with an expectation that every sentence that they read is something that they might be quizzed on or they might be responsible for knowing and that's not how as you know as practicing historians we tend to approach most texts that we that we read and that we engage with in our research in our historiography in our engagement with the discipline and that's something that students need to be told and taught and shown um and part and part and parcel of that is figuring out what is interesting and relevant within your reading and especially in multi-disciplinary classrooms making that sort of reading like a historian skill very explicit and also getting biologists to think about um you know how reading like a historian can help them as a biologist getting Engineers to think about how reading like a historian can help them as Engineers um is a really great way to make the course valuable to them um scholarly writing is something you've talked a lot about we're going to talk more about today I'll just note some things that I found in my own teaching that some skills that I tended to take for granted when I started teaching I now definitely don't take for granted um that students will know how to paraphrase how to take notes on a reading how to cite their sources how to identify what a paragraph or what a chapter or what a book is claiming these are all things that depending on the course may your module may need to be more or less explicitly part of your design and your plan for how to teach the course um I find a really important especially in these multi-disciplinary settings as I've said um component of the design of the course is thinking about how to make students make the module into their own so I sometimes think about my intro History of Science module not as one course for hundreds of students but as hundreds of different courses that all you know share some some common nucleus of of lectures and discussions and course materials and getting students to develop this as hundreds of different courses each of them customized to their own their own goals their own needs and something that they themselves should be constantly revisiting over the over the over the term helps every student whether they're engaging the course primarily as a way to relax or a flexible sort of background thing to their more important classes or whether that's a core interest of theirs helps them get the most about what they need from the course and how they're how they're approaching it um you'll have seen this concept of metacognition of sort of identifying the process of learning that students are going through um and this helps students learn more but I think just as importantly it helps students appreciate what they've learned and articulate what they've learned including and thinking about where this fits in your in your sort of career development um helping students be very explicit about evaluating themselves about setting goals it gives them a much clearer idea of what they've taken away from the course that's reflected in their evaluations of your teaching um and their ability to articulate what they've learned in settings where you need them to have a clear idea of what they've come away with um I think incorporating self-assessment into my own courses uh my own my own modules has been one of the the best aspects of assessment that that um that I've been able to do um and uh so getting students to evaluate their own work to suggest their own Mark even uh and it doesn't mean you go with whatever marketing student suggests but it tells you how this has been interpreted the task how they view their own work whether they're going to be surprised or disappointed what the market they actually get and it lets you calibrate your feedback in a way that's going to be much more useful to them um we can maybe talk about in Q a since we're running a bit uh short on time uh about how this relates to institutional rubrics so often your institution will have a very fixed scale that they want you to use um and that is often not as prescriptive as as it feels um so that that's what I'll say about that there's often much more flexibility in those than than uh it would seem um I want to say uh about 60 seconds of words about what uh what to do when students take shortcuts because that can be a very frustrating um and a very challenging thing to encounter especially as someone who's relatively new to teaching and there's a real tendency to blame the students for um for taking shortcuts of seeing them as um as lazy or cheating or um trying to uh somehow somehow cheat the course and I think one sort of Mark of maturity in your course design and in your adaptation um in teaching is to work on seeing student shortcuts as symptoms of problems with your course design so in almost every case and there are obviously exceptions um but in almost every case that I've um that I've encountered in my own colleagues teaching um when you see um surges of of plagiarism or bad citation practice or bad Writing Practice or what I what you might call the bootstrap essay where students try to answer your essay question Without Really engaging the course materials that you provided them and the lessons you've given them they're almost all cases where you haven't developed the narrative and the sequence and the skills of the course in the way that that students need them to be developed in order to in order to learn effectively um and just a last couple of ideas about designing resiliently um so thinking about as we talked about earlier um how students are going to be able to derive value gain benefit from your course when they haven't prepared for reasons that are virtuous or reasons that are excusable or reasons that are Preposterous um doesn't really matter the students still have to come to the courses unless you learn something um what students can do when they miss a class when they're bored how they can challenge themselves within the bounds of your curriculum and your design um what you can do so the lesson works if your lesson realized especially on discussion or on interaction or on group work how to make that worthwhile when students have different levels and different kinds of preparation and my sort of parting parting advice is the magic words for being able to have flexible coursework and uh particularly being able to accommodate a lot of different student needs within the kinds of regulatory and review Frameworks that structure a lot of higher education here is portfolio assessment so being able to say we're going to ask students to submit a body of work that demonstrates what they've learned but without necessarily having a fixed uniform set of essay questions or or tasks that every student does in the same way has been Lifesaver in a real um liberating experience for um for teaching if that's something that you are that your department will let you get away with so that that's where I'll end and we have a couple minutes for for a discussion or questions or thoughts that you all have or stop screen sharing now thank you thanks so much Michael that was that was really interesting loads of loads of like great ideas and um ways around challenges that you face when you're when you're trying to design a module and think about all the things that you have to think about it's quite mind-bending once you actually when you're designing it and then once you've kind of given it for the first time and then you're trying to develop it over time it's it's really a never-ending process um does anyone have any um questions or comments please put them in the chat or um or speak up uh yeah yeah so that's a good question so am I saying that that uh that that cheating plagiarism is is the teacher's fault almost always the teacher has has some responsibility for it um and I think that's a really challenging perspective to take on as um as a teacher so um definitely uh the you know the first few times that I uh in in my own teaching when um I encounter students doing um you know just doing Lazy cribbing from Wikipedia or um uh they're not not properly citing things or or incorporating text in a way that we move frowned upon in in essays um it was really disappointing it was kind of heartbreaking um and uh I took it kind of personally but I think it was important in responding to that and recognizing that there were uh more shortcomings in in my own design where students were turning to those approaches because they were being asked to do things that they weren't prepared to do they were being asked to demonstrate skills that they hadn't developed um and the assignment wasn't um wasn't building on the actual learning that they that they were doing in the course in a way that um that they could be proud of and that they could that they could succeed in um so I do think that is um it is important always to ask when you're seeing cases of things that um we tend to punish as dishonesty um as symptoms of symptoms of course design and they can often be addressed with with changes in the way you approach your your course design um yeah question a couple of questions here both both about portfolio assessments um which are about um um is it difficult to assess like implementation specific examples so maybe just if you could talk around that for a minute that would be great yeah definitely um so um so when I when I took over our intro History of Science module um there was a kind of I think very stereotypical history assessment pattern of a short essay in the middle of the module and a long essay at the end of the module um and especially in that multidisciplinary setting we're finding that students who were not coming from essay writing Fields were really struggling with both essays but especially the short essay early on but also there weren't really enough opportunities during the you know 10 instructional weeks that we had to develop the kinds of essay writing skills that we were then examining them on and on at the end so what we were able to do is say we want students to write a certain number of words um in my case you know sort of 2500 to 3 500 Words um demonstrating what they've learned on the course but um but there are lots of different ways they can do that and we want them to be explicit about how they're choosing a way they're demonstrating what they've learned that respond to what they did in the module in order to learn the material in order to develop the skills that demonstrate a variety of different skills uh and that are really directly engaged with what they need from the course and where um where they're going with it um and what we found is that if you include that sort of level of explicit reflection So within the self-assessment within the self-evaluation within students sort of explaining what they've done it actually becomes a lot easier to mark because you know you know what they're expecting you know how they've engaged with it you know how they relate what they've learned to the formal course expectations and you can give much more targeted and effective feedback to to what they need from the course rather than guessing just you know seeing seeing you know what how they how they've answered um whatever one question you've said for them about about 16th century France um having them to take their own way into the material lets you be a lot more targeted in your marketing um and have it be a lot more responsive to how they're pushing the course now formally um what you do for your board of studies is you say these are the outcomes we're evaluating here's how it's structured here are the parameters we're giving the students here's an example of the kinds of things that they're going to be doing and what I found is most I I think you can probably expect to encounter a little bit of skepticism but generally especially in the current climate in higher education um a lot of board of studies will be willing to let you try um and being able to demonstrate that you're being rigorous and explicit and effective with that will will let you keep on doing it after uh after the first try or tune um I don't know if that probably the partial answer but hopefully helpful that's fantastic Michael um there's one more question in the chart which I think might maybe you might be able to answer that in the chat itself while we move on to the next that would be great it's about what what non-history students get out of doing history modules which I think you're very well placed to talk about um uh

2023-02-15 01:50

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