Flexible Learning Open House, June 9-10

By Heather McCabe posted on June 5th, 2014

As part of the CTLT Institute, UBC will be hosting a Flexible Learning Open House on June 9-10. The open house will feature a keynote address given by Derek Bruff, director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching (CFT), a panel discussion on students as producers, a poster session which will showcase flexible learning projects that faculty members have undertaken across campus in the last year, and a workshop on evaluating teaching and learning enhancement projects.

In addition to Bruff’s role at Vanderbilt’s CFT, he is a senior lecturer in mathematics, and his research interests include educational technology, visual thinking, and social pedagogies. His talk, entitled “Class Time Reconsidered,” will look at the idea of the flipped classroom and explore learning principles and teaching practices that can help instructors make more intentional and effective use of class time and engage students in deeper learning.

The panel discussion, “Students as Producers: Enhancing Student Learning Through Meaningful Participation,” will look at the role of students as collaborators in the production of knowledge. Bruff has written extensively on this topic, and “Students as Producers” was the theme for Vanderbilt’s CFT for 2013-14. Faculty from UBC, including Simon Bates (Physics), Jon Beasley-Murray (Latin American Studies), and Eduardo Jovel (Land and Food Systems), will talk about the roles their students have played in their courses, generating research and course content for fellow students, over a million Wikipedia readers, and community organizations, respectively.

The open house will also include an Evaluation Workshop for people who are thinking about developing an evaluation plan for their flexible learning or teaching and learning enhancement projects. The workshop will cover strategies and tools for evaluating projects, developing an evaluation plan, aligning data collection with project goals, and available resources and support.

More than 20 participants from 15 different disciplines will participate in the poster session, which will highlight the outcomes of flexible learning projects undertaken in courses and also in central units such as the Centre for Community Engaged Learning and the Library, as well as the roles that Teaching and Learning Fellows have been playing in different disciplines and on different projects.