Pedagogy Workshop for Science & Engineering with Dr. Beth Simon

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Dr. Beth Simon
Principal Teaching and Learning Specialist on the Course Success team, Coursera
Faculty member of UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
Venue & Time: CPD 2.75, 20 May 2015 12:45pm – 2:00pm

Registration

Why create a MOOC in a science or engineering topic – and once you’ve decided to take the plunge, how do you set your course up to be successful on Coursera? Dr. Beth Simon will share her recommendations based on her experience both as a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and as Coursera’s Principal Teaching and Learning Specialist. In this workshop, we will discuss faculty experiences of creating courses in science and engineering subjects on Coursera, including faculty goals and motivations as well as practical advice and best practices for course design and implementation.

About the speaker

Dr. Beth Simon is the Principal Teaching and Learning Specialist on the Course Success team of Coursera. Beth is also a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego where she specialized in teaching large classes and improving learning with student-centered learning environments and educational technology. She also worked with faculty implementing hybrid/flipped classes using Peer Instruction as Director of UCSD’s Center for Teaching Development. In 2007-2008, Beth served as Science Teaching and Learning Fellow with Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman’s Science Education Initiative at the University of British Columbia.

See also: Asian e-Table on 18 & 19 May

Seminars: Learning is E-learning

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Seminar: Peer-to-Peer Teaching & Learning

Dr. Benson YEH, National Taiwan University
Venue & Time: CPD 3.04, 18 May 2015 12:30pm – 2:00pm

CCCHow can we keep students engaged in class? How can we make our students motivated to learn? These are the most challenging questions for teachers nowadays. Dr. Yeh developed a series of Peer-to-Peer teaching and learning schemes following his unique teaching teaching philosophy: “For the student! By the student! Of the student!”. In this talk, Dr. Yeh will explain how his schemes work and show the amazing results from his students’ course work.

Seminar: Gamification in E-learning

Professor Toru IIYOSHI, Kyoto University
Venue & Time: CPD 3.04, 19 May 2015 12:30pm – 2:00pm

Although gamification in education is not a new idea, the evolution of increasingly media rich, open, social, and intelligent learning tools, environments, and educational approaches—enabled and enhanced by information and communications technology (ICT)—is rapidly transforming the landscape of learning and teaching. This seminar delves into some of the critical pedagogical, cognitive, motivational, and emotional aspects of technology-supported gamification in education by reviewing and examining the past and present practice as well as foreseeing some of the future possibilities that will help further advance individual and collective capacity development and education systems in the 21st century society.

Public Seminar: Flipping the classroom – A new way to better learning

Dr. Benson YEH, National Taiwan University
Venue & Time: CPD 3.04, 19 May 2015 5:30pm – 7:00pm

Flipped classroom has attracted attention in recent years. However, how to conduct flipped classroom effectively remains a question to many teachers. How should a teacher motivate students to watch videos in advance? How can a teacher teach well without giving any homework? There are many doubts about flipped classroom for teachers without the experience.

Dr. Yeh is one of the most renowned teaching innovators in Taiwan. He developed a total solution “BTS Flipping” for flipped classroom. He has been invited to give more than 200 talks last year on “BTS Flipping”. Dr. Yeh’s talks have motivated tens of thousands of teachers in Taiwan to start flipping their classes.

About Dr. Benson YEH, National Taiwan University

Dr. Yeh has pioneered many educational experiments and designs:

  • He is the first to win the Overall Award and E-Learning Award in Wharton-QS 2014 Stars Awards: Reimagine Education, the “Oscars” of innovations in higher education.
  • He is the first to teach a MOOC course in Chinese with 48,000+ students.
  • He is the first in the world to design a MOOC-based multi-student social game to enhance the learning experience of MOOC students.
  • He is the first to design various experiential learning schemes that enable college students to be graded by elementary school students on their presentation skills.
  • He is the first to create and promote the style of designing mathematical problems with creative literary writing.

Since 2010, Dr. Yeh has been the strong advocator of his teaching philosophy: “For the students, By the students, Of the students”. It states that students can be motivated to learn if teachers can share more responsibility with them (e.g., by letting students design their own homework problems. Dr. Yeh’s speeches have motivated many teachers to start thinking differently in teaching. His new book on education, “Teach for the future” has been one of the bestsellers in Taiwan.

About Professor Toru IIYOSHI, Kyoto University

Toru Iiyoshi is Director and a professor at the Center for the Promotion of Excellence in Higher Education (CPEHE) of Kyoto University where he also serves as Deputy Vice President for Education. Previously, he was a senior scholar and Director of the Knowledge Media Laboratory at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies of the University of Tokyo, and Senior Strategist in the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Prof. Iiyoshi’s current areas of research and development include educational innovation and technology, open education, technology-enhanced scholarship of teaching and learning, and future of higher education systems. He works with various national and international initiatives, projects, and organizations in an advisory role to provide vision and leadership in the development and distribution of innovative educational technology. Prof. Iiyoshi is the co-editor of the Carnegie Foundation book, “Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge” (MIT Press, 2008).

HKU04x Making Sense of News starting on 19 May 2015

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Making Sense of News

Learn essential, critical thinking skills in the age of social media to effectively navigate and make sense of news.

About this Course

With social media and a 24/7 news cycle, how do we — as news consumers — make sense of what we hear and read? At a time when we are flooded with an abundance of information and disinformation, it is essential for each one of us to become a more discerning news consumer.

This six-week course will help you identify reliable information in news reports and become better informed about the world we live. We will discuss journalism from the viewpoint of the news audience.

A certificate will be awarded upon successful completion of the course.

Together, we will examine the following topics:

  • What makes news? The blurred lines between news, promotion and entertainment.
  • Why does news matter? Social sharing and the dynamics of the news cycles.
  • Who provides information? How to evaluate sources in news reports.
  • Where is the evidence? The process of verification.
  • When should we act? Recognizing our own biases.
  • How do we know what we know? Becoming an active news audience.

If you are interested in becoming a more discerning news consumer, please join us and sign up today.

Registration:
https://www.edx.org/course/making-sense-news-hkux-hku04x

* All the instructional video clips in the course will have subtitles in Simplified Chinese

把握新聞資訊

在社會媒體充盈的時代，運用批判思維，清晰有效地把握新聞資訊。

課程介紹

面對24小時不斷滾動的社會媒體及新聞資訊，作為新聞受眾，我們如何更好地了解自己的所見所聞？我們所處的時代，真實與虛假信息大量糅雜並存。作為受眾，在這一背景下，如何保持清醒的判斷力，對每一個人都十分重要。

本課程為期六週，旨在幫助你識別新聞報導信息的可靠性，以更好地了解我們所處的世界。課程將從新聞受眾的角度對新聞報道進行審視和討論。

我們將探討以下話題

  • 什麼是新聞？新聞、炒作以及娛樂之間的模糊界限。
  • 新聞資訊為何重要？社會化分享以及新聞的動態循環過程。
  • 信息來自哪裏？如何衡量新聞報道的來源。
  • 證據在哪裡？如何對證據加以核實。
  • 何時採取行動？了解我們自身的偏見。
  • 知識如何形成？成為一個積極主動的新聞受眾。

想令自己成為識辨能力更高的新聞受眾嗎？請報讀我們的課程。

登記:
https://www.edx.org/course/making-sense-news-hkux-hku04x

＊教學視頻配有簡體中文字幕

Students worldwide welcome HKU MOOC’s rich learning experience

HKU’s second Massive Open Online Course, HKU02.1x The Search for Vernacular Architecture of Asia was launched on April 14, 2015. As of April 30, the course has attracted 6,700 students from 137 countries. This five-week course combines Professor David Lung’s lively and visually rich teaching videos with a number of interactive activities that are having a positive impact on student engagement and learning.

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Figure 1. Top 10 countries/regions of enrollment. Data as of April 30, 2015

Building a sense of community

The benefits of learners feeling a sense of community is well discussed and much valued in the education field. However, pedagogically speaking, a learning community is not often easy to build. In this course, we leverage both technology and social media to achieve this goal.

Map of the class
In Week One we asked students to introduce themselves and share with the rest of the class what motivated them to join the course. To provide the students a visual and engaging experience, we used a world map where students can add their locations and a description. In turn, others can click on the pins to learn more about their classmates.

Arhi-class-map

Figure 2: Map of the class. Nearly 450 students entered their locations and self-introduction. Collectively these entries were viewed by students in the class for more than 4,200 times. Data as of April 30, 2015.

Social media
To build a sense of community and enable connections between the course and the learners and amongst the learners themselves, we built a Facebook page and provided the students with information about local edX meetup groups around the world that they could potentially join. The Facebook page has nearly 700 ‘Likes’ from students. Beside posting course-related information and updates, the course’s Facebook page also turned out to be a good communication tool between the course team and the students as well, where a number of students posted their course-related questions that we helped answered.

Enabling peers as a powerful source for learning

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MOOC learners bring with them tremendously diverse background such as geography, education, profession, and life experiences. Well-designed MOOCs provide opportunities for students to learn from both the professors and others in the same course. This course uses several ways to enable students to learn from their peers.

Weekly discussion forums and roundup videos
Each week we provide the students with a relevant topic for them to share their experiences and perspectives with each other. Now at week 3 of the five week course, the students have added more than 700 postings in the forum responding to the discussion weekly topics.

We then produce a video each week where Professor Lung and his course team respond to the main themes and specific questions raised by the students in their discussions. Students found the weekly roundup videos to be very helpful. For example, one student said,

“Very lively, useful discussion stimulated by ‘virtual’ student responses to the course content; it is gratifying to know that the academic team is absorbing and taking seriously the input of such a large and diverse student body! Well done.”

Peer assessments
Two of this course’s assignments involve peers to evaluate each other’s work. While using peer assessments in large-scale online courses is still a somewhat controversial issue that is being discussed and explored, well-designed and meticulously implemented peer assessments can be a powerful tool for students to learn from each other. Student response regarding the first peer-assessed task in this course has shown that the peer assessment has had some positive impact on student learning. Based on the student responses to our survey after the peer assessment concluded, 97% of them said they were glad they participated in the peer assessment task. Students responding to the survey described how they found the experience to be beneficial for their learning.

“First I had an opportunity to tell my peers about my local built environment because it is interesting enough to be shared. Second, my peers shared a lot of stories about their hometown. That was great!”

“This course offered a new style of peer assessment I have not seen in other edX courses. I liked this one the most, the flow was good and made it enjoyable to take part in.”

“What I like about this course is that there are many people from different countreis sharing their knowledge which is priceless.”

“Very interesting and well executed assignment. I have started many online classes and dropped out because I didn’t feel I fit within the structure. Only one other class (MIT microbiology class) was as well-structured and wide-encompassing as this class seems to be. A very difficult goal to accomplish.”