Welcome Simon Bates!

Dr. Simon Bates is UBC’s new Senior Advisor, Teaching and Learning, and Academic Director, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT). In his role, Dr. Bates will provide academic leadership to CTLT and will contribute to the implementation of evidence-based and research-informed approaches to teaching and learning at UBC Vancouver. Dr. Bates’ background is in computational materials physics and physics education research. Most recently, he was in the dual role of Dean of Learning and Teaching in the University of Edinburgh’s College of Science and Engineering and Senior Lecturer in Physics and Astronomy. Dr. Bates described his Senior Lecturer role as closely related to UBC’s Senior Instructor role, in the way that there is a teaching focus within the role in parallel with the research responsibilities. He is passionate about teaching, and has a keen interest in trying to understand what constitutes effective teaching.

In mid-July, we sat down for some Q&A with Simon. Here’s what he had to say about his new role at UBC and his move to Canada.

Q: This is a big question to be asking so early on in your tenure here, but do you have a vision for teaching and learning at UBC?

Simon Bates (SB): This is where you ask me about a vision, on the second day that I have been working here! I don’t know if I have developed my own vision yet. This is a non-UBC specific answer as I feel that I don’t know enough about the way that things are set up here, and the strengths and, no doubt, weaknesses of the way various programs are delivered. I think there has been a huge change in higher education in the last 15-20 years, both in terms of number of students going on to higher education and the way the world operates outside university. Access to information has changed…The fact that I no longer carry things around in my head that I once knew when I was younger and I no longer place the same value in remembering, because I can look them up on my phone as quickly as I could try and dig them out my head. I think we have to recognize that students’ experience of higher education and the purpose of higher education have changed quite dramatically too. If you think back twenty or thirty years, where, as an instructor teaching a course you might be the sole keeper of a definitive set of notes or information on that particular topic. Well, now, chances are before students come to your class they could watch someone doing a seminar on the same topic, sometimes of very good quality. In the first year physics course that I taught at Edinburgh, I had to teach Newton’s laws of gravitation. When I found out that there was a digital archive of Richard Feynman’s lectures I just stopped trying to teach this stuff and I told the students to go watch his lecture from the ‘60s because there was no way I could ever do it better than him. Then, I used the class time to do something different. And, also they got this insight into a scientist who was not only a fantastic researcher but an outstanding teacher as well. The way students interact with information has changed so dramatically, and I think that universities are, in general, large complex organizations with significant inertia. And I think that sometimes there is a long lag time between seeing changes coming from the outside world, from the student population, or from a technological sense, and actually being able to mobilize a large organization to respond to those changes. Is that vision enough for day two?

Q: You’ve also taken on a faculty role in physics department, is that right?

SB: Yes, I’ll be co-teaching a section of Physics 101, in the spring semester, with a new faculty hire in Physics. I was absolutely adamant when I was thinking about accepting this position that I wanted to retain an involvement in teaching. I am aware of the time pressures and the challenges that decision will bring for me, but I think with the sort of dual role that I have as Senior Advisor and Academic Director, it’s important for me to teach. I have seen too many people who have gone into leadership roles and have become too distant, too quickly, from what its actually like at the front lines of teaching.

Q: What are you thoughts on UBC’s new Professor of Teaching rank?

SB: For many years I had often thought that the right way to promote this kind of a career path for people was to try and keep the academic roles on a single sort of track if you like. I’ve now come to realize that I don’t really think that works. I think that the problem is evaluating promotions, submissions, or applications on the basis of traditional research work; we know how to count things like papers, citations, graduate students, grants, and invited keynote lectures. When you’re evaluating something that’s more focused on an internal activity like teaching, even though I am sure that many people’s teaching has external visibility, it is inherently a more private activity. So you can’t use the same metrics to evaluate it. I think that if you have a separate track, you can apply different criteria to then look for evidence of people performing at that professorial level.

Q: So, you will be involved in that here at UBC?

SB: Yes, I imagine I will be! It’s something that I had always wanted to try and make some progress on because I don’t think in general we, as a community of educators in the broadest sense, have a very good handle on understanding what makes reflective teaching within interdisciplinary contexts. So, anything that we can do that enables us to evaluate that in a more rigorous way, be it as part of a professional development sense or a promotion case or something like that, I think that has to be a good thing. But the fact that there is that career pathway open to individuals who chose to follow that kind of a path is a very good thing.

Q: You have an interest in e-learning, how did that emerge in your work?

SB: My route into educational development and scholarship was through e-learning. At that point it was really just taking off with many institutions rolling out VLE’s (editor’s note: virtual learning environments; known as LMS or learning management system in North America). I taught first year introductory courses which were big, very heterogeneous courses, with Physics majors and non-majors in the same class. We developed a lot of e-learning stuff for the course; a lot of multimedia applications, drawing in other things from around the web. We did some work with learning objects and that really got me interested in applying for grants, and learning a little bit more about trying to understand how the subjects that I was most familiar with, the sciences and physical sciences, were taught and understood by students. So, from there I took a leadership position in teaching within the Physics Department. In many Schools in Edinburgh the responsibility for teaching and learning is delegated from the Head to a position called Director of Teaching, who is typically in charge of all the undergraduate, post graduate and distance education offerings. So I took on this role and it gave me the opportunity to really drive forward some of the things I wanted to do in terms of pedagogy, but also in terms of strategic development for the department.

Q: Some of the research you have done has been around teaching large classes, correct? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

SB: I like to think of the first year class as being sort of our lab where we can go and experiment. After doing that for a number of years and doing various things, we know an awful lot about how students think and how they learn through the discipline, but also what some of the challenges are that are unique to first year. Aside from large class sizes, and diversity and heterogeneity, it’s about managing and helping the students over that transition. I don’t know a huge amount about the high school system here, but I imagine it’s not so dissimilar to the UK – where it is very assessment focused. It’s very much about practice in a rather narrow curriculum sense, in order to achieve the outcomes that the subject or the module is assessed by. And, all of a sudden they get to university and in many courses it’s not like that at all. Many instructors – and this is part of what the ethos of the university is – are interested in communicating the value of learning for its own sake, rather than simply for the things that will be covered on the exam. We’ve done a number of things to try to make the whole experience for students in these courses more engaging; to have it live longer with them than simply the 11 or the 13 weeks that they do the course. We used clickers for nearly a decade to try to engage the students, and even before we actually got the electronic handsets we were using the same kind of pedagogy with coloured cards.

Q: What are you looking forward to about your new home in Vancouver?

SB: I have visited Vancouver quite a lot. I came here in 2008 and spent some time at the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative, and the weather was just as good as this. It was quite an easy decision to choose to move over here because we knew enough about the city and the location and the lifestyle to know that this would probably work for us. So there is myself, my wife, and our son (three and a half years old). I don’t know when he is going to stop being excited, but he is just completely excited all the time – bounces out of bed at six o’clock in the morning. Well, you see its been quite a long time coming. It feels like it has taken an awful lot of planning since I was offered and accepted the position. It’s just nice to finally be here, and even better that the sun has come out. We are a fairly outdoorsy family – we used to have horses in the UK. We like to mountain bike, we hike. We don’t ski yet, but I can see that definitely being on the list.

This article was published in the September 2012 CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues. Below is a list of the articles included in the issue:

Find out more information about the CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues.