The Spaces for Teaching, Spaces for Learning workshop, a part of Celebrate Learning Week, presented three interrelated topics that touched on the expanding range of spaces for teaching and learning. From a faculty /instructor point of view, the workshop highlighted a number of innovative ways to make use of different learning environments. Taking a student perspective, the presentations drew on examples of broadening the opportunities for learning, be it in physical, digital, or social and informal spaces.
Dr. Shane Dawson, Director of Arts Instructional Support and Information Technology (ISIT), was first to present. He showcased the newly developed Collaborative Lecture Annotation System (CLAS), a web-based video annotation tool which was developed by Arts ISIT and the Department of Psychology. CLAS allows students to annotate and flag important parts of a video (for example, from recorded lectures or presentations), as well as provide overall comments. “Allowing students to highlight everything throughout the video, from interesting to important, really increases engagement and collaboration,” said Dr. Dawson. Annotations are point-based, meaning that flags are inserted at certain time intervals along the length of the video. Notes can be added on a side panel to elaborate on the flagging. Analytic features include being able to see the number of times the video has been viewed, which areas were watched, and which areas students watched over again. Annotations can be shared as well, so that it shows where students converged and diverged (perhaps signaling the students who may need extra support). How much the viewers can see of these features is in the control of the video owner. To show the benefits of the program, Dr. Dawson presented a case study of a professor in the School of Music. Here, it was used by band members to re-watch their performances and note where they needed to improve as a whole, as well as individually. The instructor found that the video’s student annotations showed a lot of convergence. The instructor also found that overall, throughout the process, “the students had become far more engaged in their learning improvements.”
Showcasing another interactive digital learning tool, Joanna Pedersen, eHealth Strategy Office Education Coordinator, explained the application of Remote Hands-on Interactive Medical Education (RHIME) in medical school internships. UBC’s distributed medical education program, where medical students are trained in remote and rural settings, maintains that these students can benefit from “academic feedback provided by urban physicians who regularly prepare students for and assess clinical skills examinations.” RHIME uses a YouTube-like platform to facilitate feedback and provide students with the formal clinical examination training to compliment their integrated training. Students film themselves performing certain tasks and then upload their videos to a secure server for review. The feedback is also video recorded and embedded into the student’s original video to aid in self-reflection and continued discussion. The video- and audio-based project, which completed its first phase in 2009, has lead to much success and discovery, both for participating students and RHIME developers. Students working in remote areas have had access to meetings with their urban setting counterparts, and it was found that the preparation put into making the demonstration videos provided the greatest learning experience of all. While students initially spent hours upon hours in preparation for filming themselves, they were able to become so comfortable with the procedures—compliments of their peers—that eventually “they went in cold,” said Joanna. The student-mentor relationship and the system of feedback turned out to be two crucial parts to the increased ability to recruit interns. The same principles apply to recruiting specialists, for whom the ability to give feedback at any time is extremely convenient, especially when they are constantly juggling busy schedules.
Complimenting a presentation that explored extending the boundaries of a learning environment, Dr. Andrew Riseman, an Associate Professor in Applied Biology and Plant Breeding, gave an animated presentation on informal learning spaces. He began by suggesting that it is important to match pedagogy to the learning environment. As an example, he used the H.R. Macmillan Building, which was revamped to align with the pedagogy of the Faculty of Land and Food Systems. This redesign included the addition of many quiet spaces for small group work, and moveable furniture so that rearranging the layout is easy. Another learning space that Dr. Riseman drew on was the Land and Food System Orchard Garden, created to help engage the UBC community in awareness of urban agriculture, and provide a learning place for practical applications of agriculture in academics. In collaboration with the Faculty of Education, Dr. Riseman wants to teach teachers how to use outdoor environments, which allow people to connect content with space in the outdoors. “It’s more than students just digging up dirt and planting trees,” Dr. Riseman said, and even though outdoor learning spaces may not be as weatherproof as a classroom, “there are definitely things to learn on rainy days too.” Dr. Riseman hopes that the Orchard Garden will serve as an exemplar of how school gardens can be pedagogical objects, and will show how informal learning spaces can also be divided into smaller learning spaces—citing compost bins within the garden as an example. “Taking the content of a course and the specific learning objectives, and infusing them with the natural environment can broaden the value and the possible outcomes,” he said.
Further illustrating his philosophy, Dr. Riseman talked about the applications of the UBC Farm in learning. “The [UBC Farm] environment allows direct contact between theory and practical use, and so many different classes from different Faculties could easily work in the same space.” Sociology students have used it to ask questions about the population that shows up at Sunday farm market days, and Engineering students are able to use various objects around the farm for experiments. The Intergenerational Landed Learning on the Farm Project, based in the Children’s Learning Garden at the UBC Farm, further extends the use of the farm as a learning tool. The initiative focuses on the link between a healthy environment and human well-being, using the farm to enhance what elementary school children are learning in school. Looking forward, Dr. Riseman notes that with the entire farm already being wifi-enabled, the plan is to be able to measure absolutely everything. Its applicability would then be spread across an even broader range of academic disciplines. All students working in a stats-related course would have access to statistics generated by the farm, which would hopefully add more meaning to the numbers that they are using.
The workshop ended with a summary of the presentations from the student perspective by Science Undergraduate Society President Mona Maleki. She talked about the Abdul Lahda Centre, a by-students-for-students building with group study space, quiet space, and a place for socializing. The informal learning space is an environment set up by the students themselves, and aims to compliment the diversity of how students learn outside of the classroom. Concluding remarks from Dr. Riseman shows the hope and potential for spaces like these in the future. “The only limitation is our mind and what we limit ourselves to. We have to get away from thinking that learning has to happen in one place.”
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