Background:
I’m a researcher at department of
Medicine-Huddinge at Karolinska Institutet. My main task is doing research on
Hematological patients but I have been involved in teaching activities for
Master and PhD students as well. Epigenetics is the main topic I’m teaching and
I’m trying to develop my teaching skills and my presentation.
The educational problem I want to solve using the IT
tools I have chosen:
At the beginning of the course I had one
problem in my mind and it was about teaching activity from long distance to
Iran. I’ve gotten several invitations to teach in Iranian universities but
couldn’t go there to teach. But now I have got two more interesting ideas to work on using the tools presented during our course on Using Educational Technologies to Enhance Learning.
First idea is to have a distance course on Epigenetics for PhD students, having international PhD students in mind as the target group and not only PhD students at KI
Second idea is to have an educational course for newly students arriving at our lab. As we are hosting several short time master student who join our lab for 10-20 weeks and they need to learn basic techniques. It is a repetitive teaching and we have to repeat and repeat for each student and it will be boring to say the same sentences all over and over again. So I believe the technologies presented in this course would be helpful to teach students basic lab techniques, specially the theoretical part of each technique.
What
I plan to do - what ideas do you have?
Long distance teaching:
I will produce 12 presentations 15 Min.
each, using Screen cast and voicethread. Each presentation would be followed by
a questionnaire with 5 questions related to the topic which is discussed. Access
to presentations would be restricted and each student will have access to the
next presentation only after answering all the questions correctly. All the
presentations would have commenting options where students can have questions
and comments which will help me to improve the presentations.I have a one week course in my mind in the same format as a 5 days active learning. We will design lectures, literatures, Articles, power point presentations and video clips either by me and my colleagues or by international well-known scientists. We can also use some of video clips available on line. Here we will have defined learning objectives for each day which will be evaluated at the end of the day by a test. Students would be divided in groups and each group would have a specific assignment to discuss and prepare a presentation using advanced educational techniques so they will learn how to use these technologies as well. These assignments can be used for future courses so the course will be improved by the students.
I will simply use my blog, I will gather a bunch of useful links and clips to teach students basic and practical aspects of each techniques. When a new students joins the group I will send them the links before they join the group as they can start reading about the techniques before starting practical work in the lab. So they will learn what we do in the lab and how we do it. Here we don’t need to test students in their learning process as we can just have a short discussion.
What results you hope to achieve by using the tool
I would like
to achieve all these 3 goals within one year and have the programs ready to be
used by students, I’m sure I will learn a lot during these process which will
help me to be a better teacher.I hope there will be students who are interested in this way of learning and they will help me to start up this plans as soon as possible.
You mention 2 interesting 'problems'.
ReplyDeleteOutreach - reaching students in Iran and creating lab introduction Courses.
I have not considered lab introduction Courses and think that is a great idea. You could even look at the progression and only give accesscards if the student that completed the online course.
The outreach is something I also find very interesting and would like to explore. But as you indicated during our off-line coffee break some of the Tools might not be available.
Good luck with reaching your goals....
Sounds like a great plan producing 12 presentations for about 15 min. each, by using Screencastomatic as well as Voicethread and follow it up with questionnaires related to the topics. By only letting the students access to each presentation after answering all the questions correctly I assume you will have some form of feedback to them so that they can look up how to answer correctly next time they take the quiz.
ReplyDeleteThe one week course you have in mind in with lectures, literatures, articles, presentations and video clips sounds like a big project! I am glad that you are paying attention to defined learning objectives for each day and that they can be evaluated at the end of each session with a test. Great that you are thinking ahead with the idea of using the assignments in future courses to improve the course.
Using a blog for gathering useful links and video clips to teach students basic and practical aspects of the course is great. You might consider using Twitter for giving your students links as you find them and also create a hashtag so that students.
/Hans