The Point
1 December 2022
What’s the point of going to class? Maybe you turned up to all your classes in person. Or maybe you skipped all your classes and only watched the lecture recordings as videos at home late at night. Whatever you tried, did it work out? Did you feel prepared heading into your final exam? Was it a good use of your time?
The main “point” of turning up to class is not anything to do with the class itself. It’s about the ancillary indirect benefits of showing up on the day again and again over time - establishing good habits, time management skills, forming connections with your peers and teachers, and developing soft skills that are crucial to find a job. If attending classes “live” is not an realistic option, you’ll need to find other ways to enrich your learning experience.
Your People
29 November 2022
The transformation from “consumer of information” to “creator of knowledge” is a rare and unlikely process.
Research training, especially for students who have never had any prior research experience, is a particularly jarring learning process. This is Part 3 in this blog series on different strategies to develop some skills and “early wins” in research training. Part 1 discussed the idea of information overload, literature searches, and data management, and Part 2 talked about the concept of research design. Today let’s talk about the ever elusive topic of research supervision and mentorship. Exactly what should you expect from your supervisor, and what should they expect from you?
The Simple Truth
29 November 2022
As an undergraduate university student, I had a great GPA, really liked the area I was studying, and was willing to put in the work. On paper I should have hit the ground running when I started my research career. But in all honesty I was a terrible researcher when I first started, because it took me years to realise this simple truth:
The transformation from “consumer of information” to “creator of knowledge” is a rare and unlikely process.
While I was a quick study and motivated by intellectual curiosity, I didn’t have the skills to tackle my research project in a logical and systematic way. This is Part 2 in this blog series on different strategies to develop skills in research training
Overload
25 November 2022
This entry is an entirely selfish undertaking - the truth is I’m running out of time.
Or more accurately I was running out of time? Last week I was invited to give the opening Keynote for our Summer Research scholars, and the slides were due at the same time as everything else - committee meetings, exam marking, manuscript revisions, curriculum reviews… The pressure as a Keynote speaker is to be engaging, motivational, if not inspiring (cue the world’s smallest violin), but I’m not sure if I have many (if any) magic tricks left up my sleeves this year.
So…. this was my attempt at a productivity life-hack - to write my talk by narration, filming my stream of consciousness brain-storming (brain-dumping?), and using the footage to reverse-engineer some semblance of a presentation. I committed to publishing this footage as a YouTube video too, which raises the stakes! It turns out nothing makes you focus more than the risk of embarrassment on two fronts - both online and in-person if the talk wasn’t any good - so sadly this may be my new way of ensuring personal accountability in the face of looming deadlines. To triple-down on this notion, here’s the essence of my talk in blog form as well: 5 ways to develop your research skills.
Retrograde III: A Way Forward
4 November 2022
If you're part of the teaching community, you know just as well as I do that we're very tired of talking and thinking about the pandemic, and all of the implications that it’s had on students. We’re all tired of learning new buttons to press, new systems to navigate, all with very little notice, and fatigue and burnout is just as much of our day-to-day as the excitement of connecting with students. How should teachers think about professional development in this climate, and find more meaningful, sustainable ways to improve our effectiveness in both online and in-person classrooms?
The Divide
26 October 2022
How do five different generations view university teaching and learning?
Teachers often argue that they learn most when they teach something to others. This seemed to go with the maxim that as a teacher you needed to be ahead, but only just ahead by an hour or so, of your students in having learnt a subject. But are our students catching up, or has their capability and expectation overtaken us?
Retrograde II: Hidden Costs
21 October 2022
Not too long ago, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were a novel jewel in the crown of Higher Education, making headlines as Big Education and Big Tech converged in productive synergy. Students from all across the world can access education from Ivy-league institutions, and the transformative potential it had on global education was palpable. Fast forward a few years, and all of a sudden MOOCs were making headlines again for all the wrong reasons. The risks of >90% student drop out rate and ongoing workload implications for teachers made many institutions hesitate, and the value proposition of developing new free MOOCs became muddier and muddier.
How did the sector arrive at this point, and should we continue to design new online courses accessible to the masses? My answer is a resounding yes, but perhaps not for the reason you think. Let’s look backwards before we can look forwards and see what’s next.
Retrograde (Part 1)
16 October 2022
Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it but is what’s new always best? We learn by reflecting on old mistakes, but re-tracing our steps also reveals hard-won wisdom from previous generations. If you’ve been a student or worked as a teacher any time in the last 2-3 years, you will be all too aware of how chaotic education has become. It’s precisely during these moments of instability though that we should look backwards to see how it will inform the future and what happens next. My work is very much student-centred, but the next few posts are all about teachers. How all of us have adapted for different teaching approaches and delivery modes, and what we can learn from each of the 7 phases of university teaching over the past two decades.