Friday, August 28th, 2020
Pivoting to remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic: Challenges, opportunities, and insights
Learn about the different ways that Vantage instructors pivoted to remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This online event featured three short talks by experienced UBC Vantage College instructors who reported on their experience over the summer months as they adapted to remote teaching contexts.
You can access the full event recording below:
Contents of this talk:
Pandemic Teaching: Designing UBC’s COVID-19 & Society course
By Katherine Lyon, PhD
This presentation details the development of a new online sociology course, COVID-19 & Society, delivered summer 2020 at UBC. Course design considerations to be discussed include the strengths and challenges of teaching and learning about an ongoing crisis, the facilitation of digital course learning communities, and the rapid and collaborative development of thematic course content.
Adapting to new circumstances: Recounting the experience of Engineering program instructors at UBC-O
By Ernest Goh, PhD
Under normal circumstances, the Applied Science (Engineering) stream of UBC Vantage College conducts its summer term in UBC's Okanagan campus, in the city of Kelowna. Arising from the COVID-19 situation, this past Vantage summer term was conducted online. Instructors taught from home, while none of the students were in Kelowna. At the start of term, 19 students were in East Asia, 41 in North America, and 4 in other parts of the world. More students returned to their home countries during the term. This presentation recounts the experiences of a group of Engineering instructors, led by Ernest Goh, as they adapted their teaching to the new situation this past summer. The considerations included workload distribution, pacing, reasonable contact hours for all time zones, etc. Additionally, one of the courses is a project course, with some logistics to consider. Ernest will share insights from this experience in his role as coordinator.
Key Design Considerations and Implementations for Teaching Chemistry Online
By Anka Lekhi, PhD
As I prepared to transition a first-year Chemistry course online, I identified four key elements to help me design the course. These key elements included: making content easily accessible, building community among learners and between learners and the teaching team, incorporating peer learning, and having opportunities for feedback on student learning. In this presentation, I will outline specific strategies I implemented in Canvas and Collaborate Ultra which facilitated these four key elements.
Tuesday, February 25th, 2020
Vantage College: A hub for transformative teaching & learning
Speakers:
a) the enriched student experience, and lessons learned in relation to how to improve our approaches to integrating multilingual learners in our classrooms.
b) the innovative curricular models adopted, and still being developed
c) learn about VC graduates’ performance in the program -- during their first year -- and throughout the rest of their studies at UBC.
d)examples of highly successful interdisciplinary collaborations, as well as challenges to keep in mind to address issues of sustainability, engagement, and logistics related to interdisciplinary teaching initiatives.