EdShare: collaboration in a University for learning and teaching

Poster for the Learning Societies Laboratory, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton Open Day, Wednesday 27 February 2008.

EdShare: collaboration in a University for learning and teaching

Poster for the Learning Societies Laboratory, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton Open Day, Wednesday 27 February 2008.

Helping immigrants identify as 'university-bound students' : unexpected difficulties in teaching the hidden curriculum. 'Ayudar a los inmigrantes a identificarse como 'estudiantes con destino a la universidad' : dificultades inesperadas en la enseñanza del currículo oculto'.

Monográfico con el título: 'Identidad y educación'. Resumen basado en el de la publicación

Teaching at the University of Leuven : a case of teacher training in Higher Education in Flanders, Belgium

Resumen basado en el de la publicaci??n

(How) Do research and administrative duties affect university professors’ teaching?

We analyze the interaction between university professors’ teaching quality and their research and administrative activities. Our sample is a high-quality individual panel data set from a medium size public Spanish university that allows us to avoid several types of biases frequently encountered in the literature. Although researchers teach roughly 20% more than non-researchers, their teaching quality is also 20% higher. Instructors with no research are 5 times more likely than the rest to be among the worst teachers. Over much of the relevant range, we find a nonlinear and positive relationship between research output and teaching quantity on teaching quality. Our conclusions may be useful for decision makers in universities and governments.

Using social networking tools for teaching and learning: a perspective of University lecturers and students

The use of online social networking tools (SNTs) has become commonplace within higher education. In this paper a definition and a typology of educational affordance of social networking service (SNS) are presented. The paper also explores the educational affordances whilst examining how university lecturers and students use SNTs to support their educational activities. The data presented here were obtained through a survey in which 38 participants from three universities took part; two universities in Uganda and one in the United Kingdom. The results show that Facebook is the most popular tool with 75 % of participants having profiles. Whilst most participants perceived the educational significance of these tools, social affordances remain more pronounced compared to pedagogical and technological affordances. The limitations of this study have also been discussed.

Power law distribution in education: Effect of economical, teaching, and study conditions in university entrance examination

We studied the statistical distribution of student's performance, which is measured through their marks, in university entrance examination (Vestibular) of UNESP (Universidade Estadual Paulista) with respect to (i) period of study - day versus night period (ii) teaching conditions - private versus public school (iii) economical conditions - high versus low family income. We observed long ubiquitous power law tails in physical and biological sciences in all cases. The mean value increases with better study conditions followed by better teaching and economical conditions. In humanities, the distribution is close to normal distribution with very small tail. This indicates that these power law tails in science subjects axe due to the nature of the subjects themselves. Further and better study, teaching and economical conditions axe more important for physical and biological sciences in comparison to humanities at this level of study. We explain these statistical distributions through Gradually Truncated Power law distributions. We discuss the possible reason for this peculiar behavior.

English collocations extracted from a corpus of university learners and its contribution to a language teaching pedagogy

Taking into consideration the relevance of foreign language teaching and the learning of collocations (ALTENBERG; EEG-OLOFSSON, 1990; FONTENELLE, 1994; MEUNIER; GRANGER, 2008), this paper aims at showing results of an investigation on whether the teaching of collocations should be implicit or explicit to the Brazilian university students. Furthermore, the research has the purpose of presenting some collocational aspects from a corpus of the written language learners made up of intermediate, upper intermediate and advanced university students' argumentative essays at a public university in Brazil. With the help of WordSmith Tools (SCOTT, 2007), it was possible to raise students' most frequent collocational choices and patterns, the most/least used type of collocations, the influence of the mother tongue on their choices, among other aspects. With the purpose of motivating and involving students in classroom research, it was also introduced The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), created by Mark Davies. By doing so, students could compare their collocational choices with the patterns found in the online corpus, extract more collocational patterns and, consequently, be aware of the potential of corpora for the foreign learning process, specifically for raising language awareness, with focus on prefabricated chunks.

Report on the practice based culminating experience as teaching assistant for "Pathology and Public Health" class taught at University of Texas School of Public Health, Houston

Objectives. The objectives of this report were to describe current best standards in online education, class competencies, class objectives, class activities and to compare the class competencies, objectives and activities undertaken with the current best practices in online teaching and to provide a list of recommendations based on the most efficacious practices. ^ Methods. Utilizing the key words- online teaching, national standards, quality, online courses, I: (1) conducted a search on Google to find the best standard for quality online courses; the search yielded National Standards for Quality Online Teaching as the gold standard in online course quality; (2) specified class objectives and competencies as well as major activities undertaken as a part of the class. Utilizing the Southern Regional Education Board evaluation checklist for online courses, I: (1) performed an analysis comparing the class activities, objectives, and competencies with the current best standards; (2) utilized the information obtained from the analysis and class experiences to develop recommendations for the most efficacious online teaching practices. ^ Results. The class met the criteria set by the Southern Regional Education Board for evaluating online classes completely in 75%, partially in 16% and did not meet the criteria in 9% cases. The majority of the parameters in which the class did not meet the standards (4 of 5) were due to technological reasons beyond the scope of the class instructor, teaching assistant and instructional design. ^ Discussion. Successful online teaching requires awareness of technology, good communication, methods, collaboration, reflection and flexibility. Creation of an online community, engaging online learners and utilizing different learning styles and assessment methods promote learning. My report proposes that online teaching should actively engage the students and teachers with multiple interactive strategies as evidenced from current best standards of online education and my “hands-on” work experience. ^ Conclusion. The report and the ideas presented are intended to create a foundation for efficacious practice on the online teaching platform. By following many of the efficacious online practices described in the report and adding from their own experiences, online instructors and teaching assistants can contribute to effective online learning. ^