Advances in Teaching & Learning Day Abstracts 2005

Proceedings of the Advances in Teaching & Learning Day Regional Conference held at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston in 2005

Enabling a community of practice: Fostering social learning between designers and design managers at postgraduate level

This paper discusses the principles and practices of a joint programme of MA Design and Design Management studies at a UK-based university that has encouraged students from different design disciplines to develop a community of practice (COP). It describes the structure of the current MA programmes and how a series of staff initiatives in response to financial and organisational necessity has led to conditions conducive for the emergence of a communities of practice. A community of practice is defined by Wenger and Synder (1999, p.139-140) as a group of people informally bound together by shared expertise or a particular interest. Developing a COP can be a means to generate new ideas, methods and processes (Schlager, Fusco, & Schank, 2002). Building a community of practice is a vital ingredient in the development of a design professional operating in a post-disciplinary design era in which complex problems stretch across traditional disciplines and cultures (Moggridge, 2007). The paper begins by providing a background to the growth and expansion of postgraduate education in the institution and proceeds to describe the structure and delivery of its programmes. It highlights learning opportunities created by teaching staff to facilitate the development of a community of practice. It concludes by presenting a number of challenges faced by programmes in maintaining conducive environments for COP to foster in view of proposed growth

A postgraduate design learning experience: understanding the effects of community, cultural and contextual environment

This paper describes on going research that investigates how learning (students and tutors) takes place in a multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural postgraduate design programme in the UK. The research maps and makes explicit the effects of community, cultural and contextual environment on learning. Initial findings have identified that learning is taking place within communities of practice and further research is used to explore reasons for its emergence. The authors evaluate and discuss the effects of learning in a post disciplinary and multi-cultural environment, and its value to current design postgraduate pedagogy. A social model of learning and communities of practice is evident in the design programme studied and preliminary findings indicates that this model is particularly relevant model to adopt in the current post-disciplinary era

Teaching Data Science

We describe an introductory data science course, entitled Introduction to Data Science, offered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The course introduced general programming concepts by using the Python programming language with an emphasis on data preparation, processing, and presentation. The course had no prerequisites, and students were not expected to have any programming experience. This introductory course was designed to cover a wide range of topics, from the nature of data, to storage, to visualization, to probability and statistical analysis, to cloud and high performance computing, without becoming overly focused on any one subject. We conclude this article with a discussion of lessons learned and our plans to develop new data science courses.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2016

Does design education always produce designers?

By questioning what we mean by the term ‘designer’ this paper describes the ideas behind a new Open University course in Design Thinking. The paper shows how the creative skills of students can be consciously developed, and deliberately applied outside of the creative industries in what are termed ‘embedded’ contexts. The distance learning model of education pioneered by The Open University is briefly sketched before the developments and ideas behind the new course in Design Thinking, in particular the concept of ‘social practice’ are explained in detail. The paper presents the results of an extensive student and tutor survey regarding the course before concluding that, although it is possible to teach design practice by distance, practice-based expertise for tutors remains a critical success factor

Business Process Management Education in Academia: Status, challenges, and Recommendations

In response to the growing proliferation of Business Process Management (BPM) in industry and the demand this creates for BPM expertise, universities across the globe are at various stages of incorporating knowledge and skills in their teaching offerings. However, there are still only a handful of institutions that offer specialized education in BPM in a systematic and in-depth manner. This article is based on a global educators’ panel discussion held at the 2009 European Conference on Information Systems in Verona, Italy. The article presents the BPM programs of five universities from Australia, Europe, Africa, and North America, describing the BPM content covered, program and course structures, and challenges and lessons learned. The article also provides a comparative content analysis of BPM education programs illustrating a heterogeneous view of BPM. The examples presented demonstrate how different courses and programs can be developed to meet the educational goals of a university department, program, or school. This article contributes insights on how best to continuously sustain and reshape BPM education to ensure it remains dynamic, responsive, and sustainable in light of the evolving and ever-changing marketplace demands for BPM expertise

Science education on the U.S./Mexico border: Field-based studies for future teachers in bilingual/binational schools

The University of Texas at El Paso’s field-based program of studies for future teachers provides opportunities for powerful learning through a dialectical union of reflection and action. Methods courses in academic disciplines are linked with seminars and coursework on community partnerships, dual language education and culturally responsive education. This article illustrates the processes of planning, implementation and evaluation of this approach, highlighting the impacts of forging connections among schools, communities and university personnel to improve education on the U.S./Mexico border and in communities with culturally/linguistically diverse student populations. Parents, students and future teachers interact in bilingual workshops that center on pupil achievement and conceptually correct science education. Preliminary outcomes indicate that two-way dual language (TWDL) bilingual programs (i.e., validating native language literacy along with English language acquisition) with a strong parental engagement component provide a strong framework for teaching/learning that can help improve educational outcomes for ELL/immigrant children and deepen future teachers’ skills and knowledge. Focusing on academic enrichment for all students, these field-based experiences enable future teachers to learn strategies that integrate students’ and families’ linguistic and cultural experiences as a resource for learning. The co-authors highlight qualitative data findings from the Science in Our Homes – Ciencia en Nuestras Casas field-based project in a multilingual, multicultural K-8 school on the U.S./Mexico border, providing insights for educators in diverse communities whose efforts focus on closing the achievement gap for English language learners and/or immigrant students

The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning

IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning is a peer-reviewed, biannual online journal that publishes scholarly and creative non-fiction essays about the theory, practice and assessment of interdisciplinary education. Impact is produced by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at the College of General Studies, Boston University (www.bu.edu/cgs/citl).In this issue, podcasts are looked at as a pedagogical game changer. Using the award-wining podcast Serial as their catalyst, this issue's essayists look at podcast's emerging role in higher education, how multimodal learning can help students find their voices, the podcast's place in the curriculum at a criminal justice college, and how podcasts can inspire students to reflectively assess their own writing. Our reviewers take a critical look at the podcasts Welcome to Night Vale and Revisionist History

Contours of Inclusion: Inclusive Arts Teaching and Learning

The purpose of this publication is to share models and case examples of the process of inclusive arts curriculum design and evaluation. The first section explains the conceptual and curriculum frameworks that were used in the analysis and generation of the featured case studies (i.e. Understanding by Design, Differentiated Instruction, and Universal Design for Learning). Data for the cases studies was collected from three urban sites (i.e. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston) and included participant observations, student and teacher interviews, curriculum documentation, digital documentation of student learning, and transcripts from discussion forum and teleconference discussions from a professional learning community.The initial case studies by Glass and Barnum use the curricular frameworks to analyze and understand what inclusive practices look like in two case studies of arts-in-education programs that included students with disabilities. The second set of precedent case studies by Kronenberg and Blair, and Jenkins and Agois Hurel uses the frameworks to explain their process of including students by providing flexible arts learning options to support student learning of content standards. Both sets of case studies illuminate curricular design decisions and instructional strategies that supported the active engagement and learning of students with disabilities in educational settings shared with their peers. The second set of cases also illustrate the reflective process of using frameworks like Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to guide curricular design, responsive instructional differentiation, and the use of the arts as a rich, meaningful, and engaging option to support learning. Appended are curriculum design and evaluation tools. (Individual chapters contain references.