Resource music for teaching American history

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Resource music for teaching American history

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Helping design educators foster collaborative learning amongst design students

This paper discusses the development of online teaching resources that enable design educators to foster collaborative learning amongst students in the design disciplines. These online teaching resources will be made available through the Design Collaboration website. This website was recently set up by Northumbria University, a UK based institution, to provide an online resource for design educators wishing to develop collaborative pedagogies in design education. It currently contains case studies of collaborative student projects but lacks practical teaching resources. As a result, a research project was set up to compliment the current case studies by creating a suite of design-specific tools and resources that will help foster team management and development. Although various institutions have addressed the subject of group work and collaborative learning, there has been no online resource dedicated to the development of practical teaching tools to help design students work and learn together. This paper focuses on showcasing the range of teaching tools and resources developed through classroom-based trials. These resources have been developed specifically in consultation with Northumbria University's design educators and trialled with undergraduate and postgraduate students from different design disciplines. In addition, issues surrounding the translation of these tools into a practical, easy to use and accessible in an online format is discussed. The Icograda World Design Congress 2009 Education Conference is the ideal international platform to share these tools with the wider design education community. More importantly, we hope to grow the website by encouraging other design educators to submit case studies to the website, using it not only as a means of sharing good practice but also as a tool for reflection. The research value is two-fold (a) translating implicit knowledge of collaborative learning into a practical teaching resource and, (b) helping tutors improve their teaching practice, by linking the teaching resource to real experiences through case studies and interviews

Professional development online : showcasing good practice to support open, distance and flexible learning

Designing Electronic Learning and Teaching Approaches (DELTA) is an online professional development initiative to support pedagogically-appropriate teaching with technology by showcasing examples of good practice in e-learning. The site aims to increase appreciation of e-learning possibilities for teaching staff through an easy-to-access, just-in-time resource. This paper describes the site and introduces the modular evaluation approach which is being implemented to examine it from different stakeholder perspectives. It then focuses on the first evaluation module which investigates how users perceive and engage with DELTA. The paper provides the initial evaluation findings which will contribute to the ongoing improvement of DELTA as a professional development resource that supports open, distance and flexible learning.<br /

Teaching sustainable resource management in uncertain environment

Dynamic evolutions of resource stocks with stochastic elements in the transition equation are in general very difficult to master. Their handling requires a deep understanding of control theory, probability theory and sometimes even of game theory due to strategic interaction of 'agents'. But without strong mathematical backgrounds, students from adjacent research fields have a hard time with control theory. The same is true for probability theory and game theory. One way to avoid this problem is to change the aim: instead of target function optimization, guarantee the continuance of the system within certain boundaries. The latter relates to Viability theory. Unfortunately, even Viability theory requires more mathematics than the 'average' student is prepared for. The paper at hand will demonstrate how Excel can help here. Excel is applied since it is a widespread tool and most students are familiar with its basic features. Therefore students can concentrate on how to implement a dynamic system in a spreadsheet and how to simulate probability distributions and approximate the distribution of the target function - given different control rules. This enables them to assess opportunities and risks associated with these control rules. One topic appropriate to demonstrate the idea is renewable resource management. As many studies state, there is a deficit in sustainable learning not only in economics (Salemi and Siegfried 1999; Walstad and Allgood 1999) , but particular in system dynamic models (Moxnes, E. 2000; Pala and Vennix 2005). This is due to the complexity associated with long run- and feedback effects, and the complexity becomes even harder when stochastic development is included. The purpose of this paper will be to inspire students and to encourage them to solve stochastic dynamic problems later on their own with the simple tools at hand presently.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Russell Square: a lifelong resource for teaching and learning

A quarter of a century ago, in 1978, Birkbeck College’s Faculty of Continuing Education (FCE, then the Department for Extra-Mural Studies of the federal University) moved to the offices that it now occupies in numbers 26 and 25 Russell Square. Then, as now, FCE was the one of the largest and most active extra-mural departments of any British university, with an enormous range of courses covering virtually every subject taught in ‘internal’ university departments and many more besides 1. Some of these courses have, from time to time, used Russell Square as a learning resource. Many more staff and students alike have (along with thousands of local workers, tourists and residents) used the square’s gardens for relaxation and recovery, without reflecting on its origins or present significance. This Occasional Paper examines the past and present fabric of Russell Square (‘the Square’) as a resource for teaching and learning. It is a composite narrative assembled by FCE staff whose disciplines range from nature conservation through garden history and architectural history to social policy. It deconstructs the Square as an entity and attempts to decipher some of its ‘meanings’ that provide links between subjects taught within FCE. We hope that it will stimulate discussion about the way this single ‘place’ – our Square - can be ‘seen’ or interpreted in different ways for diverse purposes, and about the way that it can be used as a resource for teaching and learning across disciplines

Electronic Commerce Teaching Resources Platform Construction Solution Study

The paper proposes the solution to teaching resource application platform that applies to electronic commerce teaching. Electronic commerce teaching resource platform system includes hardware system structure and software system structure. It is an open approach based on B/S mode that provides each faculty with local and remote teaching resources via Intranet/Internet and booming cloud technology. It establishes inner- and inter-scholastic supporting teaching resource library to meet the demands in teaching practices, and includes functions such as theory teaching, practice teaching, skill practice, entrepreneurial internship, teaching resource service, laboratory management, teaching management, teacher-student interaction and etc. The paper combines the comprehensive teaching resource platform construction practices of modern business and logistics in Beijing Youth Politics College, and puts forward opinions on and solutions to construction scheme of electronic commerce laboratory and teaching resource system in colleges and universities, including construction purpose, system structure, network laboratory composition, teaching function, function of teaching resource library contents and other aspects. Besides, it proposes the basic solutions to experimental teaching platform, teaching management platform, practice and entrepreneurial platform and teaching resource library construction

Students as producers: Designing games to teach social science research methods and ethics

In this paper we explore our experiences of a staff-student collaborative project that sought to design games and learning resources that could be used to 'liven-up' research methods and ethics teaching in the social sciences. Final and second year undergraduate social science students were encouraged to reflect on their own experiences of both research methods teaching and the process of doing primary research, in order to design games resources that would be useful for future cohorts of students. The concept of games was applied twofold in the project: the development of the teaching resources was itself set up in a games format: we based our initial workshops on the style of the BBC's "Apprentice" programme in order to come up with ideas for the games resources and to introduce a competitive element into the design process. Two groups of students were given a brief to design a games resource that would 'liven up' social science research methods and ethics teaching. Groups then spent an intensive day working on the brief alongside an academic facilitator before pitching their final game concept in a presentation at the end of the day when a winner was announced. In subsequent workshops students worked collaboratively to further develop both games before piloting them on further groups of students prior to production. The second application of the games concept lay in the development of an actual learning resource to be used in future research methods and ethics teaching. The premise of developing an undergraduate dissertation, its (realistic) design and the potential ethical and methodological problems encountered when doing research underpinned the learning objectives for the games developed. The developed games resources have been introduced into the curriculum to supplement the existing (more traditional) learning and teaching strategies and to add a 'fun' element into research methods teaching. Developing a game-based learning approach themselves has thereby increased students' influence on the design of teaching and learning strategies and helped produce a useful learning resource for future cohorts. The paper highlights the benefits of staff-student collaboration in the design and production of game resources, and in particular, the potential for harnessing students' experiences of teaching and learning through feeding it into curriculum development. The paper also demonstrates the benefits of gamification - through a discussion of the positive student feedback and evaluation received by the developed games