Interdisciplinary Faculty Learning Community: Reflections of Peer Review of Scholarly Teaching in Online and Hybrid Courses

ABSTRACT In 2017-2018, the faculty authors collaborated in a Peer Review of Scholarly Teaching in Online and Hybrid Courses, Faculty Learning Community (FLC). The FLC followed an established process used to facilitate peer review and personal reflection of scholarly teaching, with the primary difference being the exercises were applied to online or hybrid courses. This was an interdisciplinary community including faculty from disciplines including Biology, Business, History, Information Technology, Mathematics, Physics, and Sociology.  As part of the FLC, participants shared reflections about course conception and planning, classroom practice, and student learning.  Each of the shared reflections were followed by a structured peer discussion. The focus was on reflective teaching and pedagogy.  Our experiences suggest that other faculty could benefit from sharing our interdisciplinary conversations. Review of the reflection themes suggest faculty interested in a transformative experience should participate in structured scholarly reflection and peer review.&nbsp

When there isn't a right answer : interpretation and reasoning, key skills for twenty-first century geoscience

A key challenge in university geoscience teaching is to give students the skills to cope with uncertainty. Professional geoscientists can rarely be certain of the ‘right answer’ to problems posed by most geological datasets, and reasoning through this uncertainty, being intelligently flexible in interpreting data which are limited in resolution and spatial distribution, is an important skill for students to learn. Understanding how interpretative and reasoning skills are, or might better be, developed alongside foundational geological concepts and techniques is crucial for the effective training of our future geoscientists. In the study presented here, a seismic interpretation exercise was undertaken by 36 geoscientists ranging in experience from novice to expert. During the exercise, observations were made of the approaches taken by the participants, what we term the interpretational process, and an evaluation was made of what they actually accomplished, what we term the final interpretational outcomes. From a comparison of the different experience cohorts, we show that even as a novice it is important to develop geological reasoning skills to enhance the interpretation of datasets where there is indeed no ‘right answer’