Today Brett Gilley and I ran a workshop “Two Stage Exams: Learning Together?” at the University of British Columbia Okanagan Learning Conference. Great fun was had and many ideas exchanged. Slides below. Gilley Ives – Two Stage Exam Workshop – UBCO Learning Conference – 2017-05-04

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Disclosure: my colleague, Georg Rieger, and I are currently in the process of securing post-doc funding to evaluate the effectiveness of Learning Catalytics and that position would be paid in part by Pearson, who owns Learning Catalytics. A whole lotta devices! I have been using Learning Catalytics, web-based “clickers on steroids” software, in a lecture course and a lab course since the start of September. In this post I want to focus on the logistical side…

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Last week was a historic time for us at Vantage College (the International first-year transfer College that gets 2/3 to 3/4 of my time depending on how you count it or perhaps who you ask). Our very first students evar arrived. For the past week, they have been participating in a 1500ish-student orientation program for international and aboriginal students on campus. I have been the faculty fellow for a group of 20ish students, and in addition to our…

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In an attempt to get back into semi-regular blogging, I am setting aside my pile have half-written posts and am going to share the work that I presented at the 2014 AAPT Summer Meeting and PERC 2014. Poster (link) PERC paper (link to first submission on arXiv) The quick and dirty version is that I was able to run a study, looking at the effectiveness of group exams, in a three-section course which enrolled nearly 800…

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In my mind it is hard to get students to do pre-class homework (“pre-reading”) with much more than an 80% completion rate when averaged out over the term. It usually starts higher than this, but there is a slow trend toward less completion as the term wears on. After taking a more careful look at the five introductory courses in which I used pre-class assignment I have discovered that I was able to do much…

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The last course that I taught at UFV before taking a job at UBC was an online Computation Physics course. I previously posted the mini-project videos from when I ran the course in the fall and you can check that previous post to learn more about the context of these mini-projects. The overall level of creativity seems like it was a bit lower this time than last and that might be in part due to…

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This past year I taught two sections (fall and summer) of Computational Physics at UFV, which is quite a rare thing to happen at a school where we typically run 3rd and 4th year courses every other year. The course was structured so that students would get some initial exposure to both Python and Mathematica for the purposes of physics-related computational tasks, and then as the course went on they would be given more and…

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As previously mentioned, a significant component of my new job at UBC this year is curriculum design for a first year cohort that will be taking, among other things, Physics, Calculus and Chemistry, and will have English language instruction somehow embedded into the courses or the support pieces around the courses. These students are mostly...

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I have had four paper proposals accepted to the journal Physics in Canada, which is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Physicists. I will only be submitting one paper and would love to hear some opinions on which one to write and submit. I will briefly summarize what they are looking for according...

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Dear friends. I am very excited to let you know that at the end of this week I will have officially started my new job as a tenure-track instructor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of British Columbia. This is the department from which I received my PhD, so it is...

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