Training for Faculty and students#

This section discussed opportunities, challenges and successes related to providing training for faculty, teaching assistants, and student contributors to the project. See also the succinct list of lessons learned presentated as the poster linked here.

1. Introduction#

1.1 Original intentions#

From the OCESE project proposal:

  1. “…paired-teaching assignments will be used to train EOAS instructors to build and execute Jupyter-based class activities and assignments…” (pg 5).

  2. “After a paired experience, faculty members will proceed to transform additional courses with the support of a STLF and / or a GRA or participate in a new paired teaching assignment” (pg 6)

  3. “…develop and run a Python and Jupyter notebook carpentry session focused on earth science datasets for interested EOAS Faculty, Postdocs and Graduate students .” (pg 6)

  4. “Approximately 10 EOSC Faculty will be trained to develop and teach using evidence-based pedagogies supported by open source notebooks. Graduate students will also be able to receive TA training to use these activities in class and labs.” (pg 7)

  5. Regarding project evaluation: “The evaluation of faculty development has been modeled after the successful Teaching Start-Up program offered in the Faculty of Science.” (pg 9)

All these intentions except the third were accomplished to a greator or lesser extent, as explained below. However, professional development differed from these proposals for two main reasons:

  • All 3 years were needed to carry out development & fine tuning of teaching practices and resources. Tutorials or workshops only make sense with proven techniques and strategies, therefore it was premature to prepare and run these before project goals were successfully developed and piloted.

  • Project participation requires participants to be involved and commit the necessary time and focus throughout their portion of the project. Some colleagues were able to do this, but many became overwhelmed by pivoting to fully online learning during 2020 and 2021.

1.2 Timing & COVID#

  • Project: May 2020 - May 2023

  • COVID: March 2020 - ~August 2022, including the summer of 2022 as a time to “recover” from the constant pivotting in the 2020W and 2021W teachig sessions.

2. Who#

2.1 Who has received support?#

The OCESE project has supported development and/or implementation of methods, resources, tactics (i.e. pedagogy and logistics), infrastructure and associated procedures. Faculty partners provided the course as context and defined specific needs for each lesson, assignment, or assessment, including both resources and methods or procedures. See these lists:

  • Faculty who were supported and/or contributed is on the project outline page.

  • Graduate and undergraduate students who learned by contributing to the project, either as formally hired workers or as teaching assistants with teaching or support roles in a course; also on the project outline page.

  • A separate table in the executive summary summarizes courses and number of students affected over 3 years.

2.2 Who could receive support?#

Which EOAS courses or instructors could benefit from professional development support? Twenty-four EOAS courses currently use computing or dashboard resources. Thirteen courses need to be asked if they do, or will, use computing (especially open) facilities of any kind.

All other courses could certainly benefit from interactive concept simulations, data exploration dashboards or similar open education resources. For example, geology courses in EOAS have benefitted from using the Mohr’s circle dashboard to explore visualization of stresses within rocks, and from engaging with figures using an impage-annotation app (developed during a previous EOAS project, and currently under development. See “interactive images” on our dashboards page).

Many other examples of interactive resources involving climate-related, geophysical, glaciology, geology and other concepts are listed on the third party apps page. Although such resources exist, training faculty to incorporate interactive exploration of concepts into their courses is still required. {Evidently it is easier to build resources than to cause or help instructors make effective use of them.}

3. Lessons to be conveyed#

Faculty and student Pro-D in the form of docs, guidelines, tutorials have emerged from all project threads.

Which procedures, resources or teaching tactics are appropriate for in-person (or virtual) workshops? Which for one-on-one support? Who is most appropriate for carrying out that kind of support?

We have had teaching assistants, part time students emmployees and UBC or Department staff helping individuals during preparation of materials or delivery of specific courses. Teaching assistants have been instrumental in supporting development and piloting of new resources, lessons, and procedures. They will likely continue to be invaluable in sustaining existing innovations or developing new ones. The majority of graduate students in EOAS are already proficient Python programmers.

Are any courses “going further” because students are more up to speed with coding or other quantitative practices? EOSC 112 and 340 now access climate models via dashboards. If so, this is a justification for new tactics which may benefit from faculty support or professional development.

Incorporating open education practices or resources#

Skills considered “open source practices” include using GitHub to collaborate on (and manage version control of) code or documentation, building content for public access (eg. Jupyter Books or blogs, etc.), incorporating appropriate licensing into development, and submitting for “official” status as Open Education Resources (with institutional help, such as UBC’s Open UBC group).

Some instructors and student assistants already use open source practices for their research or teaching, particularly use of GitHub for collaborating or building Jupyter Books or Jupyter Notebooks. We have benefited from their experience.

Few have time or inclination to actively engage in Open Education Resource community or practices. This requires extra time and effort that is not yet readily recognized during promotion and tenure deliberations. However there are experts in the institution who are eager to provide services, both with the Open UBC group, and at the UBC Library’s Open Collections where librarians with open resource expertise can be found.

More details about OERs can be found on the Open Resources page.

The “moving target” challenge#

Development for teaching of (a) tactics for providing students with resources (eg hubs) and (b) efficient assesment practices can not keep pace with changes in the computing community (opensource, or otherwise). Also, different sustainment models have different pros and cons. For example:

  • Institutional (UBC) support means technical and support staff get to know the instructors and their courses and can be available “on demand”. Institution-level support (eg CTLT) benefits from economies of scale more than Department-level support. However, support teams still need to keep up with best practices in a very rapidly evolving “ecosystem” of technology. Keeping up to date is more than full time - something specialists can do better than instituitional groups who provide a variety of technical services across campus.

  • In contrast, third party support for hubs and tech support (eg 2i2c) will provide more widely-tested strategies and likely more reliable facilities, but with “fees for service” rather than costs distributed across institutional service groups.