On 13 December, the e-learning room in building T29 was packed full of eager students and faculty members to hear about how to successfully adopt different e-learning technology and pedagogy from across different Divisions and Teaching Units. The title for this workshop was ‘Experiential Learning - a sharing of good practices in the applications of e-Learning technology for teaching and learning’. Five UIC faculty members shared their experiences with the UIC community at this Teaching and Learning Workshop.
The Chair of the e-Learning Sub-committee and Associate Vice President of UIC, Prof Lillian Kwan, along with Associate Director of Information Technology Services Centre (ITSC), Dr Kai Pan Mark, introduced the e-learning workshop before welcoming the first speaker, English Language Centre (ELC) Senior Lecturer, Course Convener for Professional Communication, and e-Learning Sub-committee Member, Mr Darrel Rea. Mr Rea’s talk was titled ‘The Role of iSpace in UIC’, and began with Mr Rea explaining how teachers can get their students to engage in assigned learning activities on iSpace.
Mr Rea’s talking about iSpace
Using a current course, Mr Rea highlighted and quoted students’ forum posts, showing how he can track their activities and analyse their posts, which is called learning analytics. He demonstrated how teachers can track the students’ learning processes during their engagement in the activities. The wealth of positive student comments was eye-opening. After showcasing the live forum, Mr Rea explained how he uses iSpace to analyse the students’ learning processes as well as to identify student learning needs.
Mr Rea’s talk was very data heavy with clear evidence of student engagement through e-learning. The breadth and depth of student activity information available on iSpace (MOODLE) is significant. Mr Rea demonstrated different ways to hone in on this data to focus on information relevant to individual students and how it can be used for feedback and both formative and summative assessments.
The next speaker was ELC and Academy of Continuing Education (ACE) Lecturer, Mr Edward Martin, who shared his experience and some tips for integrating iSpace assignment rubrics and Panopto video hosting into teaching. Panopto is like a campus YouTube (Youku), which allows UIC community members to share videos. Mr Martin showed attendees how to link student video assignments to iSpace for assessment. Mr Martin also encouraged attendees to explore new applications of Panopto to suit their own unique teaching contexts.
Mr Martin explaining the benefits of Panopto
Division of Business and Management Assistant Professor and Acting Programme Director for E-BMIS, Dr Darren Weng, gave a presentation titled ‘Decision Experiments in Business and Economics’. He asked “How can we create experiential learning in a classroom setting?” then proceeded to discuss various ways in which web-based decision experiments can be incorporated into classroom learning, as well as to create a more interactive and effective learning experience for students.
Dr Weng talking about web-based decision experiment
Assistant Professor of Division of Culture and Creativity (DCC), Dr Yuan Yuan, spoke about how Game Base Learning (GBL) can improve the effectiveness of teaching and enhance students’ learning engagement through fun games. She shared her experience of how GBL is used to engage students and enhance learning effectiveness through an activity she did that was related to hotel training.
Dr Yuan showing the audience a GBL for hotel training
Finishing off the talk was a joint presentation by Associate Professor of Division of Science and Technology (DST), Dr Yi-Lung Kuo, and DST Instructor, Ms Jenny Yang. Dr Kuo began with his talk: ‘Dos and Don'ts for Effective E-Learning Practices’. He explained that when various e-learning practices are adopted strategically to engage students both in and outside classroom, they can improve students’ learning attitude and enhance their comprehension of learning outcomes. Ms Yang presented several dos and don’ts for effective e-learning practices at UIC. She mentioned that faculty should adopt e-learning practices as tools to improve overall teaching effectiveness as well as suggesting that teachers could create their own resource banks of e-learning activities to share with colleagues. Lastly, Ms Yang emphasized that the “one size fits all” does not work for e-learning, and that, instead, educators should incorporate e-learning into their teaching through small learning goals each semester.
Dr Kuo talking about effective e-learning practices
Ms Yang going through the 'Dos and Don'ts' for e-learning practices
Reporter: Samuel Burgess (MPRO)
Photographers: Samuel Burgess (MPRO), He Yilin (ITSC)
Editors: Deen He, Samantha Burns (MPRO)
