BTB3221 - Taxation law and practice is a unit that many students (especially those with international background) find difficult to study. As it is a specialist technical discipline. Our colleague Toan Le tried to make tax law easier to learn for students by introducing group learning workshop and presentations. But in Semester 1 2018, he was allocated a seminar room that was not suitable to conduct the 3-hour long group learning workshop. The room had no window or no screen on the wall. And it was in a long rectangle shape which made it difficult for the students at the back to see the front.
We had to improvise - with the help of Deb McCormack and Tristan Cui from the TaLT, we moved the students out of the traditional classroom and we facilitated the outdoor on the lawn of the Peninsula campus.
Each week, after the 90 minutes lecturers, Toan took the 38 students out to the lawn in front of the Peninsula library and ran a 90 minutes workshop there.
How it works is that like in the traditional classroom students were broken up into groups and allocated a space to work and then to present their group work. As the students did their work Toan would facilitate their learning by going around each group and joining in the discussion, assisting them to answer their allocated tasks.
To communicate with the larger group and deal with the occasional noise, Toan carried a portable microphone that the TaLT supplied.
Feedback /outcome
The workshops proved to be successful. Students enjoyed the different learning setting! Happy students generally correlated to a better learning experience!
Perhaps because they were being outdoor and have an open space to work, students showed better engagement than when they were learning in the classroom. They did not check their mobiles or access Facebook or Twitter on laptops and they were even taking selfies for the special classes.
When it was time to present, the students listened inattentively as the picture shown. The noise was not a problem. Thanks to the portable microphone I was heard and the student presenters did not experience any issue. In fact, students overcame it by moving closer in to listen.
However, you need to consider the students with health issues for this setting. Also, the cold weather stopped us from doing that for the whole semester.
Overall, it was a successful experiment of a flexible and new approach to teaching and learning. And it is FUN!
Our Monash polling system FLUX has just added some new and useful features: it is now possible to add images, code and LaTeX to Polls in FLUX!
Images in Polls
It's now possible to add images to Multiple-Choice Polls by dragging and dropping your image into the question textbox (see below).
Code in Polls
You can now write code in Multiple-Choice Polls either `in-line like this` or ```in blocks like this``` (see below).
Maths (LaTeX) in Polls
It's also now possible to render a limited subset of LaTeX in Multiple-Choice Polls by typing equations like this: $$ \sqrt(4) = 1 + 1 $$ (see below). If you are excited about the new features like me, why don't you login FLUX now and give it a try? If you have any further questions, please contact us or you can find answers in this support document.
I visited Caulfield's STARLab (Simulated Teaching and Research Laboratories) to observe the BFX5260 Treasury and Financial Markets teaching team in action, and I was in for a treat. The morning started out with great energy. Students were lining up to get their ID card scanned for attendance, and looking eager to get started.
This semester, the BFX5260 teaching team have implemented co-teaching, the flipped-class model, trading simulation, and digital in-class assessment all at once. How do they do it? Let’s dive in.
Co-teaching
Wayne Huf, Amale Scally, Simon Yap, Long Pham and Linh Nguyen make a great teaching team. They did a fantastic job collaborating to facilitate two classrooms simultaneously. One of the goals was to keep the two classes going at the same pace, and timing of in-class assessments to be in sync.
In order to achieve that, responsibilities are shared among the teaching team. Everyone takes turn to instruct, facilitate activities and provide technical support to students every week. The co-teaching model got everyone in the team on their feet, and actively attending to every group in the class. It was great to see how much attention and support students received throughout the session.
Flipped-classroom model
The concept of a flipped-classroom model has been around for some time, and has earned its place in the current landscape of higher education. Exploration and familiarisation with the new weekly topic happens prior to class time, and that's what has been implemented in BFX5260.
'Pre-load' materials including short videos, reading and exercise files have been provided for students to engage in independent learning every week. Moodle resources were referenced frequently during the session, which was a fantastic way to reemphasise the significance of the Moodle site as a one-stop-shop to assist students with their study.Workshop times are dedicated to hands-on activities and peer-learning where students exchange ideas and consolidate new knowledge. What's more, is that students are incentivised to complete pre-class work by a weekly test at the beginning of class. Even though questions are randomised, students were allowed to discuss and work collaboratively through this assessment.
An important note to take here is that the link between pre-class and in-class work has been well illustrated. Without having done their work prior to coming to the session, students' learning experience would not have received the same benefits and impact.
Excel classes were offered to students to help them
become more confident with using the software
Trading simulations
Throughout the session, students went through a range of simulated trading scenarios. Pre-programmed prompts were scheduled during some of the activities to increase interactiveness and sophistication of the exercise. This was a fantastic illustration of how complex and fast-paced a real trading environment could be.
The design of these workshops has thoughtfully taken into account valuable opportunities for students to apply what they have learned, and go from knowing to doing. What's more, is that students go to practice making decisions promptly and effectively, to respond to the dynamic nature of their future employment context.
To guide students through these simulations, procedural knowledge was demonstrated on Excel by the facilitator, followed by time for repetition on students' computer.
Students working on their Excel sheet
Learning is then solidified by peer learning. The trading simulations happened as individual exercises as well as group activities. Conversations were buzzing among students in the room to discuss the process and results of their practice.
Students discussed during the exercises
By closely watching and assisting students while the simulations occurred, the facilitator was able to recognise and showcase outstanding work from individual student for the whole class. The students were also rewarded with very encouraging comments from the instructor and their peers, adding even more energy to the atmosphere.
In-class assessment
In-class assessment was conducted at the end to solidify everything new students have learned throughout the session. To ensure the integrity and authenticity of students' attempt during the assessment, a software called AB Tutor was run in the control room. Excel files containing students' work were pulled from their Monash computer and deleted once the transfer has been completed.
The control room - where the "magic" happens
The vision
The learning activities in STARLab do not only provide an opportunity for students to gain simulated trading experience, but also expose students to ethic considerations, encourage them to be professional and understand the value of their human inputs behind machines. Click the video below to hear from the teaching team and a unit alumnus themselves.
A closing thought
It was inspiring to see the amount of thought and effort that went into designing and delivering the unit. Perhaps it took trial-and-error to continuously improving their teaching practice, but the team have been rewarded with the level of participation and engagement among students.
We look forward to observing more active learning strategies in your classroom.
This month, the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics (EBS) welcomed Paul White, the Associate Dean Education at the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at their departmental welcome for new teaching associates. Paul ran a fantastic session on workshop facilitation and active learning for our colleagues at EBS, and we hope you will enjoy reading about some of the highlights from this session.
Paul and a group of participants
Whether you are a seasoned educator, or new to teaching, facilitating a workshop effectively can be a challenging task. The active dynamic and demanding nature of a workshop may mean that the facilitator needs to acquire many skill sets to engage and guide students. Throughout the training session at EBS, the whole group had a great dialogue and took home great insights into effective practices. We saw small and large-group discussion, mini role-play activity and many opportunities for colleagues to reflect.
Role-play activity to re-enact different student behaviours
Key takeaways
Here are a few key takeaways on how to effectively run workshops. We hope this can be your food-for-thought:
1. Establish a culture of effective learning
As the facilitator, you have the opportunity to lead by example. By modelling being well prepared, you will have a great chance of establishing a good culture of effective learning among your students. Planning and preparation is the key to facilitating a workshop effectively, and it is also the key to successfully participating in and contributing to a workshop.
Depending on your disciplines, the facilitator may have the ‘right’ answers to questions most of the time. However, such questions often address the lower order thinking skills such as recalling information, understanding basic concepts or applying concepts to simple examples. On the other hand, the Socratic method of asking thoughtful guiding questions to stimulate discussion among students, without giving them one absolute answer, is the best way to help students develop higher order thinking skills such as evaluating and critical thinking.
3. Know the key characteristics of an effective facilitator
Exercising good body language, patience and empathy, and showing enthusiasm from the facilitator, just to name a few, are great characteristics that a facilitator could have. How do you achieve these? Unsurprisingly, practice makes progress.
Involving all participants. Try ‘tracking your heat-map’, i.e. how you move around in the room and address each group of participants. It is also advisable to keep some distance and not to be too intimidating to students.
Communicating with a personal touch. For example, a great idea a participant shared was to get in touch with students prior to the semester and connect with them personally during the first session. This got students to keep coming to the following sessions. It is also good to get to know students on a first name/ preferred name basis.
4. Build and maintain a positive students’ perception of you
A facilitator’s energy can be contagious, and students can be influenced by how you carry yourself throughout your workshop. Enthusiasm and attentiveness can help facilitators go a long way in making and keeping a good impression to students.
5. Gather feedback from students
No teacher is perfect, and there is always room for improvement and enhancement in your facilitation practice. Gathering quick formative feedback from students, whether by verbal or written mean, may help you uncover great potential for your practice.
A closing thought
Throughout the session, our colleagues at EBS were very enthusiastic in sharing about their own teaching and facilitating experiences, and it was rewarding to hear the buzz from many great conversations about the ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ in running a workshop. We look forward to having more inter-faculty collaborations like this, in which we share knowledge, learn from each other and feel inspired to try new things.
Group discussion
Friday, 10 May 2019
Yee Haa, it's SXSW EDU in Austin Texas
What is SXSW
“Founded in 1987 in Austin, Texas, SXSW is best known for its conference and festivals that celebrate the convergence of the interactive, film, and music industries. An essential destination for global professionals, the event features sessions, showcases, screenings, exhibitions, and a variety of networking opportunities. SXSW proves that the most unexpected discoveries happen when diverse topics and people come together.”
“SXSW EDU is a component of the South by Southwest® (SXSW®) family of conferences and festivals. Internationally recognized as the convergence gathering for creative professionals, SXSW EDU extends SXSW’s support for the art of engagement to include society’s true rock stars: educators!”
The majority of conference programming is created by “PanelPicker®, a two-part, online process that enables the community to lend their voice to the event. Step one encourages the community to enter a session proposal to speak at SXSW EDU 2019. Step two allows the community to browse all of the ideas, leave comments, and vote for their favorite proposals.”
This year the topics that featured heavily at SxSW and SxSW.edu reflected those being discussed in the wider community - AI and the future of work, and micro-credentialing. In this report I provide an overview of some standout sessions.
Edcamp
Some of you may have heard of or attended ‘un-conferences’, where the topics of discussion are more fluid and based on what individuals and groups want to talk and hear about. EdCamp is a type of ‘un-conference’ for educators that started in the USA in 2010 and had now spread around the world. The basic premise is that attendees come with topics they want to talk about and the topics are sorted into ‘discussion sessions’. There is a lot of information on their site including a link to an Edcamp Organizer Handbook. If anyone would like to organise an Edcamp or would like to participate in one let us know.
Non-obvious
Trend curator, storyteller, innovator Rohit Bhargava presented a fascinating overview of his 2018 non-obvious trends. Rohit first published the Non-Obvious Trend Report in 2011 and it has now evolved into best selling book Non Obvious (How to predict trends and win the future) which is updated annually. Some of the ideas Rohit discussed in more detail included:
RetroTrust which is the “idea that we trust in brands and experiences from our past” - the trend is thought to be a reaction to fake news.
Muddled Masculinity describes the “rising empowerment of women and reevaluation of gender itself are causing widespread confusion and angst about what it means to be a man today.”
Learning Sciences and Ed Tech: Uncovering the Facts
Alexandra Resch - Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Jeremy Roschelle - Digital Promise Global Katrina Stevens - Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Melina Uncapher - Institute for Applied Neuroscience
The question posed to the panel was ‘What is the ONE learning science fact you wish all educators (especially those who integrate technology into their teaching) knew, and why?’
The panel used a neuro-scientific lens to look at some common learning challenges. Of particular interest was the idea presented by Katrina Stevens who spoke about ‘Identifying and impacting motivational issues’. Katrina emphasised the need to interpret student responses to learning challenges. The discussion focussed on a framework developed by Richard Clark and Bror Saxberg1 that posited consideration of the whole learner perspective gives insight into motivation issues.
1.Engineering Motivation Using the Belief-Expectancy-Control Framework || Interdisciplinary Education and Psychology || Rivera Publications. (2019). Riverapublications.com. Retrieved 1 April 2019, from http://riverapublications.com/article/engineering-motivation-using-the-belief-expectancy-control-framework#article-info
Tess Poser - AI4ALL Francesca Rossi - Global Leader for AI Ethics, IBM (Member of EU High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence) Lynne Parker - Assistant Director for AI, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Lucilla Sioli - Director of AI and Digital Industry, European Commission
In this standout session four amazing women provided a high level overview of some of the programs and guidelines being developed by governments and the EU to address some of the future challenges of AI.
The most commonly used communication methods between teachers and students these days probably are Moodle Forum announcement and mass email. But how effective the methods are? Are the students reading those notifications and mass emails? The answer normally is: we do not know. Normally we do not have any method to track whether the students have read the emails. But often when we talk to the students, we might have the impression that they are not very interested in those messages. It is hard to blame them as many of us might have the same attitude to similar messages in our mailbox. However, students might have different attitudes to the personlised emails from their lecturers' Monash email address. Zoee Cohen from the University of Arizona has also been sending personlised emails to students for years and seeing improvement in student academic performance: Small Changes, Large Rewards: How Individualized Emails Increase Classroom Performance.
TaLT has tried to answer that challenge by trialing using a learning analytics system to communicate with students with personlised Emails with one Business Law unit and one Econometrics and Business Statistics unit. The project Using Learning Analytics System to Communicate with Students with Personalised Emailswas presented at the Monash Re-engineering Education Teaching Symposium last month. You can read more about their work in our TaLT Practice Papers series.
Does it work?
We have used the SRES, Student Relationship Engagement System, to send the personlised emails to the students. The system has a function to track whether the students have opened the email. From the logs, it is safe to say that almost all students would open the emails. It is not that a surprise as we can imagine that we would check the emails from our department heads.
However, have the students read it? Have them acted accordingly? The questions are still not answered.
SETU as a test
Students are encouraged to answer the SETU questions about their units at the end of the semester. The Monash Business School average response rate is 40.63% in S2 2018. We took the chance and did a small experiment in the two units. A persoalised email addressing the student first name from the lecturer's email address was sent to all students to encourage them to complete the SETU questions. One unit got 81.88% response rate from 138 students and the other unit got 87.76% from 384 students. Both response rates are much higher than the Buseco average and have significantly increased from the previous year.
It is now safe to say that yes, the majority of the students would read personalised emails from their lecturers and they would act on the email content in terms of completing a SETU online survey.
Getting more students for the department
One of the lecturers Charanjit Kaur has sent the newest email to high achieving students in her units. The email congratulates the students on their excellent performance and invites them to choose more advanced units in Econometrics and Business Statistics in their 2d semester on behalf of the Acting Department Head. The email is formatted as a formal letter so that students can print it even use it as part of their portfolio during job applications. Also, we will find out whether the personlised invitation will bring more students into EBS next semester. And if you would like to keep up with the student enrollment competition with EBS using personlised messages or any other new ideas, please talk to your Educational Designers. We would be very happy to assist you in the new year.
Are you not sure which technology can be used for your learning activities in the class or on your Moodle unit? Are you planning to create something innovative and fun but tired of searching for the right software on the Internet? Are you tired of asking eSolutions to help you install new software on your computer? Are you tired of going through the whole process to purchase a software license?
We guess that it often happens. That is why TaLT has provided a list of the teaching and learning technology available to Monash staff.
The List
Here is the list of some teaching and learning technology available to Monash staff. It provides an overview of the related application, operating system, and cost for each product.
My Software
You might be surprised to learn that Monash makes available to you some of the most convenient software with advanced teaching and learning technology. You might also be surprised at the range of applications available, and most of them are FREE!
On a Monash managed Windows PC, click the Start icon on the left bottom side of the screen and then click My Software which will open the list of 148 free software applications.
Search and install the software that you need. In a few minutes (usually) the software will be installed automatically on your computer.
If you are interested in any product or have any questions, feel free to contact us at buseco.teaching-learning@monash.edu. TaLT is always happy to assist.
