Last week I took part in two conferences on the subject of higher education and so here’s a blog post with some thoughts and reflections.

Monday and Tuesday: ‘Workshop on Innovations in University Mathematics Teaching’

The first conference was organised by +Paul Harper, Rob Wilson and myself. The conference website can be found here. The main subject of this was active learning pedagogic techniques, in particular:

  • The flipped classroom;
  • Inquiry Based Learning (IBL).

The plan for these two days included an almost full day of talks on the Monday and an interactive IBL session on the Tuesday.

Here’s a couple of snippets from each session:

  • Robert Talbert gave the opening talk describing the flipped learning environment. You can see his slides here.



    I was quite nervous about Robert’s talk as he’s an expert in flipping classrooms and I was scheduled to talk after him. He gave a great talk (in fairness every single talk on the day was awesome) and here are a couple of things I noted down:

    A flipped classroom does not imply a flipped learning environment!

    A traditional classroom encourages the dependency of a student on the instructor.

    Flipped learning is not just videos out of class and homework in class.

    My favourite:

    The most important part of the flipped classroom is not what happens outside of the classroom (videos etc…) but what happens inside the classroom.

  • I spoke next and you can find my slides here.



    I mainly spoke about the programming course that I teach using a flipped class to our first years. I didn’t want to go in to any details about what a flipped learning environment is as I would most certainly not have been able to do it justice after Robert’s talk so I just gave an exemplar of it in practice. I might blog about the particular approach I used another time.

  • Toby Bailey then gave an excellent talk about the flipped classroom / peer instruction that he has in place for a large class.



    One of the highlights was certainly a video of his class in which we saw students respond to a question via in class clickers and then break in to groups of 2 to discuss the particular problem and finally answer the question one more time. Responses were then put up for all to see and it was great to see that students were indeed improving (you could see the distributions of clicker answers improve after the peer instruction).

    Here are a couple of other things I noted down during the talk:

    It’s not all about the lecturer.

    The importance of getting out of the way.

    Tell the class why you are doing it.

  • Stephen Rutherford then spoke about his flipped classroom in biosciences.



    This was a great talk and it was very neat to have a non mathematical point of view. My first highlight from Steve’s talk can be seen in the photo above. I think that that fundamental question (‘why am I better than a book’) could in fact help improve the instruction of many.

    A flipped classroom allows some control to be put in the hands of the students.

    The reason students are at university is to get an education and not necessarily a degree.

  • We then moved on to a relaxed panel discussion about the flipped classroom, one of the things that I think was a big highlight of that was the importance of involving students in the pedagogic reasoning behind whatever approach is used in a class.

  • The final ‘talk’ of the day was by Chris Sangwin who talked about his Moore Method class.



    This was a fascinating talk as Chris clearly described the success he has had with implementing a Moore Method class.

    In particular he highlighted the importance of he role of the instructor in this framework where students are given a set of problems to work through and present to their peers (there is no lecturing in a Moore method class).

    Some highlights:

    In 2007, after his class finished students found the book from which his problems originated and continued to work through them on their own.

    In 2008, students set up a reading group and started to read complex mathematical topics.

  • The rest of the conference was a natural continuation from Chris’s talk as Dana Ernst and TJ Hitchman spoke about Inquiry Based Learning (a pedagogic term that encompasses the Moore method - I’m sure someone can correct me if I got that subtlety wrong).




    This was a really great interactive session that ran over to Tuesday. There is far too much that happened in this session and it was hard to take notes as we were very much involved but here is some of the things that stuck for me.

    1. TJ ran a great first little session that basically got us to think about what we want to be as educators. One of the main things that came out of the ‘what do you want your students to remember in 20 years time’ question was that very few of us (I’m not sure if anyone did) mentioned the actual content of the courses we teach.
    2. The importance of creating a safe environment in which students can fail (in order to learn). Productive failure.
    3. The various difficulties associated with implementing an IBL approach due to class size (this was a recurring theme with regards to UK vs US class sizes).

    Another important point was the criteria that defines an IBL approach:

    Students are in charge of not only generating the content but also critiquing the content.

    You can find all of Dana and TJ’s content on their github repository.

After this session I enjoyed a good chat with TJ who helped me figure out how to make my R/SAS course better. After that my project student who will be working with me to evaluate my flipped classroom had a great talk with Robert, TJ and Dana who gave some really helpful advice. One of the highlights that came out of this was Robert putting very simply what I believe defines an effective pedagogic approach. Hopefully Robert will either correct me or forgive me for paraphrasing (EDIT: He has corrected me in the comments):

Whatever the approach: flipped classroom, IBL, interpretive dance, as long as the system allows you to empower your students and monitor how they are learning it is worth doing.

I’m probably forgetting quite a few details about the workshop (including the 6+ course conference dinner which was pretty awesome). Now to describe the next conference which was the Cardiff University Annual Learning and Teaching Conference

Wednesday: Cardiff University Annual Learning and Teaching Conference

This was my first time attending this conference and I was lucky enough to have my abstract accepted so I was able to give a talk.

You can find my slides here.

In all honesty I was kind of tired so I didn’t take as detailed notes as I would like and/or as many photos but here are some highlights:

  • I enjoyed Stephen Rutherford discussing the plans of the Biosciences school to bring in peer assessment:

    Assessment for learning and not of learning

  • I liked Anne Cunningham reminding everyone that students obtain content from a variety of sources when talking about their using of scoop.it:

    The curators are not just the staff. The prime curators are the students.

  • Rob Wilson and Nathan Roberts gave an overview of the tutoring system that we as a university will be heading towards.

A great three days

This brings my attendance at education conference to a total of 3 and I must say that I can’t wait to go to the next one (incidentally my abstract for the CETL-MSOR conference got accepted today). I really enjoy the vibe at education conferences as there is a slight sense of urgency in case anyone says anything that someone might be able to use/adapt/steal so as to improve their teaching and have a real impact on our students’ lives.

Two final links:

  • The #innovcardiff hashtag if you would like to see what was being said online about the innovation conference (big applause to Calvin Smith who did a tremendous job on there!);
  • The #cardiffedu hashtag if you would like to see the same for the Cardiff University education conference.

If anyone who attended the conferences has anything to add it would be great to hear from you and if anyone couldn’t make it but would like to know more: please get in touch :)