When
Where
Inspired by the conversations and connections sparked at the UCATT Teaching Exchange Symposium, this virtual workshop series invites participants to revisit popular sessions, explore new perspectives, and continue exchanging ideas throughout the year.
Students in STEM, sociology and economics can greatly benefit from using systems thinking to help them understand systems in their respective disciplines. The use of systems diagrams in particular helps students to identify different system components, their relationships, and how they shape the outcomes and the system (Fortuin, et al., 2013). However, students’ development of system modeling skills and other systems thinking skills requires significant time and rapid feedback from the teaching team. Students cannot acquire these skills in one sitting but must rather build them over time through scaffolded formative assessments with timely feedback. Without synchronous feedback found in in-person and live online courses, the asynchronous online environment creates a challenge for such scaffolded student experience - especially one that builds visual or technical systems thinking skills like modeling. Here we present approaches for incorporating a series of interactives and other activities that either provide real-time feedback automatically to scaffold student learning of systems thinking in D2L Brightspace. Participants will be invited to brainstorm ways to scaffold activities to build systems modeling skills or related skills as desired. We anticipate the strategies conveyed here will be broadly applicable to courses that feature systems thinking, critical thinking, modeling, and various complex tasks or skills.
Speakers
Rivka Fidel
Associate Professor of Practice
Environmental Science
Patricia Moreira
Assistant Professor
Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies