1 / 13

Enhancing Quantitative Methods Teaching Through Collaboration and Resource Sharing

Teaching Quantitative Methods (QM) presents unique challenges, including engaging students and sourcing relevant data. We often find ourselves teaching familiar material, limiting creativity and effectiveness. To address these obstacles, collaboration among educators can lead to an effective QM curriculum. By pooling teaching resources, sharing assessments, and peer-reviewing materials, we can enhance student learning experiences. This approach not only protects authorship through Creative Commons licensing but also encourages a supportive academic community dedicated to improving QM education.

patia
Télécharger la présentation

Enhancing Quantitative Methods Teaching Through Collaboration and Resource Sharing

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Learning to Share: Collaboration & (Open) Quantitative Methods Teaching Resources Online

  2. Luke Sloan School of Social Sciences Cardiff University SloanLS@cardiff.ac.uk

  3. Known Difficulties in QM Teaching • Teaching QM is hard work & takes time • Difficult to engage students • Many examples needed (surveys, data) • Finding interesting data • Finding interesting findings (e.g. heteroscedasticity)

  4. However • REF pressures divert time and effort from teaching • Often given to junior members of staff • Thrown in the deep-end with other duties • Career development requires scholarship in substantive areas, not generic methods

  5. The Result… • We do the ‘best we can’ (but not the ‘best we could’) • Tendency to teach what we already know • Scores of individuals in scores of institutions recreating QM materials on the same topics • We could save ourselves much time and effort by pooling our resources To a certain extent this can apply to all modules, but the level of difficulty and anxiety students experience with QM exacerbates these issues

  6. An Effective QM Curriculum • Is collaborative • Draws on experts from multiple substantive areas (many examples!) • Peer reviewed teaching materials? • Pooling of assessment regimes (e.g. MCQs)

  7. Dissemination of Materials

  8. ACTIVITY: Barriers or Excuses?Barriers to Sharing? Someone might plagiarise my resources ‘Sharing’ suggests a reciprocal arrangement – what’s in it for me? My materials are very subject specific so they wouldn’t be much use to anyone else Private curriculum providers will have free access to academic materials People learn a subject through teaching it and may be tempted to take shortcuts (i.e. ‘off the shelf’ teaching) There are already examples using t-tests online so why should I upload another version? I’ve put a lot of effort into my materials, why would I just let someone else use my work?

  9. Group Discussion

  10. Protecting Authorship • Your materials can be protected under a Creative Commons license • Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA): • This license lets others remix, tweak and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Source: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ [accessed 22/01/13] • This licensing structure is built-in to platforms such as JORUM (http://www.jorum.ac.uk/)

  11. Summary • If we’re serious about improving the QM experience for students then why wouldn’t we work together? • Imagine the advantages of having a central bank of multiple choice questions (so what if students can access them?) • Build a teaching profile online • Get added value from all the effort and hard work you put into you teaching materials (what have you got to lose?) • Resources sharing is likely to be a future agenda

  12. Luke Sloan School of Social Sciences Cardiff University SloanLS@cardiff.ac.uk Learning to Share: Collaboration & (Open) Quantitative Methods Teaching Resources Online

More Related