Welcome everyone, glad to see you this morning!
How's everyone?
Hi, I'm Karen Smith and I'm a lecturer here
at UBC in the Department of Microbiology and
Immunology.
I mainly teach first year cell biology students.
I get really excited about teaching students
about the cellular processes that occur on
something that's so small we can't even see
it with our naked eye.
We know that students might be concerned about
doing online classes.
But, let me ease your fears. Your online class
is going to be an opportunity to engage with other students.
We also have a lot of support for you because
there is a person behind that online class.
That's your instructor, like myself, and we
want you to be successful.
And we are going to do what we need to do
to ensure that you learn the material, you're
successful, and that you can move on to your
other classes at the university.
So, when you join my online class, what you
can expect is we spend a few minutes at the
start of class just checking in with each
other as a community.
And whether we do this by audio and video
online or we do that through the chat, it
gives the students an opportunity to welcome
each other and just say hello.
Teaching online is about making that class
interactive.
There's lots of powerful online tools and
activities that we use in the classroom that
we're going to use in the Fall that are going
to help you engage with that material.
Because sure you can go read on your own and
you could watch a video but that's not necessarily
processing and learning that conceptual knowledge
in a really deep way.
So, for our classes what we like to do is
we send off students electronically into a
breakout group.
This allows you to engage with the material
but also meet the people that you might be
attending class together for the rest of your
lives.
And this is going to provide that study strategy
support that you really need in higher education.
You can also expect to have something that
resembles somewhat of a lecture but this is
broken up by me asking you questions about
the material.
So, you'll be using your tablet or your cell
phone to answer what we call clicker questions
so that you can click in an answer and you
can gauge how well you're learning and how
well you understand the material.
And it also gives you an opportunity to participate
with others and see at what others are thinking
and how they're doing in the class.
And by having a very structured, what we call,
learning path of pre-classwork, in-classwork,
and post-classwork, it really helps students
keep on track.
So, a lot of opportunities in online learning
is you can do things on your own time.
Congratulations on getting accepted to UBC!
I hope to see you at some point on campus
at UBC but in the meantime I think you'll
have an amazing experience just being a student
in this online environment.
