Faculty of Management Professor Elena Obukhova is eager for her students to become “discerning media consumers.” In a recent article in The McGill Reporter “How a Desautels professor is sensitizing students to fake news,” Professor Obukhova describes an assignment she gives students to develop their skill at critically evaluating media content so that they can discern facts from fake news.
Continue reading Getting Students To Distinguish Fact From Fallacy In The Media
For the first time, Professors Kirsten Anker, Yaëll Emerich and Tina Piper from the Faculty of Law teamed up to teach the “Property” course (LAWG 220 D1 and D2), a new year-long “integrated course teaching civil, common and Indigenous property law.”[1] Their students’ final assignment was to create a poster related to the development of the Royal Victoria Hospital site. Working in teams, the students had to “explore property issues related to the development of the former site of the Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH).”[2] Specific objectives for students were to:
A number of instructors at McGill have implemented peer assessment (PA) in their courses and have generously shared some of their reflections on the topic.
Professor Marta Cerruti teaches Materials Surfaces: A Biomimetic Approach (MIME 515/CHEE 515) to undergraduate and graduate students in the Faculty of Engineering. In a conversation about her experience with PA, she shares how she implemented PA in her course both within and among student teams, reflects on students’ PA experience, and gives advice for instructors thinking about trying PA in their courses.
If you teach at McGill and give students multiple choice question (MCQ) final exams, you’ll be receiving a “Test Item Statistics Report” from the Exam Office sometime after the end of term. This report, also known as an “item analysis report,” is sent to you along with the exam results. The report lets you know all kinds of interesting things about your exam, such as:
Continue reading ‘Tis the season: reviewing multiple choice question exam results at the end of term
In this post in our new series “Hacking myCourses,” we look at a simple way to print out Quizzes created in myCourses. Just a quick reminder: we’re not actually hacking myCourses; we mean “hacking” the tools in myCourses to make them do something that isn’t obvious to do. Continue reading Hacking myCourses: Printing quizzes
Welcome to our first post in our new series “Hacking myCourses”. We don’t actually mean “hacking” myCourses (as not to raise eyebrows at IT Security)… but rather, how can you “hack” the tools in myCourses to make them do something that isn’t intuitively obvious to do?
You may be in a situation where you want to grade open-ended questions automatically for completion rather than for correctness. Here is a trick you can use to auto-grade open-ended questions such that anything a student enters in the answer box receives full points. Continue reading Hacking myCourses: Auto-grading open-ended quiz questions
There’s a new course at McGill. It’s called Communicating Science (CCOM 314). Diane Dechief, a Faculty Lecturer at the McGill Writing Centre, designed the course and is teaching its first run this semester.
I interviewed Diane to learn what the course addresses and how she designed it. The first thing I learned is that communicating science is a growing interest for many scientists.
Diane explained: There’s a movement, both online and off, toward increasing science communication. It’s a push for academics to become better at talking about their research to non-specialists, and for scientists, in particular, to assert their knowledge, control their message, and communicate with the public more broadly. Continue reading Helping Students Communicate Science – Beyond the Classroom!
