What are Hot Topics?

Hot Topics are curriculum and teaching themes that have emerged in UTS from student learning experiences, student feedback surveys (SFS), consultations and other strategic projects. They are a series of professional development and engagement opportunities to enhance courses and provide longer-term support through community building and sustained critical dialogues.

Hot Topic Theme: Student Agency and Teamwork

Research is all about teamwork and it requires active participation. How do you introduce students to research? What is the potential of research-inspired learning (RIL) to educate future professionals? RIL is one of the three elements of the UTS Model of Learning and it will be the focus of this session.

Students are not regarded as “empty vessels that need to be filled”, rather as intelligent, creative, capable learners with rich potential and curiosity. There is a wealth of research in the education domain, which suggests that research-inspired learning and peer-to-peer learning enables students to learn concepts at a deeper level.

This session explores a RIL approach to project work to enhance student agency and teamwork. Students are given a research project that requires proposing the research approach, doing active experiments, reporting on findings, critiquing the process and recommending improvements for the next experiment. This RIL approach provides students the opportunity to actively practise their research skills in a team environment and write individual research reports. The learning design integrates individual with team learning as well as practice-based with research-inspired learning to enhance students’ confidence in project work.

You will learn about a RIL teamwork design with a focus on:

Approaches to research-inspired learning
Team allocation strategy
Establishing shared expectations
Feedback dialogues with groups and individuals
Assessment tasks for teams and individuals
Approaches to enhance the student learning experience

Join us in this session to share your RIL approaches and explore opportunities and changes to your RIL practices.

Presenter

Dr Steve Ling is a Senior Lecturer and active researcher in the School of Biomedical Engineering. Over the last 10 years, he has worked in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI) in biomedical applications. In the last few years, he introduced a research-inspired learning component into his AI subject and consistently achieves the excellent SFS scores (4.2-4.7) for teamwork.

This event is facilitated by the Institute for Interactive Media and Learning (IML), Teaching and Curriculum (TAC) Team.

Franziska Trede and Dimity Wehr (TACT)

Join the Hot Topics MS Teams space to stay connected, view shared resources, favourite papers, blogs and website links.

For further information or questions, email IML_Ops@uts.edu.au