We have moved !

The version 2.0 of this blog is now online at teachingundergradmath.wordpress.com !

WeBWork Presentation

As promised, here are the slides of Djun's presentation on WeBWork :

- PDF : WeBWorK_Online_homework_Survey.pdf,
- KeyNote Presentation : WeBWorK.key.

I also encourage you to have a look at Djun's blog : http://teaching.puregin.org.

The next teaching seminar will be on Thursday 25th. Joanne Nakonechny from Skylight will talk about assessment and evaluation. Mark your calendar!

A virtual Tutoring Centre

Just coming back from Jun Kim's talk at the Lunch Series for Teaching & Learning (I hear his presentation will be posted here soon). I'm all excited by a new idea that was discussed briefly during the question session that I want to share and discuss here: the creation of a chat room where students could ask Grad TAs their questions. This would act as the virtual equivalent of the current Tutoring Centre.

First draft of the idea: have one or two Grad TAs logged in a chat room at any given time between 9am and 5pm.

Possible improvements to think about:

- Have the chat room be available later in the night (say until 9pm for example). I don't know if this is even possible, but it might prove very popular to the students.

- Having access to a script that can read LaTeX would prove very useful.

I'm really interested to know if I'm the only one thinking this is a great idea. If so, I'll try to make this a reality for the coming Fall term.

The Montillation of Traxoline

Do we really test what is important? An illustration of an endemic problem found in accademia is the montillation of traxoline, attributed to Judy Lanier.

It is very important that you learn about traxoline. Traxoline is a new form of zionter. It is montilled in Ceristanna. The Ceristannians gristerlate large amounts of fevon and then brachter it to quasel traxoline. Traxoline may well be one of our most lukized snezlaus in the future because of our zionter lescelidge.

Directions: Answer the following questions in complete sentences. Be sure to use your best handwriting.

1. What is traxoline?

2. Where is traxoline montilled?

3. How is traxoline quaselled?

4. Why is it important to know about traxoline?

An important part of learning mathematics consists of learning the impressive amount of definitions required to cope with any topic. What seems natural and obvious to us specialists, like "a differentiable function is continuous" might sound a lot like montillation of traxoline to first year students.

LEAD Survey at UBC

In the Fall of 2008, UBC's LEAD Initiative, whose name stands for Lasting Education, Acheived and Demonstrated, commissioned Angus Reid Strategies (private company) to survey teaching views of faculty at UBC. The report is varied in its topics, including faculty perception of their role in student success, prestige of UBC with regard to education, and estimates of time spent on various teaching activities (spoiler: it's a lot). The major obstacles to improved teaching identified by the survey are what you might guess: lack of enough time, lack of resources, and lack of remuneration for additional teaching effort (not just pay).

First post !

Ok, this just a test to see how everything works...
I am still in the beta test phase and hope everything will be settled shortly!

So, as a short presentation, this blog has been created in order to have discussions and interaction about topics related teaching mathematics at an undergraduate level. It could be about lots of various topics, trying a new teaching method (for example online quizzes or clickers), how to teach one specific topic (you have a great way of presenting Taylor polynomial and would like to share it) or any kind of question/comment related to the noble art of teaching mathematics.

Also, if enough people from a same course are interested it could be used to talk about specific multi-sections courses (such as MATH 100/180, 104/184, etc).