"Are you struggling with the fear of trying something new in your classroom? In Part Two of our conversation, Professors Felicia Vulcu and Cailtin Mullarkey talk about their belief that creating a safe and nurturing culture within a classroom community permits both students and teachers to take risks and innovate. We also discuss their favorite edtech tools for biochemistry courses, valuable takeaways from pandemic teaching, and their ideas to quickly train students with hands-on, tactile lab skills when in-person learning resumes at McMaster University. "
Memorable moments:
[00:05:37] Caitlin: There are only things to be gained from trying new approaches and really pushing yourself, especially when it comes to teaching and pedagogical practices.
[00:07:41] Caitlin: There are a lot of advantages to using an online testing platform. And some of our faculty members are saying, I'm never going back to writing a paper exam.
00:15:36] Felicia: We're trying to demystify these sort of concepts that some people have some real big, strong beliefs on, but don't always have the background to understand what's behind all of these concepts. And that was our main goal for DNA Decoded is just to give a little bit of context to some of these really popular topics.
[00:19:36] Caitlin: It's really important to, like you said, foster the sense of community. And in the ongoing pandemic era, that probably is a little more important than some of the content that we might be teaching the students.
Episode 4 Transcript: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dfS3-6niZiu8HFWSGjJx8qAaqPsYZmfn?usp=sharing
Teaching tools mentioned in this episode:
Caitlin and Felicia's MOOC course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/dna-decoded/
H5P: https://h5p.org/
Hypothesis: https://web.hypothes.is/start/
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