From Tuesday, October 5th to Thursday, October 7th, the eighth UNIS Learning Forum took place with 95 participants (80 on-site and 15 online) from all departments as well as a group of 10 students. bioCEED was well represented during the Learning Forum with several staff and students travelling from Bergen to attend the forum and join internal bioCEED meetings. This year’s Learning Forum was all about assessment, digital tools, academic culture and development of teaching and UNIS educational offer.
Photo: Christina Hess
The Learning Forum started off on Tuesday with the first online keynote by David Boud, Professor and Director of the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning at Deakin University in Melbourne. David gave a lecture on “From assessment as looking back to assessment as looking forward”. On Wednesday, Torgny Roxå associate professor at Lund University in Sweden and iEarth, held an inspiring talk about “Academic cultures and the development of teaching” with focus on the importance of significant networks and microcultures in evolving excellent teaching practice.
Both keynote speakers had the opportunity to deepen up on their respective topics in a following workshop. The participants thus got the chance to go more into depth with David Bouds focus on sustainable feedback practices as well as with Torgny Roxå on SoTL – community building and improvement strategy. Several other workshops were also offered, with themes such as reflective writing, peer review, the use of Canvas and popular science writing.
Students trying to solve the Escape room puzzle. Photo: Sehoya Cotner
The student program included two workshops. The bioCEED team from UiB brought a portable Escape room. The 10 participating students were divided into groups and had 30 minutes to solve the “scientific Escape room”. All the teams succeeded and learned how diverse working in a group can be, and what are the most important factors indicating a good group work.
The second workshop was held by Maria Philippa Rossi, information adviser at UNIS. She gave an interesting talk about how to make science accessible and interesting for non-scientific people.
This year, not only the local student representatives from bioCEED and iEarth were invited, but also the representatives from Bergen. It was a great experience for students to exchange thoughts and ideas and talk about future collaborations.
The poster session was a nice experience with 11 posters presented by staff, students and bioCEEDsters from UiB. It gave the opportunity for presenters to tell the audience about their educational research, small SoTL projects as well as advertising for student led projects on teaching and learning. The session was organised with small groups travelling between the different posters. Each poster presenter had then 3 minutes to give a short presentation, thus allowing all participants to hear about all the different ongoing projects.
The participation from bioCEED added a large input to this year programme with 8 posters, 3 workshops, and 2 sharing sessions as well as participation into a panel debate.
Workshops
• “How to introduce reflective writing in courses that have fieldwork as one of their learning activities” with Kseniia Kalian (FieldPass, UNIS)
• “A generic peer review concept” with Roy Andersson (Lund University / UiB)
• “What can escape rooms teach us about group work?” with Sehoya Cotner, Ruben Schelbred Thormodsæter and Jonathan Soule (UiB)
Sharing sessions
• “Creating 360° Virtual Field Guides to improve field learning” with Pernille Bronken Eidesen and Simen Hjelle (UNIS)
• “What can escape rooms teach us about group work and student engagement”? with Sehoya Cotner, Ruben Schelbred Thormodsæter and Jonathan Soulé (UiB)
Posters
• “Escape rooms for Learning” with Ruben Schelbred Thormodsæter, Jonathan Soulé & Sehoya Cotner (UiB)
• “Creating 360° Virtual Field Guides to improve field learning” with Simen Hjelle & Pernille Bronken Eidesen (UNIS)
• “UNISprout” with Samira Terzenbach & Christina Hess (UNIS)
• “SCOPE – 1st student led conference on polar environment” with Christina Hess (UNIS)
• “Fieldwork, Reflection, Visualization” with Kseniia Kalian (FieldPass, UNIS)
• "bioSTATS - a platform for learning statistical analysis and management of biological data" with Jonathan Soulé (UiB)
• "bioWRITE - a digital platform for learning scientific writing" with Jonathan Soulé (UiB)
• "bioRAKEL - a safe haven for new students leading to better learning" by Lars Martin Myhre
