York University, through its talented faculty, contribute to eCampusOntario’s virtual learning strategy Open Educational Resources (OER) collection. In December 2020, the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities unveiled its Virtual Learning Strategy (VLS), an initiative designed “to drive growth and advancement in virtual learning across the province’s post-secondary institutions,” and York University faculty members have been happy to contribute.
The ministry’s calls in 2020 and 2021 for expressions of interest presented instructors with the opportunity to create projects that expand “options for traditional and lifelong learning through the accelerated use of both online and hybrid learning.” VLS project leads are tasked with “fostering collaborative practices and emphasizing reusable and adaptable resources that can be shared through a common repository.” In other words, VLS project leads created open educational resources (OER) and other resources that have been made freely available through eCampusOntario’s Open Library.
Robert McKeown, an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS) answered the call. He joined forces with Catherine Pfaff, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Queen’s University, and Sumon Majumdar, associate professor and head of the Economics Department at Queen’s University, to create two asynchronous VLS courses to help social science students bridge the gap between high school and university mathematics, probability and statistics. Anita Lam, associate dean, teaching & learning in LA&PS at York University, helped gamify the GAMES: Intro Statistics modules. All members of the York University community can now access the modules via eClass.
“Our aim was to comprehensively cover concepts for a diverse set of learners, whether they are high school students who come to university without a strong background or just want to refresh their knowledge, or mature learners who are looking to upskill,” said Majumdar.
The courses, named GAMES 1 and 2, offer a Gentle Approach to Math, Excel and Statistics. Together they offer a comprehensive and practical refresher for students in the social sciences, economics and business. One module, GAMES: Intro Statistics, has been gamified to enhance student learning and retention.”
“Because of the pandemic and the need to teach online, I gained some experience with digitizing classes, as well as the pros and cons,” said McKeown. “I learned how to create content at home and got a sense of how to create content on a budget.”
The team is making the courses practical, using problems that are relatable, using examples from subjects such as business, politics and sports. Each has multiple modules that allows students to focus on one particular topic at a time and teaches them to interpret data when it appears in social science coursework or in the news in the form of survey data with a margin of error, for example.
To ensure that the courses were understandable and workable with York’s eClass platform, McKeown hired students to review the modules. The statistics module is now live on eClass, with the others rolling out during the year.
“This is an innovative pedagogical and practical approach to teaching math with a focus on the social sciences, which can be pretty daunting for students,” said Majumdar.
Full story available on YFile.