Large US textbooks (UKPSF: K1, K2, A4)

I am just updating my lecture notes for my foundation course in Physics. I got the original notes from the people who taught it four years ago. I am now adding a summary at the beginning and a summary at the end. I have added a few more questions in the notes. I thought I was utilizing some of the ideas from Physics Education research. 

But now when I look at the results, my notes are starting to look like one of those big American text books on physics, such as University Physics with Modern Physics by Young et al. There is always a summary of basic equations, and little boxes with equations. These textbooks essentially contain all topics in an introductory course in Physics. I don't remember using that kind of text book, when I was a undergraduate student at Imperial College.  Each lecture would recommend different more specialized textbooks, such on waves.

It could be that the British way of using books is used, because the level of the courses was higher, so a large comprehensive book didn't contain enough information. My understanding is that, these big introductory courses were unpopular with the students.

Excel certification (UKPSF: V4, K1)

One of my colleagues went to visit a placement student in London. He found that the most useful thing that the student had learned on their mathematics degree was a familiarity with the spreadsheet package Excel.  I had the same experience.

We do teach some Excel to the students, but because the staff don't like to use it, apart from entering marks, we don't perhaps teach as much as we should. Excel is really rubbish at plotting histograms, so that biases me against it. Also a useful data analysis package only existed for Windows.

My colleagues suggested that we look into getting the students to take some exam to get  Excel certification. Now that I have done a quick web search, I see that Microsoft actually off a number of certification exams.    I have seen a University in the USA off certification in the SAS statistical language, but we don't use it because it is expensive.  It is not clear to me that a University department should be also be certifying students in Excel. It might be hard to organize. It is not clear how to pay for the student's exam. Also the exams are taken at special places.

Student understanding of electostatics (UKPSF: A1 K1 K2 K3)

The first lecture of Physics II is on Monday. The subject is on electrostatics and a starting to look at currents in electricity.  So the first example is rubbing amber and it becoming charged.

 
This was know to ancient Greeks. This is a good way to introduce charge. However, I don't fully understand the mechanism, behind how the charge is separated. The mechanism is not discussed in any standard textbooks. It looks as though the physics is called: triboelectric effect. 
This is what the great Feynman says:

Yet in all our long and involved discussion we have never explained why it is that
when we rub a piece of amber we get a charge on it. So you see, this physics of ours
is a lot of fakery  -- we start out with the phenomena of lodestone and amber,
and we end up not understanding either of them very well.

To really understand the basic physics of static electricity requires that the students know about atoms. I will briefly discuss atoms and things later on in the course, so now is probably not a good time to add much more detail.

When I read a few chapters of Five easy lessons by Knight, I see that from Physics Education Research, that many students really only learn the algorithmic nature of the electricity problems. They don't really understand physical principles, such as charge conservation. Also, from the
research quoted in the book -- they don't really understand important things such that an insulator can get charged.

When I was reading a paper called Matter and Interactions by Chabay et al. they claim that the syllabus needs to be made more modern. And that the atomic theory should be used more. They have written a text book, where they use a more modern approach to physics and not this is complementary to physics education research. 

Thinking about teaching Physics II for the second time. (UKPSF A1 A2 K1)

I am just starting to teach a foundation year module called Physics II to the students. This is the second time I taught the course. So here are my thoughts on improvements.

• I would like to add more applications. I have been reading about batteries and more about medical application of radiation. These are always good for motivation. With my better understanding of cognitive load theory, I need to  make sure that the applications are clearly separate from core course material.
• I showed a few videos last time. I think it is better to download the videos from youtube if that is possible. The adverts and banners get in the way. I like the videos because they replace physics demonstrations, that we don't have. Also in the end of the course I used explicit questions, to focus their attention on the explicit thing I wanted them to think about.
• The lecture motes had some inbuilt exercises. I need to add more particularly with the new 2 hour long lectures.
• The students seemed to like the two mock tests that I ran. I provided solutions, but I could make the solutions more useful, by linking back to lecture material. Also I will add instructions on how to use the feedback in the self marking.
• There is no white board in the lecture theatre, so I am going to have to use the visualizer, when I write the odd solution to problems.

I wonder if there is a literature on how to effectively use videos in lectures.

I am sure that more things will occur to me as time progresses....

SCORM (UKPSF A4 K4)

I presented a quick example of embedding multiple choice questions into a video using the Edpuzzle online system at the recent meeting at Cardiff. I didn't make a presentation, but just did a basic "show and tell." The main comments I got were about integration with online course management systems such as moodle What I was told was that there is a common system to integrate different educational technologies together called SCORM. When I had a quick look at the web page for SCORM, I see it was invented in the USA, because of the many different educational technologies.  The technology education market is huge and worth many billions of dollars. This explains why the government got involved in the creation of standards to get educational software to talk together. It also stops "vendor lock in."

SCORM is something the technology people at the University would have to install, so that may take sometime.  Interestingly enough the MapleTA system I use doesn't use SCORM to talk to Moodle.

One person (a national teaching fellow), at the meeting,  told me that she used a similar (non free system) to check that students had watched the videos, when she was teaching using the flipped classroom.  This system integrated with Moodle via SCORM. I now see that a SCORM plugin is already installed in Moodle at Plymouth University.

 Why is this important for students? It makes it easier for the students to log into the system, because with SCORM, they could in principle use the single sign in to login.

Beyond mathcentre: electronic resources for maths assessment and support (UKPSF A3 A4 K4 V1)

Last Friday I went to a meeting called Beyond mathcentre: electronic resources for maths assessment and support at the University of South Wales in Cardiff. This is part of the Sigma network, which is a network of lectures in Mathematics based in the South West of England.

The first talk was by Embedding computer-aided assessment and other electronic resources in the curriculum, Martin Greenhow from Brunel University. He had his own computer aided assessment system. It didn't use a computer algebra system as a back end, so he was using multiple choice questions. He thought that the multiple choice questions was good for the students. It was better motivation, if a student gets 2/10 on a multiple choice than getting 0/10 on a mathematical quiz.
He spent a lot of time making the mathematical problems relevant. For example his system was used for teaching nurses how to measure out the correct amount of medicine. He had learned about the correct doses of various pills. This report gives information about errors about medication. It claims that  7000 deaths occur annually, because of medication problems.  Some of these problems are not due to arithmetic issues, but miss-identification of the doctors written notes.

Martin was a big believer in using SVG (scalable vector graphics) for figures, because the students could easily resize them.  This is useful for students who have vision or reading problems. Like everyone else he was using, or planning to use, mathjax for displaying mathematics.

He found that the students really liked the detailed feedback he provided. He also tried to find the common errors that the students made and then he would provide detailed feedback to help them. He used the phrase mal-rules for mathematical mistakes the students were making. See this paper from a cognitive perspective.

He talked to me about the entropy of questions. Also he mentioned the idea of question-space from  Chris Sangwin  
to try to quantify the number of mistakes the students could make.

Martin also used project students to help author questions and the feedback. Writing such detailed questions is a lot of work.

He also seemed to claim that if a woman's name was used in a word question, then more female students would get the correct answer. So he designed the questions to take into account diversity.

He liked the idea of computer aided assessment and exams. The students relaxed when they saw the exam questions, because they had been trained on the algebra system. If they had done no work, or cheated on the assessment systems, then they got a low mark on the exam.

So what did I learn from it. Now that I see what people are doing, they are clearly in the lead in providing detailed feedback to students. The students like the feedback, when it is tailored to their
mistakes. I will have to look again at the feedback possibilities in the commercial computer algebra system I use (MapleTA).

Adding questions to videos (UKPSF: K4 K2)

I often use screen casts when I am teaching students about programming. I am not really set up to use pod casting, where I write mathematics on a tablet. See this example by a colleague.



One of the local PGCAP people told me they thought  Martin stopped  video and then asked the students to do some questions. This turned out to be a misunderstanding.

It turned out that it is possible to embed questions into videos. See this example I have made
using edpuzzle. 

I really liked what I saw of edpuzzle. There is an equation editor, which seems to use latex to  create the questions. There is only the possibility of making multiple choice questions, but that should be fine. you.

It was easy to:

• crop the video (a similar system to the editor in youtube)
• add a question at a point in the time line of the video.
• add audio commentary at various points in the timeline

The main disadvantage is that the students must log into the system with a google email or another type of account. This is done so that the student's mark's can be recorded. This is good, because it lets me see who has taken the test. But it is bad, because some of the students may not want to register.

It is a useful tool, if I want to comment on a video made by another person. The ability to add audio clips is very useful, because I may want to make a comparison between the video and  something I have covered in the class.