The use of a «flipped classroom» approach in teaching foreign languages to technical university students

With the development of modern technologies, a flipped classroom approach is gaining popularity. The idea of «flipped classroom» approach is that the main stages of the teaching and learning process, such as classroom activities and homework, change places. It means that the theoretical material is studied by students on their own by watching videos and listening to audio lectures recorded by the teacher, or preformed materials downloaded from websites on the Internet, while in the classroom the students are involved in fulfilling practical tasks and discussion of problematic issues. Goal. The purpose of the article is to determine the potential of the flipped classroom approach in teaching foreign languages to university students. Methodology. The flipped classroom approach assumes that students have an unlimited access to electronic resources. There are the following advantages of the technology: learning at one’s own pace, advance student preparation, overcoming the limitations of class time, increasing the participation in the classroom activities. Among the disadvantages are students’ being lack of equipment and unlimited access to the Internet resources. Another disadvantage of the technology is an extra workload on teachers who have to develop, record and upload lectures, which take time and skill, as well as carefully integrate them into the classroom work. Results. The data of the university students’ interview on the benefits and disadvantages of the approach are given which reveal conflicting points of view though the majority mentioned the availability of the e-learning materials always at hand as the key benefit of the approach. Originality of the study is the revealing of the potential of the flipped classroom approach in teaching foreign languages to university students, emphasizing its pros and cons, exploring the ways of its further development. Practical value. Despite some of its disadvantages the technology can be widely used in teaching foreign languages, especially in the frames of distance learning as it gives the students an opportunity of learning languages on their own with the teacher’ role of being the facilitator.

Keynote: Accountable assessment

There is widespread agreement about the importance of accounting for the extent to which educational systems advance student learning. Yet, the forms and formats of accountable assessments often ill serve students and teachers; the summative judgements of student performance that are typically employed to indicate proficiencies on benchmarks of student learning commonly fail to capture student performance in ways that are specific and actionable for teachers. Timing is another key barrier to the utility of summative assessment. In the US, summative evaluations occur at the end of the school year and may serve future students, but do not help teachers better support the students who were tested. In contrast, formative assessments provide actionable grounds to improve the quality of instruction on the basis of both the granularity and specificity of their content and their timing. Unfortunately, the psychometric qualities of formative assessments are often unknown. I describe an innovative approach to assessment that aims to blend the productive characteristics of both summative and formative assessment. The resulting assessment system is accountable to students and teachers by providing actionable information for improving classroom instruction, and at the same time, it addresses the demands of psychometric quality for purposes of system accountability as it is currently practiced (in the US). The innovative assessment system relies on partnership with teachers to generate (1) a shared conceptual frame for describing instructional goals and valued forms of teaching and learning; (2) a set of electronic tools to help teachers detect, share, analyse, and interpret student learning data; and (3) classroom and school-level community professional development structures to support and sustain a widespread practice of assessing to guide instruction. These features are coupled with new psychometric models, developed by the Berkeley Evaluation and Research Center, that provide more robust estimates of student learning by linking information from multiple sources, including student classroom work, student responses to formative assessments, and summative evaluations. (Mark Wilson will address the psychometric modeling during this conference.) Here I describe challenges and prospects for this innovation with a case study of its implementation in a K–5 elementary school that is seeking to improve the quality of instruction and students’ understandings of measure and rational number arithmetic.

Implementing Technology for Teaching: The Use of a Mobile/Tablet Approach for Enhancing Students’ Learning (Design Interaction) Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL)

In industrial design education, the curriculum should be structured to facilitate and advance student learning. The purpose of this work is to enhance the education by introducing mobile lectures and imbedded innovative approach to Bournemouth University (BU) Education, which will be employed by the lecturer in the years to come.

Mass Incarceration and Public Health at the Undergraduate Level: Course Design and Rationale for Bachelor of Science in Public Health Programs

Schools and programs of public health are appropriately positioned to advance student learning opportunities on structural drivers of health inequities, including mass incarceration. Although there are often undergraduate-level public health courses about general topics such as health inequities or social determinants of health, courses on the intersection of public health and mass incarceration at the baccalaureate level are rare. This article describes the design, development, and implementation of a baccalaureate-level public health course focused on mass incarceration to afford the public health workforce the opportunity to gain foundational exposure to the historical and structural forces influencing social drivers of inequality and the critical role of the discipline of public health to address and tackle such inequities using evidence-based approaches.

Online English Teaching Course Score Analysis Based on Decision Tree Mining Algorithm

With the advent of the Big Data era, information and data are growing in spurts, fueling the deep application of information technology in all levels of society. It is especially important to use data mining technology to study the industry trends behind the data and to explore the information value contained in the massive data. As teaching and learning in higher education continue to advance, student academic and administrative data are growing at a rapid pace. In this paper, we make full use of student academic data and campus behavior data to analyze the data inherent patterns and correlations and use these patterns rationally to provide guidance for teaching activities and teaching management, thus further improving the quality of teaching management. The establishment of a data-mining-technology-based college repetition warning system can help student management departments to strengthen supervision, provide timely warning information for college teaching management as well as leaders and counselors’ decision-making, and thus provide early help to students with repetition warnings. In this paper, we use the global search advantage of genetic algorithm to build a GABP hybrid prediction model to solve the local minimum problem of BP neural network algorithm. The data validation results show that Recall reaches 95% and F1 result is about 86%, and the accuracy of the algorithm prediction results is improved significantly. It can provide a solid data support basis for college administrators to predict retention. Finally, the problems in the application of the retention prediction model are analyzed and corresponding suggestions are given.

Integration of Intercultural Learning into an International Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experience in London, England

As the number of international advanced pharmacy practice experiences (APPEs) continues to grow, this is an opportunity to incorporate intercultural learning (ICL) to further advance student pharmacist training. Purdue University student pharmacists participated in a clinical research focused APPE in London, England. To prepare for this APPE, students completed a one-credit course focused on intercultural learning and travel preparation. The purpose of this report is to describe the implementation and assessment of ICL during this course and international APPE. The course includes interactive ICL activities, reflective assignments, and personalized assessments. During the eight-week APPE, student pharmacists worked on an individualized Intercultural Development Plan®, which includes ICL activities, focused reflection, and check-ins. ICL was assessed using the Intercultural Development Inventory® (IDI®) at the beginning of the course and at least four weeks after APPE completion. Student APPE feedback was also reviewed for evidence of ICL. Twenty-seven students completed the course and APPE from 2018 to 2020. The average IDI developmental orientation (DO) before the course was 91.7, placing students in minimization. The average perceived orientation was 120.9, placing students in acceptance. There were 18 students who completed the post-APPE IDI: 12 students demonstrated growth in the DO (range: 1.5–23.72), and six students experienced a decrease in their DO. Intercultural learning can be implemented and assessed as part of an international APPE.

Performance report for a 10-year-old MD/PhD Program: A survey of trainees at the University of Ottawa

Purpose: Integrated MD/PhD programs are relatively new in Canada and represent a platform to train the next generation of clinician-scientists. However, MD/PhD programs vary substantially by structure, funding and mentorship opportunities, and there exists a paucity of data on the overall students’ successes and challenges. The purpose of this study is to assess objective and subjective metrics of the MD/PhD Program at the University of Ottawa. Methods: Students in all years of the program were invited to complete a 58- question survey, and the resulting data were analyzed by descriptive statistics. Results: Our survey had an 88.5% (23/26) participation rate. The program has been gaining interest and the number of applications increased by 178% between 2013 and 2018. Tuition support was considered an essential element in accepting the admission offer, as 47.8% of students would have declined admission without full tuition coverage. The MD/PhD students were heavily engaged in scholarly activities, with an average of 8.3 presentations/ publications per respondent. Respondents indicated low satisfaction with formal career planning advice (28.6% satisfied/very satisfied) and program transition guidance (22.2%). When delivered informally by peers, both career planning advice and program transition guidance were experienced as more satisfying (65.2% and 63.6%, respectively). Only 34.8% of survey respondents identified as female, highlighting the challenge of achieving diversity in clinician-scientist training programs. Conclusion: Our report contributes to the body of knowledge on concrete obstacles experienced by students within MD/PhD programs and key areas that can be improved upon—locally, provincially and nationally—to further advance student success.