Second day of the non-teaching period.
PhD supervision with Tris this morning. We discussed her work on fixing my errors in a preliminary CA code to model colorectal cancer development and immune cell interactions with the tumour cells. Good work really. We have implemented a framework code for the model, but now need to work on developing realistic rules based on the known biology, including diffusible species in the calculations and rules. Translating all of this into words to slot into a draft manuscript is also currently on our minds.
I also continued work on my QANZIAM talk. It's about student perceptions of criterion referenced assessment in university maths classes. Working on the QANZIAM talk so much is actually something I'm okay with: even though it is only QANZIAM, it will help in building the paper that will come out of the work. Today I brought down the data from the surveys (designed by Jen Flegg) on surveymonkey and starting some preliminary work on that - no series stats, just descriptive and summary work. What I'm hoping for here is to get a whole heap of fairly basic conference papers out as well as some more advanced journal papers that synthesise the finding across the units in which I experimented.
Tonight I've been working on FaST curriculum renewal work. That doesn't sound like research, but the way I'm viewing it, it is. We are attempting to build a culture of importance of teaching and learning, and research into T&L, within FaST. This means developing a plan for staff PD (incl seminar series to disseminate research, T&L experiments etc), a series of invited speakers to guide our work and provide us with input from external experts, a commissioned grants scheme which will see curriculum renewal work receiving (at least some) funding from the Faculty for directly relevant projects that will run like educational research projects with a view to applying for (and hopefully gaining) external funding such as that available from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council.
Phew...that's it.
Nice to see you trying to bring some great changes to the faculty. Some fantastic ideas in there! So if I am reading this right, you are trying to shape the content that is taught in the Maths degree?
ReplyDeleteMaths comes later since it is in good shape - it's a faculty wide project, so at the moment we are looking at the BSc, Biomed Science and Medical Science degrees.
ReplyDelete