With the 2022 TBLC Meeting just around the corner, we would like to bring attention to one of our featured workshops: Are Your Learning Objectives More Difficult or More Complex? What’s the Difference? This session will be presented by Cynthia and Paul Standley from The University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix. We hope you enjoy this session!

Title: Are Your Learning Objectives More Difficult or More Complex? What’s the Difference?
Presented by: Cynthia Standley – The University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix
Paul Standley from The University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix
Date & Time: Wednesday, April 13, 2022, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM Eastern and Tuesday, April 19, 2022, 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM Eastern

As educators, we are tasked with writing learning objectives that are specific, measurable, realistic, and observable behaviors of what the learner is to do. We rely on Bloom’s Taxonomy to do this. With the advent of the flipped classroom, there is an ever-increasing need to incorporate higher-level learning objectives as students engage in active learning. This workshop will focus on writing those higher-level learning objectives. In writing these higher-level objectives, there is a tendency to write more difficult objectives, rather than more complex. Just because a learning objective is difficult doesn’t make it more complex. Students can be exerting great effort to achieve learning, but still processing at the lowest level of thinking! To move up Bloom’s taxonomy, we must engage more complexity. In this workshop, we will first review the difference between complexity and difficulty and complete a group activity to determine if the examples provided reflect increased difficulty or complexity. Then, we will move on to taking a simple, familiar task and describe questions or activities that move the task up Bloom’s Taxonomy. Finally, we will end by taking a concept students need to learn and describe questions or activities that move that concept up Bloom’s Taxonomy. Through this stepwise approach, we should clear up any misconceptions about the difference between difficulty and complexity and be better prepared to write those more complex, higher-level learning objectives!

We hope you enjoy this and our other exciting workshops.

With the 2022 TBLC Meeting just around the corner, we would like to bring attention to one of our featured workshops: An Easy Guide to Teaching TBL with Engaging Online/blended Activities for STEM Students. This session will be presented by Stuart Clark from the University of New South Wales Sydney. We hope you enjoy this session!

Title: An Easy Guide to Teaching TBL with Engaging Online/blended Activities for STEM Students
Presented by: Stuart Clark – UNSW Sydney
Date & Time: Tuesday, April 12, 2022 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM Eastern and Tuesday, April 19, 2022 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM Eastern

Engaging students virtually and in mixed online/face-to-face environments can be difficult, especially with STEM activities. In today’s world, teachers and lecturers have access to an ever-growing number of online tools to support the delivery of their teaching, but the number and complexity of tools can be confusing to many educators. Multiple platforms can also be a problem for students who are required to split their attention between complex information presented and solved in different tools. In this workshop, we will examine one type of tool – interactive notebooks – that allow lecture material, videos, equations and coding to be integrated into one place.

STEM students can use the notebook by adding notes, do their own calculations or solutions and sharing their solutions with educators. Interactive notebooks work well at different stages of TBL – they can be used to create preparation material and provide application exercises that already perform some calculations and allow team members to adjust their results by discussion and interaction to provide answers to the application exercise. Elements of cognitive load theory can help us design these interactive notebooks to reduce the demands of working memory for students and carefully build long-term memory. Interactive notebooks allow for careful balancing of cognitive load, with worked examples being developed that gradually increase the amount of input the student contributes. Interactive notebooks can also be used to provide faded worked solutions. For example, educators can use interactive notebooks to hide a formula but allow students to play with parameters. This workshop will go through the basics of cognitive load theory and interactive notebooks and put you in the place of educational designers working to improve interactive notebooks for your students.

We hope you enjoy this and our other exciting workshops.