Guest post by Salma Shaheen, Pure Mathematics (salma.shaheen@uwaterloo.ca)

In this blog post, I will tell you about one excellent talk that I have attended at the CMS winter meeting in Toronto (December 02 to December 05). It was my first time attending a CMS gathering and my first conference in person since the outbreak. The meeting features many guest speakers, keynote speakers, mini courses and motivational talks that significantly benefit my teaching as well as research. There were some teaching related sessions in which presenters shared their educational research results and the methods to validate educational approaches.

My only concrete goal for the conference was to attend instructional sessions so that I can improve my teaching abilities and grow professionally. For this, I attended one mini course entitled “Instructional skills for new instructors”, session on “Where are we on the mathematics and statistics education hype curve?”, and session on Community building in instructor training.

The effort done by Thomas Wong and his team at Heriot-Watt University (Fostering Global Teaching Communities) to overcome the pedagogical and technological obstacles that are necessary to educate effectively during the epidemic was particularly the most inspiring presentation for me and I will discuss it.

Heriot-Watt University has three main campuses: Edinburgh, U.K.; Dubai, U.A.E.; and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. During pandemic, their main goal is to develop or design a fitting subject that provides a sustainable teaching/mentoring model. The first thing that came into their mind was to replace lectures with videos because they are simple to convey information about, simple to produce and edit, have low technological requirements, and provide a close match to online lectures. But it has many drawbacks, such as being a passive learning medium, a one-directional broadcast, and often lacking continuity; on top of that, it is extremely dull to record alone! Thus, they modified the idea of recording and decided to use a model where there is a presenter whose duties are to prepare and deliver content; an impartial moderator for explanation, clarification, and corrections; and a student for pacing, clarity, questions, and feedback. In the academic model, Dr. Wong was presenter; the moderator was Dr. Wong’s Malaysian colleague, Dr. Kai Lin Ong and Emma was an undergraduate student. The whole team Spent 1 month over summer for recording and building the course.

During this time, Dr. Wong presented the material to the student live, and the student was allowed and encouraged to ask several questions while Dr. Ong would be there to correct any mistakes he saw and act as a bridge to connect Emma and Dr. Wong. Emma asked questions in the videos to make sure that any of the explaining being done by presenter is clear. During the term, three weekly units are available:

• Summary and Learning Objectives
• Video
• Reading and Exercises

Videos help students understand the material and further provide background for reading. There are discussion boards, assessments, and student feedback opportunities for the remaining portions of the course.

Most of the students who attended this course responded positively and mentioned this as a strength. According to students, they are by far one of the best teaching teams among the rest in the aspect of engagement with students and explaining things, not to mention the non-monotone lectures with a student in it.

The way of adding student (Emma) and moderator (Dr. Ong) in lecture videos made it seem like I was at an actual class, and not just learning from the video. Dr. Wong and his team won an award for their work during the pandemic.

After the pandemic, most of the universities are trying to develop courses online and this model is amazingly effective because every time Emma asks a question in the video it will help struggling students while watching lecture.