Episode 5: Active learning and randomized tests with Dr. Celina Berg

Download: 05-Dr.Berg-Transcript

 

THIAGO

Welcome to the Teach Anywhere Podcast, EdTech Stories from Real Educators, where we interview faculty and instructors about how they use educational technology in their courses at UVic. My name is Thiago Hinkel, and my pronouns are he and him.

 

BECCA

I’m your co-host, Becca Edwards, and my pronouns are she, her.

 

BECCA

Before we begin, we would like to acknowledge and respect the Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples on whose traditional territory the university stands, and the Songhees and Esquimalt peoples, whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day with us.

 

THIAGO

With us today is Dr. Celina Berg. Dr. Berg is an associate teaching professor in the Department of Computer Science at UVic. Celina teaches a range of computer science courses and develops curriculum to support active learning lectures, leveraging videos and programming tools. Hello, Celina. Welcome to the podcast.

 

CELINA

Hi, Thiago. Thanks for having me.

 

BECCA

So thanks so much for joining us today, Celina. On your website, you mention active learning lectures. What do you mean by active learning lectures?

 

CELINA

That means when my students come to my class, I expect them to actually work and work with me, not just sit and listen to a lecture and actually actively work on exercises that I give them. A lot of the time I’m not even talking. And when possible, I bring TAs in to help me because we do have a big classroom with like, you know, 2 to 300 students sometimes. And it’s really nice for them to be able to interact with myself and TAs and really work on their problem solving skills, you know, and get help on the hard stuff, not just watch me do the problem solving. Because doing problem solving is a very, very different scenario than watching someone else, someone else’s thought process, right?

 

BECCA

And how did this become one of your teaching focuses? Like what inspired you to focus in on active learning in the classroom?

 

CELINA

So I started teaching when I was doing grad school, and I did my grad school here at UVic, and I didn’t know a lot about when I first started teaching, didn’t know a lot about education research or, you know, the things that you both work on, but I just went on instinct, right? I was just like, oh, you know what, like I want students to think and ask questions, and so I would pose questions and I started creating like little worksheets for them, like here and there in class and I’d give them out. And I got like really good feedback. They were like, oh, you know what? This is really awesome! It’s nice that I can go back to it after. And I was like, oh, this is great. And this was quite a while ago. I started doing like screencast, and this was like in the early two thousands, 2005, kind of. Not just giving a static exam solution but actually working through a solution and posting those. So those kinds of things I just felt like, I felt like it worked. After my PhD, I went to UBC; I was in a tenure-track position there, teaching-faculty there. And they have a lot more resources I think than we had at UVic in terms of funding because of the Carl Wieman Institute, and they really were focusing on active learning in the classroom and technology to support learning. So I spent almost five years there, and I learned so much from my colleagues there about integration of technology, about educational research, about evidence-based teaching. I guess like I went to an institution where everyone was doing this. And it was really supported, to the point where the feedback I got from students in my evaluations were not, oh, you know, she doesn’t do this or she doesn’t do this. It was, this is really good, this is really good, and, you know, it would be really good if you added some clicker questions in during class to get our feedback. Like, they were very savvy and understood the technology that was available for their learning opportunities as well. So I felt like when I came back to UVic, sort of a coming home to the institution I did my PhD at, I was like, we got to get this now. I really got to integrate these kinds of things into our practices in CS. Yeah.

 

THIAGO

So you tell us you studied here at UVic, then spent some time at UBC, and returned to UVic, right?

 

CELINA

Yeah.

 

THIAGO

Can you tell us a bit more about this return and maybe expand, how was it when you started here, right, on your current role?

 

CELINA

So there were some personal reasons for me moving back from Vancouver to Victoria, obviously family, but UVic has always really felt like home. One thing that I did miss when I went to UBC was the smaller size here. I loved the ability to walk out of my office into the building and see students that I recognize. And I’m like, oh, you’re in my class, you’re in my class. How is it going? Like what, you know, what are you working on? How is your assignment going? See you in class! You know, those kinds of things. I didn’t have that feel at UBC. It is just massive. I had to, you know, have a bike to get between class so that I could get there on time. It was just so big and I didn’t, you know, it was a different feel. I started to make connections with TA teams. My TA team itself was 50 students, right? Like, just massive. So I felt like when the opportunity came up for me to come back to UVic, I really felt like I wanted to go back to that smaller feel and I wanted to bring all of the great things that I had learned and experienced at UBC to UVic.

 

CELINA

Now, back at UVic, I’ve really been focusing mostly on the intro programming courses that, you know, are the foundation for the students. I’m really like, super excited to interact with people that are new to programming and discovering it. And I think that’s the thing that I really love about the CSC 110, and I’ve taught CSC 111 here as well is that, you know, we get this mix of students that’s like, yes, I’ve programmed before and so many haven’t and they’re like, I got to take this course or I think I should take this course or my mom thinks I should take this course, right? And they like, discover it and they’re like, this is awesome! Like, I’m really enjoying this. There’s the other stories too, where they’re like, never taking this course again, Celina, just help me get through it, right? And I understand both sides. So, yeah, that’s kind of how I got back to you UVic and what I’ve been doing so far.

 

THIAGO

Wonderful. Thank you.

 

BECCA

So, today you wanted to tell us about one of your courses in particular. I think you said it was Computer Science 110. So it sounds to me like this might be an introduction course. Is that right?

 

CELINA

Yeah, it’s sort of the introduction to programming.

 

BECCA

And what is this course about and how many students are in your course and what does the typical student look like? Give us a little introduction to your course.

 

CELINA

Well, we have had, in computer science we’ve had, I guess luxury/problem, depends on your perspective, of growth, student growth. So, you know, our class sizes have just been growing like crazy and students are really interested, which is a great thing. It’s also a challenge. So last year I think I had between two sections, we started with about 550 to 580 students. I’m not… my memory is not quite there, but in that range. So quite big, big classes, lots of interest. You know, it is, this course is a service course for students that are required to take a CS requirement for their program. It’s also a course that our CS majors are required to take, some engineers opt to take it as well. it’s an alternative for their intro to programming course. So you can kind of get the feel like it’s this big class with a wide range of abilities and backgrounds and interests.

 

BECCA

Ok. So, when you teach this course, and I think you’ve kind of already answered this question, but I’ll go ahead and ask it, when you teach this course, what kind of instructional strategies do you focus on? Like, what is your kind of approach to teaching in this course?

 

CELINA

To answer that, I want to take you back a step. So I’ve always believed that, you know, students, math, computer science, intro to programming or learning to program is really very similar to learning math and calculus. The more you do it, the more you practice, you know, the better you get at it and the more you start to recognize, oh, this is this kind of problem, I’m gonna use this, you know, process and I’m gonna apply this construct and, and there I can solve the problem that way. You know, and even this idea of types of learners has been sort of challenged I think in educational research that, you know, people have talked in the past about, oh, we’ve got visual learners, we’ve got auditory learners. Really that’s been challenged recently, and it’s people learn by practicing, people learn by doing. So my goal has always been, can I get, can I encourage students to do the practice, like put in the work, right? Give them the ability to do that. And so um when I was at UBC, I actually integrated a tool, like this programming practice tool that was actually written by a master’s student here at UVic. Yeah, Anna Russo Kennedy, which she’s, you know, long since graduated, she created this sort of proof of concept programming practice tool. And I was like, hey, I’m going to use this. It wasn’t, I want to say it wasn’t reliable enough, like it was yes proof of concept, but it wasn’t reliable enough for me to use for grading purposes like for assessment and stuff. But I used it as an optional tool. Students used it; they used it probably not the way I intended. I expected them to sort of use it frequently. They used it to cram for exams, but they used it. And sort of getting that feedback from them. So I mean, for myself, I really want students to, you know, have that ability to work on their own and practice on their own in their own time.

 

BECCA

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

 

THIAGO

So you were mentioning in the beginning in your introduction when talking about active learning, right, that your objective is to have students participate as much as possible. And I wonder by using this strategy or this tool that you just mentioned, how did that help you in that sense to get students to participate more, more actively in your classes?

 

CELINA

Yeah. Interesting. Great question, Thiago. So that was sort of back in, you know, past history. Fast forward, we hit COVID. Everything kind of changed. For myself, I had come to UVic and I was like, ok, well, I’m going to change, you know, I’m going to update these courses to integrate active learning, do some videos, have some pre-lecture work for students, and we’ll do exercises and activities in the classroom. Well, COVID hit and I was like, well, I’m doing this now, like, and it was like, we converted things to what I knew was the best way to online with, you know, pre-lecture videos and pre-lecture quizzes. So students would interact with the material and have, you know, some feedback before they came to lecture about their understanding. And then we take those constructs and we’d actually apply them to programming problems in class. And again, COVID, this was online, but I was limited with what we had with Brightspace. And Brightspace, I mean, that did offer, you know, the ability to, you know, have multiple choice questions and those kinds of things. But what I found was COVID changed things for a lot of institutions. So University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, UIUC, they had been using in-house this tool called Prairie Learn. And one of my old colleagues at UBC, she used to be at UIUC, UBC started using this tool because they were like, well, you know what, we’re getting a lot of requests for this. Let’s make this an open source piece of software that other institutions can use. And it really took things from, yeah, Brightspace provides this functionality for making questions that are, you know, pretty standard but pretty, you know, not very high up on Bloom’s Taxonomy, if you want to talk pedagogically, right? So instead I’m able to write questions that actually get students to write code and highly randomized questions. So I can give you a question, you don’t get it right. But you can, if you retry it, you get another variant of the question, which was not anything that I had in Brightspace, right? It was, you know, I give them a question and they just knew they got it wrong. So they try another answer, another answer until they, you know, eliminated all the possibilities of the choices. But so this tool really provided the ability to create content that made students think and solve problems, but also in a highly randomized way.

 

BECCA

You said that that tool is called Prairie Learn. Is that right? And can you, so you kind of said a little bit about what the tool does, but can you say a little bit more about the tool? Just so that what would be a two-sentence description of Prairie Learn?

 

CELINA

So Prairie Learn lets me as an instructor write questions for students that are highly randomized and allows me to provide real-time feedback to them on their solutions, which is not anything that I’ve ever had before, besides the proof of concept programming tool that I had used before that Anna created. So you’re able to, anything I can write in code I can write in the back end. The students don’t see that side of it, but I can programmatically write questions and generate randomized data. It allows me the ability to again randomize assessments with the quizzes and midterms as well as with assignments give students the opportunity to sort of get feedback, update their answer and then try again.

 

BECCA

And so is Prairie Learn like most useful say for instructors in computer science? Or is it something that could be used by like a range of different instructors, like from different disciplines?

 

CELINA

Right. So I feel like it has well like Brightspace, it would have use across multi disciplines. I know it’s being used in physics, engineering and math in these other institutions. Anything that you can, for example, I mean, imagine physics, you know, you generate a graph for a question, well, that graph can be generated, you know, thousands of different variants of that graph. So all of a sudden you have, you know, we’ve written one question but it gives students the opportunity to practice with it as well as gives me the ability to give you two assessments and you two wouldn’t have the same question or the same answer.

 

THIAGO

So it sounds to me that it’s randomized in the sense not that you have like a huge pool of questions that the program will like select for students. But on the other hand, it’s like variables, maybe that you can add in questions themselves and those variables will change for depending who is taking the exam or the test.

 

CELINA

Yeah. So you think about if you’re familiar with Brightspace and they kind of have the question pools and they would draw from those, I write one question and the variability is written into the question and then the system itself generates those variants at the time of the test. So, I mean, it sounds scary, but I mean, a lot of our, a lot of our scientists know how to program, you know, write these basic programs and they’re using these Python libraries. So, like I said, anything in the back end is just written in Python. So our mathematicians, our biologists, our physicists, they know how to write this stuff. It’s not just, oh, this would only be useful in computer science. Yeah.

 

BECCA

All right. Um So I think that you’ve kind of told us a little bit about what you were trying to achieve with the use of Prairie Learning. You’ve also kind of told us how you decided on that as a tool, you were recommended by colleagues. And it served the purpose of creating these kind of randomized questions. So now I’m gonna ask you, did anything get in the way when you selected the tool and you were ready to use it kind of what was your process? And did anything get in the way of that process?

 

CELINA

That’s a really great question. I’m gonna pause you just for one second because I just want to bring you back because it feels like what I just said was like, oh yeah, it’s so easy to, well, I just made these questions and we just used it and it was totally fine. But it wasn’t like, oh, I just picked this up a month before classes started. And we started, I started to look at this in January of 2022. By May of 2022 I was teaching that course in the summer, I used it again just as an optional thing for students to try out, to do some practicing on nothing for assessments, nothing for grades just so that they could, you know, again, use it to get the feedback on their programming when they felt like programming, when they felt like doing their homework, right? But then came September and I fully integrated my assessments into Prairie Learn. So when I say assessments, we have everything, you know, for grades, some are formative, some are summative, but formative assessments, the quizzes, pre-lecture quizzes, it’s not worth very much. But again, to encourage students to, you know, do the pre-lecture work come into class with some understanding of the things. Those were combined with videos that I had already created during COVID. So that was great reuse. Labs. They had a lab and an assignment each week. And then within class, we actually did activities and exercises as well that were very similar, not the same but similar to the exercises they would do in the lab. So they would go into the lab and they would have the ability to get help from TAs, but they still had the tool feedback and what they were able to do, what they were never able to do before in my 110 class, was they were able to submit their code, test runners would run, and they’d be like, oh, this isn’t quite right. Let me fix it and resubmit or oh, I named my file wrong and I just got zero. Let me fix that and resubmit. Before, with Brightspace, It was so static. The students uploaded a file, my TAs downloaded the file, you know, and then tested. And I was like, oh, well, sorry. I like, I got 550 students. Don’t make that mistake again. Right? And this is why I had a lot of little assessments through the term so that if they did make a mistake, they typically learned from it and didn’t make it again. Right? But this was so much better because they were able to get that feedback, fix their code, learn from it, because that’s the goal for me is not to penalize you, is for you to learn, right? So that was great. The assignments they did on their own. Again but that same process. And then we, I actually started to use, I used the tool for midterm. So students brought their computers into the classroom, and they again got the feedback during the exam of what was wrong and they could fix it. Some of the short answer classic questions, obviously, you know, a single attempt on those because those were, you know, simpler, quicker questions. But so I’m explaining this to you just so that you can, you know, see the scaffolding that happens. So students had three midterms throughout the term. They had a final and then a final exam and all of these were in this Prairie Learn environment. Now, challenges. So getting Prairie Learn integrated with UVic login system was… it took time. LTSI, Craig Scharien was great in helping me connect with the privacy office, worked with the Prairie Learn people because they are hosting the tool so the students are accessing it. So we were able to come to an agreement and get it so that it was, you know, safe for students to use, and the privacy office approved it. Now we’re working on integrating it further so that students will pay for the hosting of it. I think a small fee somewhere between $10 and $15. So to allow more courses to use it. And again, LTSI is really helping us to work with Prairie Learn to get that rolling.

 

BECCA

So it sounds like you kind of used it as a test case as like an optional tool during one course. And then when you realized that it would be really useful, you then worked through the channels at UVic in order to get their approval so you could kind of move forward with using it more universally?

 

CELINA

Yeah. Because, I mean, I don’t want to force students to use anything that hasn’t been, you know, approved by our university for sure. The other thing with, you know, getting approval takes time and like I said, we, you know, we did start on this early in 2022, that approval did not come through right at the beginning of term. So my students did not have the tool for the first few weeks. So for their first two assignments, they didn’t have it. We were using Brightspace in the old process and the old quizzes, and then we transitioned. Their first midterm was on Prairie Learn. But I feel like that was a challenge for me and for my students in that they didn’t have that full ramp-up. I didn’t have it from the get-go. And I feel like it would have been different for them in their first midterm. But I still also feel like that first midterm was very different than their working on their assignments in their labs. There was a time pressure, there was a stress. There was a, oh, my gosh, this is telling me it’s wrong and I have no idea what’s wrong with it. And I got more questions to answer. Like it was that. You could see that sense of panic with some of them; others of them were like, oh, this is awesome. I know I got, you know, this, this and this and you know, I’m done and I’m out of here. But that first midterm was, you know, when I came away from it, I was like, whoa, the marks are way lower than I thought they would be. And this is like, oh, we’re going to have to look at what’s happening here. But what I saw was students started to use the tool more, started to use like because I had input a whole bunch of practice problems that weren’t for marks but just for them to practice with. They started to do them, they’re coming to office hours, they’re asking questions about, oh, you know what, like I’m still, you know, this is working but this isn’t working. Why is that? Why is it not working? Really great learning, right? And we were really like converging on this mastery based learning that I envisioned from like years and years back, like students actually putting in the practice and getting that feedback, fixing their mistakes, and then moving on. That being said, as the term went on, you know, we did have some attrition clearly that happens with, you know, these large courses, but the students that did stay with the course, the midterm scores, the averages went up, their ability to, you know, see an error and react to it and understand it, which is really what programming is about because you don’t write code, you don’t write things perfectly to begin with. Being able to, you know, change that, update it and then submit something that was correct was just phenomenal. I was now testing them on that ability, and I’d never ever been able to do that before. You can’t do that on a written exam. They can’t get that feedback and fix it and change it. So I’m really testing them on their ability to program, right?

 

BECCA

So that’s really interesting that you kind of mentioned this like real world skill. I mean, I have friends who program and I see how they program, and I see how like you try something, you have to like make changes and adapt. And so I just like the ability for this tool to give your students the option or the opportunity to have that like real world lived experience in advance of like seeking employment in the field. That’s really valuable.

 

CELINA

Yeah. Yeah. It’s, I mean, I think it’s, it’s amazing to be able to test them on the actual skill. Because it’s not real to write code on a piece of paper and have it completely correct from the start. And I think that our grading process before took that into account, where we could. But I, you know, really like this trajectory where we are at. By the final exam, again, the final exam was long, three hours. Lots of… a bunch of questions. Many students were finishing early though. And, again, able to sort of work through the problems, take the input and fix their code and yeah.

 

THIAGO

So it sounds like the tool will give you feedback on time and you can keep working on the same question until you get it right. Correct?

 

CELINA

And, and again, depends on how you want to set up the question. You can set it up so that students, you know, with multiple attempts, maybe their mark goes down a little bit, right? Or they have a limited number of attempts, right? Again, depends on your pedagogical perspective.

 

THIAGO

And I wonder how did your students initially react to that, that they would have the chance, you know, to get feedback and to interact with the question and have like more chances to get it right.

 

CELINA

Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, during an exam you can’t really ask them for sure. And the ones that I was made aware of were the ones that were stressed because they were like, hand up. This isn’t, I’m getting this message and there must be something wrong with your question. And it’s like, oh, well, actually, no. Right? It’s something that you’ve done wrong and you need to fix it. So that was, you know, that was my challenge. The only feedback and again, just qualitative, was not positive, right? It was stressed out students. But I did have, you know, other students would come into office hours and office hours as, as usual for most instructors are much more busy before an exam. And I had, you know, large room and a big group of students in there, you know, 20 students working on problems coming and going. And a student came in, they’re like, oh, yeah, that my last midterm went well. And I’m like, oh, great. So, because other people in there it didn’t go well. And I’m like, oh, great. So how did you prepare for midterm one? Like, what did you do to make sure that you were ready for it and you were, you know, comfortable with it and, and, you know, you had that positive outcome? And the students said, well, I just went through all of the problems that we did in class and then I went through all of the practice problems and did them a couple of times in Prairie Learn, and I felt really comfortable and confident. And I was like, oh, that’s really interesting. And it was really great for all my other students to hear that too, you know, and have that sort of positive reinforcement of, yes, practice is what you need to do, right? To be able to do enough so that, like I said earlier, you recognize, oh, this is this kind of problem, you know, I’m going to pull this from my tool kit and I’m going to use it to solve this problem, you know.

 

BECCA

So, it sounds like throughout this process, you might have learned kind of some things about kind of your own teaching practices and about kind of interacting with your students. I guess I’m curious, what’s the most important thing that you learned? Is there anything that you, that you didn’t expect to have happened that happened or something that surprised you or you’re like, oh, this is a learning that I’ve just gotten.

 

CELINA

Ok. So I feel like when I was integrating the tool into our class and into the curriculum, I knew in my heart that this was going to be really beneficial for the students and great for their learning as much as it might cause them a little, some stress and stress is real. I understand that, but I felt like I knew that it would really be beneficial for them. The thing that I saw… the benefit that I saw that I didn’t expect and didn’t think about was the benefit my TAs had. So they were now interacting with this large piece of open source software. And like, these are second year students. I had a really, really, I wanna say green or, you know, junior TA team that had, you know, taken the course with me the year before. Eight of them were, you know, in their second year. Great, great computer scientists, great students. But now they were able to actually see, you know, in the back end, how I was writing these questions using Python that they knew the language interacting with this again, like I said, this large open source piece of software. And I see the potential for that to grow if these TAs are interested in using this in different courses and actually contributing to the actually open source piece of the software. That’s even an option, right? And I’ve got a T A that’s now applying for co-op jobs in the fall, and we were talking about it, and I’m like, well, now you, you know, you have experience with test writing, unit test writing; you have experience with navigating through a large piece of open source software to understand how it works so that we can write code that fits with it.

 

THIAGO

I understand that you probably have used this approach or this software a couple of times now. So looking at your experience and what you’re doing now and maybe thinking ahead, is there something you would adapt in this approach?

 

CELINA

So what I’m looking at for the fall is, and this is gonna sound like maybe counter intuitive, but I’m looking at increasing the number of and taking the word midterm out of it, but increasing the number and calling them more unit tests and making them more frequent and worth less, even less marks. They were worth only 10% each, but now let’s make them worth less. Let’s have five of them across the terms so that students again are getting that practice, make them shorter. They’re now only covering, you know, a smaller subset of the content allowing students to sort of focus on those pieces. So, I mean, the testing effect; it’s been studied, you know, over and over again. So I want to look at that. The other thing that we worked a lot on and I worked with one of my TAs that continued to work with me after the course was over was on improving the feedback that students got in those error messages. And so again, trying to reduce that anxiety for them, trying to help them with understanding how to read error messages to fix their problems and, and then, you know, be able to resubmit. That was one thing that again he really helped me with, from their student perspective. And I think we’ve done a really good job. Well, he’s done a really good job, and now I’m leveraging it to provide that better feedback for students so that they can and are able to, in an exam, be more likely to progress and not have… and have less of that anxiety feel.

 

BECCA

Yeah, I can imagine that like how you say that a student has gotten something wrong could really impact their motivation, their mood, just their ability to even engage with the problem in this situation.

 

CELINA

Exactly.

 

BECCA

All right. Well, thank you so much for sharing the story of your course with us today. Before we say goodbye, I’d like to ask you one final question, which is, what is one question you wish that we’d asked you and how would you have answered it?

 

CELINA

I think one thing that we didn’t talk about is remote learning, and this is always, this has been again, near and dear to my heart for a lot of years. So again, back in my Phd, I was TAing. Not even, I hadn’t even taught a course myself yet, but I was TAing for my then PhD supervisor. Her and I, we offered a remote version to two students that were living in the Alert Bay community, a First Nations community, and using Skype and, you know, what we could, right? And then again, this was like 2004 before, you know, any of the technology we have now. It was tough, but it was like, I think so important to be able to offer learning to people that aren’t able to come to our university for whatever reason. Maybe they live remotely or maybe they are, I mean, compromised or, you know, maybe they, um, you know, have family that they’re taking care of. Whatever reason, we know how to do this now. We have the technology that we didn’t have back then and especially with tools like this, where students can get feedback on their actual problem-solving process. Back then they had to wait to meet with me on Skype. Yeah, I mean, I was available on Skype and we used the technology there but still it was, OK, I tried this with my code and it’s not working. And now I don’t know what to do, right? Versus the tool giving them a little bit of feedback on, you know, what kind of test cases were used and those kinds of things. So I think the technology has come a long way and just even that, well, I guess it has been a long time, but it feels like a short period of time. And so I feel like we really have this ability to, you know, leverage things like this to make remote learning even better. I don’t think it’s… I think it’s hard still, because you still need to develop a community. One thing I didn’t mention was last fall and this fall we had an online section of the course, where I did have students that were linked in remotely using Zoom. They still wrote their exams online. We used Zoom to check IDs and make sure that, you know, they were writing the exam themselves, that kind of thing. But it really gave us the ability to try this little small cohort of, yeah, let’s do this online because I really, I, you know, again, I really think it’s important to be able to offer education to people that aren’t necessarily just people who come and sit their bum in a seat, right?

 

BECCA

So creating kind of a more inclusive and equitable kind of learning space just by…

 

CELINA

And opportunities, right? Opportunities to learn. I grew up in a small town and, as a student, I had, I had small children and I worked, right? And so I was in a different demographic and it was, you know, to have had the ability to take courses that were more flexible would have been a wonderful opportunity for me. I mean, obviously I was able to figure it out, but, you know, let’s not make everyone try to figure it out when we know we can do this, right? We were forced to do it for two years, right? And let’s take the good and recognize the bad that happened with that too, and let’s try to make it, you know, even better.

 

THIAGO

Wonderful. Thank you very much for joining us, Celina. This has been a great conversation. We wish you all our best.

 

CELINA

Thank you so much you guys.

 

BECCA

All right. Well, that brings the episode to a close. Make sure to visit our website at uvic.ca/teachanywhere, where you can learn more about teaching and learning at UVic and discover um other episodes in the podcast. We will talk to you again soon.

Hosts: Rebecca Edwards & Thiago Hinkel

Guest: Dr. Celina Berg

Technical Production: Thiago Hinkel

Transcript Preparation: Thiago Hinkel

Theme music: “freesound1.wav” by freezound5 (https://freesound.org/people/freezound5/sounds/588258/). Available for use under the CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication at freesound.org.