Upcoming Events
A CODON CONVO with justin shaffer
APRIL 27th | 4 PM ET
Student Advice for Success in High-Structure Courses
Grab a cup of coffee and join us for a Codon Coffee Convo with Justin Shaffer! Justin is a teaching professor at the Colorado School of Mines and has taught 8000+ students in a variety of STEM disciplines using a high-structure course design over the past 10+ years. Justin also researches and publishes on the efficacy of high-structure course design components, especially relating to student success in large, first year STEM courses.
High-structure design involves students being actively engaged in the learning process via pre-class content acquisition and assessment, in-class active learning, after-class review and assessment, and frequent summative assessments. We as instructors often give advice to students on how to succeed in class, but what do students tell each other? Justin will present his research on student advice for success in high-structure courses which involved qualitative analysis of 838 students’ responses across four STEM disciplines and two universities.
We’ll discuss how this research informs strategies that instructors can use to best support student learning and how it can impact the design of the Codon Learning platform. We’ll demonstrate how to (1) build a high-structure course that includes pre-class, in-class, and after-class components, and (2) align all of these items to course learning objectives to support student’s metacognitive skills and study habits. By the end of this Convo, you’ll have the resources and knowledge to implement high-structure practices into your own courses and help your students achieve positive outcomes.
Dr. Justin Shaffer is a teaching professor in Chemical and Biological Engineering and Quantitative Biosciences and Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. Dr. Shaffer is the anatomy and physiology editor for CourseSource, is a former editor for the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society Educator Journal, and is the founder of Recombinant Education.
Previous Events
A CODON CONVO with Scott Freeman
APRIL 4th | 4 PM ET
A National Consensus on Learning Objectives for Introductory Biology
Grab a cup of coffee and join us for a Codon Coffee Convo with Scott Freeman! Scott is a co-PI on an NSF-sponsored project to develop lesson-level learning objectives for majors and nonmajors introductory biology. Nearly 800 instructors contributed draft learning objectives, suggested revisions, and voted to identify those that are essential for biology students to know and be able to do. Scott will discuss how this project may impact the way we think about course design.
Together with the Codon Learning team, Scott will present Introducing Life Sciences, a new course for Biology majors. We’ll demonstrate how this courseware operationalizes the learning objectives by 1) making it easy for instructors to align all course materials to the learning objectives and 2) helping students identify what they know and do not yet know, study using self-testing rather than trying to memorize a textbook, and monitor their progress at the learning objective level.
Scott Freeman is Lecturer Emeritus at the University of Washington. The recipient of a UW Distinguished Teaching Award, he has published research on how innovative approaches to teaching science benefit all students, but particularly students from disadvantaged backgrounds. He is the author of the textbooks Biological Science and Evolutionary Analysis, which have sold over 500,000 copies and been translated into multiple languages, and the popular book Saving Tarboo Creek, which is for general audiences.
A Codon ConvO with jenny knight
SEPTEMBER 29 | 4 PM ET
How Technology Can Be Used to Promote Self-Regulated Learning
Dr. Jenny Knight is using the Codon Learning courseware platform to study students’ self-regulated learning behaviors. Professor Knight will lead a discussion on self-regulated learning and share findings from her ongoing research. Attendees will have the chance to login and experience the Codon platform as the Codon team demonstrates how the Codon “Study Path” helps students reflect on the learning objectives they need to work on and use self-testing to achieve those objectives.
Dr. Jennifer Knight has been teaching courses to all levels of undergraduates in the Department of Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder for 20 years. She has worked to develop this Genetics course over many years, choosing only a subset of commonly taught topics in order to create more opportunities for active and deeper learning. Her work as a Biology Education Researcher has included developing concept assessments to diagnose student misunderstandings and measure learning gains, facilitating many workshops on scientific teaching, and studying how students engage in complex problem solving and reasoning, particularly in genetics. She is the past President (2019-2020) and founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER).