Title: Accessible Course Redesign: A Choose your Own Adventure First Year Chemistry Program
Abstract: Teaching introductory chemistry is a challenge – handing large enrollments, acknowledging our diverse population, closing gaps in incoming knowledge, and having desire to support students who are struggling while inspiring those who are thriving has meant that the First Year Chemistry Program at Dalhousie University has had to evolve. With an emphasis on developing an “accessible” course (one of the foundational pillars of many Equity, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives), we have shifted from a traditional style-lecture based course to an intentionally hy-flex model, allowing students to choose the best mode of delivery of the course that works for them, their learning preferences and their out-of-class life commitments. This so called “Choose your own Adventure” class leans heavily on evidence backed pedagogies including Universal Design for Learning, flipped Learning, “ungrading” practices (specifically specifications grading), gamification/game-based learning and Bloom’s model of skills mastery. In this talk, I hope to provide a rationale for why our course has progressed in this way, how it was developed and give a candid snapshot of the challenges that have been faced along with how we are addressing those issues.
Bio: Dr. Angela Crane (she/her) is a Senior Instructor in the Department of Chemistry at Dalhousie University. Here she acts as the First Year Chemistry Program Coordinator which sees an overall annual enrollment of 1600+ students. During her 6 years at Dalhousie, Angela has transformed the already customized “Concepts in Chemistry” program from a traditional lecture-based class to a more immersive experience. In teaching, her focusses are learning-centric practices such as Universal Design, flipped learning, alternative assessments and gamification/game-based learning and how to apply these pedagogies to a high enrollment, multi-section, diverse class. Angela’s accomplishments in this course redesign have been widely recognized at Dalhousie through 4 separate Dalhousie Legacy Awards for University-wide Teaching Excellence (most recently with the Early Career Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence in 2022) and nationally through a 2022 D2L Innovation Award in Teaching and Learning from the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE).