Post by Jared van Rooyen, MSc candidate in Earth Science at Stellenbosch University, in South Africa. Part two of three in a Crowdfunding Science series by Jared. ___________________________________________________________ During March of 2017, myself and a group of students supervised by Dr. Jodie Miller of Stellenbosch University’s Earth Science department (South Africa) completed a 5-week long ...[Read More]
Where does the water in streams come from when it rains?
Post by Anne Jefferson, associate professor in the Department of Geology at Kent State University, in the United States. __________________________________________________ The title of this blog post might seem like a question with an obvious answer, or even a silly question to pose on a blog devoted to groundwater, but if you don’t see the connection between streamflow and underground water, you ...[Read More]
Making guidelines for graduate students
I strive for effective, compassionate supervision and I clarify my goals, approach and expectations in my guidelines for graduate students (available here, from McGill’s best practices in supervision). As I wrote, most students enter a relationship with a thesis advisor without a clear idea of what they can expect so I compiled this handout to give you some idea of what I expect of you as st ...[Read More]
Surprises and lessons learned from co-teaching an inter-university graduate course
Contributed by Grant Ferguson, University of Saskatchewan grant.ferguson@usask.ca In an earlier blog post, Tom discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of co-teaching a blended graduate course to students at McGill University, the University of Wisconsin – Madison and the University of Saskatchewan. This course wrapped up last month… we definitely learned a few things during ...[Read More]
Active learning in large classes: a gallery ‘walk’ with a 100 students
Active learning in large classrooms is difficult but not impossible – here is one example of an active learning technique developed for small classrooms, the gallery walk, which I have successfully re-purposed for a class of 100 (but I see no real upper limit on class size with the modified version of this activity). “In Gallery Walk student teams rotate to provide bulleted answers to questi ...[Read More]