Teachers often rely on tests and exams to understand how well their students are learning the subject. However, the traditional approaches of assessment end with giving marks or grades to the students. What if teachers could do more than just give marks to students? In this article, an educator tries a different approach to assessing answer sheets and shares her experiences from it.
A flipped classroom is a traditional classroom turned upside down! This means that the students listen to lectures, videos and other course materials at home, and solve problems (normally done as 'homework') or engage in discussions with their classmates and teachers in the classroom. This article explains why such a mode of learning is useful with the help of a case study from an Indian context.
Tools based on artificial intelligence (AI), like ChatGPT, are becoming increasingly popular among students, perhaps to a fault, causing rising concerns among educators. But can these tools be useful in some ways to educators too? If so, how can they leverage them to augment their students' learning experiences? And what can they do to prevent students' over-dependence on these tools? In this article, an educator shares her explorations into these questions.
When someone learns to cook, they also learn some rules that are never to be broken. Are these rules backed by science? Can we test them using some simple experiments? What can undergraduate students and faculty learn from these experiments? Why are they valuable to science education? In this article, Vijeta Raghuram, the Program Manager-Education at IndiaBioscience reflects on these questions based on her experiences at a workshop.
Posted on in Biochemistry, Education, Teaching & Undergraduate
Low exposure to research, often due to the financial constraints of college laboratories, and extensive curriculum can make studying biology unexciting for students. This short article on ‘frugal science’ describes how paper, a cheap and familiar material, has been developed into instruments to study nature and stimulate creativity and curiosity in students.
Posted on in Biochemistry, Health & Medicine, Undergraduate, Interdisciplinarity & Education
Ananya Mukherjee, who teaches Biology, and Rukma Prince, who teaches English Literature to undergraduates at Azim Premji University, have co-created a Science Communication course for science and non-science majors, which will be offered in August 2024. In this article, they share what prompted them to create this course and the kind of educational issues that the course aims to address.
Posted on in Science Communication, Teaching & Undergraduate
Food spoilage is covered in undergraduate biology courses with limited scope for practical experience. This article describes a simple module that not only helps students explore the topic experimentally but also develop a deeper understanding of various scientific concepts and gain experience in design thinking.
Posted on in Biochemistry, Biotechnology, Microbiology, Undergraduate, Research & Education