SCL Toolkit for Applied Science
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Ibri College of Technology has commenced a Series of Workshops in SCL on May 4, 2017 at the Multipurpose Hall. The aim of these workshops is to give more practical ideas on delivering lessons using the Student-Centered Learning approach.
Duhai Alshekaili, a lecturer at the IT Department, was the first presenter for this 8-parts series. He demonstrated his proposed SCL model entitled “SCL Toolkit for Applied Courses” which can be adopted by many courses taught not only in the IT department, but also in Business and Engineering departments as well as for some ELC courses.
Duhai’s presentation was composed of two parts. The first part was a demonstration of the toolkit and the assessment which used to measure the course’s SCL-compliance.
As an introduction, he made several brief descriptions of what SCL is, while referring to the Colleges of Technology’s (CoT’s) SCL Framework as a “go-to” document to be aware of many Student-Centered Learning methodologies.
In the main part of his presentation, he discussed the implementation plans for the SCL toolkit, which consist of four elements teaching, learning, assessment, and resources. He believes that traditional teaching methodologies cannot be completely eliminated as it is used to deliver the theoretical concepts of each course. On the other hand, He highlighted that the practical sessions should get more teaching hours than theory.
In addition, He described the four Student-Centered Learning methodologies used in Programming courses, namely, logbooks (which can then be used for the Open-book Exams), discussions (which can be done online via Moodle or WhatsApp groups), presentations (done by students), and mind-maps (which can be implemented periodically to figure out the students’ ability to connect topics together). He strongly believed that the combination of SCL methodologies is highly appropriate for the applied courses such as Programming, Chemistry and Physics or any other courses with different sorts of problems to be solved. Also assessment methods and resources required for SCL implementation was discussed. Finally, he presented a table to figure out whether your course is SCL-compliant or not, with applying his course (Programing I) as an example.
The multipurpose hall (where workshop was conducted) was filled with lecturers from the English Language Center, Business, Engineering and IT departments who enriched the session with a valuable question and answer (Q&A) interaction. Q&A session was introduced by IT Department’s Heads of Sections, Dr. Pugalarasu of Math section, and Mr. William Ancheta of IT section. Through Q&A discussion, some crucial points were highlighted for instance, in WhatsApp groups how we make sure it is acceptable for both genders to share contact information. To address this issue, it was suggested that group discussions will be formed on Moodle, as it will not require any revealing of any personal information except of College’s Email.