STLHE 2015

What does Flexible Learning (FL) mean to you? In this 45-minute interactive session, our teaching team will present how FL, an instructional approach allowing flexibility of time, place, and audience through the use of technologies (Khan, 2007), is integrated in the Land, Food and Community (LFC) series of courses in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia. We invite you to share your understanding and experience with FL strategies, which, for us, have been promoted and implemented for over a decade. FL has achieved success indicated by course evaluations and testimonies from students, the teaching team, and community partners (Rojas, 2009). We will focus on three themes: 1) objectives and designing process of using FL as pedagogical approach, 2) improvement and challenges in implementation, and 3) evaluation strategies. We will invite you to discuss each theme based on your engagement with FL in your specific context. Using a wiki page as the platform (a FL strategy we use regularly), you and the teaching team will collaboratively document our discussions. We will maintain this wiki page for further discussion and collaboration after the session ends. This session will showcase the various FL strategies applied in the LFC series courses, offer you first-hand experience with a FL strategy (wiki), and promote discussions among delegates who are interested in FL strategies and pedagogical reform in higher education. 

Key words: Flexible Learning, sharing experience, active learning strategies, community-based experiential learning 

References

Khan, B. H. (2007). Flexible Learning in an information society. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Rojas, A. (2009). Towards integration of knowledge through sustainability education and its potential contribution to environmental security. In S. Allen-Gil, L. Stelljes, & O. Borysova (Eds.), Addressing global environmental security through innovative educational curricula (pp. 131–153). Springer Netherlands. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-9314-2_14