Elizabeth Angstmann, Scientia Education Academy Fellow

Professor Elizabeth Angstmann

Physics
UNSW Science

 

Professor Elizabeth (Liz) Angstmann is an Education Focussed academic in the School of Physics.

Liz has been the first year director in the school of physics since 2011, she is responsible for the education of thousands of students each year. During her time as first year director, she has introduced many changes to how first year physics courses run, where possible utilising technology to efficiently teach and assess students while concurrently improving the learning experience by encouraging students to be actively engaged. In 2013, Liz introduced an online course, ‘Everyday Physics’, which exemplifies her teaching philosophy: it engages students by presenting them with everyday objects and phenomena, before presenting the physics describing how they work. This elective course is taken by hundreds of students each semester.

In 2018 Liz introduced a graduate certificate in physics for science teachers. This online degree qualifies current science and mathematics teachers to teach physics. Having been a high school teacher, Liz is passionate about assisting school teachers to provide the best possible science experience for students.

Liz is a 2018 citation award recipient of the Australian Awards for University Teaching. 

Liz is an Academic Mentor at UNSW. Read more here.

Current Projects
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Title: Online resource repository for science

Introduction 

With the sudden shift to online teaching due to the COVID pandemic many academics across the country have put a lot of effort into developing good online resources. The Australian Council of Deans of Science (ACDS) were keen for resources to be shared between institutes and so set up a funded project to develop a repository of online resources for teaching and assessment. Submitted resources will be peer-reviewed for inclusion in the repository. The physics part of this project is being led from UNSW. http://www.acds-tlcc.edu.au/resource-sharing/

Aims 

Promote the sharing of good online science resources between Australian institutes to save academic time and effort but also to provide inspiration for what is possible. 

Provide a mechanism for peer-review of teaching resources, enables recognition of outputs for education focussed academics at a national level. 

Progress / Outcomes / Next steps 

Criteria for reviewing materials have been developed and are currently being tested with the first submissions for the repository. The criteria utilise two external ‘Universal Design for Learning’ (UDL) guidelines which outline important frameworks for ensuring that “all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities”. In evaluating resources, we focus on the requirement to ‘provide multiple means of representation’ (guidelines 1, 2 and 3 within the UDL framework). Secondly, we have relied on Mayer’s “Multimedia Learning” to evaluate audio visual resources (videos, animations, recorded lectures), which presents a series of common principles conducive to student learning that are well agreed upon in literature. After resources are assessed against these criteria, they will be sent to peer-reviewers to check they are correct. Feedback will be provided to the resource creators after this process. . The next step is to work with a web developer to get the repository online. 

References

  1. CAST (2018). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 2.2. http://udlguidelines.cast.org 
  2. Mayer, Richard E. Multimedia learning In Psychology of learning and motivation, vol. 41, pp. 85-139. Academic Press, 2002. 

Scientia Academy Blogs
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Who benefits from grading first year?

"As educators we want our students to appreciate the challenge and beauty of the topics and ways of thinking that we are trying to teach them."

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