Join us for WinterFest 2018, where we’ll take on the problematic of introductory/foundational courses. Foundational courses are intended to initiate the uninitiated into our discipline. Students face the difficult task of learning difficult interrelated concepts and reshaping their mental habits into disciplinary ways of thinking.
Professors are tasked with promoting this ‘deep learning’ while also facing large class sizes and a wide range of student motivation and performance abilities. In this context, deep learning—the process of making sense of and organizing knowledge within the discipline—often gives way to surface learning—the seeming rote memorization of disjointed facts—even in motivated students.
WinterFest 2018 brings together professors, instructional designers, educational researchers and others to explore the challenges and the unique opportunities presented by foundational courses.