a digital portfolio
As the course instructor for my department's honours thesis seminar, I coach 18 students to complete their honours thesis. The course is worth double, and it's a full year, so the expectations for this research area very high -- not appreciably different than a master's thesis in fact. I see myself as a guide, advisor, coach, supporter, and facilitator rather than as an 'instructor'.
I've been involved in the creation of learning technology inside the university and outside the university. I've led a Faculty-level learning tech and IT team in the creation of new tools and the marketing and support for new and existing tools. I've started two edtech companies and done application development, UI/UX design, legal, marketing, sales, user onboarding, and user support.
What have I learned? Don't be naive. Be realistic.
I teach a course with students in a small group through the whole term, building public facing websites. I give lots of feedback along the way, essentially coaching more than teaching.
In 2020 I tried using Notion for the whole process: all of the scaffolded group work, my coaching, and then the public-facing website. It was a huge success. This is the story.
For years I was frustrated with how we track grad students' progress and supervise them. PhD committees don't share notes, department information is inaccessible to supervisors, students are stressed that their committee doesn't know what they're working on and what stage they're at. So I solved this problem with a web application built on no-code platform Bubble. It's live at Prograds.com and we've got paying customers at U of Toronto, UMass-Amherst, Texas A&M, North Texas, UBC, Mount Allison.
My academic research career has been focussed on Political Behaviour. That is, mostly the study of the actions and choices of citizens in democracies. I've studied vote choice, referendum choice, media effects on voters, the formation of attitudes, judgments of governments under federalism, the effect of election polls on voters, survey design and survey modes, the effect of the number of parties on voters, and the factors influencing citizens' satisfaction with democracy.
I have used and taught statistics, data analysis, and statistical software since 1995. I am best with Stata but have used R, S-plus, SPSS, Shazam, and more. My statistical and analytic skills are mostly in the realm of econometrics but I have dabbled in Bayesian methods and MCMC estimation.
As Director of Arts ISIT I led a project to build an ePortfolio tool from scratch on the Wordpress platform. Collaborating with Jason Myers, Michael Ha, Letitia Henville, Heidi May, Ricardo Serrano, Angela Lam, Leanna Chow, and Julie Walchli, we did it.
I was trained as a political theorist as well as a quantitative political behaviour specialist. I published a paper in Public Opinion Quarterly on Jeremy Bentham's theory of Public Opinion in a liberal democracy.
I am leading an effort to collect information on the learning experience, learning activities, and output of students in all UBC Political Science courses. We then aggregate that information by student to produce what we call a "Rich Transcript" showing what each student did in the course in their Political Science major. Feedback from students has been very positive.
In 2018 and again in 2019, 45 students collaborated to build the UVoteBC.ca website (2018) and the Elect2019.ca sites (2019). The first site provided information and guidance for citizens as they made their decision in the BC Electoral Reform Referendum of 2018. Elect2019.ca was a set of 6 student-built websites to inform voters and analyze the 2019 Canadian Federal Election.