Enhancing Learning Teaching and the Student Experience – 7 March 2008

This year’s Learning and Teaching Event seeks to provide a broad showcase for work that promotes engaged student learning and enhances the student experience. An outstanding keynote speaker, Professor Eric Mazur, will talk about his method for engaging students in peer discussion that promotes a ‘deep approach’ to synthesis learning. He will also run a workshop that provides an opportunity to learn about the use he makes of a classroom voting system to stimulate student engagement.

Faculty and Central Services staff are presenting posters that illustrate their approaches to learning, teaching or supporting the student experience; as well as presenting mini-workshops (10 minute appetizers run during the poster session) or parallel workshops that cover a wide range of topics. The aim is to promote collegial discussion about what is best in learning and teaching at the University of Surrey, to share good practice and encourage further imaginative exploration of what is possible in supporting the student learning experience.

Keynote Speaker

Eric Mazur is a Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University. An internationally recognized scientist and researcher, he leads a vigorous research program in optical physics and supervises one of the largest research groups in the Physics Department at Harvard. Dr. Mazur has made important contributions to spectroscopy, light scattering, and the interaction of ultrashort laser pulses with materials. He serves as a consultant to industry in electronics and telecommunications. In 2005 he founded SiOnyx, a company that is commercializing black silicon, a new form of silicon developed in Mazur's laboratory.

In addition to his work in optical physics, Dr. Mazur is interested in education, science policy, outreach, and the public perception of science. To this end, Dr. Mazur devotes part of his research group's effort to education research and finding verifiable ways to improve science education. In 1990 he began developing Peer Instruction a method for teaching large lecture classes interactively. Dr. Mazur's teaching method has developed a large following, both nationally and internationally, and has been adopted across many science disciplines.

Dr. Mazur is author or co-author of 209 scientific publications and 12 patents. He has also written on education and is the author of Peer Instruction: A User's Manual (Prentice Hall, 1997), a book that explains how to teach large lecture classes interactively. In 2006 he helped produce the award-winning DVD Interactive Teaching.

This event is supported by FAHS, FEPS, FHMS, FML, CLD, SCEPTrE, SPLASH, ELC and ELU.