THE STUDENTS EYED THEIR CLASSMATES AND THEIR INSTRUCTOR SUSPICIOUSLY—one of them was an imposter. Not many students have the opportunity to attend class aboard a virtual spaceship in a life-or-death situation, but Dr. Firas Moosvi’s class isn’t like most others.

Dr. Moosvi—a Lecturer in the Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science—believes in meeting students where they are and using technology to improve the learning experience. So, when his students repeatedly asked him to play the popular online game Among Us, Dr. Moosvi made it happen and created a memory that he and his students will never forget.

Growing up, Dr. Moosvi always wanted to become a scientist, though it took him some time to find his specialty. “I used to get chemistry books for kids, where you mix home chemicals to see the reactions,” he laughs. “The thing I wanted to do as a child, I’m now doing as an adult but in a very different way than I expected.”

After completing his doctorate in Physics—during which he conducted experiments using a magnetic resonance imaging scanner to research the effect of anti-cancer drugs—Dr. Moosvi’s focus has now shifted to study how students learn and the importance of having a growth mindset. Dr. Moosvi credits several important mentors who opened his eyes to interdisciplinary research and fostered in him a love of teaching and learning.

“Learning is failing productively. The process of learning is so much more important than a grade. I want students to like the process of learning, even if they don’t connect with the material.”

As he reminisces about his time as an undergraduate student, Dr. Moosvi recalls the difference an extraordinary instructor can make. “Organic chemistry wasn’t my favourite subject, but I went to every single class because of the interactions with the instructor,” he recalls. “She would ask us questions during class, value our input, and then adjust her lessons accordingly. She also encouraged us to think about our own process of learning—called metacognition—and this was very shaping for me.”

Now as an educator, Dr. Moosvi hopes to pass on his love of learning to his students and teach them to value discovering new things. “Learning is failing productively,” he reveals. “The process of learning is so much more important than a grade. I want students to like the process of learning, even if they don’t connect with the material.”

This sense of passion and motivation for his students is just one of the reasons Dr. Moosvi was recently awarded UBCO’s 2022 Provost’s Award for Teaching Excellence and Innovation. He brings an interdisciplinary perspective to teaching as he looks for ways to improve both his teaching methods and the overall systems in place, collaborating closely with colleagues to see how they can align their practices to provide a better experience for students.

One area Dr. Moosvi is passionate about is encouraging students to focus on learning instead of grades—a seemingly daunting and insurmountable task, especially when society’s systems, structures, and policies are centred around grades and the fallacies of their inherent “fairness.” Dr. Moosvi points to a quote by American author and lecturer Alfie Kohn as central to his philosophy on grades and learning: ‘Research shows three reliable effects when students are graded: They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in the learning itself.’”

“As an institution and as a society, we need to refocus our students’ attention on rich, high-quality feedback rather than grades. This will require critical work and broad structural changes to our systems to re-centre higher education on learning.”

Dr. Moosvi adds: “As an institution and as a society, we need to refocus our students’ attention on rich, high-quality feedback rather than grades. This will require critical work and broad structural changes to our systems to re-centre higher education on learning.”

He believes changes are also needed to ensure universities have the structures in place to support equity, diversity, and inclusion. Grades, admissions processes, and restricted class sizes are all part of the larger issue of inequality in higher education. “We need to transform our education systems to better support students and ensure that more students succeed,” he explains. “Learning technologies, such as the Jupyter project, OnTask, PrairieLearn and Gradescope play a huge role in how we can get more people through our doors and reduce barriers to a quality education.”

Rather than smaller classes, Dr. Moosvi hopes to see larger classes in the future—with the technology-driven solutions that will allow educators to continue delivering exceptional educational experiences to more students. “My primary responsibility as an educator is to help students build relationships with each other and with me so we can go on a learning journey together, as a community. This community-building helps us feel like we’re part of something bigger than ourselves.

“With everyone’s help, I hope we can also get to a place where past privilege matters less. In my courses and at my university, I want to be a major driver of that change.”

The post Dr. Firas Moosvi builds community in large classrooms appeared first on UBC Okanagan News.

FOR DR. BOWEN HUI, IT’S IMPORTANT TO REMIND HER STUDENTS that she was once an overwhelmed undergraduate student too.

“I remember walking into a first-year computer science course, not knowing if I should sit at the back or the front of this huge lecture hall,” explains Dr. Hui, who now teaches computer science in the Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science. “I remember following my friend down the stairs and seeing all these male faces reading computer magazines and talking about things I had no understanding of.

“That was my first experience in computer science; it was scary, intimidating and male-dominated.” She continues, “I tell this story to my first-year students because I want them to understand some strategies they can employ to overcome these fears.”

According to Dr. Hui, working in teams and getting help from professors and teaching assistants as part of the lecture are a couple of strategies for overcoming the shyness and communication challenges that many first-year students experience. “Team-based learning is especially important in first-year classes,” explains Dr. Hui, “because it helps students build a network of support among their peers and establish a sense of belonging in the discipline.”

She adds, “Professors aren’t as scary as we seem. If only students knew what we were really like outside of work—that we struggle to check our emails and pick up our kids from school on time. Our days are hectic just like everyone else’s—we’re people too.”

“Computer science isn’t just about programming; there’s so much more to the discipline than that. Expanding young people’s horizons and helping them explore their passion at the community level would be awesome.”

While intimidating at first, her first-year computer science course set Dr. Hui on a path to study—and then ultimately teach—the subject. Now Dr. Hui focuses her research on artificial intelligence (AI), learning analytics and educational technology.

“AI is fascinating because you can have a passion in a different field and bring it to computer science. AI marries it. I had a passion for language, psychology and, more broadly, cognitive science. As a student, I developed language games and worked on projects in machine translation, text extraction and intelligent user interfaces. AI brought everything together for me and has so many interdisciplinary applications. I tell my students, ‘If your passion is AI and you want to do some interdisciplinary work, you can easily collaborate with people in other fields.’”

As for what she enjoys most about UBCO, where she has taught and conducted research since 2012, the smaller campus size is a definite draw. “I get to interact with students differently; I’m not sure I would get that kind of interaction in a larger campus. Students here are so amazingly good at what they do, and it’s hugely rewarding to know that I played a small part in their journey. That’s the key thing I love about my role; the rewards from research take a while to realize, but when I work with students there’s an immediate impact. This campus provides me with a new and different way of making a difference in the lives of my students.”

This sense of encouragement and motivation for her students is just one reason Dr. Hui was recently awarded UBCO’s 2022 Provost’s Award for Teaching Excellence and Innovation. “I listen to students to find out what strategies work for them, and help them achieve what they want out of their education.”

Aside from her work with students, Dr. Hui has also served on several university-wide committees to further promote and integrate computer science into courses, evaluation processes and activities. She hopes to take this work into the community in the future, teaching young children what computer science is all about.

“Computer science isn’t just about programming; there’s so much more to the discipline than that. Expanding young people’s horizons and helping them explore their passion at the community level would be awesome.”

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KYLE LARSON’S CAREER TRAJECTORY PERFECTLY REPRESENTS the power educators have in the lives of their students. Growing up, Dr. Larson didn’t know what he wanted to be—only that he wanted a PhD—until a series of influential teachers set him on a path to ultimately studying the Himalaya.

“I had a high school teacher who was kind of like an anti-teacher—he didn’t ‘make’ us learn, but instead he talked to us and told us stories that incorporated different aspects of Earth Sciences,” explains Dr. Larson, now a Professor of Earth, Environmental and Geographic sciences at UBCO. “I found the way he presented the material really engaging and as a result, I found the material itself engaging. For me, teachers like him stand out.”

Later on, during his undergrad, Dr. Larson was fortunate to be involved with a researcher in Structural Geology and mountain building. Aside from the subject matter—which fascinated Dr. Larson—he also discovered some less-than-obvious benefits of studying Earth Sciences while working alongside the professor as a field assistant: “We would take a helicopter into the mountains in the Yukon and stay there for a couple of weeks. I thought to myself, ‘I can go camping for a living? This sounds all right—I can do this!’”

However, this fieldwork—along with a subsequent role with the BC Geological Survey—also taught Dr. Larson the breadth of knowledge and education needed to be a scientist and “make sense of the world.” After graduating with a Master of Science and trying to enter a lagging job market, Dr. Larson continued in academia for his PhD after learning that a Queen’s University professor was searching for a graduate student to study mountain building in the Himalaya.

Now, almost 15 years later, Dr. Larson has visited the Himalaya 14 times in the pursuit of research, hoping to understand how the Earth’s crust deforms where its tectonic plates collide to form mountain ranges. “Typically, what I do is look at the rocks that were deformed during mountain building and try to gain evidence about the processes involved in accommodating the convergence of two different tectonic plates.”

For Dr. Larson, the Himalaya is a perfect research base because it’s a relatively young mountain belt; still actively forming, the range is preserved and hasn’t eroded away like some other ancient belts formed hundreds of millions of years ago.

“We use the mountain range as a natural laboratory, looking at rocks and how they fit together—much like pieces of a 3D puzzle. We see the end part of the puzzle, which is complicated, and then we try to break it down to its individual components and rebuild what geology has done over millions and millions of years.”

Of course, in Dr. Larson’s line of work collecting rock samples is critical and he has one special piece in his collection. “I have a rock specimen from the summit of Mt. Everest for a study we’ve just completed. Sometimes, I put it on the floor and stand on it, just to say I stood on the summit of Everest,” he jokes.

Using novel methods co-developed in the Fipke Laboratory for Trace Element Research (FiLTER), Dr. Larson and his team have made a series of fundamental discoveries about how major mountain belts form. One method involves examining the radioactive decay of the element rubidium to strontium using state-of-the-art laser and spectrometry instruments.

“People have been looking at these elements for decades, but you could only do it by dissolving minerals and separating them using an incredibly labour-intensive process. Now, we can figure out the ages of these rocks by putting the minerals that contain those elements under a laser and then examining how much rubidium has broken down into strontium,” explains Dr. Larson.

“I’ve felt nothing but support from people on campus. They’re always there to help and are invested in the outcomes of what you’re doing…. It really feels like the campus is invested in success, and people who work here day-in and day-out strive to make it happen.”

Another study from the lab, led by recent doctoral graduate student Dr. Iva Lihter, used the chemistry of minerals to model how the Himalaya evolved. Dr. Lihter was able to show that some of the minerals scientists have been using for decades to inform their models are potentially 450 million years too old to be part of the Himalayan system.

“A finding like this provides caution,” says Dr. Larson. “Now we know we have to be aware of this and can’t assume, carte blanche, that everything we see in the rock record is related to what is currently happening in the Himalaya.”

In recognition for the innovative work Dr. Larson and his team are currently exploring at FiLTER, Dr. Larson received UBC Okanagan’s Researcher of the Year award for Natural Sciences and Engineering.

He notes that UBC Okanagan’s smaller campus size and close-community feel have helped enable interesting conversations that led to multiple successes. For example, “The equipment that a lot of the FiLTER lab work has been done on was purchased outside of typical grants, thanks to conversations with people in the Vice-Principal, Research and Innovation office. The few degrees of separation between researchers and the people who can enable that research is so important.”

“I’ve felt nothing but support from people on campus,” Dr. Larson adds, “They’re always there to help and are invested in the outcomes of what you’re doing. There’s always someone to talk to about a problem or opportunity and more times than not, we’re able to come to a positive outcome. It really feels like the campus is invested in success, and people who work here day-in and day-out strive to make it happen.”

The post In the company of giants appeared first on UBC Okanagan News.

AS THE SEARING FLAMES LICK AT THE LODGEPOLE PINES AND KINDLING MOSS, Jeffrey Nishima-Miller works alongside his fellow firefighters to keep the wildfire contained. He’s trying to prevent the flames of the Elephant Hill fire—90 kilometres west of Kamloops—from ravaging nearby ranches, towns and Indigenous communities, where thousands of British Columbians make their living off the land.

That was the summer of 2017 and like many university students across the country, Nishima-Miller—now a doctoral student at UBCO—spent his summers working for the BC Wildfire Service. He’s battled some of the province’s most severe fires. But now, as a researcher exploring how Indigenous communities can create their own wildlife strategies, Nishima-Miller is using past experiences to inform his work. He’s seen first-hand that too many of BC’s forests are “begging to be burned.”

“It’s not surprising what we’re seeing in terms of the size and severity of wildfires. There’s this new reality of climate change and enormous fuel loads in the forests, along with a lot of bug-kill wood,” says Nishima-Miller. “It’s not a good situation; the result is a lot of fires in a short period that are bigger, more intense and hotter than ever, and that move fast across the landscape.”

It didn’t use to be this way.

In the early 1980s, Dr. Kevin Hanna, Nishima-Miller’s doctoral supervisor, worked as a firefighter in the then Ministry of Forests. At the time, there was an emphasis on year-round locally based management to prevent wildfires, often involving community members with fire experience.

Here, a patrol looks for any hot spots still left smouldering from a recent forest fire.

“That’s one of the biggest changes I’ve seen; a lot of the fire suppression and firefighting was directed by the local level,” explains Dr. Hanna, an Associate Professor of Earth Sciences at UBCO and Director of UBC’s Centre for Environmental Assessment Research. He is interested in the risks that wildfire can pose for infrastructure and how the potential for forest fires needs to be considered in the planning, engineering and construction of major projects like pipelines or highways.

“If there was a big fire—and big fires like we see today were rare in those days—we often drew on local people who had training and experience. But what we’ve seen over the years is less local engagement and control, and more centralization of fire suppression, which has shown advantages and disadvantages.”

Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Nishima-Miller.

Dr. Hanna notes that although today’s forests are very different due to climate change, in his day the closeness of ranchers and Indigenous peoples to forested areas benefitted firefighting directly. “We worked closely with people who lived and worked on the land. In a fire, they were the ones who could tell you which places to worry about or not, and what the best routes to move equipment and people. They knew who to call when nearby equipment was needed.

“It’s revealing for me to look back and see how we might be able to take that knowledge and experience, and use it going forward,” says Dr. Hanna, adding it’s time to rediscover the value of engaging communities and local people in addressing wildfire risks.

Dr. Mathieu Bourbonnais, an Assistant Professor in Earth, Environmental and Geographic Sciences at UBCO, echoes the need to change course.

“The current way wildfires are managed is very much founded in Eurocentric approaches and landscape management that focus solely on fire suppression,” explains Dr. Bourbonnais, who—like Nishima-Miller— served as a wildland firefighter in the late 2000s.

In fact, it was those initial firefighting experiences that propelled Dr. Bourbonnais to graduate school and into academia. His fascination with the geomatics in his daily fire briefing packages led to studies in geographic information sciences, remote sensing and statistics. Today he focuses on understanding fuels and fire behaviour, how forests, ecosystems and wildlife may respond in the future, and how to design proactive mitigation to absorb impacts.

“In 2021, BC spent $800 million fighting wildfires, and the combined bill for the major fire seasons in 2017, 2018 and 2021 will likely be over $2 billion in fire suppression costs. Compare this to the approximately $30 million, for example, that’s annually available to communities for fire prevention work. So, there’s a scale element here that doesn’t match.”

Dr. Mathieu Bourbonnais, Jeffrey Nishima-Miller and Dr. Kevin Hanna.

Although Dr. Bourbonnais, Dr. Hanna and Nishima-Miller have experienced different periods of firefighting and fire management stretching across nearly four decades, their experiences all point in the same direction: society needs to shift its idea of how to get ahead of the wildfire challenge.

“The fires I see now are not the same fires I fought 10 to 15 years ago,” says Dr. Bourbonnais. “It’s a different beast, so we need to explore the idea of collaborating more with communities. We also need to realize that we can’t look to our recent history for what to expect with future fire seasons, because the idea that more fire suppression will fix the problem doesn’t seem like it will work.”

Dr. Hanna points to examples in BC’s Cariboo and Chilcotin regions, where Indigenous communities and local ranchers have taken a role in fire prevention on their lands. Using their own equipment, logging skills and knowledge of the region, they proactively work to protect the land and their livelihoods. “They know their area intimately, and have a personal interest in working to help prevent and respond to wildfires.”

Dr. Bourbonnais says addressing climate change also plays a huge part in tempering wildfire trends. Although climate change is a global challenge, there are issues that can be addressed more immediately and locally.

“Changing how we manage fuels, fires and landscapes are things we can address right now. When people talk about the fire situation being too big to tackle, we actually have many of the mechanisms. We have policies, we have people who can do the work—including prescribed burning and thinning—and we have the knowledge. But unfortunately, we’re not harnessing this to our advantage.”

As for Nishima-Miller—the youngest of the three and the one who has fought some of the most severe wildfires in BC’s history—he’s optimistic.

“There’s still so much work left to do but I hope these recent severe wildfire seasons make things better in terms of areas that needed to burn.”

While all three see promise in BC’s recent move to a year-round wildfire service, they also note that if society is going to meet the challenges facing it today and in the years to come, there needs to be better use of local knowledge and skills, and more openness to new approaches to wildfire management.

The post Catching fire: BC wildfires are bigger, hotter and more consequential than ever appeared first on UBC Okanagan News.