On Monday night, Associate Professor Blake McKimmie and Associate Professor Barbara Masser from the Applied Social Psychology lab and Associate Professor Mark Horswill from UQ’s School of Psychology were presented with a UQ Excellence in Teaching and Learning award at Customs House by UQ Provost Professor Aiden Byrne. This award was given for their work in leading the team that produced the Crime101x MOOC and the on campus adaptation The Psychology of Criminal Justice.
UQ Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic) Professor Joanne Wright said the award recipients had developed high-quality teaching practices and created inspirational learning environments for students.
“It takes a truly exceptional teacher to recognise psychology students’ difficulties understanding the criminal justice system and to solve that by filming a murder drama that follows the crime, the investigation and the trial to provide students a single cohesive example.”
This is the second award for CRIME101x, which also picked up a MERLOT(the Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching cooperative) Classics award at the Innovate Conference in New Orleans in the USA earlier this year.
Associate Professor Blake McKimmie said that Crime101x and The Psychology of Criminal Justice use an innovative mix of drama and interactive learning to identify ways the criminal justice system can be improved.
“The content engages student’s curiosity by challenging them to think about these questions before telling them what the research says. This means that when they’re watching the drama and the lecture videos they’re actively engaging with the material and searching for the answers.”
The interactive or ‘flipped classroom’ teaching approach used in the on campus version of Crime101x is in line with current learning research, indicating that engagement in active retrieval learning activities, such as weekly content testing, and lecture attendance can lead to better learning outcomes.
Associate Professor Blake McKimmie is also using this research, and his experience helping to create Crime101x, to develop and reinvigorate the first year psychology course PSYC1030: Introduction to Psychology: Developmental, Social & Clinical Psychology. Presenting this work at the Teaching & Learning Week Online session this week, ‘Transforming PSYC1030 through MOOCs’ at both UQ and Griffith University, Blake has been able to share this innovative and award winning teaching approach with the broader academic community.
To enrol or view the course outline for the online version of the course, CRIME101x: The Psychology of Criminal Justice, click here.
For further updates about transforming PSYC1030 through MOOCs, and online approaches to teaching and learning, subscribe to this blog below.
