Faculty Reflections and Adaptations in a First-Year Block Model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper highlights the experiences of faculty members in the transition to a block model in engineering education, where courses are taught sequentially in short blocks, blending in-person and online instruction. The block model pilot at a suburban Toronto campus aimed to improve student outcomes, alleviate student stress from heavy workloads and commuting. Kolb’s cycle of experiential education was used as a framework for understanding faculty experiences. Faculty members adapted their teaching methods for condensed learning sessions, supported by development workshops and ongoing pedagogical counseling. Faculty members identified challenges and successes in redesigning courses, emphasizing the importance of faculty development and student-centered programming. It contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning by documenting the faculty perspective on block model implementation, informing best practices for engineering educators. The findings highlight the potential of the block model to foster active learning communities and suggest areas for future refinement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".