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Best practices for supporting student experiential learning in an online environment during emergency situations: Lessons from Covid-19 pandemic response
Background: In 2020, nearly four weeks into the first semester of the academic year, the University of Canterbury (UC) in Christchurch, New Zealand, transitioned to online delivery of all teaching in response to the nation-wide lockdown due to Covid-19. With 48 hours’ notice, all on-campus activities ceased and were replaced with lectures delivered live via Zoom or recycled from previous delivery, and simulated, or otherwise facilitated, practical experiences. Assessments were temporarily halted, then resumed over a more compressed timetable with online and “take home” activities largely replacing traditional invigilated assessments. Purpose: Our research explored the challenges and successes of UC’s fast transition to online learning, with a particular emphasis on understanding the impact of the loss of face-to-face delivery on practical experiences normally delivered through laboratory and field activities. Our goal was to develop a set of best practices to improve our response to future emergency situations. Methods: A two-part survey was electronically distributed to students enrolled in a 4-year engineering programme and a 3-year sport coaching programme at the University of Canterbury. Results: While students strongly appreciated efforts of lecturers and tutors to support their learning, differences in communication approaches affected student experience both positively and negatively. A clear need for two-way communication as well as consistency and clarity in messaging were key findings. A general dissatisfaction with replacement practical activities was expressed, demonstrating a need for contingency measures to be in place to mitigate the impact of future disruptive events on practical learning. Efforts to manage online assessment of learning were generally well received, even in a compressed timeframe, though several unhelpful practices were highlighted. Students also identified many positive aspects of their learning experiences, including live tutorials and made-for-purpose video presentations
Sweet Suburbia and the Bustling City
This paper focuses on the representation of Wellington in New Zealand tourism films in the decades preceding the establishment of the National Film Unit (NFU) in 1941. While critically engaging with current discourses about early New Zealand film production, New Zealand film history, New Zealand human geography and the cinematic city, it performs the textual analysis of eight case studies also examining archival materials related to their production, circulation and reception. This article aims to demonstrate how the cinematic depiction of New Zealand’s capital city in the analysed time frame was a complex and multi-layered process driven and characterised by the coexistence and intertwining of tourism marketing, national publicity and colonial agenda
Colin McCahon and the Visible Mystery of Painting
This essay brings together two paintings that on the surface seem to have very little in common: one dates from 1528–29 (The Visitation by the Italian late Renaissance painter Jacopo Carucci, better known as Pontormo after his birthplace), the other from 1968 (Visible Mysteries no. 8 by Colin McCahon). They are brought together here because they share the same subject matter: the central Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation, the mystery of God’s word becoming flesh, and the belief that divine and human natures are united. These two paintings can, in both similar and different ways, teach us something about the visible mystery that is painting
Māori Election Petitions of the 1870s: Microcosms of Dynamic Māori and Pākehā Political Forces
Māori election petitions to the 1876 Eastern Māori and the 1879 Northern Māori elections were high-stakes political manoeuvres. The outcomes of such challenges were significant in the weighting of political power in Wellington. This was a time in New Zealand politics well before the formation of political parties. Political alignments were defined by a mixture of individual charismatic men with a smattering of provincial sympathies and individual and group economic interests. Larger-than-life Māori and Pākehā political characters were involved in the election petitions, providing a window not only into the complex Māori political relationships involved, but also into the stormy Pākehā political world of the 1870s. And this is the great lesson about election petitions. They involve raw politics, with all the political theatre and power play, which have as much significance in today’s politics as they did in the past. Election petitions are much more than legal challenges to electoral races. There are personalities involved, and ideological stances between the contesting individuals and groups that back those individuals. Māori had to navigate both the Pākehā realm of central and provincial politics as well as the realm of Māori kin-group politics at the whānau, hapū and iwi levels of Māoridom. The political complexities of these 1870s Māori election petitions were but a microcosm of dynamic Māori and Pākehā political forces in New Zealand society at the time
The Logic of Internal Rational Agent
In this paper, we introduce a new four-valued logic which may be viewed as a variation on the theme of Kubyshkina and Zaitsev's Logic of Rational Agent \textbf{LRA} \cite{LRA}. We call our logic (Logic of Internal Rational Agency). In contrast to \textbf{LRA}, it has three designated values instead of one and a different interpretation of truth values, the same as in Zaitsev and Shramko's bi-facial truth logic \cite{ZS}. This logic may be useful in a situation when according to an agent's point of view (i.e. internal point of view) her/his reasoning is rational, while from the external one it might be not the case. One may use \textbf{LIRA}, if one wants to reconstruct an agent's way of thinking, compare it with respect to the real state of affairs, and understand why an agent thought in this or that way. Moreover, we discuss Kubyshkina and Zaitsev's necessity and possibility operators for \textbf{LRA} definable by means of four-valued Kripke-style semantics and show that, due to two negations (as well as their combination) of \textbf{LRA}, two more possibility operators for \textbf{LRA} can be defined. Then we slightly modify all these modalities to be appropriate for . Finally, we formalize all the truth-functional -ary extensions of the negation fragment of (including itself) as well as their basic modal extension via linear-type natural deduction systems