The Department of Language & Literacy Education is pleased to welcome Dr. Leah Macfadyen, who will be joining the Department in January 2018 in a Tenure Track Instructor position.
A very warm welcome to Dr. Macfadyen!
Biostatement:
Leah Macfadyen is an interdisciplinary educator and researcher, with graduate degrees in the sciences (PhD, UBC, 1999) and in the humanities and social sciences (MALS, SFU, 2006), an established publication history and record of scholarship, and more than fifteen years of experience in qualitative and quantitative educational research. She has designed and taught online, hybrid and face-to-face courses, programs and workshops for undergraduate and graduate students, and for adult and professional learners in continuing education programs.
Dr Macfadyen’s early eLearning research drew on her interest in theories of culture and intercultural communication, and was motivated by the reality of our increasingly diverse learner audience. This work later informed her development and continuing co-teaching of ETEC 565G: Culture and Communication in Virtual Learning Environments for the UBC MET program.
Latterly, the rising tide of learning data captured by learning technologies, and the emergence of the field of learning analytics, spurred Dr Macfadyen to also bring her analytic and scientific skills to the study of virtual learning. Since 2010 she has led learning analytics work in the UBC Faculty of Arts. Her research in learning analytics – individual and collaborative – has been published in respected peer-reviewed journals, and has been presented at the leading academic conferences in the field.
Dr Macfadyen is inspired by the potential for learning analytics to offer actionable insights into our teaching and learning contexts and practice: who our learners are and how that has changed over time, what choices our learners make and how that affects outcomes, and how design and teaching innovations impact learner behavior and learning outcomes. She is also keen, however, to engage researchers and practitioners in ongoing critical discussions about the limits of ‘big data’, the challenge of data literacy, and the ethical and social implications of this work.
For more see: https://changingeye.com/