BU Scholarship to Honor LU Lingzi

As thousands of offers to help in some way pour in from alumni, friends, and others around the world, a fund has been established to endow a memorial scholarship at the University in the name of LU Lingzi, the BU graduate student who was one of three people killed in the Boston Marathon bomb attacks on April 15, BU Today reports. “It’s a fitting tribute and the right thing to do,” says Kenneth Feld (SMG’70), a BU trustee who proposed the memorial scholarship Wednesday at a meeting of the executive committee of the Campaign for BU, which he chairs. Before the meeting adjourned, its seven members had committed $560,000 to the fund, created in accordance with the preferences of the LU family, who will be traveling to Boston this week from their home in Shenyang, China.

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Flipped learning: Professor tested, student approved

Seven in 10 students say they watch online lectures more than once.

Marcio Oliveira could see the benefits of his kinesiology course’s flipped learning approach with every new hand that popped up in the first minute of every class, as students peppered him with questions. But he needed more than anecdotal evidence, so he conducted a survey, and the results proved that the hands didn’t lie.

Oliveira, a professor and assistant chair in the University of Maryland’s Department of Kinesiology, began his flipped learning experimentation during the spring 2009 semester in his 200-student class, turning the traditional learning model on its head: students learn content outside of class—through podcasts and recorded lectures, mostly—and do what was once known as homework during class, with the help of professors.

Students seemed to appreciate the flexibility of watching lectures online, outside of class, and having Oliveira and his teaching assistants (TAs) answer questions during class and in smaller sections headed by the TAs. It wasn’t until Oliveira asked students about the flipped model that he knew how popular the approach had become.…Read More