Lucy Taylor

Supporting student self-study: The educational design of podcasts in a collaborative learning context

One activity-rich way to utilize collaborative learning, team-based learning (TBL), can present students and teachers with both opportunities and challenges. TBL requires students to prepare for each class, where they are then assessed for their ‘readiness’ to apply the concepts learned during their pre-class preparation. This study addresses two aspects of TBL in an aim to better support and facilitate student learning and engagement: (1) supporting students during their pre-class preparation by providing metadata on the often-difficult required readings, and (2) offering students communication from the teacher, or ‘expert’ – something students often perceive as missing in active learning classes. Short, supportive podcasts are provided to students to give context to their out-of-class preparation and to allow them to hear directly from the teacher. Results suggest that the intervention of supportive podcasts successfully addresses these two issues and may benefit other collaborative classrooms that face similar challenges.

Creating better cities: how biodiversity and ecosystem functioning enhance urban residents’ wellbeing

Cities concentrate risks and the adverse effects of dense populations, such as outdoor air pollution, chronic disease and the impact of extreme weather events. Governments and planning bodies struggle to heed and apply the abundance of unintegrated research that links aspects of the urban environment with urban residents’ wellbeing. In order to promote human wellbeing in cities, a number of key features of the urban environment should be promoted. The medical science, urban ecology and urban design research already recognises the importance of some aspects, including providing walkable spaces, community space and greenspace. We argue that in practice, the provision of these three features is insufficient for human wellbeing. Emerging research demonstrates the importance of biodiversity and ecosystem functions to wellbeing. This paper outlines the concept of wellbeing and provides a summary of the three established features of urban environments that enhance residents’ lives: the provision of walkable, community and greenspace. We then outline the importance of two vital but often overlooked links in the discussion of how urban planning contributes to wellbeing: biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Until governments and policies recognise the importance of these two elements, urban design and management for wellbeing is at best simplistic. It is important for biodiversity and ecosystem function to be considered during the design decision process. Urban designers and ecologists should recognise that their work has the potential to contribute to human wellbeing by integrating biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in their research.

The impact of urbanisation on avian species: The inextricable link between people and birds

This study investigates the impact of urbanisation on birdlife in a major city. Line transects and point counts were used to survey birds in three habitat types: parkland, residential areas and business/industrial areas. Abundance, richness and diversity of assemblages were determined for all bird species and for those birds native to the area. Behaviours of birds, and of human residents in relation to birds, in these urban areas were documented, including all instances of avian aggression. Bird species, including a subset of native bird species, have greater abundance and richness in parklands. Overall species diversity is greatest in residential habitat types, but native diversity is greatest in parklands. Introduced species are most abundant in business/industrial habitat types. The most frequent aggressive encounters were initiated by noisy miners Manorina melanocephalas, one of the four most common species throughout all habitat types (other common species include the rainbow lorikeet Trichoglossus haematodus, rock dove Columba livia and common myna Sturnus tristis). Other behaviours involved birds utilising food and roost resources and were classified as being caused by active and passive human behaviours. These outcomes indicate that local changes to the environment can impact the bird species by providing different food and roost resources. Human residents and local governments have a range of tools to modify the diversity of urban areas. Further research is needed to determine alternative definitions of modification, such as defining it as open space, and investigating the health of the avian populations in urban areas.

Wellbeing and urban living: nurtured by nature

In recent decades, empirical evidence has demonstrated that nature can enable urban environments to support human wellbeing. Research into links between nature and human wellbeing is often carried out with one wellbeing index or in single locations, which can limit our understanding of findings. To further this work, we deployed an online survey to residents of the two most-populous cities in both Australia and New Zealand. The survey measured self-reported wellbeing via three indices used widely in the literature: general wellbeing (WHO-5), personal wellbeing, and psychological wellbeing. We compared results with two biodiversity indicators: bird species richness and the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) of respondents’ postcodes. We also asked respondents to rate the amount of nature they view from their immediate environment: both at home and at work or other frequent location. Our results support a link between local nature and human wellbeing across all four cities, significantly in the two Australian cities. Qualitative data reveals that urban life can challenge human wellbeing by creating a unique suite of stresses that residents strive to balance. There is the potential for nature to support human wellbeing in typically degraded urban environments. While this work corroborates existing literature demonstrating links between human wellbeing and nature, our qualitative research extends our understanding of these links by providing more detailed and nuanced information.

Correction to: Wellbeing and urban living: nurtured by nature

Table 3 contained an error in how the degrees of freedom are displayed. The comma separating the model (e.g., 1) and error (e.g., 121) has been deleted in the Auckland, Melbourne, and Sydney columns. Where the degrees of freedom should read “1,121”, for example, it displays as “1121”. The corrected table follows.

Podcasting: are student competencies hindering its potential?

Currently, podcasting has been overwhelmingly embraced by commercial and community media sources such as T.V. and radio to expand their listening audience. This same concept can be utilised from an educational point of view, where podcasting has the potential to expand flexible learning environments to give students more control over where and when they engage with their learning experience. This paper presents a study on the impact of short podcasts on students and academic staff in the Faculty of Economics and Business, The University of Sydney and has exposed a potential concern about the technical competencies of the student community.