This paper is a report on the results of a study of 266 members of the Alpine Club of Canada, Calgary Section. The study attempted to gain further insight into why people climb mountains. The results indicate that an everchanging mosaic of primary and secondary motives for climbing exist. Age, ability and sex would appear to be three of the stronger determining variables that influence this mosaic. A model for characterizing motives for participation in physical activity is suggested. The categories of the model include: 1) social experience, 2) health and fitness, 3) excitement, 4) expressive, 5) relaxation, 6) competitive achievement, 7) non-competitive achievement, and 8) the love of nature.

We describe the design and evaluation of an innovative course for beginning undergraduate mathematics students. The course is delivered almost entirely online, making extensive use of computer-aided assessment to provide students with practice problems. We outline various ideas from education research that informed the design of the course, and describe how these are put into practice. We present quantitative evaluation of the impact on students' subsequent performance (N = 1401), as well as qualitative analysis of interviews with a sample of 14 students who took the course. We find evidence that the course has helped to reduce an attainment gap among incoming students, and suggest that the design ideas could be applied more widely to other courses.

Lectures are a commonly used teaching method in higher education, but there is significant debate about the relative merits of different classroom practices. Various classroom observation tools have been developed to try to give insight into these practices, beyond the simple dichotomy of “traditional lecturing versus active learning”. Here we review of a selection of classroom observation protocols from an ethological perspective and describe how this informed the development of a new protocol, FILL+. We demonstrate that FILL+ can be applied reliably by undergraduate students after minimal training. We analysed a sample of 208 lecture recordings from Mathematics, Physics, and Veterinary Medicine and found a wide variety of classroom practices, e.g. on average lecturers spent 2.1% (± 2.6%) of the time asking questions, and 79.3% (± 19%) of the lecture talking, but individuals varied considerably. The FILL+ protocol has the potential to be widely used, both in research on effective teaching practices, and in informing discussion of pedagogical approaches within institutions and disciplines.

We describe an organising principle for online learning materials we term coherently organised digital exercises and expositions. Larger in scale than individual lessons but smaller than a programme of study, this innovation in instructional practice is increasingly guiding our thinking in the development of university mathematics courses. Essentially we have taken the book and put it inside automatically assessed online quizzes. In doing this we embrace the potential provided by new technology to implement evidence-based practices such as spaced retrieval practice. This paper discusses details of this innovation, and how we have implemented it. On the basis of these experiences, we believe this innovation has the potential to change the model of education for university mathematics courses in substantial and non-trivial ways.

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