Ramon Lawrence
Academic Director, Centre for Teaching & Learning
My key areas of expertise: Impacts of artificial intelligence on education, student help seeking and support, automated assessment systems, integrative evaluation of teaching and peer reviews
My role within the team: Academic Director responsible for strategic planning and initiatives, communication and collaboration with Faculties at UBC Okanagan and the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology and Learning Technology Hub at UBC Vancouver, and administration of teaching awards including Teaching Fellows and the CTL Advisory Group.
My background: I am a computer scientist having completed an Honours in Computer Science in 1996 and a Ph.D. in 2001 at the University of Manitoba. In addition to my CTL role, I am a Professor of Computer Science with research interests in database systems, artificial intelligence, and educational systems. The research has resulted in a spin-off company called Unity Data that provides software and consulting for data integration that has supported numerous companies worldwide. Teaching recognitions include receiving the UBC award for Teaching Excellence and Innovation in 2017, the Killam Teaching Prize in 2020, and a 9-time member of the teaching honor roll recognizing the top 10% of instructors. Current teaching research studies the impacts of AI on education including developing automated assessment and student help systems such as the HelpMe system for student support.
When I’m not working… I am supporting the UBC Okanagan Softball Team (and my daughter as a pitcher), walking and hiking, and playing computer games.
Research & Publications relevant to work at the CTL:
- Kevin Wang and Ramon Lawrence. “HelpMe: Student Help Seeking using Office Hours and Email”. Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (SIGCSE 2024), Portland, OR, USA. ACM. 7 pages.
- Ramon Lawrence, Sarah Foss, and Tatiana Urazova. “Evaluation of Submission Limits and Regression Penalties to Improve Student Behavior with Automatic Assessment Systems“, ACM Transactions on Computing Education, September 2023, Vol. 23, Number 3, pages 1-24.
- Kevin Wang, Seth Akins, Abdallah Mohammed and Ramon Lawrence. “Mastery or AI Deception? Analyzing ChatGPT’s Assessment Proficiency and Evaluating Detection Strategies“, 2023 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI 2023). 7 pages.
- Kevin Wang and Ramon Lawrence. “Using Assignment Incentives to Reduce Student Procrastination and Encourage Code Review Interactions“. 2023 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI 2023). 6 pages.
- Sarah Foss, Tatiana Urazova, and Ramon Lawrence. “Automatic Generation and Marking of UML Database Design Diagrams“, SIGCSE 2022: Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Feb 2022, pages 626–632.