Individual Fellow Initiatives

Compounding the challenge of consuming a healthy diet is the fact that many students have little or no familiarity with preparing their own food.  The result is inadequate diets that do not support optimal health and academic performance.

Digital archives and the internet have made it possible for non-experts to make major contributions to research through crowdsourcing and citizen science. UT has fascinating and important collections of primary sources for the humanities, many of which have been digitized. But before my PTF project, there were no digital tools at UT to facilitate crowdsourcing as a pedagogical strategy, engaging students with historical documents while enriching the collections themselves. The project therefore proposed to develop two UT-based crowdsourcing platforms.

Because there is only one other required course for English majors (the research seminar), E314 is taught with special attention to the skills and experiences UT English majors need for their later coursework. All E314 classes have the dual tasks of introducing students to our discipline and preparing them for success in upper-division courses. All E314 courses also emphasize the teaching both of critical methods and of critical writing and revision.

A primary tool in helping instructors improve their teaching skills is a careful assessment of the strengths and weaknesses they exhibit in the classroom environment. While end-of-semester student evaluations can offer valuable feedback on these matters, the numerical summaries and written commentaries those evaluations provide are often too unfocused to help teachers progress at their craft from one semester to the next.

Based on a long-standing interest in peer observation in my own college, the intent of this project was to foster a broad campus discussion on the importance of this collegial practice for improving teaching and learning and enhancing faculty development.

With the much-anticipated addition of a medical school on The University of Texas at Austin campus, we have an ideal opportunity to reexamine health-professional education, and plan for a more collaborative interprofessional education approach to address the future health-care needs of Texas, the United States and world health. The goal of an interprofessional education approach is to prepare health professional students to deliberately work together with the common goal of building a safer and better patient-centered and community/population oriented health care system.

In order to better advise students, we need to have a fuller understanding of how individual students learn in various environments; what strategies tend to work best in online vs blended classrooms; and what types of students are going to profit most from the advantages—and be harmed least by the disadvantages—of each learning environment. The project will use the accompanying grant to fund a study that compares student learning strategies and success in the online and blended versions of Introduction to Ancient Rome (CC 302).

The primary purpose of the Health Communication Scholars Program was to improve training of graduate students interested in health communication to engage in interdisciplinary collaboration and secure grant funding for research projects. More structured education and experience with this process as graduate students would better prepare these students for expectations they will face as junior faculty–to work with colleagues in other fields, find creative ways to align research interests, and propose projects for competitive funding.

Many engineering systems are too complex to be studied with experimental or analytical methods. Thus, computational techniques are an essential element in the engineering profession. The current mechanical engineering curriculum introduces these tools during their sophomore year in ME 318 – Engineering Computational Methods, but there is limited opportunity for “spiral learning” to reinforce the concepts and techniques learned.

Often when faculty express an interest in exploring and adopting new teaching, they ask: Where should I begin?  What should I do? How will it help? If an instructor will take even a small step, the next may be easier.  Education specialists advise us to create multiple, low-risk settings that encourage students to try new ideas and test new skills. It would seem that the same advice applies to developing one’s own teaching practice and in encouraging useful change among colleagues.

CS312 is the introductory programming class for computer science majors. It teaches students structured programming: designing and implementing computer programs that solve nontrivial problems. CS312 is the first required course for Computer Science majors. It is part of the four course pre CS program. CS is different than many of the other disciplines in the College of Natural Science. Most students have some exposure to math, chemistry, biology, and even physics during their secondary education. And some have the opportunity to take Computer Science courses.

SSC 302 is an introductory course that blends the skills of data analysis, basic modeling techniques and inferential statistics. Many UT students complete this course to satisfy their core math requirement. I believe the content of SSC 302 should be made available to students prior to their enrollment here at UT, both to accelerate their preparedness for college and to help inform their choice of major trajectories once they are here.

New faculty hires have many resources at their disposal to improve their teaching. In fact, so many resources exist that it can be paralyzing. What I propose is not an investment in offices or institutions, but rather in people. By virtue of completing a dissertation, most Ph.D.s are proficient at research. Regrettably, the correlation between research and teaching is not perfect; though a perusal of the teachers in the Academy of Distinguished Teachers shows that a strong correlation very well may exist. Teaching, regrettably, usually only becomes a problem when it is a problem.

To date, we have had a number of sections of CH301/CH302 that have utilized the hybrid framework to varying extents. In this new hybrid model, the in-class learning is supported by a  significant set of online resources to support independent learning outside of the classroom. This approach marries the flexibility and customized nature of web based learning modules to   deliver the factual knowledge and procedural knowledge with relevant, engaging classroom  based instruction that will serve to motivationally engage the students.