PTF Impacts

On October 25-26, 2020, Rice University hosted the Grow PoLS Virtual Workshop: Growing Equity, Inclusion and Diversity for the Physics of Living Systems. The purpose of this PoLS (Physics of Living Systems) workshop was to grow the ecosystem of physics by recognizing the systemic barriers that exist in STEM fields at all education and career levels, by building alliances, and by sharing best practices to overcome these systemic barriers.

Each year, the PTF Chair-Elect has the opportunity to share recurring Teaching Tips with all faculty at UT. These messages cover a variety of topics, styles, and methodologies, from brief and practical classroom strategies to in-depth conversations with voices from across campus.

In September 2020 History faculty Adam Clulow interviewed Erika Bsumek for Not Even Past, the digital magazine of the UT Department of History, to discuss the development, use, and impacts of ClioVis, the digital timeline visualization tool created as part of Bsumek's PTF Initiative. This article is part of a wider series that explored how teachers and students across the History department, the university and world more generally responded in new ways to the unprecedented classroom environment faced in a time of global pandemic. 

ClioVis, the digital timeline visualization tool created by Erika Bsumek as part of her PTF Initiative, was highlighted in UT Department of History News on May 25, 2020 by Dr. Megan Raby. The article explored the ways that ClioVis and Epoch, an initiative by History faculy Adam Clulow, are being used to create undergraduate research opportunities for UT liberal arts and history students. 

Former PTF chair Jen Moon co-presented at the International Society for Exploring Teaching & Learning (ISETL) Annual Conference in October 2019.

Explore the conference proceedings (Thursday, Friday, Saturday) or read the abstract below.

PTF Deborah Beck and her PTF Initiative were featured as a guest post of Sententiae Antiquae, a scholarly Classics blog with over 27,000 readers.

In the post Beck describes some of the reasons for and benefits of using podcasting as a tool for learning in Classics courses:

PTF Leaders Cynthia LaBrake and Mary Neuburger presented both a poster and a talk at the 2018 Reinvention Collaborative meeting (now the Association of Undergraduate Education at Research Universities, UERU) on November 8-10, 2018 in Arlington, Virginia. The 2018 Biennial National Conference featured more Undergraduate Vice Presidents/Provosts and more participants overall than any previous Reinvention Collaborative meeting.

Erika Bsumek built the ClioVis digital timelines platform for instructors and students to build interactive digital timelines as part of their coursework or scholarly initiatives. The platform has been used by thousands of students across the US, including throughout the UT System, University of Michigan, Stanford, and others, in both humanities and STEM disciplines, as well as for research initiatives.

As part of his PTF Initiative, Adam Rabinowitz developed two UT resources for crowd-sourcing humanities archival and historical work and student “citizen science:" FromthePage (partnered with UT Libraries) and Nanosourcer (a Canvas plugin). UT’s customized FromthePage instance is permanently supported by UT Libraries, publicly available, and has nearly 1000 users working on over a dozen different archival collections.

As part of his PTF Initiative, Luis Martins founded the Entrepreneurship Minor within the McCombs School's Rosenthal Department of Management. The Entrepreneurship Minor is available to all undergraduate students at UT Austin, and develops entrepreneurial mindsets and skillsets that equip students to have impact on organizations and society as startup founders or as employees in established organizations.