PTF Impacts

On April 30, 2025, Guyot hosted a public poster session showcasing student projects focusing on datasets from the City of Austin Open Data Portal, held at the University of Texas at Austin. Projects ranged widely in focus, from environmental data to transportation and public safety, demonstrating the breadth of student inquiry and analysis.

At the end of each semester, about 10 students volunteer to present their findings to the City of Austin employees during one of their regular data meetups.

3 different PTF projects presented:

Loescher project focuses on: Elevate excellence in the classroom through new strategies to understand, measure, and improve rigor in all courses 

•each class is designed and delivered with the expectation of students learning at high levels •each student demonstrates learning at high levels 

•each student is supported so they can learn at high levels

View the poster here

Dr. Chen presented PTF project insights on the topic of internships at the following venue: 

Chen, W. (2024). Publishing in the Interdisciplinary fields. Invited Talk at the School of Liberal Arts & Sciences, University of North Texas at Dallas.

"Musings in Greek Literature" is a podcast co-produced by Prof. Deborah Beck and advanced UT undergraduate students of ancient Greek.

Dr. Accosta, Dr. Castleberry, and Dr. Davis presented a poster at a national conference describing the Pharmacy Practice Lab (PPL) sequence spanning all six semesters of the UTCOP didactic program to consolidate lab components and increase skills development while aligning with and reinforcing curriculum balance.

Two presentations about promoting the use of a local open data portal for data science projects.

The first presentation was made with the collaboration of a former student/current UGCA at an event organized by Open Austin, which addresses local social and civic challenges through creative uses of technology.

The second presentation was made at the weekly statistics seminar at Texas State University with mostly professors in attendance.

Rodriguez, S.R. & Wilson, R. (2024, January) Faculty-driven Communities of Practice: Implications for inclusive mentoring. Round table presented at The Association of Science Teacher Education Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA.

View this proposal from July 2023

Dr. Berkin Dortdivanlioglu and I (Krishna Kumar) received a grant from the Cockrell School of Engineering to use AI for persoanlized tutors in our introduction to programming course. We have since built a personalized tutor for this course and is available for student privately. We are in the process of making the tutor public through TACC

Dr. Chen presented PTF project insights on the topic of internships at the following venue: 

Chen, W. (2024). U.S.-China AI Race and Global Professionals. Panel on GPT Asia, Texas Global, UT Austin.

Chen, W. et al., (2023). Bridging the Internship Gap: Preliminary Findings from the Internship Project. Paper presented at Media Sociology Postconference, International Communication Association, Toronto.

This invited paper is part of a group of six articles on "rupture and repair" in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic published in Transactions of the American Philological Association, the journal of the professional organization for American Classicists.

https://doi.org/10.1353/apa.2023.a913465

This profile of "Musings in Greek Literature" appeared in the Spring 2023 edition of Life and Letters, the magazine of the UT College of Liberal Arts. This article explores the podcast and its origins, which occurred spontaneously in a conversation with Adam Rabinowitz about experiential learning. At the time, Adam was a PTF, but I wasn't. I re-applied multiple times to the PTF program and was ultimately selected for this podcast project in large part because of Adam's support and encouragement.

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.

This year’s Teaching Tips  were written by Chair-Elect Jessica Toste, from the Department of Special Education.

Dr. Beck made a guest appearance on the Classics media podcast "Movies We Dig" due to her work with "Musings in Greek Literature." On this podcast, hosted by several young Classicists including two graduates of the UT Classics Ph.D. program, Beck discussed the made-for-TV version of Homer's Odyssey starring Armand Assante and Isabelle Rosselini (1997).  

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:

The 2017 Provost's Teaching Fellows Steering Committee prepared this poster as part of the Symposium Changing Education: Redesigning the Undergraduate Experience, hosted by Project 2021 and the Faculty Innovation Center at UT Austin on March 30, 2017. The format included keynote presentations punctuated by short talks and plenty of time for discussions in breakout sessions.

More than a dozen of the country’s leading education experts met at Rice University October 13-14, 2014 for the biennial De Lange Conference, “Teaching in the University of Tomorrow.” This conference was presented in collaboration with Scientia, an institute for the history of science and culture, and the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University.