PTF Impacts

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

To learn more about the Rigorously Compassionate initiative at UT Austin, which focuses on combining empathy with academic excellence, visit their website:
Rigorously Compassionate Program

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.

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.

“Bridging Rhetoric and Engineering: Qualitative Results from a Writing Center Program to Improve Engineering Undergraduate Writing,” Proceedings from IEEE ProComm, 2024. Pittsburgh, PA (July 14-17, 2024). I delivered this co-authored conference paper at the IEEE ProComm conference. See the link for the paper.

View the presentation slides here

For more information, you can access the article with the DOI: 10.1109/ProComm61427.2024.00034.

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.

This video project was designed to be shown in all Signature Courses at UT. Together with a discussion prompt, the video aims to acquaint students with mental and physical health resources on campus, and to teach them strategies for success.

A campus-wide faculty learning community constructed a canvas sandbox website where we could share materials related to climate change, with annotations, with the broader UT community. We collected our groups materials, and tried to organize them in a useful way. This includes lectures, activities, quizzes, projects, pre/post tests, etc. We organize both by learning objective, and by course. Our website is now live. A publication on pre/post survey results is being prepared.

In 2024, I piloted a new web-based version of Astronomy 301 (Introductory to Astronomy), and taught it a second time in 2025. I attempted to include best practices for active learning, which was a challenge in this environment.

Dr. Jason Heppler of George Mason University reviewed ClioVis, the digital timeline visualization tool developed by Erika Bsumek, in the March 2024 issue of the Journal of American History. According to an excerpt from the review:

D'Arcy Randall gave a co-authored presentation about the program developed as part of her PTF Initiative at the Conference on College Composition and Communication on February 16, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois, themed "Doing Hope in Desperate Times." The presentation was part of a session featuring Writing Centers titled "Cross-Disciplinary Collaborations to Promote Transfer and Self-Efficacy," which was among hundreds of sessions of varied topics, formats, and scholarly approaches for over 1000 attendees. 

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 Nina Telang, from the Chandra Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

PTF D'Arcy Randall delivered a co-authored presentation at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 26, 2023.

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

Team-Based Learning is a specific interactive educational method that has been shown to develop skills for meaningful teamwork. Through engaging classroom activities, students experience the benefits of working with others. According to the literature, students perceive the benefits of teamwork including understanding the course material more deeply and producing higher quality class assignments.

Nico Osier presented about the Stock Images Database developed as part of their PTF Initiative at the 2022 Open Education Conference. Themed Rise to Action, the conference took place on October 17-20, 2022 and was completely virtual. Osier presentation titled "Creation and Use of a Stock Images Database to Make Lectures More Diverse and Inclusive" and also featured several student researchers. 

D'Arcy Randall's PTF Initiative created a collaboration between the Cockrell School of Engineering and The University Writing Center to create resources and consultant trainings to better support STEM students in technical writing projects and assignments. As a result of the Initiative's work and findings, a number of STEM-specific UWC resources have been created and/or revised, which can be found on the UWC website.

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.

"Measuring Impactful Teaching Practices" was presented at the International Virtual Exchange Conference, December 2022, Spain. We explore Global Virtual Exchange (or GVE) at the University of Texas at Austin in the last academic year, 2021-2022 to measure the impact of the faculty-led program,   Our main takeaway was that professors and students participating in the GVE program find the greatest benefits to be in the intercultural student-to-student exchange and the exposure to different perspectives.