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.

PTF Layla Guyot presented a session at Open Data Day in March 2024, hosted by the Austin Public Library. This event was part of International Open Data Day, which celebrates open government data with events hosted around the globe. Guyot presented about promoting the use of a local open data portal for data science projects with her collaborator, former student/current UGCA Dustyn Ransom.

In Fall 2024, PTF Ruth Shear helped launch the new general chemistry labs, rewritten to include Research Methods material (rebranded "thinking like a scientist"), and taught to 4500 students. This involved a complete overhaul of the CH204 general chemistry lab course, turning it into two classes: CH104M and CH104N. These courses are required for the vast majority of CNS majors as well as all pre-health students. The courses were piloted in Fall 2024 with 400 students, and fully launched in Fall 2025 with over 4500 students.

As part of Steve Finkelstein's PTF Initiative, a campus-wide faculty learning community constructed a canvas sandbox website where they could share materials related to climate change, with annotations, with the broader UT community. They collected the group's materials, and then tried to organize them in a useful way. The materials include lectures, activities, quizzes, projects, pre/post tests, etc., and are organized both by learning objective and by course. The website is now live, and a publication on pre/post survey results is being prepared.

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.

On April 11, 2024, three Provost's Teaching Fellows presented at the final session of the "Teaching as Wellbeing" mini-conference series, hosted by the UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers in collaboration with UT System faculty developers. The series served as a monthly think tank about the relationship between teaching, learning, and wellbeing for educators and educational developers across UT system.

In 2024, many of Dr. Tanya Clement's student researchers created dynamic Digital Humanities projects, and some were able to share those projects with broader academic audiences:

Trent Wintermeier (graduate student), Monica Olivio, and Nati Roman (undergraduates) presented “Listening and Annotating Spirituality in the Gloria Anzaldúa Archive” as part of Platforms, Power, and Pedagogy. Computers and Writing Conference. Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas, in June 2024. 

"Musings in Greek Literature" is a podcast co-produced by Prof. Deborah Beck and advanced UT undergraduate students of ancient Greek. Episodes are available directly from UT's Liberal Arts Information Technology Services and also from Apple and Spotify.

PTF Layla Guyot gave an invited presentation at the weekly statistics seminar at Texas State University, to an audience of primarily faculty. In her talk Guyot discussed promoting the use of a local open data portal for data science projects.

Nine students from PTF Layla Guyot's Elements of Data Science course were selected to virtually present the insights gained during their coursework to the Data, Impact, Visuals, and Exploration (DIVE) meetup organized by the City of Austin.

Dr. Acosta, Dr. Castleberry, and colleagues presented a poster at the July 2023 Meeting of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy in Aurora, Colorado. Their poster discussed the relationships between a student’s perceived preparedness before and after Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs), OSCE grades, perception of their performance, pre-pharmacy and pharmacy GPAs, composite Pharmacy College Admission Test (PCAT) score, and admission Multiple Mini Interview (MMI) scores.

PTF Jen Ebbeler was interviewed for this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about how professors can help their students connect and build relationships in both in-person and virtual classrooms, and explore the impact of student interactions on their learning.

Read the entire article here.

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.

As part of their PTF initiative's goal of creating protocols and resources to better streamline the creation and regular updating of course materials, Osier created this Stock Images Database in Airtable to collect sources of free, online images featuring a broader spectrum of body types, skin colors, and other key elements which are vital to medical education.

As part of their PTF initiative's goal of creating protocols and resources to better streamline the creation and regular updating of course materials, Nico Osier created this Trauma-Informed Course Auditing Checklist in Airtable to streamline the process of ensuring their lectures and course materials are responsive to research-backed best practices in trauma-informed teaching. Osier's Auditing Checklist was designed with Nursing and Health Sciences courses in mind, but can be adapted for instructors in virtually any field.

As part of their PTF initiative's goal of creating protocols and resources to better streamline the creation and regular updating of course materials, Osier created this Bitmoji Database to keep track of the icons they use throughout their course materials and slides to create consistency and systematize their creation and editing processes. This Database can be used as a template for other instructors who are interested in using Bitmoji or other icons and symbols in their course materials, and once copied can be easily edited to fit the individual instructor's needs.

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.

PTF Maddie Holland created a Canvas page that contains videos, short assignments, and teaching notes for instructors in any discipline who would like to teach their undergraduates how to work together effectively in teams. The videos and assignments are student-facing and come with instructor guides on how to implement them in various classes. Completed video modules as well as supporting assignments can be found on Canvas.

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.

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 Stephanie Seidel Holmsten, from the International Relations and Global Studies program.

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).  

The Kendra Scott Women's Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute (KS WELI) held the inaugural Female Founder Pitch Competition in October 2021.

The UT System works with internal and external partners to foster critical literacies in students across the P20 continuum.  UT institutions work to cultivate these literacies in students across traditional and emerging academic disciplines, and through partnerships and programs in PK12 schools, communities, and business and industry across Texas.