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

Many of the final projects are available online:

https://hipstas.github.io/annotating-adler/

https://hipstas.github.io/gea-psychic-spirituality-recordings/

https://makaylabaughman.github.io/the-leigh-hunt-hair-book/

https://utancientamericas.omeka.net/ 

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.

"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 colleagues presented a poster at a national pharmacy conference on 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.

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, 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.

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.

For an article on the concept of the social classroom, exploring its impact on student interactions and learning, check out this piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Social Classroom.

For her Provost's Teaching Fellows initiative, Nina Telang developed of a Supplemental Instruction (SI) program in a sophomore-level Electrical and Computer Engineering course, EE319K: Introduction to Embedded Systems. 

Supplemental Instruction (SI) study sessions to help students succeed in introductory courses by employing a peer teaching model. SI Leaders – TAs or peers who have already successfully taken the course – plan and lead two identical, voluntary SI sessions each week, which students can join at any point in the semester. 

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).  

Vernita Gordon was a featured presenter at the UT Austin Physics Departmental Colloquium series on December 1, 2021. This series of events features physicists from within and outside of the University, and is open to all UT faculty, students, and staff. Gordon presented on her PTF Initiative, "Being Human in Physics."

"ClioVis: Description, Origin, and Uses," a September 2020 article from Not Even Past: the digital magazine of the UT Department of History, was awarded Editor's Choice by the online aggregate Digital Humanities Now. 

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. 

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.

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. 

Before deciding what your career goals are, it’s critical to know what you value most in a job. What gets you out of bed to go to start the day, go to work, and/or live your life? This exercise will help you define and prioritize what drives you. We provide definitions of 8 common "drivers". Once you understand these drivers, you can take the exercise and go through a ranking process to determine which are most important to you (i.e. you’re less likely to compromise on these) and which are less important (i.e. you’re more willing to compromise on these).

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:

Objective Structured Clinical Examinations, known as OSCEs, are a widely established assessment practice in Pharmacy education. PTF Renee Acosta created OSCE rubrics as part of her PTF initiative to help students gain constructive feedback and more consistent practice of their skills prior to moving on to future courses. Acosta's rubrics that have since been used as the foundation for future PTF projects and other OSCE rubrics used within department.

View the rubrics here.

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.

PTF Katie Dawson coordinated a Faculty Learning Community of six faculty members from across UT - American Studies, Biology, Art/Design, Classics, Education, and Theatre- in a 15 week faculty learning community focused on active and creative teaching strategies. Through the project, faculty members explored active and creative teaching methods in monthly meetings, and re-designed at least two lectures to use active/creative teaching approaches. Faculty also received individual coaching and observation from me or one of my graduate students.