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.

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/ 

For more information about the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) program at UT Austin, visit the program's webpage: DNP Program at UT Austin

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. 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. 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.

Two promotional videos were created to highlight the impact of Pharmacy Practice Labs and collaboration with UT Athletic Training.

View the videos: Pharmacy Practice Labs and Partnership with UT Athletic Training

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.

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.

Life and Letters, the print and digital magazine of the UT College of Liberal Arts, featured ClioVis, the digital timeline visualization tool developed by Erika Bsumek's PTF initiative, in their November 2023 issue.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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:

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).

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.