Stories

Duck is an environment for students to explore practice questions. The developer began with the explicit goal of breaking down the false dichotomy among right and wrong answers. Although many faculty begin with the expectation that they should be able to mark items as "right" or "wrong", the challenge of writing unique feedback for each item provides an opportunity for them to be reflective about the nature of the task at hand. This has been effective in transforming the kinds of questions some faculty write, as they realize the questions they're asking are not very interesting.

The PNL collaboratory wanted people at different locations to be able to analyze data collaboratively. Initially, they created data analysis applications that could be operated collaboratively and gave a variety of controls to a teacher, who could allow different users to join in and participate in the analysis. During trials, they found that, although many faculty had demanded a system that could provide control, in fact such systems were too cumbersome. They transitioned to using VNC, which allows people to use the same applications they usually use and which don't control who can do what. Instead, normal social controls appear to be sufficient to enforce polite behavior regarding who is operating the mouse at any given time.

Students using the OWL electronic homework environment described a variety of strategies they used to subvert the "mastery" component, that required students to retake quizzes until they could demonstrate competence at a particular level. One strategy entailed having students in a group collaboratively develop a spreadsheet with the formulas necessary to solve each of the problem types. Students could then simply fill in the values from the quiz and get all of the correct answers to the problems.

Project LearnLink began at Emory to build a community of learners among science students. Based on FirstClass, a collaboarative conferencing system, LearnLink was transmitted from department to department (and even college to college) by students. Because the software permitted students to control their own conferences, to add icons and to set up chats, they were its biggest advocates. Different voices entered the virtual classrrooms. people who never spoke in class often contributed long, thoughtful essays. Science (and soon everything else) exploded, 24-7.

PKAL Project Kaleidoscope is a national alliance of faculty focusing on what works in improving undergraduate science education. From its focus on developing faculty leadership for the 21st Centtury to its focus on building and laboratory design, PKAL has led the discussion of undergraduate science reform. By listening to faculty voices and courting institutional leadership, by insisting on take home action plans, PKAL has created a viable, supported network for reform. Most participants are from liberal arts colleges. Including research 1 instituions offers many boundary challenges.

CUR The Council for Undergraduate Research is an alliance of many liberal arts institutions (primarily), with a common focus of building infrastructure and support for undergraduate research and making it part of the central mission of undergraduate education. Including R1s has presented some real challenges.

BioQUEST The BioQUEST curriculum consortium is a collaboratory of science educators and technology folks. The mission is to reinvent undergraduate biology education through a problem posing, problem solving, and peer persuasion philosophical approach to teaching and learning, using open problem spaces to challenge and entice learners.

Bringing BioQUEST and other open ended simulations to biology departments has required more persistence. In smaller honors classes where the profs were more open to relinquishing control the introductions were easier. The primarily research community were less willling to spend the time to adopt and adapt. They needed scaffolding, examples, and resources as well as assistance to implement exercises. The rewards and incentives of their community made it difficult to interest them in the time investment. Honors students were good vectors for the ideas and introduced a demand into other classes. The development and use of PBL and Cases began to permit entry points for that community. Over time we began to capitalize on the desire of research faculty to attract research students to their labs. By identifying needs ( needs assessment) and then bringing in BioQUEST workshops and other visiting scholars, we began to build interest in the tools. Adapting research tools (Biology WorkBench) was one entry point.

A Biology Workbench lab at UMass Amherst went through multiple generations before TAs and faculty supported it. Initially, each group of students used protein explorer to view a variety of macromolecules, performed a BLAST search on a unique protein, an alignment, a box shade, and colored in amino acids in a PDB file to visualize structure with colors representing identity and concensus, and then present their findings. TAs complained that it was too complicated and required "too much clicking". The activity was redesigned so that students used protein explorer and performed a BLAST search and alignment, but then pasted the alignment into a tool that colored in the amino acids automatically, and then present their findings. TAs complained this was still too complicated. In the final revision, students use protein explorer to compare several different lysozymes, visit consurf to view conservation of sequence with a unique protein, and present findings. Now the TAs and lab coordinator love it.

A development process which has proven particularly successful is for the developer to work one-on-one with an interested faculty member on an idea (either from the faculty member or the developer). Input from potentially interested faculty to ensure that the range of capabilities supported will have broad support and the project is developed to support scalability. The project is developed and tested in a single course, then scaled up and provided as part of the available resources for all faculty in subsequent semesters.

Teaching with Technology Faculty Workshops

Many forms of workshops exist from the 3 hour one technology or one simulation focus to the 9 day marathon BioQUEST immersion. What I have found works is more like a class for faculty 2-3 hours a week for a semester, that is built around each participant working on a new course or new course material. The kicker is helping each other and bringing together folks from different disciplines and schools.

CancerQUEST CancerQUEST began as a project of one faculty member who was besieged with questions about the biology of normal cells and cancer cells by members of his wife’s cancer survivors support group. By engaging undergraduate students in his classes in developing content, animations and materials, he built a website that is a tool for many levels of cancer education. Its many audiences have contributed to the “user-friendly” nature of the site and have extended its uses.

PBL, ICBL and other variants

In these communities the focus is around a pedagogy. Some successfully use technology, some depends on face-face contact and insist of small groups. The continuum of approaches and applications from k-12 to medical schools makes this an interesting set of communities to investigate, asking how they bridged substantive differences and where technology has helped.

PRISM This project unites graduate students in the sciences with high school and middle school teachers to design course materials using technology built around real world authentic problems and cases. although in its infancy it is teaching us many things about borders and bridges across boundaries.

Virtual Sherlock

The Chem

CrossingBoundaries