The University of Wisconsin-Madison has awarded six faculty members Educational Innovation (EI) funds designed to provide them the opportunity to extend their sabbatical plans to further an educational innovation project. Three of the recipients are faculty members in the College of Letters & Science.
EI funds are used to supplement the sabbatical program in order to facilitate EI engagement at a grassroots level.
“The Educational Innovation sabbatical program was developed to help faculty expand their study leave in areas related to educational innovations,” says Christopher Olsen, interim vice provost for teaching and learning. “As with all EI efforts, the goals for sabbatical funding were projects that enhance teaching and learning, expand our capacity to reach learners, and develop opportunities for economic efficiencies and/or new revenues."
Below is a list of the L&S recipients and the projects they will work on during their EI sabbaticals:
Wei-Yin Loh, professor, Department of Statistics
The UW Department of Statistics is planning to offer a new Big Data Analytics Professional Certificate program beginning 2014, which will initially target nontraditional students from the local business community. It will focus on learning strategies and tools for discovering and communicating meaningful patterns in datasets generated by advances in information technology. Loh will teach a course on decision tree methods in the program and use the EI sabbatical time to design and develop the course, with the material available to future instructors.
“The course can serve as a model for teaching statistics to nontraditional as well as traditional students,” Loh says. “The proposed course and certificate program will have a positive impact on a corresponding EI effort in the Computer Science Department through their own certificate program. The two programs complement each other because they attract similar types of students.”
Marisa Otegui, assistant professor, Department of Botany
Otegui’s main goal will be to explore and develop the state-of-the-art imaging capabilities of a new transmission electron microscope that was recently installed on campus. She will develop a new module on 3-D electron microscopy for Botany 858 (workshop on plant imaging) and gather teaching material for Botany 300 (plant anatomy) and Botany 860 (plant cell biology) courses. Otegui will work on the restructuring of the graduate course offerings in plant biology and to offer modern courses organized in topic modules and taught by experts in plant and/or biology-related fields.
“There is a great need for hands-on courses at the graduate level on campus,” Otegui says. “We will address this need by developing course modules with emphasis in experimental designs, data interpretation and cross-disciplinary training. We will also integrate an existing workshop on scientific writing to include this important aspect of graduate training into our course series.”
Edwin L. Sibert, professor of chemistry
Sibert will use the time to dramatically extend changes to the gateway course Chemistry 103. The revised course has already significantly enhanced active learning through the use of clickers combined with in-class discussion, group work offered through evening sessions in both the dorms and the Chemistry Building in which challenging material is tackled by teams of students, and through the use of an online homework system. Sibert proposes replacing the less interactive components of the lectures with short, topic-focused videos followed by online questions.
“Students enjoy many aspects of the lectures, especially the clicker concept test integrated with the chemical demonstrations,” Sibert says. “These components will be maintained. Collaborating with others in the department, especially Jim Maynard, our technology expert, will ensure that new online components are not only pedagogically sound but of high quality production.”
To see the full list of recipients and projects, read the full story from University Communications.