University Times

The Office of the Provost’s advisory council on instructional excellence (ACIE) has funded eight teaching proposals to fund under the 2008 Innovation in Education Awards Program.

Funding for this year’s awards totaled $127,000. The awards encourage instructional innovation and teaching excellence. ACIE seeks to identify high-quality proposals that show promise for introducing innovative, creative approaches to teaching that can be adapted for use in other courses.

Winners of this year’s awards are:

• George W. Dougherty, professor of public and urban affairs in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA), for “The Student Philanthropy Project.”

This project aims to transform the way students learn about philanthropy by adding a real-life experiential learning component to the curriculum. It is believed that providing experience with grant-making processes and techniques will help students seeking careers in both the not-for-profit and for-profit sectors.

• Bonnie A. Falcione, professor in the Department of Pharmacy and Therapeutics, for “Development and Systematic Evaluation of Rubrics to Assess Value of Student Wiki Contributions in Collaborative Case-Based Learning.”

This project seeks to develop a method to identify the value of individual student contributions when using Wiki technology for collaborative patient-care-based activities. The technology will be introduced in the second year of the Doctor of Pharmacy professional program.

• Ping Y. Furlan, professor of chemistry at Pitt-Titusville, for “Nanoscience and Technology Across the Natural Sciences Curricula.”

This project seeks to implement nano-themed activities in classrooms across the natural sciences curricula and to upgrade the EasyScan2 Scanning Tunneling Microscope to include an Atomic Force Microscope. Broadening the curriculum will impact Pitt-Titusville students majoring in the natural sciences, who comprise 20 percent of the student body.

• Amy Seybert, professor of pharmacy and therapeutics, for “Simulation-Based Learning and Online Learning to Enhance Problem-Solving Skills in Acute Care Pharmacotherapy.”

The project’s goal is to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills in Doctor of Pharmacy candidates by utilizing human patient simulation. The Acute Care Pharmacotherapy course will combine online and simulation-based assessments of a student’s knowledge and performance.

• Christian Shunn, professor of psychology, for “A Case Library of Authentic, Effective Writing Assignments for Peer-Based Learning.”

This project seeks to broaden the diversity of writing skills learned by undergraduate students in the Department of Psychology. The project will build on Shunn’s SWoRD project, a web-based system that allows faculty to integrate significant writing-with-revision assignments into courses without a large number of significant instructors or teaching-assistant grading resources.

• Heiko Spallek, assistant professor in the Center for Dental Informatics in the School of Dental Medicine, and professor Mark P. Mooney, who holds joint appointments in the departments of oral medicine and pathology, anthropology, surgery and othodontics in the schools of dental medicine and medicine, for “Quantitative Image Analysis Using Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended.”

This project will develop two web-based modules to give biomedical researchers the ability to analyze quantitatively an array of images, such as histological samples, radiological images and other imaging artifacts derived from diverse lab equipment.

• Nuno Themudo, professor of international affairs in GSPIA, for “Community Teaching Lab.”

The Community Teaching Lab will allow PhD students to develop teaching skills by creating and delivering community outreach courses. In addition to being taught in Pitt’s classrooms, the courses will be available online and free to the public, modeling the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseware program.

• Ronald Zboray, professor of communication, Joseph Grabowski, professor of chemistry, and Barbara Kucinski, lecturer in psychology, for “Improving Undergraduate Education: Instructional Resources for Teaching Assistants (A Multimedia Web Site and DVD).”

Directed at graduate students, this project will develop several short instructional videos of 2-5 minutes each that model the fundamental strategies and elements of classroom teaching.

The Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education will provide instructional design, graphics and video production services.