The Pii Instructional Innovation Grants Program completed its first annual competition in February 2007.  Monetary Awards and Consultation are provided to help advance innovative learning designs at OU.  As the projects are delivered, faculty will be sharing specifics of their design and evidence of student learning through the Sooner Teaching Commons.  

Service Learning Awards

Yiefi Dong, Computer Engineering; Xun Ge, Instructional Design and Technology.  Open Seed: Empower Software Engineering Education Using Open Source Software Development (OSSD) Approach 

Students are engaged in developing software solutions in an open source environment to meet needs of community partners. Students and Faculty actively seek partners on campus and off campus who have needs for applications and develop a relationship to meet those needs.  Students develop the solution working in high performance teams and deliver the finished project in one semester or in one academic year depending on the complexity of the project. 

 Natalie Tindall, Strategic Communication. Changing Direction – The Integration of the PRSSA Bateman Case Study Competition and Service Learning into the Public Relations Capstone Course. 

This project strengthens the current Public Relations Capstone Course through the refining the service learning component of the course.  Students will develop a public relations campaign for a non-profit in Norman and reflect on their work to develop critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and group processing skills.  Students will use the “Student Guide to Service Learning” to help them connect academic and civic learning.

 Linda McKenney, Instructional Leadership & Academic Curriculum.  Extending Children’s Literature through Book Bags: A Service Learning Project for Pre-Service Teachers. 

This project helps develop student teachers ability to select children’s literature that connects subjects across the curriculum.  Student teachers select literature based on a rubric that emphasizes literary quality, ability to integrate knowledge across the curriculum, and cultural sensitivity in a diverse society.  Teachers make book selections and include books in the “book bag” for distribution to public school classrooms that are deficient in resources to promote childhood literacy.  Funding will be used to help students develop bags for distribution in New Orleans in conjunction with a national meeting as a model for promoting literacy in resource poor schools.

 Dissemination/Travel Awards:

Julia Abramson, Modern Languages. Teaching Material Cultures. 

Paper presentation for the South-Central Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Annual Meeting.   Paper described how Julia is incorporating scholarly research into core French courses regularly taught in College of Arts and Sciences and the Honors College.  Through the paper presentation, the faculty member generated an exchange of ideas on classroom practice and solicited ideas on curricular innovations.  Julia will be working with Pii to find new ways to use her research in the development of course activities including the development of a service learning component for one of her courses.

 Xun Ge., Educational Psychology  Open Seed: Empower Software Engineering Education Using Open Source Software Development Approach.  

Paper Presentation for the ED-MEDIA 2007 World Conference on Educational Multimedia & Hypermedia & Telecommunications.
 

Presenting initial findings on the project discussed in earlier section.  Will use the presentation to solicit feedback and to develop international partnerships to further the reach of the project.  A long term goal is to develop international service collaborations providing students both an international experience and a service experience to help strengthen their ability to work in global teams on software solutions to civic needs.

Integrating Technology to Enhance Student Learning 

Alberto Striolo, CBME.  Designing software to describe the dynamics and control of chemical processes. 

The project seeks to develop new learning activities and assess those activities to explore how integration of modern technologies improves student learning in ChemE 4153.  Faculty member identified six key concepts students should learn, assessed student learning of those concepts, and discovered student learning deficiencies that needed to be addressed.  In looking at his learning plan, Striolo discovered that the current strategies were not leading to sufficient retention of content knowledge and proposed a redesign of the course to address the challenge.  This project will integrate technology by developing homework activities implemented within MatLab or Mathmatica.  Striolo will be working with Kent Johnson to develop exercises using models developed in a nationally recognized NSF project on teaching engineering dynamics using mathmatica.

 Pat Hardre, Educational Psychology. Improving Teaching in the Academy: Online Instruction Supporting the Professional Development of University Teaching Assistants. 

Based on seven years of research on improving teaching assistant training, this project addresses the need to find innovative ways of improving TA performance in teaching activities.  Research findings suggest that online professional development focused on instructional design improves the quality of teaching by TAs in the classroom.  This project will develop three interactive modules to be used as an integral part of TA training at OU.  It will also be made available to institutions across the state at a point in the future.  The project contributes to the overall goal of strengthening TA training at OU through the evolution of a hybrid TA training model that involves both Pii and the Departments.  This hybrid model will allow us to tailor TA training to the specific needs of departments.

 Grady Wray, MLLL – Spanish  Listen and Express Yourself in Spanish: An Innovative Way of Improving Conversation Skills in Advanced Spanish Conversation Courses. 

This project addresses challenges of students in Spanish of orally producing and/or responding to native speech.  The project aims to supplement and/or take the place of traditional textbook approach to conversation courses through a series of technology innovations that engage students in native speech.  Through using the latest technological applications, students complete homework that requires both listening and speaking.  Using a web-text, students may submit oral responses to the instructor allowing efficient and effective evaluation of their work.

 Tamera McCuen, Construction Science.  Design and Implementation of BIM across the OU Construction Science Curriculum.  

Engineering Disciplines led the charge to incorporate design across the curriculum to develop students who could “do design” upon completing their baccalaureate education.  This project extends this concept to Construction Science.  The Construction Science Department project seeks to bring coherence to their curriculum through a design emphasis using Building Information Modeling software.  Pii will partner with Construction Science to construct learning activities across courses that promote a coherent student learning experience that prepares them for construction careers. 

Traci Carte, Management Information Systems Integrating SAP in the MIS Curriculum

Management Information Systems is committed to providing immersive learning by asking students to apply knowledge in realistic contexts. To that end, the educational experience relies heavily on hands-on experiences. Creating opportunities for students to gain significant direct experience with a tool such as SAP will enhance the applied nature of many MIS courses. Additionally, a number of the largest recruiters of MIS students are SAP customers: ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Deloitte Consulting, Accenture, Citgo, Devon Energy, IBM, Chesapeake Energy, Shell Oil to name a few. By integrating SAP coverage into the curriculum MIS hopes to forge stronger partnerships with these companies. Recruiters can bring more real-life experiences to our students (through classroom visits, internships, etc.) and  students can develop stronger relationships with their future employers earlier in their education and provide value as employees sooner. 

Hybrid or Blended courses provide the potential for improved learning experiences in large lecture classes through replacing a day of lecture per week with interactive web based learning activities.  This project serves as a pilot project for OU in which we will design, deliver, and assess a hybrid model.