Climate Lab Weather Balloon
Description: The SIF team is providing technical expertise to make way for new experimental possibilities in GSU’s largest science class, Geography 1112, which enrolls over 1500 students annually. As part of SIF’s active learning pedagogy initiatives, designed to support innovatative, dynamic, and active educational techniques at Georgia State University, SIF Fellows are collaborating with faculty from the Department of Geosciences to launch a weather balloon high above the 28 story 25 Park Place Building. This balloon will contain instrumentation allowing students in Geography 1112 to study weather and atmospheric pressure in hands-on, real-world ways and directly engage in scientific observation and experimentation.
Contact:
Brennan Collins
Digital Champions & Activate Hybrid Pedagogy Videos
Description: The Digital Champions team is creating a short promo video for hybrid coursework through the Digital Champions grant. Their objective is to raise awareness among GSU faculty about hybrid courses and the corresponding grant. It features, for example, Dr. Gladys Francis who uses unconventional methods such as asking students to create tweet-length summaries of readings in French. By creating this short, the team is distilling a large amount of information into a more attractive visual package so that the target audience can understand the project through a short, attractive, punchy medium. This video will encourage more faculty to apply for the grant and be a part of the project. Hybrid Pedagogy Interviews are a video series featuring faculty and students who have experience with 1/2 online and 1/2 face-to-face classes. The series covers a variety of subjects (best practices, avoiding pitfalls, balance, etc.) of both faculty who have taught these courses, as well as students who have taken them. This semester the team focused on faculty interviews, and next will focus on student interviews. These videos will also work as a resource to explain how hybridity can work for students. The goal is to encourage more faculty members to incorporate hybridity into their current pedagogies.
Contact:
Brennan Collins
George Pullman
Online Deliberation Mapping Tool
Description: This project is designed to provide instructors and students with a tool to curate, monitor and administer asynchronous student-created deliberations online. Similar to already available tools such as debategraph.org and AGORA, our application gives users the ability to agree, disagree and question posts made during a deliberation process. It also allows users to analyze the development of deliberations using time sliders to show how these deliberations have developed over time. This team’s goal is to create a stable online environment for classroom use based on deliberation activities.
Contact:
Justin Lonsbury
Physics Active Learning
Description: The Physics Active Learning Team aims to prepare undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants (TAs) to be highly effective instructors in active learning laboratory environments. Teaching in active learning classrooms can be an adjustment for instructors who have no experience learning in these types of classrooms. Through interventions such as teaching observations, individual feedback, and roleplaying exercises, this project instills TAs with the pedagogical and technological skills necessary to be transformational educators in undergraduate physics classrooms. The outcome of this work will provide a model for training teaching assistants in STEM disciplines as higher education moves increasingly toward the active learning model.
Contact:
Brennan Collins
Online U.S. History Survey
Description: This project seeks to develop and produce a completely online course and curriculum using custom software and content. SIF work on the project has helped to re-conceptualize the multi-media textbook at the heart of the class, develop a number of video modules, and an array of remediation quizzes designed to improve comprehension of class material. Most of this material is already in use in the current hybrid version of the course, which will go completely online in the fall of 2015.
Contact:
Jeff Young
Unmanned Aerial Systems Hyrdology Project
Description: Student Innovation Fellows provided technical support to the Georgia State University Watershed Hydrology and Geomorphology Laboratory, including UAS hardware support and maintenance, piloting and pilot training for their investigation into the use of small UAS as a low cost, high resolution survey tool. This training, requested by Dr. Katie Price for students of her graduate seminar, exposed a number of students to the use of UAS as a tool for scientific research, including one student who has chosen to use UAS in his Masters Thesis. The project was initially presented by Dr. Price at the European Geophysical Union, and the research is ongoing in the Geosciences Department.