Three faculty grantees were asked to provide a five minute vignette on their experiences with disseminating one of their educational innovations.
- Cathy Skokan, Colorado School of Mines
- Michael Gage, University of Rochester
- Robert Beichner, North Carolina State University
Cathy Skokan, Colorado School of Mines
- Energy Curriculum for Tribal Colleges
- Target audience: Faculty in mathematics, science and technology
- Developed a series of courses, showed it to two tribal colleges, went to drawing board with tribal colleges, and put together as six course sequence
- Tribal Colleges gave a series of limitations: students are different, they don’t learn from just lecturing need lots of hands on, wide range of faculty (but they’re really the same as everywhere else)
- Schools can’t absorb more than one or two courses per year, couldn’t expect the colleges to adopt whole 6 course curriculum
- Some faculty only use activities, some use whole modules, some use whole curriculum
- High school, middle school and elementary school teachers
- Success factors:
- Tribal college community is a specific target community
- 1-2 courses per year
- Activities, modules need to understand financial limitations
- Did conferences and journal articles for dissemination
Michael Gage, University of Rochester
- WeBWorK project: http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/Main_Page
- About 100 schools are using WeBWorK now
- Community wiki for interaction, forum, trying video conferences
- Moving from University of Rochester to MAA to raise visibility
- Support over 10 years from NSF, moving to MAA over next 5 years with “more dissemination”
- Specific Goals: Just trying to move homework online, graded automatically (all homework is graded, almost no work for professor) with instant feedback (students find the feedback extremely useful)
- Dissemination to:
- Initial dissemination via research contacts.
- Then spread via Rochester’s department chair and told his colleagues about it. Department heads are especially interested in automatic grading
- Smaller universities hear about it “by word of mouth”. Smaller university faculty are more interested in educational aspects.
- Lots of presentations.
- Graduate students have used as students, and now that they’re teaching.
Robert Beichner, North Carolina State University
- SCALE-UP Project: http://www.ncsu.edu/PER/scaleup.html
- Work together, leverage community as much as you can
- Workshop for high school teachers on SCALE-UP, run by Windward School—the community has taken leadership and builds on work
- Be opportunistic, lots of connections that interweave relationships