PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 23, No. 13, Feb. 5, 2004

PITA grants to fund projects to enhance UI teaching

By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor
217-244-1072; slforres@illinois.edu

The Office of the Provost and the Teaching Advancement Board recently announced the 2003-04 recipients of the Provost’s Initiative on Teaching Advancement grants.

Now in its sixth year, the PITA program provides resources for testing and/or implementing innovative projects in the areas of teaching development and assessment, instructional enhancements and the scholarship of teaching and learning at the university level.

Grant recipients for the 2003-04 academic year and their projects:

• Kim McDonough, professor of English as an international language, is teaching an elective seminar on action research for graduate teaching assistants in the second language and foreign language departments. McDonough will examine the seminar’s impact on TAs’ professional development as they investigate issues or concerns about teaching and learning that arise in their classes, such as how to get their students to speak the target language more or implementing curricular innovations in response to students’ needs or interests.
  
  “Although it’s not required, there’s an emphasis on getting the TAs engaged in the wider community of language teachers beyond the UI and to share their research with other teachers who might have similar questions or concerns,” McDonough said. “It helps with their professional development and helps them bridge that gap of seeing themselves as consumers of research versus producers of research – people who have a voice and have something to share with other teachers.”
  
• David Schejbal, associate vice chancellor and director of continuing education, and Faye Lesht, head of academic outreach in continuing education, lead the Off-Campus Teaching Academy Vision of Excellence. OCTAVE is a multiyear project aimed at preserving and enhancing the quality of instruction offered by part-time adjunct faculty. As a result of budgetary constraints, some department heads are considering expanding their off-campus programs and have raised concerns about training mechanisms for adjunct faculty, Lesht said. Part-time adjunct faculty, many of whom do not live in the Champaign-Urbana area and work for other institutions or organizations, teach about 70 of the 450 off-campus/online courses for adult learners that are offered by the Urbana campus every year.
  
  Two audio-conference sessions that OCTAVE committee members offered for part-time, adjunct faculty during the fall semester were well received – a seminar on student/course assessment presented by Michael Loui, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and a discussion on classroom management, presented by Sandra Goss Lucas, adjunct professor of psychology, and Tonya Manselle, clinical professor of social work.
  
  The committee plans to develop six more audio conferences this academic year on topics such as teaching adults, course planning, classroom management and early feedback and evaluation, Lesht said. In the future, the committee also may design some online modules. In addition to Lesht, Loui, Goss Lucas and Manselle, also serving on the committee are Faye Dong, professor and head of food science and human nutrition; Christine Jenkins, professor of library and information science, and K. Peter Kuchink, professor of human resource education.
  
• Gary Gladding, professor and associate head of physics, and Steve Marshak, professor and head of geology, in a continuation of a PITA grant from last year, are developing an economical wireless polling system for large lecture courses that they hope will become the standard in multimedia classrooms on the Urbana campus. The commercial polling systems currently available use infrared technology, which has “fatal flaws” such as its limitation to one-way communication and its inability to pass through objects and people, Gladding said. The infrared units also can be too expensive for large classes because multiple receivers must be installed in classrooms to overcome the systems’ slow transmission and their susceptibility to “data collisions,” which often occur when large groups of students are transmitting signals.
  
  Mats Selen, professor of physics; Tim Stelzer, research professor of physics; and graduate student Benny Brown are designing a system that utilizes radio frequencies and has base units and remote devices with microchips capable of two-way communication. When an instructor would poll a class using the new system, red and yellow LED indicators on students’ remotes would acknowledge transmission of their responses and confirmation of the base units’ receipt of those signals.
  
  The team estimates that one base unit costing less than $100 could poll a class of 400 students, whereas an infrared system would require installation of multiple receivers and might cost up to $5,000. Students would purchase their remotes, which they could use in any course employing the technology; the base units would be portable and could be used in multiple classrooms. “What we’re building is really sophisticated, but we’d like to be able to sell it for not a lot more than it costs to make it,” Gladding said. “Once we have a really good working system, we’ll be talking to faculty and seeing if anyone wants to try it out this coming fall.” The team hopes to have a working prototype and instructions ready this spring so that instructors can test drive the system in the 90 multimedia classrooms on campus this fall.
  
• Vernon Burton, professor of history, is conducting a scholarship of teaching and learning project evaluating the effectiveness of Project RiverWeb, a collaborative online multimedia database that allows students to explore the environment, history and cultures of the American Bottom Landing Site of East St. Louis. Students in History 263, “Chicago, a City; Illinois, a State,” will complete an assignment using Project RiverWeb and will evaluate the online resources on factors such as accessibility, legibility, ease of use and clarity of historical context versus traditional source materials. The information gleaned from the questionnaires will have a twofold purpose: to help enhance RiverWeb’s functionality and to evaluate whether RiverWeb’s technologies improve teaching.

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