2018 Agenda and Program

Delmar Larsen

UC Davis

It is becoming ever clearer that new and innovative educational efforts are required to facilitate the greater creativity, flexibility, and increased learning capability needed for post-secondary education in the future. Unfortunately, rapidly rising undergraduate fees and textbook costs are serious factors that impedes access to higher education for many students; many of whom do not have the funds to benefits from these new advances that are often commercialized. Rising textbook costs are a serious barrier for under-served, at-risk students and open-access resources (OER) textbooks are beginning to address this issue. The Libretexts project is designed as a collaborative OER platform to simultaneously enable the dissemination and evaluation of existing resources and as a dynamic “courseware” to facilitate new education developments and approaches, with an emphasis on data-driven assessment of student learning and performance. Since its inception ten years ago, the Libretexts has been exponentially growing and currently reaches over 60 million students per year and is the most visited chemistry website and online OER textbook resource in the world. 

Dani Jauk

The University of Akron

The interactive workshop is based on an 11-minute video performance which is meant to be a performative academic paper with the title “bloody mary hairy!” a DIY (gaga-)feminist didactics cock*tail tale. It introduces the idea of “gagafeminist teaching didactics” as variation of feminist pedagogy in higher and adult education learning environments. The interdisciplinary scholar-activist team developed it as a cock*ta(i)le-mixing session based on ideas from Jack Halberstam’s (2013) book Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the Edge of Normal. It was released at the first D-A-CH conference of German-speaking gender studies associations in Cologne, Germany, September 2017.

This CREATE workshop will allow participants to explore and collect more gagafeminist teaching strategies and to broaden our understanding of queer and feminist pedagogies.

Mary Hricko

Kent State University - Geauga Campus and Regional Academic Center

Open education resources (OERs) offer a rich array of academic material that can be easily integrated into course instruction. While an overview of existing OER textbook resources will be given, this presentation primarily focuses on the lesser known academic resources that provide access to content through archival collections, digitized reference materials, and academic depositories. Discussion will identify why using such resources improves student learning and research. This presentation will also showcase how faculty can share and contribute their learning resources to various OER depositories.

Susan N. Kushner Benson

The University of Akron

Kristin K. Koskey

The University of Akron

Xin Liang

The University of Akron

This panel discussion will begin with a brief overview and discussion about CBE education, including examples of competency based programs in higher education, a discussion of the benefits and challenges associated with CBE, and the status of CBE in higher education in Ohio.

Central to the presentation will be an interactive-conversation about the curriculum mapping process we are using to move from a traditional program to a CBE model. We will explain how student learning needs and program outcomes contributed to our ah ha! moment, and we will illustrate the strategic tasks we have already completed and those that we anticipate. We will share the ways in which we intend to support student learning through the development of online learning communities, and how we expect our roles as faculty members are likely to evolve.

The session will conclude with a discussion of the policies and procedures for attaining Higher Learning Commission approval for offering a competency based program.

Sukanya Kemp

The University of Akron

Irina A. Chernikova

The University of Akron

How successful are Ohio universities in disseminating STEM education to their students? The question may be difficult to address as there are several different performance indicators and there is a lack of uniformity among the relevant variables. The goals of the analysis are to map out the efficiencies of OHIO universities in both undergraduate and graduate STEM pathways and suggest ways for improvement.

In an attempt to measure university efficiency in STEM education, the researchers use the non-stochastic frontier model of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), which is commonly used in Operations Research literature, to evaluate the efficiency of producers. In this initial research, the author isolated the large public universities of Ohio as the subject of the analysis. The author found that with the input-output structure defined by the data, certain universities clearly stood out as efficient compared to others in the dissemination of STEM education.

In the second part of the analysis, the researchers decide to look closer to home. They study methods of improving the institutional efficacy through teaching strategies at The University of Akron itself. Three strategies are offered: increased choices in scheduling; redesigning the curriculum; and offering multiple options for mode of delivery. Two connected courses, Technical Data Analysis and Survey of Basic Economics, are used as a sample set to test and evaluate these strategies.

Policy and strategic implications for the schools are also discussed.

Jodi Henderson-Ross

The University of Akron

Amber Ferris

The University of Akron

John Roncone

The University of Akron

Christin L. Seher

The University of Akron

This DISCUSS session includes a panel of faculty who will share pedagogical practices for creating community connections in higher education. Each faculty member will provide an overview of their personal experiences including the challenging and rewarding aspects of guiding students while engaging with local communities. A primary goal of this DISCUSS session is to provide a forum for sharing ideas, identifying resources and collectively imagining a vision of community engagement in higher education.

Melissa Dreisbach

The University of Akron

Victor Pinheiro

The University of Akron

John Fellenstein

The University of Akron

Amanda Pinheiro

The University of Akron

The use of STEM (Science-Technology-Engineering-Math) education has become an innovative integrated curriculum used in education. School systems and educators are in search of creative ways to integrate subjects and engage students in a critical, higher level of thinking. Institutions are attempting novel methods of promoting STEM education to motivate students and capture their interest in STEM. The method of using sport as a vehicle to teach STEM concepts are fun and engaging for students. Most students don’t realize that STEM can be found in most every subject. Having students explore for STEM concepts in sport helps to reinforce and open their minds to the multitude of subjects and careers that STEM encompasses.

For this hands-on workshop, the use of stations will facilitate the learning of practical classroom examples of teaching STEM concepts through the use of sports. Science topic examples will include biomechanics and physics. Participants will use a criteria sheet to analyze a sport skill, basketball chest pass for biomechanical principles. Another example will use the scientific method to discover the angle of release, aerodynamic principles and the physics of flight of a thrown, badminton shuttlecock, ping pong ball and golf size wiffle ball. Technology will be incorporated with the use of a video recording software that will aid in the analyzing of the sport skill and the physics of flight experiment. The STEM concept of engineering will be addressed through the use of a hands-on polymer science activities designed to address the elasticity/bounce of the basketball by comparing 2 different putty balls participants mix; and group project that has the participants constructing basketball shoes and then walking on eggs. The Math component of STEM will be integrated into the activities in the form of data collecting, averages, percentages and graphing of results. Also, the idea of having students create a “Sport-Player Statistic trading card” will be presented to the participants.

Each station will be a mix of hands-on and demonstrational to help the participants engage in integrating STEM and sport. The main objective of this workshop is to assist participants in facilitating creative thinking and lesson creation that can be taken and incorporated into their respective teaching areas. These deliberately-designed STEM activities provide a different perspective on how much science, technology, engineering and math are embedded in sport.

Stacey Cederbloom

University of Mount Union

One of the most frustrating aspects of teaching is spending time grading a quiz and returning it in a timely fashion, only to see students make the very same mistakes on the following exam. I concluded that either the students were ignoring my multiple warnings that the same concepts would appear on the exam, or they were attempting to use the quiz to study but were unsuccessful. In either case, I desperately needed a teaching innovation.

When I became aware that “when students are required to think about their own learning and articulate what they understand and what they still need to learn, achievement improves” (Black & Wiliam, 1998a; Hattie, 2009), I created Inside the Numbers as a progress-tracking tool which helps me hold students accountable for correcting their mistakes on quizzes. It also helps me hold students accountable for assessing their confidence in understanding the concepts and executing the skills addressed by quizzes. In the five semesters I have used this with 313 students in my MTH 105 College Algebra classes, I have seen a remarkable drop in the number of same mistakes made from quizzes to exams. I have also witnessed students’ excitement from an increased confidence in their math abilities.

There have been other positive outcomes from using Inside the Numbers that I did not expect. Considering all of the benefits, I would not think of teaching my remedial math classes without using this progress-tracking tool; I only wish I had designed it at the beginning of my career instead of in year seventeen!

In this presentation, I will discuss the research supporting Inside the Numbers, the details of its design and specifically how I use it, students' responses to using it, and the other positive outcomes that I did not initially anticipate. Time will be set aside during the session for participants to create their own progress-tracking tool that is tailored to their content areas. All participants are encouraged to bring materials for a unit or chapter for one of the courses they are teaching to use when creating their own tool.

Nicola Kille

The University of Akron

Julie Yuhua Zhao

The University of Akron

This presentation identi es some of the challenges that international students often face in a US classroom. In this presentation, student survey results about their experiences in UA classrooms will be shared. In addition, we will explore some of the resources available on our campus. Finally, we will offer ideas for how to make any classroom more welcoming and inclusive for international students.

Gerald Austin

The University of Akron

Eric Veigel

The University of Akron

The Global Classroom is the rst political science course of its kind to be si- mulcast on four continents. The Global Classroom, inspired by the success- ful Campaign Battleground class at UA’s Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, utilizes real-time, interactive videoconferencing and data sharing technologies to bridge four international locations into a highly collabora- tive teaching and learning environment. This course leverages UA’s distance learning classrooms to enable students at four institutions to learn about politics together and from each other.

Michael Shiflet

The Ohio State University

Ashley Miller

The Ohio State University

Now in its third year, the Affordable Learning Exchange (ALX) at The Ohio State University supports faculty who wish to replace traditional teaching and learning materials with a wide array of open and affordable resources. In this presentation, Affordability and Access team members Ashley Miller and Michael Shiflet will discuss the tools that Ohio State faculty members are using for this work, support offered by the ALX team, and innovative new projects to ensure sustainability and promote growth of open education practices across Ohio.

Melissa Askren Edgehouse

University of Mount Union

Steve J. Edgehouse

Stark State College of Technology

We know that digital video engagement is a fact of modern life, as YouTube overall, and even YouTube on mobile alone, reaches more 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the US. (YouTube, 2017). Too, we suspect that screencasts, both instructor- and peer-generated, are helpful and supportive for student learning (Marinov, Webb and Valter, 2016), and that they are perceived by students as beneficial and result in improved course performance (Green, Pinder-Grover, Millunchick, 2012). And yet, and so often, screencast content generation often finds itself largely relegated to digital library tutorials and not much of anywhere else (Oliver, 2016).

This panel presentation hopes to address this juxtaposition by providing attendees with strategies for integrating screencasts into online, blended and face-to-face classes as a means of:

1. feedback production
2. providing ways for students to craft assignments via screencasts to make presentations a viable assessment in online blended and even face-to-face courses
3. sharing strategies that cultivate warmth and a sense of individual personality in online and blended settings
4. utilizing screencasts that provide assignment guidelines in order to add clarity, reduce student questions, and to create a database of often-requested content
5. demonstrating best methods, such as recording setting, audio, and length strategies, for generating screencasts using free software that can be integrated into learning management systems

Carolyn Behrman

The University of Akron

Kathryn Feltey

The University of Akron

Matthew T. Lee

The University of Akron

Molly B. Hartsough

The University of Akron

Due to the structural constraints of the K-12 educational experience that emphasizes consuming and recalling material, many students enter college with an instrumental mindset about higher education. This mindset focuses on consuming course content, earning grades and a degree, and using their credentials as the basis for securing gainful employment after graduation with little cognitive or personal growth along the way. This panel explores the use of reflective and contemplative methods in an instructor created “open space” to shift the learning experience away from such instrumental concerns and towards the related goals of personal and social transformation.

Alan S. Kornspan

The University of Akron

Sean X. Cai

The University of Akron

John Roncone

The University of Akron

In recent years, scholars have become interested in utilizing various instructional approaches to assist college students in learning to teach children with disabilities (Wilhelmsen & Sørensen, 2017). In particular, one approach that undergraduate pre-service teachers are taught is to utilize assistive technology within their instruction (Dell, Newton, & Petroff, 2017). Specifically, students in physical education teacher education programs have been taught innovative technological approaches to help children with disabilities learn motor skills (Piletic & Davis, 2010). For example, college students learning to teach physical education to children with disabilities have been trained to utilize interactive video games, iPads, virtual reality, and other technology to help enhance the learning experience (McMahon, & McMahon, 2016). Thus, the purpose of this presentation is to provide a panel discussion on how university instructors have used technology and other innovative pedagogical techniques to teach a college course in Adapted Physical Education. The first presenter will overview the relevant research that supports the incorporation of technology and interactive pedagogical practices within an Adapted Physical Education course. Next, the second presenter will provide a discussion of practical examples of current technology that undergraduate students are taught to utilize in order to enhance the learning of children with disabilities. The third presenter will describe how innovative interactive techniques are utilized in teaching the adapted physical education course. Finally, the panel will provide the audience with the opportunity to ask questions about the techniques utilized in helping college students learn to teach children with disabilities in a physical activity environment.

Steve Kaufman

The University of Akron

We have all had lessons that we wish were more exciting. Either through our own experiences as the learner, or as instructors delivering a lesson, we tend to remember the teaching strategies that made us care about the topic and engaged us. Gamification is a multi-faceted strategy that can be used to drive class participation. Through competition, mastery learning, badging, simulation, and self-assessment, we can turn our classroom experiences into interactive, thought-provoking spaces where students feel acknowledged and rewarded for sharing their thoughts and insights. During this session, we will discuss and demonstrate multiple gamification techniques. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in activities that will help reinforce how these techniques work. We will also have the opportunity to explore free educational technology resources that can help implement a gamified lesson in a variety of teaching modalities.

Dudley B. Turner

The University of Akron

The first step is to understand what "storytelling" is using a broad framework. This will help participants to be more comfortable with their ability to create (“write”) a story. Second, we will learn about the effects of storytelling and benefits according to research and practice. Then we are better able to develop our own stories. And most of the time will then be spent on the steps to create and implement digital storytelling for our classes.

The workshop includes experimentation with several tools for development of stories and the production of digital storytelling. Participants can either use one of the provided laptops, their own device, or team up with another participant (or two) to work on a story project. Time for production will be provided with coaching. Then sharing and discussion of the storytelling projects will help illustrate the variety of ideas and approaches.

Briefly:

• Define "story" and "storytelling"
• Describe the effects and benefits of storytelling
• Brainstorm stories for our classes
• Apply various tools to create and share digital storytelling
• Feedback

Gain fame and fortune in this session of multiple, Pecha Kucha-length, presentations. Participants each have 6-minutes 40-seconds to wow the audience with their amazing idea. After the time is up, the buzzer will sound and the next participant is up. The audience will vote on the best idea and that presenter will win an awesome prize!