Respecting Our Students

Giving our students the respect they deserve will improve their performance, our mutual interactions, and our satisfaction as teachers. This is obvious to many TPT readers, but there are times when we all, myself included, forget. There are times when our judgment is clouded by institutional culture, or our best intentions are subverted by the vexations of our roles as instructors. This essay is based on my own experience teaching physics (primarily at a public urban university, primarily at the introductory level), and on conversations with many colleagues here and elsewhere. I hope this essay will serve as a reminder to all of us that we must treat our students with respect, and that the rewards of doing so are worth the effort of rethinking some of our behaviors

MiniBooNE: Status of the Booster Neutrino Experiment

MiniBooNE is preparing to search for nu_mu to nu_e oscillations at Fermilab. The experiment is designed to make a conclusive statement about LSND's neutrino oscillation evidence. We give a status report on the preparation of the experiment and outline the experimental prospects.Comment: 6 pages, To appear in Proceedings of the XIX International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics (Neutrino 2000), Sudbury. Canada, 16-21 June 200

SoTL 101: An Introduction to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

In this workshop held at Marian University Dr. Andy Gavrin discusses the power of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), how SoTL research is completed, and how to develop one\u27s own plan for conducting SoTL research in the classroom. Dr. Andy Gavrin is Associate Professor and Chair of Physics at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), and a member of IUPUI’s University College faculty. He is a co-developer of the Just-in-Time Teaching method, and a “serial adopter” of educational technologies. He is a Fellow of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) and winner of the AAPT’s David Halliday and Robert Resnick Award for Undergraduate Teaching. His research is focused on the use of technology in science education. He received his BS in physics from MIT, and his MS and PhD in physics from The Johns Hopkins University. He joined the faculty of IUPUI in 1995

Connecting students' homework to their participation in a course-based social network

This paper presents a comparison between students' efforts on homework (problem sets delivered and completed online using WebAssign) and their participation on a course-focused social media site. The social media platform, CourseNetworking (CN), has many features typical of Learning Management Systems (LMSs), but is distinct in several important ways. The interface is far more "student centric" than traditional LMSs, and is designed to increase engagement; most of the CN window is devoted to student-authored content. Also, the site measures and "gamifies" participation, using an algorithm that includes posts, completion of surveys, comments on other students' posts, and other actions. The setting for our efforts was an introductory calculus-based mechanics class enrolling approximately 150 students, most of whom were engineering majors. Course exams, problem sets, and labs followed a traditional model. Social media participation was not required, but it was encouraged and students could earn a small extra-credit bonus. We investigated correlations between social media "micropoints" and three variables associated with the homework: time on task, points earned, and assignments skipped. Our results show small to moderate correlations and statistical significance in all three cases. Pearson's correlation coefficients are r = 0.286, 0.444, and -0.436 for time on task, points earned, and assignments skipped, respectively. The associated p values are 1.2 × 10-3 for time on task, and p < 10-5 for the other two variables. Because the variables we measure are not normally distributed, we verify these results by also calculating Kendall's tau statistic. This analysis confirms both the size and significance of the correlations we observe. We do not suggest a causal connection; rather, our conclusion is that participation in the social network is a form of engagement with the class comparable to traditional measures of engagement such as homework effort and outcome. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2017

Engaging Students in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class Using an Academically Focused Social Media Platform

There are many reasons for an instructor to consider using social media, particularly in a large introductory course. Improved communications can lessen the sense of isolation some students feel in large classes, and students may be more likely to respond to faculty announce-ments in a form that is familiar and comfortable. Furthermore, many students currently establish social media sites for their classes, without the knowledge or participation of their instructors. Such “shadow” sites can be useful, but they can also become distributors of misinformation, or venues for inappropriate or disruptive discussions. CourseNetworking (CN) is a social media platform designed for the academic environment. It combines many features common among learning management systems (LMS’s) with an interface that looks and feels more like Facebook than a typical academic system. We have recently begun using CN as a means to engage students in an introductory calculus-based mechanics class, with enrollments of 150-200 students per semester. This article presents basic features of CN, and details our initial experiences and observations