Enabling Chemical Conversations: Investing five minutes in First Year Students.

Have you ever considered the benefits of being able to orchestrate a five minute one-on-one chemical conversation with every member of a large first year class? Even better where each student presents you with a piece of work which clearly shows whether they have understood and can apply key concepts of the topic, and your conversation is then directed productively. Students receive immediate, personal feedback and benefit from direct interaction with staff around an area of personal difficulty, staff benefit from the direct insight into the students’ level of engagement and understanding and can direct students to a support network where any issues or gaps in background knowledge or application beyond the scope of the conversation can be dealt with in a supportive friendly environment. Easy identification of “students at risk” is also a benefit. This has been successfully done in all first year chemistry topics at Flinders University since 2008 with large cohorts (up to 421). While we don’t deny it has taken a great deal of hard work the benefits are enormous

Creating a STEM Identity: Investment with Return

Establishing a strong STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) identity at Boise State University, a metropolitan campus with approximately 3,655 undergraduate STEM students and a total undergraduate enrollment of approximately 19,042 (16,136 FTE) has been an important step toward creating a climate conducive to facilitating fundamental change. Examples of such change include building collaborations among faculty within and across departments, establishing the identity of students as part of a community beyond their chosen major, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of university systems, and perhaps most importantly, developing a framework to think deliberately about ways to effect change. This paper is focused on describing and categorizing the development of a STEM “identity” over the past decade within a metropolitan campus that does not have an overall STEM central mission. The College of Engineering (CoE), established in 1997 as a result of a regional demand for engineering and computer science graduates, began focusing heavily on student success initiatives in 2004 with support from the Engineering Schools of the West Initiative, through the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This first wave of initiatives was critically assessed, and engineering student success became a focal point for the CoE. Internal research conducted under this grant exposed numerous roadblocks that impeded students\u27 academic success. In 2010, another large grant, funded through the National Science Foundation Science Talent Expansion Program (STEP), was awarded to increase the numbers of students graduating with STEM degrees. This grant engaged an interdisciplinary, cross-college team of STEM educators passionate about continuous improvement and pedagogical reform. Six months after the STEP grant launch, a second grant was awarded, a NSF Innovation through Institutional Integration (I^3) grant. All activities associated with these grants were deliberately categorized as “STEM” activities, in order to benefit all STEM students and faculty. This had the added benefit of unifying the STEM community and helping launch a sense of common purpose among STEM faculty and staff. We discuss a framework and present supporting cases to show how developing a STEM identity has been a critical step towards cross-curricular integration and improvements in pedagogical development, structures, policies and a sense of STEM community

Rancho Santa Fe Foundation (RSFF) Plan-to-Plan Report

Over the past two months, a USD project team conducted extensive research to inform the strategic planning process of the Rancho Santa Fe Foundation (RSFF). The team identified three key questions that will be important for the RSFF to address as it positions itself for growth. Those questions are: 1) What is the identity of the RSFF, both internally and externally; 2) How should the RSFF define community; and 3) How should the RSFF define growth?https://digital.sandiego.edu/npi-bpl-strategicplanning/1000/thumbnail.jp

Real-World Industry Collaboration within a Mechatronics Class

This paper describes the implementation and assessment of an innovative senior/graduate level mechatronics (robotics) module that integrated structured and unstructured learning experiences, in collaboration with an industry partner. With real-world constraints and expectations, students designed and delivered a product as the final project. In fall 2007, the corporate partner provided state-of-the-art, programmable robotic kits with a user-friendly programming environment. The assigned project was to design a biomedical robot to work in a hospital intensive care unit (ICU) to perform tasks such as transporting supplies or delivering paperwork. Students with diverse skills and majors were grouped in ten teams, two to three students each. Student learning activities included designing a robot from a box of FisherTechnik materials, without the aid of instruction manuals; writing program code using the PCS environment; and integrating hardware and software. After four weeks of building, training, and testing, each team’s robot was unique. In the final competition, each robot was assigned to a particular room in the ICU to perform a specific task. Overall, the results indicated that the students gained hands-on experience with the state-of-art technology and effectively applied the conceptual course content to a real application

Applying the CACAO Change Model to Promote Systemic Transformation in STEM

Since its inception in the Middle Ages, the university classroom can be characterized by students gathered around a sage who imparts his or her knowledge. However, the effective classroom of today looks vastly different: First-year engineering students not only learn basic engineering principles, but are also guided to consider their own inner values and motivations as they design and build adaptive devices for people with disabilities; students in a large chemistry lecture work animatedly together in small groups on inquiry-based activities while an instructor and teaching assistants circulate and guide their learning; students learning differential equations practice explicit metacognitive skills while problem-solving in class. Even though educational research, especially research that is targeted at STEM disciplines, demonstrates what most effectively engages students and supports their learning, many of today\u27s classrooms look much like they did a century ago, with a professor delivering a primarily one-way lecture and students passively sitting in seats bolted to the floor. At this juncture in history, colleges and universities face a public call to engage a more diverse representation of students in effective learning, persistence, and degree attainment, and to do so economically and efficiently. It is essential that institutions draw upon methods demonstrated to effectively increase student learning and success. Educational researchers have thoroughly explored the basic science in this area, and a body of literature documents effective evidence-based instructional practices, hereafter referred to as EBIPs

Leading change beyond your classroom – Capacity building in SoTL and leadership by SaMnet

The issue: The introduction of quality standards can place delegates to the ACSME conference in the forefront of reflection on, and changes to, teaching in their school, faculty, and university. How do you make the transition from being someone who experiments and implements strategies to teach more effectively into someone who leads colleagues in doing so? Furthermore, what support can you gain in that process, both support from within your institution, as you work to help others to satisfy externally imposed standards, as well as outside your university? Approach: Development of the capability of academic staff in science and mathematics to lead change is a chief aim of the ALTC/OLT project developing the Science and Mathematics network of Australian university educators – SaMnet. We have engaged more than 100 university staff (‘SaMnet Scholars’) across 19 institutions in teams of four to pursue action-learning projects. SaMnet are supporting these teams with guidance in the scholarship of teaching and learning and in providing insight into leading organisational change. SaMnet also provides mentoring and contact with other academics who share an interest in the area of a particular project, e.g., standards, inquiry learning, or new ICTs. The effort is meant to change an individual innovation in teaching into a formally recorded experiment. A well documented experiment can not only be published; it can provide data sufficient to convince colleagues, heads of school, deans, and others that the innovation addresses their key performance indicators, such as those that result from national quality standards. This approach builds on an uneven foundation: (1) the growth in SoTL in universities; (2) a history of initiatives to improve teaching in science and mathematics that is recognised has having left little widespread impact; and (3) literature on the nature of change in organisations, in general, and on change in universities, in particular. The first set of SaMnet’s action-learning projects is approaching a mid-point, and the projects have another year to run. The ACSME conference provides an opportune moment to reflect and gain additional perspectives on the strategies being pursued. Progress: Work in progress - initial. Key questions: 1. How might insights into organisational change be relevant to your efforts in your university, particularly in relation to coming standards? 2. What do you feel that you could learn from SaMnet Scholars at this session about tailoring your efforts to gain support from your head of school and dean? 3. What are we missing? What could a national network of science and mathematics academics do for you that we might not have thought of? 4. What aspects of leading change would you like to learn about – steps and transitions in change processes (Kotter and Bridges), aspects of a new idea that spur adoption (Rogers), or surface issues and underlying issues that need to be addressed (Wilber)

Abismos refractivos de pasión en Cumbres Borrascosas: Bronte, Buñuel y el más allá del humanismo

Desde el Romanticismo hasta hoy en día se ha venido produciendo una contestación al silenciamiento sentiente de la nación que había caracterizado la época de la Ilustración. En 1858, la novela de Emily Brontë, Cumbres borrascosas, nos muestra un páramo de Yorkshire cuna de flora, agua siempre presente y viento fantasmagórico. Cien años después esta novela brillante y provechosa inspiró Abismos de Pasión, dirigida con habilidad por Luis Buñuel. Esta película encarna muy bien la descentralización de lo humano de Brontë, mostrando una amplitud conceptual similar, al representar los intercambios comunicativos entre lo humano y lo no-humano. Tanto Buñuel como Brontë contestan el proyecto humanista de silenciar lo no-humano simplemente al aceptar que lo más-que-humano pueda ser escuchado. Una película reciente sobre Cumbres borrascosas, dirigida por Andrea Arnold, continúa esta misma tradición. Ambos, lo animal y lo no-animal pueden ser escuchados, haciendo hincapié en las propiedades actantes de lo no-humano, tal como sucede en la novela de Brontë. Dichas comunicaciones son coadyuvantes, por lo menos razonablemente, de hacer que los lectores y los espectadores escuchen de formas novedosas y permeables.There is a counter-tradition to the Enlightenment project of silencing the sentience of country which can be traced from Romanticism to contemporary times. In 1858 Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights introduced its readers to a Yorkshire moor of cradling flora, interventionist waters and ghost-accommodating winds. One hundred years later this brilliantly productive novel inspired Abismos de Pasión, ably directed by Luis Buñuel. Buñuel’s film connects with Brontë’s decentralisation of the human, demonstrating a similar conceptual openness to representing communicative exchanges between the human and non-human. Buñuel, like Brontë, resists the humanist project of silencing the non-human by the simple but powerful act of accepting that the other-than-human can be heard. The most recent Wuthering Heights film, directed by Andrea Arnold is made in this tradition. The animal and non-animal are given room to speak, highlighting the actant properties of the non-human, permitted in Brontë’s novel. Such communications are instrumental if not reasonable, for they invite attentive audiences to listen in newly porous ways

The Ethics and Politics of Drones in Animal Activism

This paper considers the use of drones in animal advocacy and aims to provide a moral and political justification for their use. We focus on animal protection groups who fly drones over farms to take pictures and videos of the way animals are used in agriculture and who then share these images publicly with a view to changing either consumer behaviour, the laws which regulate animal agriculture, or both. We identify unique moral issues associated with drone use and provide an argument to support their use in animal protection, in the ways spearheaded by Will Potter and other animal advocates worldwide. We then analyse privacy issues associated with drone use and consider whether the potential harms outweigh the benefits. We conclude that while privacy concerns are legitimate, they do not outweigh the public good generated by drones. Moreover, animal advocates can easily manage those concerns. Finally, we illustrate our argument in practice with a recent case study from Australia