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IITAP – Innovative Instructional Technology Awards Program

IITAP celebrates and rewards faculty efforts to incorporate technology in their teaching. The annual awards are offered by the Office of the Provost and administered by the Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment (DIIA). IITAP is now in its eleventh year of recognizing innovative, new media instructional materials and highlighting accomplishments on behalf of enhancing teaching and learning for students at the University of Texas at Austin.

Danteworlds: Inferno, Paradise, and Purgatory
Gold Award Winner at IITAP 2007

Guy P. Raffa
French and Italian

Danteworlds is a unique approach to help guide students, teachers, and other readers of Dante's "The Divine Comedy" through Purgatory and Paradise, canto-by-canto and region-by-region. Integrated, multimedia content aids in locating characters and creatures, and decoding the many references to religion, mythology, philosophy, history, politics, and other literary works. Each region is supported by artistic images, audio recordings of Italian verses, and study questions designed to aid individual study and group discussion, review for exams, and generate ideas for essays and research papers.

For additional information on Danteworlds, see an interview with Dr. Raffa.

Building Mass and Energy Balances (BMEB): A Multi-Level Web-based Educational Tool
Gold Award Winner at IITAP 2007

Richard Corsi and Jeffrey Siegel
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering

Engineers model the physical world by describing real-world phenomena using scientific principles and mathematics, such as the laws of conservation of mass and energy. Engineering students write and solve equations based on these laws to calculate mass and energy transport and balances when modeling building systems. Siegel and Corsi, in collaboration with the Faculty Innovation Center (FIC), created a Web site that combines real-world scenarios with variable parameters and an interactive calculator to illustrate how varying factors can change outcomes, providing students with a practical tool to recognize and calculate design problems.

Kinematic Analysis of Human Movement ("Biomech")
Gold Award Winner at IITAP 2006

Larry Abraham
Kinesiology and Health Education

This project was designed to create a Web-based interactive instructional tool to assist students learning to conduct biomechanical analysis of human movement. A Web-based (Flash) application was developed to display digital video clips of a variety of movement activities, with tools for actually measuring the movements displayed. Students orient the images, set the scale, and mark the locations (frame by frame) of selected points in the video. The spatiotemporal data are stored for further quantitative analysis, such as calculating joint angles, velocity, and acceleration. These exercises facilitate student understanding of basic mechanics, provide authentic experience in the application of mechanics to studying human movement, and provide a highly motivating learning environment accessible to students around the clock. At this point the project consists of the Web-based application, a set of sixty-three high-speed movie clips converted to single-frame digital video, and a set of instructions for two laboratory assignments. This instructional module is suitable for use in classes teaching basic concepts of human biomechanics, techniques of biomechanics data collection and display, and applications to specific teaching, sport, and clinical rehabilitation settings. It was used for the first time in the Fall 2005 semester in KIN 326K Biomechanical Analysis of Movement.

Operations Research Models and Methods
Gold Award Winner at IITAP 2006

Paul Jensen
Mechanical Engineering

This ORMM Web site holds a large collection of materials for the study of operations research (OR). The materials are organized under the general headings of models, methods, computation, problems, and OM/IE. The models section contains articles describing how decision problems can be expressed in a form amenable to analysis by operations research. The methods section contains articles that explain the theoretical development of solution methods. The computation section provides instructions for Microsoft Excel add-ins that can be used to solve models. The problems section provides opportunities for student practice. The OM/IE section addresses models and methods particularly useful for operations management and industrial engineering. Other pages on the site provide download access to the add-ins and example Excel workbooks. A tours section organizes the site by specific topics. An instruction section provides links to materials on the site for teaching several courses.

It is innovative because there is no other online collection of materials about operations research that approaches the scope, depth, and quality of the ORMM site. The use of Excel add-ins for instruction is innovative and unique. The site is open to the Internet and its contents are free.

Français Interactif
Gold Award Winner at IITAP 2004

Karen Kelton, Carl Blyth, and Nancy Guilloteau
French and Italian

Français Interactif is a unique first-year French curriculum designed to take advantage of UT Austin's new smart classrooms. With digital video technology, our students explore French language and culture by following the lives of real UT students who have participated in the UT Summer Program in Lyon, France. UT students introduce their French host families, their French university, and their lives in France.

The program contains a wealth of cultural information: videos of native French speakers, as well as scenes of day-to-day interactions (vendors in the market, waiters at a café, children celebrating birthdays, etc.). Français Interactif emphasizes interaction and communication: student/teacher, student/student, student/computer, student/native-speaker. The goal of Français Interactif is in its title: interaction in French.

Features of Français Interactif:

• 320 videos: UT students in France, native French interviews, vocabulary and culture presentations (.mp4, .mov)
• Recorded vocabulary lists (.mp3, CD audio)
• Phonetic lessons with recorded examples (.mp3)
• Online grammar (600 pages) with self-correcting exercises and audio dialogues (3 hrs, .mp3)
• Online grammar tools (verb conjugation reference, verb practice)
• Diagnostic grammar tests (testez-vous)
• Workbook of classroom activities and homework assignments (13 chapters, 575 pages, .pdf format)
• Online comparative polls and Internet writing activities

Virgil: An Interactive Tutorial for Writers

Gold Award Winner at IITAP 2004

Lester Faigley
Rhetoric and Composition

Virgil, a writing assistance Web site, solves two primary problems: 1) Since it is constantly available, it provides help for students and teachers who, for whatever reason, cannot get to the Undergraduate Writing Center (UWC), or who need help late at night or on the weekends when the UWC is closed. 2) The UWC is often at or above capacity. While it can never replace a live consultation, Virgil helps students identify the help they need at different points in their writing process, thereby both offering an alternative and helping students get more out of their UWC consultations. Because it is not password protected, it is also a significant outreach tool.

Multimedia Version of Masterworks of British Literature
Gold Award Winner at IITAP 2003

Elizabeth Cullingford
English

E316K is a course that many teachers and students dread: I wanted to change it from a chore into a delight. My MTV-generation students are more visually than verbally literate, and I turn this post-Gutenberg fact of life to my advantage, luring them into the unfamiliar linguistic worlds of Chaucer and Milton via the familiar stimuli of music and images. I have created a PowerPoint multimedia framework for my lectures, beginning with an image relevant to the day’s topic (one of Chaucer's pilgrims, a medieval illumination of Hell, a painting of Shakespeare), accompanied by music of the period: Machaut for Chaucer, say, or Lawes for Milton. Thereafter I punctuate the lecture with slides (for example, multiple iconic representations of the Fall introduce my discussion of the temptation of Eve). The lectures that introduce each author are the most media-rich: for example Shakespeare is contextualized by musical montages of Queen Elizabeth and pictures of the Globe Theatre. Lectures on Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Eyre contain fewer images, because I use clips from videos and DVDs instead. Some slides are extremely text-specific: the heifer from the Parthenon frieze described in Keats’s "Grecian Urn," a sound recording of a nightingale for his "Nightingale" ode, photographs of Maud Gonne to accompany Yeats's "No Second Troy," and Dore's illustrations to Coleridge’s "Ancient Mariner."

For additional information on Multimedia Version of Masterworks of British Literature, see an interview with Dr. Cullingford.

DigiMorph.org: A Digital Library of Vertebrate Morphology
Gold Award Winner at IITAP 2003

Timothy Rowe
Geological Sciences

DigiMorph.org is a unique educational resource aimed at college students and researchers in the field of vertebrate morphology. DigiMorph presents 500 animated volumetric visualizations of the vertebrate skeleton in all its forms, from fossils to embryos and adults of living species. Our imagery was generated using a high-resolution X-ray computed tomographic scanner to scan approximately 300 important specimens brought to us by 55 collaborators from 24 of the world’s premiere natural history museums and universities. Visualizations generated from CT data include slice-by-slice animations through complete specimen volumes, animated volumetric and 3D surface models. DigiMorph.org also includes explanatory text, references, links, and metadata enabling rapid searching through nearly one terabyte of information. The DigiMorph development team includes The University of Texas High Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility (UTCT), the Texas Memorial Museum, the Center for Instructional Technologies, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and the ACES Visualization Lab. We were supported by NSF, the Intel Foundation, and UT Austin.

ArchNet: Collaborative Group Workspaces
2004 Best of IT Collaborative Award

Anne Beamish
Community and Regional Planning Program, School of Architecture
with Dr. Larry Speck, Patrick McCook, and Jeremiah Petersen

ArchNet is a Web-based international community of scholars, educators, students, and professionals concerned with architecture, planning, and landscape architecture who share a commitment to improving the quality of the built environment. Currently ArchNet has over 18,000 registered members from 140 countries, receives 3,500 unique visitors per day, and the numbers are increasing steadily. Membership is free. The aim of ArchNet is to build bridges, particularly between the Islamic world and the West, share resources, encourage collaboration and communication between individuals and institutions, and to nurture local expertise. The shared resources are extensive with over 36,000 images and 2,000 publications.

A new resource recently added to ArchNet is collaborative group workspaces. They are available to all ArchNet members and can be used for educational purposes (large lecture classes or studios), as well as projects, conferences, and design competitions. They offer a variety of applications: announcements, file storage, calendars, chat rooms, discussion forums, Web pages, and image collections. Groups can design their own spaces according to their needs and use as little or as much functionality as they like.

For additional information on ArchNet: Collaborative Group Workspaces, see an interview with Dr. Beamish.