IITAP Gold Awards Recognize Innovative Instructional Technology in Engineering and Foreign Languages
At the 11th annual IITAP Showcase on April 23, gold awards were announced in two categories of innovative use of instructional technology. For accomplishment in Web-based Multimedia Learning, Orlando Kelm, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, was recognized for his entry Tá Falado: Brazilian Portuguese Pronunciation. For accomplishment in an Innovative Learning Environment, William O’Brien, Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, was recognized for his entry Expanding the Classroom: Mobile Technologies for Construction Education. Leslie Jarmon was selected for a Special Recognition Award for her entry Raising the Bar: Using Second Life in an Interdisciplinary Communications Course, recognized for promoting community engagement in a virtual world.
IITAP, administered by DIIA, is an initiative of the provost to encourage, support, and reward innovation in using instructional technology to promote students’ knowledge and skills by making learning more engaging, relevant, and active.
Dean Judy Ashcroft, Division of Continuing and Innovative Education,
suggested that the 11th IITAP showcase was an appropriate occasion for
reflection on how far innovative pedagogy using instructional technology
has come since 1997. She credited the numerous small epiphanies of early
adopters among UT Austin faculty for the ripple effects evident today
across campus in ground-breaking teaching supported by emerging technologies.
Provost Steven Leslie applauded the entrants for their leadership, their interdisciplinary vision, and their commitment to teaching and learning excellence, reflective of the charge of the Commission of 125 that UT Austin strive to be the best public university in the nation.
Tá Falado features a series of 40 podcast lessons to help learners focus on pronunciation differences and similarities for Spanish and Portuguese, languages that share many similarities, especially in vocabulary and grammar. The majority of UT Austin students who want to learn Portuguese have already studied Spanish. The podcast format is ideal because it allows teachers to help students focus on aspects of Portuguese and Spanish that otherwise would go unnoticed. The podcasts are supported by downloadable notes and observations, and each lesson contains a discussion blog to address questions and clarifications.
Expanding the Classroom uses mobile technologies to extend the classroom to address spatial reasoning concerning issues such as job site layouts, materials flows, and work areas. With tablet PCs and sensor motes to mimic sensors used in commercial applications, instructors can virtually recreate a jobsite in a large, yet safe, environment. Eventually, a range of learning modules will allow the support of a sequence of construction courses, exploiting innovative technologies to provide active learning experiences for students.
Raising the Bar features a project-based learning design requiring students to demonstrate their grasp of communication strategies, reasoning through analogy, and building multi-causal explanations, by completing a semester-long team project incorporating Second Life. The virtual world component provides a challenging 3-D environment in which students may apply, test, repeat, adapt, and improve their use of communication strategies in ways that are beyond the reach of the physical boundaries of a classroom.
Silver and bronze awards were announced for three other exciting entries.
Marc Bizer, Department of French and Italian, received a silver award for Reading between the Lines/Lyre entre les lignes, a Web-based resource designed to be used as an interactive accompaniment to in-class work in an introductory class in French literature. The site offers a low-stakes, entertaining way for students to practice literary explication before tackling one of the course’s major, formal writing assignments.
Kitty Milliken and Earle McBride, Department of Geosciences, received a bronze award for Sandstone Petrology: A Tutorial Petrographic Image Atlas, a Web-based resource that allows instructors to duplicate the microscope experience while allowing students to explore on their own. At a time when petrography—the study of rocks using various forms of microscopy—is being squeezed from the curriculum because it is labor intensive, the sandstone tutorial is designed as a supplement to laboratory experiences, allowing instructors to teach petrography more efficiently and more effectively.
Stephanie Rude and Aaron Rochlen, Department of Psychology, received a bronze award for Psychopathology in Action: A Clinical Diagnostic Tool for Students, a Web-based resource that helps students with little to no clinical experience learn the critical skills of clinical diagnosis, envisioning how mental disorders manifest themselves in people's lives, by means of an interactive and engaging online environment. Without realistic case material, students often struggle learning how to apply complex diagnostic criteria.