2015-2016
Online Learning Resources in the Digital Age
Project Team
Rachel Heiser, Assistant Dean and Academic Support and Learning Resources Specialist
Christina Rose, Assistant Dean
Jancy Munguia, Esther Chiang and Elizabeth Reilly
Audrey Lin '18, Charlie Bruce '15, and Christina Stella '17
Courses Involved
ACKSK001 "Understanding the Student Mind: Strategies for Engaging in Self-Care and Metacognition” and GNST043 “Meta Cognition and the Transition to College”
Timeline
Project piloted: Fall 2015-Spring 2016
Project Link
"Athena's Guide" blog, written by Audrey Lin with videos by Charlie Bruce and Christina Stella
Goals and Description
This project will draw on material taught in ACKSK001 and GNST043 to create accessible multimedia that helps students learn about and apply effective metacognition and self-care strategies. Student interns will work collaboratively to develop podcasts, blog posts, and video blogs for fellow students. This content will teach important practical skills, such as effective time management and study skills, and introduce students to technology which supports them.
Creating online equivalents of this material, which is otherwise taught in courses, will allow the material to reach all students who might benefit from it. It will be accessible and available to the community, and distributed to students in the way which the interns determine is most effective.
Lagim Tehi Tuma: Dreamwork We Do Together
Project Team
Alice Lesnick, Term Professor of Education, Director of the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Education Program, and Coordinator of Africana Studies
Esther Chiang and Elizabeth Reilly, Post-Bac Educational Technologists
Courses Involved
Dalun-BiCo Lagim Tehi Tuma (Summer Action Research Fellowship)
Timeline
Platform development: Spring 2015
Piloted in fellowship: Summer 2015
Project Link
Dalun-BiCo Lagim Tehi Tuma Website
Goals and Description
In 2006, a Haverford College student traveled to Dalun, Ghana on a microfinance internship. Collaborating with two community leaders, the Haverford student, Andrew Garza, opened up the first Titagya School in 2009. This preschool and kindergarten program now has five schools in three different communities of Northern Ghana. In 2010, the partnership between Titagya and the Bi-college community (BiCo) began with individual student internships funded by Haverford’s Center for Peace and Global Citizenship. In 2012, 16 BiCo students along with Professor Alice Lesnick and Professor Pim Higginson traveled to Dalun through Bryn Mawr College’s 360 program. Since then, there have been a series of additional summer fellowship exchanges where BiCo students have traveled to Ghana and community partners from Ghana have traveled to the BiCo.
In 2014, Bryn Mawr formed a partnership with the University of Development Studies (UDS) in Tamale, Ghana. This summer (2015), three BiCo fellows are working with UDS partners. However, due to extenuating circumstances, the BiCo fellows were unable to travel to Ghana this summer. Though same may see this as a disappointment, Alice Lesnick seized the opportunity to turn the fellowship into a dynamic online collaboration and partnership with a variety of speakers, Dagbani language lessons and more! To facilitate a more direct line of communication between UDS and BiCo fellows, Elizabeth and Esther created the Dalun-BiCo Lagim Teha Tuma website. This website serves as a way to communicate this program’s work to stakeholders and a source of information about the program.
Introduction to Chinese Literature: Translation and Adaptation
Project Team
Shiamin Kwa, Assistant Professor on the Jye Chu Lectureship in Chinese Studies
Esther Chiang and Elizabeth Reilly, Post-Bac Educational Technologists
Course Involved
EALC 110: Introduction to Chinese Literature
Timeline
Syllabus development: Summer 2015
Platform implemented: Fall 2015
Goals and Description
For this course, Professor Shiamin Kwa will redesign the course EALC 110 to facilitate a more active student role using three blended components. First, students will use the iPad app Pleco several times in class to collaboratively explore poems. Pleco, an interactive Chinese dictionary app, will allow the students to interpret short poems, including formal qualities, which would otherwise have been unmanageable for intermediate readers
Students will also produce individual “digital textbooks” over the course of the semester by incorporating representative texts for each unit. The project, which will create miniature and personalized anthologies, will allow students to reflect on the growing body of materials and encourage them to develop a more expansive understanding of the relationship between texts and forms in Chinese literary tradition. The students will be active participants in their own learning, working both independently and collaboratively to construct new knowledge and think about canon formation, adaptation, and intertextuality.
Additionally, because the course emphasizes the important connections between visual form and verbal content, students will create visual interpretations of the poems which will be shared on Tumblr and linked to the course’s Moodle page.
Improving Student Access to Civic Engagement Opportunities
Project Team
Ellie Esmond and Vippy Yee, Director of Service and Leadership Programs & Assistant Director of Volunteer Programs
Miranda Canilang, Summer 2015 Intern
Esther Chiang and Elizabeth Reilly, Post-Bac Educational Technologists
Timeline
Project Developed: Summer 2015
Project Implemented: Fall 2015-Spring 2016
Project Link
"Volunteering 101" Tutorial on the Civic Engagement website.
Project Description and Goals
This project will expedite and improve the Civic Engagement Office's process of matching students with volunteer opportunities. The CEO, with help from Mellon Digital Curriculum Summer Interns, will create an online course that will help students assess their motivations and interests, learn about the options available through the CEO, and direct them to the appropriate resources.
This course, which will be required for students as a first step when contacting the CEO, will include an interactive survey, scheduling information, and opportunities for self-reflection. In the future, the CEO hopes to include testimonial videos from student volunteers and community partners. In addition to helping students, this information will assist the CEO staff better and more quickly identify opportunities that are a good fit for each student.
How to Build a Praxis Independent Study Course
Project Team
Nell Anderson and Kelly Strunk, Director and Associate Director of the Praxis Program
Elizabeth Reilly and Esther Chiang, Post-Bac Educational Technologists Archana Kaku and Jennifer Orr, Summer 2015 Interns
Course Involved
Praxis Independent Studies
Timeline
Platform development: Summer-Fall 2015
Piloted in courses: Spring 2016
Project Link
On the Praxis Independent Study program page, you can read about the program and look through the tutorial.
Goals and Description
Currently, when a student decides to develop a Praxis Independent Study (PIS) course, the student attends a drop-in information session or makes an individual appointment to learn about the process. Praxis Program staff would like to develop a more engaging method for providing information to students, and develop better infrastructure for supporting the creation of PIS courses campus-wide.
The first stage of this project will be a Qualtrics-based module that will help students begin the process of creating their course. The module will offer multiple tracks, including a brief pre-assessment, information addressing the core elements of a PIS (with a particular focus on finding and approaching a faculty member and identifying and securing a field site/field supervisor), tutorials, and videos, which lead into an individual consultation. The Qualtrics module will be interactive and include multi-media to support better student engagement. By creating the module in Qualtrics, the information will be more easily accessible to students with varying levels of interest and knowledge, as well as different learning styles. It will also allow the Praxis Program staff to effectively assess understanding and be better prepared to meet a student’s needs during the consultation.
In addition to the Qualtrics module, this project will also create digital equivalents of all the forms required to set up a PIS course, and a Moodle course which centralizes all the required materials in one location.
Food and Drink in the Ancient World
Project Team
Annette M. Baertschi, Associate Professor, Greek, Latin and Classical Studies and Esther Chiang, Post-Bac Educational Technologist
Course Involved
CSTS 320: "Food and Drink in the Ancient World"
Timeline
Platform development: Summer 2015
Piloted in course: Fall 2015
Project Link
The class' Omeka website can be viewed by visiting this link.
Goals and Description
This project has two components, both of which will use digital technologies to improve student understanding of the role of food and drink in ancient culture and society. The first is a digital map, which visually represents the provenience and supply of culinary ingredients, including information about production, preparation, and availability. In order to begin to understand food and drink in the ancient world, it is important to provide maps that tell a story of travel and trade. Using both Pleiades, a historical dynamic map, and AWMC's Antiquity À-la-carte tool, Baertschi and Chiang will develop interactive maps for the students to use during class to provide a visual comparison to the readings. This map will be an important resource for students in the class, providing them with an overview of the variability in food cultures, the geography and history of the ancient Mediterranean world, and reading and using digital maps.
The second component is a group assignment during the course. Students will work in small groups to create digital presentations using Omeka. These presentations will combine a wide array of primary sources from Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections material and material found elsewhere. These presentations will be combined into a collective guide, and form the foundation of an online archive about food production and consumption in the ancient Mediterranean world. The project will teach students to analyze and synthesize complex historical and archaeological evidence and present it in a novel digital format.
Education, Technology, and Society
Project Team
Alice Lesnick, Term Professor of Education, Director of the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Education Program, and Coordinator of Africana Studies
Esther Chiang and Elizabeth Reilly, Post-Bac Educational Technologists
Course Involved
EDUC 275: Education, Technology, and Society
Timeline
Platform development: Summer 2015
Piloted: Fall 2015
Project Link
The projects developed by the EDUC 275 students are connected to outside K-12 classes and a senior citizen community center. Instead, here is a link to a YouTube video in which some of the students discuss what they learned and showcase elements of the projects they designed.
Goals and description
Through four pivotal online media platforms, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, and Wordpress, Professor Alice Lesnick invites students to critically engage with these tools in order to understand how they play important, complex, and contested roles in education within and beyond classroom contexts. For each online media platform, a different guest speaker will spend class time working with groups on learning one platform and applying this platform into the context of their field placement. For example, as Alice describes, “students working with high school students in a Philadelphia charter school could read the Wikipedia entry on charter schools and think about what needs to be added or changed.” The purpose of this project is to have students think more critically and creatively about their consumption and experience of online media so that they will become better decision makers and have the digital literacy to understand usability as well as the complexities behind these tools.
Building Bryn Mawr
Project Team
Alicia Walker, Assistant Professor of Medieval Art and Architecture and Director of the Center for Visual Culture plus her student assistants
Joseph Marra, Associate Director for Planning and Projects
Camilla MacKay, Manager of Research and Instructional Services
Scholarly Communications Librarian
Course Involved
First-Year Emily Balch Writing Seminar, “Building Bryn Mawr”
Timeline
Platform development: Summer 2015
Piloted in course: Fall 2015
Goals and Description
Professor Alicia Walker has decided to include two “flipped classroom” components in the fall 2015 iteration of her Emily Balch Seminar, “Building Bryn Mawr”.
The first component involves scanning and developing interactive assignments using the historical plans of the plethora of 19th century buildings on campus. The interactive assignments will give students the opportunity to practice reading, interpreting, and critically assessing architectural plans. Students will practice close visual analyses of the buildings and will compare plans of the same buildings which were intended for different purposes. These assignments will prepare students for class sessions where they will discuss buildings, construction, and function with campus architect Joseph Marra. This component is intended to increase student engagement with the archival material to promote more robust in-class discussion.
The second component involves creating online peer review modules in Moodle to facilitate student interaction with one another’s work. Walker intends to create targeted guides on how to conduct peer reviews, as a way for her to be involved with the online peer review activity in an effective yet unobtrusive manner. The goal of the online peer review is to encourage student independence and improve writing skills while maintaining a level of rigor and accountability.
These components will encourage students to think through the course material creatively in order to link visual evidence with historical evidence as well as the social themes examined over the course of the semester. Additionally, the project will create a fuller visual archive of building plans for the College archives that students can utilize in their course papers.
Digitizing Study Abroad Information Sessions
Project Team
Theresa Cann, Assistant Dean and Director of International Education
Esther Chiang and Elizabeth Reilly, Post-Bac Educational Technologists
Archana Kaku, Janna Coles, and Miranda Canilang, Summer 2015 Interns
Course Involved
Study Abroad programs
Timeline
Platform development: Summer 2015
Piloted in course: AY 2015-2016
Goals and Description
Theresa Cann worked with the Post-Bacs and ETS Summer Interns during summer 2015 to digitize certain aspects of study abroad information sessions and application processes. Cann observed that the students that were unable to attend the in-person information sessions had significantly more questions than those that did and struggled more with the already complicated process of applying to study abroad. Cann wanted to create a resource that was more accessible and to digitize the materials from the live info sessions so that information can be revisited. All students with sophomore status were added to a Moodle site that has modules about study abroad programs and policies, mini quizzes, application procedures, financial aid information and pre-departure checklists. Hosting these materials on Moodle is useful for Cann because she can see which students have accessed the materials before agreeing to meet with them in person. Since these materials are only in private Moodle courses, there is no public link. This project will continue in 2016-2017.