Teaching

In the spring of 2021, I started looking for collaborators who were interested in research in undergraduate laboratories.  Through the power of professional networks, six of us began meeting to identify a project for the Strategic Instructional Innovation Program in the Academy for Excellence in Engineering Education (AE3) in the Grainger College of Engineering (GCoE) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  The first project we identified was to create a community of practice (CoP) of instructors of laboratory and design courses.  Since then, the community of practice has continued to grow and expand its impact.  

Read more about the Lab and Design CoP on their website.

The goal of alternative grading is to apply assessmentmethods that separate feedback from the final grade of thecourse. In the United States, traditional grading is frequentlybased on a weighted average of points earned throughout thecourse to arrive at a formulaic final grade that is indifferent tothe actual learning attained by each student. Most alternativegrading systems do not assign grades based on these traditionalpercentage or points-based scales. 

After one term of teaching remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, I shared my process of flipping my class with limited resources at home.  My paper was published in the COVID-19 special issue ofAdvances in Engineering Education.

Last spring, UIUC announced that we were moving from Compass2g (Blackboard) to Canvas this academic year.  So, I've been exploring Canvas over the summer and decided to jump in and move my course to Canvas this fall.  My plan is to share tips about developing courses in Canvas along the way.

Since I have to manually move my content, my goals for this semester are to have a paperless lab and the content is also accessible for all students in my lab.  For the latter, I am going to draw from the UDL guidelines and the IT Accessibility 101 course provided by the Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services at Illinois. 

My first course in Canvas will be BIOE415: Biomedical Instrumentation Lab.  I'm organizing each lab into a module with background information and the experiment instructions.  Therefore a lot of my content is getting transferred to pages that are just webpages and you can edit the HTML if you know what you are doing.

My first tip is about how to add figure captions to images on pages in Canvas.  It is easy if you know HTML, but not if you are trying to search for how to do it on Canvas pages.

As a follow up to my earlier blog post about creating videos quickly, I thought I would share a few examples of the final product.  When I started creating videos for an entire term online, I decided to add a bit more personalization.  All of the videos started with me on the screen introducing the content before jumping into the annotated PowerPoint content.  I created an animated logo in Adobe After Effects to add some flair and personalization.  Finally, I put some bed music and end credits to make it seem a bit more like what they were used to from other YouTubers.

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, many faculty have been asked to move their courses online with very short notice.  Last year during the polar vortex I experimented with making lecture videos with PowerPoint.  I have now updated the process again for the videos I am creating this year.  The process is efficient and I think it meets ADA requirements for captions.  The videos are not perfect but they convey the material clearly and are pretty good given the circumstances.

At WE19 I collaborated with Yanfen Li and Nicole Jackson to facilitate a flipped session on applying for academic jobs.  The slides and additional details from the session are provided here for reference during and after the session.

In 2018, I switched from live in-class presentations of project results to video-recorded presentations.  I surveyed the students about their experience and archived the videos and discussion boards for further analysis.  Overall, the switch to student-produced video presentations was a success.  In 2019, I shared the initial results and assignment design at the 2019 Frontiers in Education conference and the Quad-Pod Consortium Teaching Symposium: Transformative Practices in Teaching & Learning.  The article is available on IEEE Xplore.

At the 2019 American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference, I published a tips and tricks paper about technologies that were available for providing feedback and grades to students.  The full paper can be accessed from the ASEE website.

In 2018, I was asked to share an innovative assignment as part of Kettering University's Principles of Effective Teaching (PoET) lecture series.  In this talk, I describe an assignment where I have students share a real-life application of something they learned in the course with their peers.

At the 2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference, I published an innovative practice about adding Cody Coursework (now MATLAB Grader) to my control systems course.  The full paper can be accessed on IEEE Xplore.

At the 2017 Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference, I published a paper about teaching assistants (TAs). The observations about the influence of TAs in the laboratory emerged from the laboratory equipment study that I conducted during my dissertation. Based on student comments during the original study, the TAs had an impact on the learning environment in the laboratory.   The full paper can be accessed in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

At WE14, Diane Peters and I shared tips for teaching STEM in a workshop on Saturday afternoon.

This year I completed my first teaching certificate through the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning at the University of Illinois.  Throughout the year, I attended seminars, collected feedback from my students, and had someone observe my teaching.  I wrote reflective essays on the entire process as well.  I learned a lot while completing the requirements of this certificate.  Many of the lessons I was able to apply right away as a teaching assistant, however other lessons I have made note of for future classes that I teach.

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