2012 CLIF Abstracts

The purpose of the study is to obtain student reports of any perceived increase in engagement across a series of course elements, in particular business simulation. The elements include online assignments (publisher-provided and individual assessment) use of tables, exhibits from the text during class presentations by the professor, 2 collaborative case presentations for assessment, Harvard business simulation 1 individual, 1 collaborative deliverable for assessment. The third year advanced managerial accounting course currently has 20 enrolled. The data will be collected using Polls in CLEW.

Success as a beginning teacher is directly related to the ability to effectively engage in professional practice. This project is intended to improve teaching and learning by engaging teacher candidates in understanding the standards of the teaching profession, and through storytelling utilizing text and video vignettes, applying this knowledge in practice. This open learning project will provide students with the opportunity to envision the intersection of what professional practice means to them personally, and as a member of the teaching profession. Specifically, through the development of these online learning resources which include an existing online, anonymous, Professional Practice Tutorial for Beginning Teachers, coupled with peer developed video vignettes, storytelling for professional practice will allow teacher candidates to critically engage in personal reflection concerning the application of the Ontario College of Teachers Ethical and Professional Standards of Practice. During May – July, 2012, recent graduates from the BEd program will develop the video vignettes. This process will begin with focus group sessions conducted with their peers. This data will then be used to write case studies based on the stories shared to create video scripts and tutorial questions. This project will build upon the success of the current Professional Practice Tutorial for Beginning Teachers by providing students with the ability to interact with text and video depictions based on experiential knowledge from the field, providing a nuanced description of professionalism in practice. In 2013 data will be collected from the online tutorial site to ascertain student response and completion of the tutorial.

An experiential learning opportunity for a large group of students at the University, CSI- Windsor: Forensics Hands -On Workshop, will be developed. Initially, with the funding provided, the workshop would be open to the students registered for an open course offered from the Center for Inter-Faculty Programs: Introduction to Forensic Science (14-57-201). The enrolment for this course is around 200. Based on previous small offerings of the workshop, we know that the majority of students are interested in participating in this kind of event. The 200 students would be divided in ten groups, with twenty students per group. The workshop experience would be included in the course outline and contribute to the grade. Crime scenes would be created with collaborations from professional experts (Mr. Wade Knapp, Forensic Ident. Unit., Toronto and experts from Ontario Police College, Alymer). A history of over 3 years of collaboration with these experts has established a good working relationship and network with the Forensic community. The students would learn to collect and analyze various kinds of evidence generally found at the crime scene like samples of hair, fiber, blood and saliva stains, DNA, spent bullet shells, fingerprints, blood spatter, documents, drugs etc. The workshop would be worth 10% of the open course, Introduction to Forensic Sciences (14-57-201). The students would be given pre-workshop readings and handouts and required to submit the results of their analyses in a Forensic Report, following the industry recommendations. During the workshop I would like to collect video and picture footage that could be used later as an online resource. Once the workshop has been successfully scaled-up to accommodate 200 students in Introduction to Forensic Sciences, I will use it as a model to offer the workshop to a broader audience, including more students and community members.

The Interdisciplinary Playbook is a proposal for an action-oriented collection of ideas and best practices for faculty to use in building courses that are based not exclusively on themes or knowledge-sets, but on ways of thinking and doing that span disciplinary boundaries. Drawing from the expertise of Project Team Members, Prof. Justin Langlois, Dr. Phil Graniero, and Prof. Rod Strickland in a range of interdisciplinary settings, the Playbook will be developed from a synthesis of existing research on interdisciplinary teaching methodologies and practices along with interviews with faculty from a range of other institutions actively implementing interdisciplinary curriculum. The Playbook will be available both as a written report -- importantly, a highly readable and useable report for non-experts -- and as a CTL presentation and workshop on strategies for employing action-oriented thinking methods into interdisciplinary curriculum.

“What do industrial engineers do?” and “what is manufacturing?” High school students commonly ask these questions in engineering education outreach. These questions, however, are challenging to answer, especially for industrial engineering, which focuses on systems integration and optimization in additional to design and manufacturing activities. A window into the broader view of manufacturing and being an industrial engineer can be opened with some hands-on learning experiences. To do this, it is proposed to utilize a desktop (portable) rapid prototyping (RP) machine (fab@home) for outreach activities and for experiential learning in appropriate undergraduate engineering classes. This fab@home machine builds a component by depositing layers of material, and uses a computer aided design model as direct input. A component can be built with varying materials, including food items (cheese, peanut butter, and so forth), as well as more traditional non-edible materials, such as silicone. The fab@home machine has been purchased. Final assembly and machine commissioning is required. Once functional trials have been run using different materials, including chocolate, experiential learning modules will be developed for the appropriate audiences and outreach activities.

The notion of threshold concepts - concepts that involve troublesome knowledge and are essential to allow students to make connections that would otherwise remain hidden - is rapidly gaining traction in the higher education community. This project proposes to explore a new method of teaching one of the most important threshold concepts in social work: the Theory of Change through the application of an on-line program - Theory of Change Online (TOCO) - designed specifically for training on the Theory of Change. This platform will be incorporated into the final two courses of the MSW curriculum sequence: Advanced Social Work Research: Program Evaluation and the Advanced Integration Seminar. We anticipate that students will find the engagement in the on-line simulations and interaction with their colleagues through the TOCO to create a more stimulating learning environment that will enhance their understanding and willingness to engage in more critical thinking about social work interventions using the Theory of Change. It is also anticipated that the approach of TOCO, which helps students make explicit visual-textual connections between elements of plans and the underlying theory, will be more effective than traditional lectures and readings at triggering individual activation of the threshold concept of interest. Training new social workers to be comfortable and proficient in analyzing and applying the Theory of Change concept is critical not only for their own learning, but for improving the effectiveness of social work interventions generally.