Category: 4-VA Initiatives

After spending almost one full year redesigning HIST 121:  Formation of the American Republic, Dr. Cynthia Kierner rolled out the new course and awaited student response:  Judging from the feedback, the new HIST 121 is a great success.

Here’s a sampling of students’ comments:

• The Civil War letters assignment “crafted my skills as a writer & document analysis . . . It should be like this for all classes!”
• “It was a great experience. I was able to get the info I needed on Monday and work collaboratively on Wednesday.”
• “Really appreciated the opportunities for discussion in lectures. It helps cement the material.”
• Modules were “a good way to shift focus from memorizing information to interpreting information.”
• The Civil War letters assignment “allowed me to really dive into primary sources to learn about history.”

Beginning the redesign, Kierner recognized her challenge.  The course, a sweeping overview beginning with the Native Americans and moving through Reconstruction, covers a lot of ground.  Moreover, the introductory class is primarily taken by non-history majors who do not necessarily harbor a passion for the subject.

“I sought to use the 4-VA@Mason grant to redesign HIST121 to emphasize skills and active learning while simultaneously lowering student costs,” explains Kierner. “Specifically, I planned to replace expensive textbooks and document readers with free online sources–including the acclaimed opensource U.S. history text, AMERICAN YAWP–and also to create a series of new module assignments that give students the guidance they need to use online databases encouraging the development of research questions, to find and interpret primary sources (words and images), and ultimately produce their own small-scale research projects. In other words, to let them act like real historians.”

Although quite familiar with many sources available to create the modules, as a researcher in the field who has taught this course often, Kierner conducted some further investigation to identify new informational sources, including digitized Civil War letters.  Kierner credits Mason’s History Librarian, Dr. George Oberle, for his assistance in finding information and making it accessible.

Concludes Kierner, “This was a desirable opportunity to retool a lecture class to emphasize active learning. It re-invigorated my teaching in lecture-style classes, while providing students with a better experience at a more affordable cost – reducing books and materials costs from $100-$150 for to $0!”

While interest in Open Educational Resources is expanding exponentially, sometimes the search results come up short.  This was clearly evidenced by the OER research undertaken by Dr. Nathalia Peixoto for her ECE 385 course. Electric Circuit Analysis I is a complex course with many different attributes, covering the first half of electric circuit theory and practice.  Topics include analyses of circuits with resistors, capacitors, inductors, and operational amplifiers; all supplemented with lab experiments to reinforce the subject matter.  As Peixoto looked for suitable written resources, she found they did not meet the needs of her course.

Peixoto’s research then took a hard turn.  While she couldn’t identify any written sources, she did find videos of lectures and presentations – primarily on YouTube – that more directly addressed the subject topics.  So, she began down the video road, compiling four pages of links to 66 different videos of nodal and mesh analysis, operational amplifiers, capacitors and inductors as well as first order and second order circuits, and more.  In the end, the free video series she curated served as an adaptable substitute for the textbook, which sold for $300.  With 100 students taking the course each year, it resulted in a total savings of $30,000.

Although Peixoto’s proposal to provide free, engaging and enlightening written materials for her students in ECE 385 did come to fruition, the mode employed was not what she had anticipated.  She offers some perspective on her journey, noting that the 4-VA grant, “helped me move forward helping out students.”  Peixoto plans to develop her course notes to share with the wider Mason faculty and more fully test the course materials.

 

After tackling the development of an OER textbook for ASTR 113 which resulted in enlightening, digitized materials for the course and saving students up to $200 on a textbook, Dr. Mario Gliozzi applied for and received a second 4-VA@Mason grant to take on the challenge of producing an online homework system to complement and support the redesigned educational resources.

Gliozzi recognized that students were not attending to their homework assignments, which are integral in testing understanding of topics on a regular basis. Therefore, Gliozzi and colleague Dr. Rebecca Ericson were interested in developing a homework system closely related to the new OER material including weekly quizzes with multiple choice, multiple answer, ordering, matching, and jumbled sentences, with feedback and clarification accessible after the quiz deadline.  Additionally, Gliozzi wanted to utilize the many illustrations/graphs available online, which helped prompt questions on fundamental concepts and allowed the students to learn the importance of understanding and interpreting graphs and diagrams.

After employing the new homework program for a semester, Gliozzi tweaked some of the elements and employed them fully the next year (ASTR 113 is only taught in the spring semester). He noticed that once the importance of the weekly homework assignment was properly emphasized at the beginning of the semester, and the students realized the close link between the homework questions and the questions in the proctored tests, the homework quizzes were recognized as one of the most effective tools for preparation and success in the class.

After fine tuning the homework and quizzes, they were made available to all Mason astronomy instructors by uploading them on their permanent ASTR 113 Blackboard repository. Thus, the new materials were a positive change for the students, but also for fellow faculty.

Gliozzi notes, “This 4-VA@Mason grant gave me the chance to develop a tool that proved useful (and free of charge) to complete the student preparation out of class which gave them the best tools possible to be successful in ASTR 113.”