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~FAST Tex
The ~FAST Tex program matches technology-savvy students with UT faculty who have a vision for a new kind of instructional technology. Faculty submit proposals describing the technology they envision, what pedagogical problems it will solve, and how they plan to assess its effectiveness. Then DIIA staffers train ~FAST Tex student interns to operate as free-lance developers working with faculty clients.
Mia Markey
Non-Linear PowerPoint to Aid Learning of Probability, Random Processes,
and Statistics
One of the challenges in learning probability, random processes, and statistics is that it can be difficult to keep track of the "big picture" when considerable attention to detail is required to learn the steps in performing the related calculations. This project converted existing traditional PowerPoint presentations into a non-linear form and added connections to other information sources, e.g., textbook-associated website material and faculty video clips. The development of interconnected, non-linear PowerPoint presentations encourage a flexible lecture style responsive to students’ learning needs, help students see the connections between topics, and provide a learner-driven resource for self-study and review.
Helen Taylor Martin
Virtual Manipulatives for Mathematics Learning
Virtual Manipulatives are computer-based versions of manipulatives (i.e., counting tiles, fraction pies, base-10 blocks) that are used to model and develop ideas in elementary level mathematics classrooms. This project’s online version moves virtual objects like the real manipulatives, with a field to submit notes and answers. In addition, the action of the manipulatives and the notations associated with them are recorded so that future elementary math teachers taking this course may gather examples of their students' problem-solving and reasoning representations for presentation to the whole class for analysis and discussion.
Lee Abraham
Using DVD Technology in the Teaching of Comedy Acting
An old show business saying claims “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Often even the best student actors struggle with comedy. This project created a DVD designed to develop students’ cognitive understanding of what is funny and why, and the techniques for playing it successfully. The DVD includes such topics as: Comic Structure, Comic Language, Characterization, Terms and Techniques, and Rehearsing and Performing. Students can watch and re-watch classic comic scenes with or without the instructional audio track and analyze them according to guidelines provided by the instructor.
Roberta R. Greene
Memories of Older Adults: A Risk and Resilience Perspective
This is the third year of a project to develop curriculum, text, and learning materials including videos on CD for teaching future professionals to meet crises and promote resilience. Each chapter of the text, entitled "Social Work Practice from a Risk and Resilience Perspective," follows a standard outline, and is supplemented by competency-based modules. This year's project added four additional chapters to the existing materials. Each chapter contains a statement of learning plan and goals, two engagement exercises, two research questions, two self-awareness exercises, ten self-scoring quizzes and a glossary of terms.
Sabine Hake
Authentic Audio-visual Materials for German
The main difficulty in upper-division language learning involves making the transition from the highly controlled environment of the classroom (grammar exercises, vocabulary texts, etc.) to the engagement with real texts and situations in the target language. An important tool for training this kind of competence is television, film, and the Internet: the first two through the medium of narrative and dialogue, which trains listening comprehension, and the third through images and texts, which trains reading and writing skills. This language portal introduces students to contemporary German media culture through the combination of digitized audio/visual materials and hyperlinks to Internet sites.
See Authentic Audio-visual Materials for German.
Lisa Moore
The Sister Arts: Painting, Poetry and Gardening in Britain, 1700–1832
"The Sister Arts: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening in England, 1700–1832" is a "virtual museum" focusing on eighteenth-century and Romantic representations of the British landscape. The site is organized to allow students to visit exhibits focusing on five well-known British landscape gardens. Four of these gardens—Stowe, Stourhead, Rousham and West Wyckham—are still extant and students learn about them through recent photographs of the sites as well as period drawings and literary descriptions. The fifth garden, Mary Delany’s Delville, no longer exists in the real world, so students encounter it via a three-dimensional animated flythrough as well as through eighteenth-century drawings, paintings, and literary descriptions of the garden.
See The Sister Arts: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening in England, 1700–1832.
Susan Houston
Finance and Budget in Healthcare Systems for Web-based Delivery
The 24 x 7 nature of nursing management makes it difficult—if not impossible—for nurses to obtain advanced education even when courses are taught in the traditional classroom setting at nontraditional times (i.e., after work or Saturdays). This project developed an online course for nursing professionals that includes problem-based learning, webcasts, threaded discussions and prescheduled chat sessions. Students are also provided with online budgeting and break-even analysis assignments in Microsoft Excel that are dynamic and provide the student with immediate feedback.
Dean Hendrickson
Fishes of Texas: Web Database of Live Fish Photographs
This project utilizes the collection of Fishes of Texas photographs, professionally taken, of live specimens in their natural habitats. A database-driven Web site was created to showcase these images for use in the biology classroom. Additionally, because the showcase is Web-based, the Fishes of Texas images are accessible from anywhere at any time to a diverse audience. The addition of interactive tutorials, simulations, and animations are included in future plans for the project.
See Fishes of Texas.
Stacy Sparks
General Chemistry Resource Database
The introductory-level courses offered by the Chemistry department are generally large, often with 300-500 students per course. Many professors have found interesting demonstrations to use for each particular topic, with specifics on how to tie the demonstration into the lecture and how to best perform the demonstration so it is visible to such a large audience. The goal of this project was to develop a database of instructional materials—movies, tutorials, demonstration ideas, diagrams, and so on —for faculty to share as they prepare to teach introductory-level courses. Faculty can login to the website, search the database for interesting materials and even add their own.
See General Chemistry Resource Database.
Dr. Graeme Henkelmen
EON: A distributed computing system to extend the time scale of molecular
dynamics simulations
A common problem in theoretical chemistry, condensed matter physics, and materials science is the calculation of the time evolution of an atomic scale system where, for example, chemical reactions and/or diffusion occur. Generally the events of interest are quite rare (many orders of magnitude slower than the vibrational movements of the atoms), and therefore direct simulations, tracking every movement of the atoms, would take thousands of years of computer calculations on the fastest present-day computer before a single event of interest can be expected to occur, hence the need for a distributed computing system. A server sends out small data packets for calculation to clients, e.g. over the Internet. So, instead of the entire calculation being done on a single processor, it is done on many client computers worldwide. After finishing its calculation, each client computer sends its results back to the server, which then summarizes the results and sends out more jobs.