Funded Projects
| Project Title | Overview of the Project |
|---|---|
| "Developing a differential diagnosis with patient centered questions- using a web-based guide" Raf Rizk Medical School Cyril Grum Medical School $2000.00 |
The Medical Student and Resident are in the novice stage of clinical interviewing when they meet a patient with a disease that is unfamiliar or complex. The history has been shown to diagnose and guide 80% of care. Learning from expert-stage Faculty how to ask best questions, a novice can rapidly improve best-question asking skills. A just-in-time web-based resource that guides the novice to ask best-questions may help improve learning outcomes. Any intervention that guides the novice should be based on expert teacher experience and should be easily available during the student-patient encounter, The final goal: the intervention should accelerate the learning process moving the novice towards expert faster. A patient-centered list of questions at the bedside may guide the novice learners elicit the illness-script (patient story) needed to develop a differential diagnosis with less omissions and less error in highly time-constrained learning and teaching care settings. |
| The Literature of Games: Course Startup Sean Silver LSA $2500.00 |
To develop a new course on the cultural and artistic significance of the play of games; I require funding and assistance in developing a custom website, and the core technology of the class, a structured game of cooperative learning. |
| Improving Oral Presentation Design, Delivery, and Feedback in Large Lecture Courses through Interactive Online In-Class Activities Stephanie Sheffield Engineering $2500.00 |
Research indicates that students in large lecture classes learn better when traditional lectures are replaced by interactive approaches to teaching, but implementing such approaches can be challenging. In Chemical Engineering 460, a large senior-level lecture course in which I am charged with helping my students master the design and delivery of oral presentations, I have found it particularly difficult to provide students with opportunities to engage in real-time conversations about what makes oral presentations effective. I propose to use Google Docs (or another free cloud-based computing platform with similar features) to develop a series of online, in-class activities wherein groups of students--using their own laptops, tablet computers, or cell phones--access a given sample slide or presentation video and, using built-in commenting and chat features, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the sample and develop (and, time permitting, implement) a plan to revise the sample to increase its effectiveness. |
| Disability Culture and the Design of Online Spaces $2500.00 |
This project asks students to approach accessibility as a civil rights issue, to consider accessibility as both a conceptual and lived practice. Students will maintain a multimedia blog portfolio throughout the semester, using principles of universal design as they craft their projects. Course material will include discussions of disability identity and activism, as mediated through online spaces. Students will use their blogs as a space where they can independently and collectively respond to readings and guest speakers. But, more importantly, students will explore both the affordances and limitations of blogging to the disability community, especially when blogs incorporate multimedia elements (e.g., video, image, audio). As a class, we will analyze and engage in the practices of ALT tagging, captioning video, and designing texts in ways that do not segregate users. At semester's end, students will reflect on the process of designing universally and generate a list of best practices. |
| Family Biographies to Build Community and Enhanced Learning $2500.00 |
To create an online site that would foster a greater sense of community in a large lecture-course on the American family. Such a site will make available to students the family (photo) biographies of their classmates (those that have agreed to share them) with the purpose to show how diverse and rich the ethnic histories, the forms, the values and experiences, and the struggles and successes these families share. It would also foster a greater awareness of how larger historical and social forces have shaped their family lives and their own personal identities. These family biographies constitute one of the most important course assignments in this course. To have them posted and available early in the term and to publish a booklet later in the term would help students build a greater sense of community and gain a deeper understanding of the many family issues this course addresses. |
| Basic Principles of Ophthalmic Microsurgery: Web-Based Learning Shahzad Mian Medical School Elizabeth Du Medical School $2500.00 |
This project is aimed towards training ophthalmology residents in the basic principles of ophthalmic microsurgery. We are evolving from an apprenticeship model where residents learn on real patients in the operating room to learning by utilizing virtual simulation and wetlab practice prior to live patients. The surgical equipment used is often foreign to beginning ophthalmology residents. To optimize the time they have in the operating room and improve safety for patients, prior preparation is essential. I would like to develop a prototype interactive web-based learning tool for residents to learn about microsurgical instrumentation. I plan to take high quality photos of the instruments and step the learner through a typical cataract surgery to teach them the names and proper usage of the instruments. |
| A virtual lab for nanotechnology education Wei Lu Engineering $2500.00 |
The goal of this project is to develop an on-line nanotechnology educational platform. The outcome of this project is a virtual lab that promotes nanotechnology education. This project will help prepare the UM students to meet the ever-increasing educational demands of the rapidly-growing nanotechnology field, allowing them to learn the fundamental principles through interactive virtual experiments; access and explore start-of-art research through visualization of large amount of research data; propose and carry out group projects through on-line collaboration and presentation. |
| Virtual Collaboration for RUSLAN ASB and Research Projects $2500.00 |
Project RUSLAN (Russian Service Learning in Action Network) has run for three years a service-learning and research program in a small town in northern Russia during the mid-term break in WT. Working with on-site partners, students pursue service-learning initiatives and research projects. The latter ranged this year from examining voting preferences in the upcoming presidential elections to the exploration of local readers' interests in Anglophone _belles lettres_. Students take a fourteen-hour membership course to prepare for the program and work on their research projects in advance, while the faculty directors (Michael Makin, Slavic Dept professor and undergraduate advisor, and Head of the RC Russian program, lecturer IV, Alina Makin) prepare for their on-site work through regular contact with local partners -- two K-12 schools, one village school, a vocational school and the town museum system. The proposed application is to create, for subsequent years of the program, a collaborative space which would be shared between UM faculty, UM student participants, on-site partners, and Russian scholarly mentors at Vologda State University, St Petersburg State University, and the Karelian Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, making the development of research projects, the distribution of materials, and the pre-planning of all projects more efficient, and greatly enriching the research potential of the program for undergraduates. |
| Application of the Google Product Suite to an Undergraduate Nursing Elective Christopher Friese Nursing $2500.00 |
The goal of this project is deliver an interactive, on-demand elective course in oncology nursing care to undergraduates in the School of Nursing. The course will use Google's Product Suite to create a collaborative learning environment in which students can interact with faculty and each other outside of a traditional classroom environment. Use of online collaborative content via Google will allow integration of the course into the busy clinical schedules of fourth-year nursing students. |
| Mining Corpora: Students as academic language investigators $2500.00 |
Many students writing in their second language face a particularly difficult challenge when it comes to selecting appropriate "collocations." These word combinations "sound right" to fluent English speakers because the words pattern together in high frequency. This project facilitates student use of online "corpora" databases of real language use. However, these databases are designed for language researchers, and can thus be unwieldy for language learners. We therefore created an online video tutorial showing students how to conduct collocation investigations based on word choices in their own writing. Students logged their process and findings in a Sitemaker database, where they could also view the findings of their peers. Students reported being pleased and surprised to find a resource for discovering how words pattern in real language use. Future work will focus on developing additional online tutorials to support more sophisticated searches, and applying both the tools and the findings on vocabulary learning to other language courses. |
| Thinking like an Archivist Elizabeth Yakel Information $2500.00 |
Technologies to support archival and preservation functions are becoming more prevalent; however, many are open source and have very rough interfaces. My colleagues and I have begun to introduce some of these applications into the classroom but the results have been mixed. Therefore, my Teaching with Technology Grant was designed to work through the issues of introducing technology in one class in the hope that lessons and techniques could be transferred to other courses. The target class for the TTI grant was Access Systems for Archival Materials, a core class in the Archives and Records Management specialization in the School of Information. The technologies to be used in the course were archival content management systems which can only be used to their fullest when one understands the archival practice. Therefore, the overarching goal was to integrate technology in a way to support the other learning objectives of exploring the issues of practice, process, standards, metadata transformation, and the presentation of information to diverse audiences. |
| Increasing Student Engagement by Integrating Technology into a Team-Based Learning Curriculum Kavita Warrier Medical School $2500.00 |
For this project, the pediatric core curriculum incorporated six team-based web modules, each of which requires two hours of class time. Created by members of the pediatric faculty, these highly interactive sessions portray real-life clinical scenarios. Because all of the students are actively answering the questions together, there is much more discussion from the start, whereas previously, students answered questions individually and then "argued" for their own response. Our research shows that students are more engaged in the classroom during these sessions as compared to didactic lecture. We are improving the modules by adding multimedia. Integrating radiographic images, laboratory results presented as they appear in patients' charts, and video or audio clips of important physical findings will enhance these cases and highlight key clinical features. |
| Collaborative Website for Course on Chinese Policy Philip Potter Public Policy $2500.00 |
The project developed a course website that enables collaboration on joint research, wiki-style student interaction, and long-term archiving and publication of student-generated policy reports. This is accomplished by adapting WordPress tools for the U-M web environment. Two students who had previously taken the class were employed to brainstorm useful features for the website. A site template drawing on these ideas was designed in conjunction with TTI consultants, and students drafted text for the website. |
| Video Clip Database for Introductory Psychology $2500.00 |
Each year, approximately 4000 students enroll in Introductory Psychology (PSY111), a survey course in which video clips are frequently used. Although instructors sometimes share some videos with each other, many are incorrectly formatted, poorly labeled, poorly edited, or poorly organized, and there is no shared database. The goal of this project will therefore be to 1) create a collection of high-quality, well-edited and labeled video clips appropriate for use in Introductory Psychology courses, and 2)develop a database to make these clips easily accessible and updatable by all Introductory Psychology Instructors. Video clips have been 1)converted to a format that can be embedded into Power Point slides (using Handbreak), 2)occasionally been edited to shorter segments (using Avidemux 2.5), and 3) created into a searchable video database (using iViewMedia Pro3). Approximately 1,000 video clips, requiring nearly 90 gigs of storage space, are now in the video database which resides on a personal external hard drive. Future plans include continued editing of videos to shorter lengths bettter suited to lectures, attempting to improve quality of some of the clips, better labeling and meta tagging of the video clips, and transfer of the local database to the University's yet to be acquired web-based video database system. These changes will make the video database more accessible and useful to colleagues. |
| The Poem Comes Alive: Using Interactive Graphics to Teach Poetry and Poetics $2500.00 |
This project will construct interactive graphic editions of poems to provide undergraduate and graduate students a new way of experiencing such fundamental poetic devices as rhythm, allusion, metaphor, analogy, and ekphrasis. While the students in my courses are keenly interested in how poems work, they frequently lack a strong grounding in poetic devises, the study of which had once been a standard feature of any literature curriculum. The goal of this project is to allow multiple ways of looking at a given poem, for example, by instantly mapping its stresses and arranging them into rhythmic patterns, playing musical examples of the same patterns, highlighing syntactic parallels hidden in the text, and revealing on-screen images and quotes referenced in the poem. The dynamic and multimedia presentation enabled by Prezi offers students a new and inviting way of reading, a kind of "pop-up video" approach to rich literary texts. |
| MVS 510 - Introduction to Imaging of Musculoskeletal Injuries Peter Farrehi Kinesiology $2500.00 |
The project introduces students to a 3D image processing tool called Amira, that was developed for use in medical and health related imaging. Students will learn how to interpret X-rays, CT and MRI scans for common musculoskeletal injures, using this technology in a lab equipped with plastinated anatomical specimens and laptops. |
| Producing New Media for the Web $2500.00 |
In this class students will learn the fundamentals of creating short, web-specific video news packages in conjunction with journalism sites. The assignments will be designed to have students develop conceptual as well as technical skills. Keeping in mind both media convergence online and the repurposing of cinema and television in the web's specific medium, students will explore how the web's context reframes their own media productions. This course is intended for majors and non-majors and presumes little prior knowledge of equipment and editing software. |
| Computer Mediated Collaboration Platform for Group Decision Making in Engineering Design Projects Robin Fowler Engineering $2500.00 |
When student teams pick from competing design options, they often pursue non-optimal strategies based on perceptions of individual team members' competence and engagedness. This project explores whether electronic platforms commonly used by geographically dispersed industry design teams enable more democratic decision making. Transcripts of student teams making decisions in anonymous and non-anonymous online chat forums will be collected and compared with transcripts of student teams working face to face. The identification of characteristics of effective decision making will inform pedagogical strategies for guiding student design teams. |
| Italian Through Opera: Internalizing the music of poetry $2500.00 |
The goal of this project was to make the internalization of the Italian language in its most sophisticated, powerful, and memorable forms a pleasurable conquest. To facilitate memorization of words to music and to reinforce familiarity with grammatical forms and vocabulary, several technology-assisted strategies have been developed: mp3 files with music slowed down without alteration of pitch.Quicktime videos that display key lyrics to music. lip-synched videos of themselves singing. (Photobooth)Sitemaker site for the libretto where students annotate the text for its grammatical, and poetic form, as well as for analysis of its literary meaning. |
