Important Dates
Note: This series are not active currently.
The Teaching Innovations Seminar Series focuses on the intersection between new and emerging technologies and best practices in teaching and learning. This free one-hour forum features faculty, staff and students from across the disciplines sharing teaching and learning strategies and the effective uses of technology in the classroom.
The series is held from noon to 1pm on the first Wednesday of the month in the Armory Innovation Studio - Armory 172 (east end of the building).
Date: 5/3/2017
Speakers: Deana McDonagh (Industrial Design)
Description: Professor McDonagh will share how she brings experiential learning into the classroom to encourage learning by doing. She will also share student project work that embodies this approach. Experiencing the experience of another enables students to design real solutions, for real people within real contexts. The session will be informative, enjoyable and a little hands-on for those who wish to experience being drunk or concussed without any long term effects.
Date: 4/5/2017
Speakers: Kate LaBore & Cheelan Bo-Linn (Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning)
Description: Digication is an online platform for creating and sharing online Portfolios. It provides tools for academic evaluation and assessment as well as a full continuum of permissions settings for complete control over privacy and sharing. It is designed to promote reflective learning practices and the presentation of the artifacts of learning (documents, images and videos). An ePortfolio tool can be a valuable tool for enhancing both teaching and learning effectiveness. Kate and Cheelan will demonstrate and discuss the creation and assessment of student eportfolios (for learning) and hypothesize future application of an ePortfolio for faculty reflection and documentation (for teaching). This will be an informal session with discussions, examples, faculty video and student voices.
University of Illinois Digication Portal: http://go.illinois.edu/digication
Date: 3/1/2017
Speakers: Eric Kurt (Media Commons)
Description: The Media Commons located in the Undergraduate Library is a collaborative campus effort that provides students, staff and faculty opportunities to experiment with digital media and other emerging technologies, with expanded opportunities to learn of best practices in educational media creation. In addition to a robust loanable technology program, the Media Commons is a service space that offers faculty, staff, and students the ability to create, use, and curate digital media. The goal is to meet the need for broad access to media creation tools, information technology training in multimedia hardware and software, and instruction in media literacy. Eric will cover the basics of the Media Commons as well as show examples of current emerging technology and media tools.
The Media Commons @ UGL: http://mediacommons.illinois.edu
Date: 2/1/2017
Speakers: Jeff Ginger (Informatics), Suzanne Linder (Informatics), Dot Silverman (Educational Psychology)
Description: The CU Community Fab Lab supports education through promoting interdisciplinary design thinking + learning and computational tinkering in an inclusive and activist-oriented space. We offer a number of university-level classes hosted exclusively at the lab and collaborate with other units to provide workshop time and project support for related and visiting courses. Over the past several years we've run classes and activities related to (1) UXD, graphic and industrial design, (2) communications, education and humanities, (3) engineering and computer science as well as (4) business and entrepreneurship. Activities have ranged from breaking apart and repairing ipads to developing and running workshops with kids in underserved parts of the community to coding colorful RPG games to prototyping solar-powered cell phone charger inventions to even telling stories with cute plushy robots. Learn about all of this as well as how you might leverage our expertise and equipment to host your class at the lab.
CU Community Fab Lab Website: http://cucfablab.org
Date: 12/7/2016
Speaker: Thomas Bassett (Geography and GIS)
Description: Maps put in place everything from life expectancy to coffee production. Their power resides in the assumption they are honest representations of reality—that they accurately depict the geography of something. But all maps reflect the objectives of their makers. They are the outcome of a process of selection and omission, which ultimately turns them into subjective representations. This understanding of the power of maps, to show the world to look like this and not like that, can be learned in the classroom thanks to user- friendly mapping software. I use Golden Software’s MapViewer in my course Geography 101 (Global Development and Environment) to teach students about the geographies of globalization. To map the geography of world hunger, students make two maps that use different metrics: calories available per capita and child stunting. They first have to evaluate their data sources in terms of what they measure and fail to measure. Students then have to decide how to classify and display these data on their maps. This presentation describes the world hunger mapping lab and the power of maps to suggest that hunger is a problem in some areas but not in others.
MapViewer Website: http://www.goldensoftware.com/products/mapviewer
Date: 11/2/2016
Speaker: Ava Wolf (Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning)
Description: iFLEX, which stands for Illinois Flexible Learning Experience, is a new type of classroom on this campus featuring enhanced technologies, increased writing surfaces, and reconfigurable tables and chairs. Join us for an up-close look at what these new features can offer faculty and students. From games and challenges, to shared thinking and writing, multimedia assignments, and 360-degree video, iFLEX classrooms are creating exciting possibilities for active and engaged learning in all disciplines.
Website: https://iflex.illinois.edu/
iFLEX Virtual Tour: http://go.illinois.edu/iflex360
Date: 10/05/2016
Speakers: Kendall Furbee and Premika Pandian (MakerGirl)
Description: MakerGirl, a 501(c)3 non-profit startup, was created in a Social Entrepreneurship class at the University of Illinois. From its inception in 2014, MakerGirl has inspired over 1,700 young girls to live and dream as unstoppable forces that say yes to the challenges of the future. MakerGirl sessions, led by university STEM women, teach girls how to design their own 3D print. Join MakerGirl Changemakers, as they discuss their latest endeavor, MakerGirl Goes Mobile, and learn how their programming inspires young girls to become involved in STEM.
Website: http://makergirl.us/
Date: 9/7/2016
Speakers: Janet Sinn-Hanlon (Veterinary Medicine) and Alan Craig (XSEDE)
Description: Beyond the dissection laboratory and clinical experience, the traditional method of learning anatomy has relied on the use of 2D textbook images. Students have a tendency to take a mental "snapshot" of a particular anatomical structure, then have trouble locating it on a live specimen or cadaver when it is not in the exact same orientation as the image they memorized. See how Vet Med is providing students with virtual 3D anatomy, particularly in the form of augmented reality, to give students a better understanding of 3D anatomical structures and their relative position to each other, so they will be better prepared for anatomy and clinical labs.
Date: 5/4/2016
Speaker: Steve Lavalle (Computer Science)
Description: Virtual reality is hitting the consumer main stream. With YouTube offering a dedicated 360 video channel, the New York Times promising 360 news content, and 3D gaming set to become popular in the next 3-5 years, how do we get ahead of the curve and apply this to meaningful learning at the University of Illinois? Steve Lavalle, formerly with Oculus VR, join us as current Computer Science instructors here on our campus to inform us about this exciting technology and how it’s coming of age.
Date: 4/6/2016
Speakers: Drew MacGregor (Technology Services) and Scott Wennerdahl (Fine and Applied Arts)
Description: Illinois Media Space (powered by Kaltura) provides all instructors, staff, and students with a place to upload, create, embed, and do simple editing. Additionally, there are permission controls, metric access, and integrations with Compass and Moodle. Several departments have started to take full advantage of this system, including Fine & Applied Arts and their courses where faculty are posting lesson introductions/closures and mini-lectures. In addition, students are creating and posting short documentaries, dances, theatrical vignettes, and other video-based assignments. So how does it all work and how is it being used by departments across campus? Drew and Scott give us the skinny.
Date: 3/2/2016
Speakers: Marci Uihlein (Architecture) and James Whitacre (Scholarly Commons).
Description: The classic term paper is an insufficient learning exercise to explore the dynamic nature of earthquakes. To better engage students on the impact of earthquakes on buildings and communities, Story Maps offer greater innovative potential. This idea started a natural partnership between architecture faculty and library staff to teach graduate students with no GIS experience a new tool to dig deeper into their subject. The students’ Story Maps demonstrated strong spatial thinking and engagement.
Presentation Link: http://arcg.is/1mDHvAA
Date: 2/3/2016
Speakers: Lawrence Angrave (Computer Science), Oliver Melvin (Computer Science), Yining Wang (Computer Science)
Description: ClassTranscribe, a University of Illinois project, creates text-searchable classroom recordings so that students can later search, revisit, and review classroom lectures with captions. This transforms lecture material into student-driven activities that are available when students are ready to deeply engage with the material. The students in the class create high quality captions using course credit as an incentive. Our results find UIUC students are actively using ClassTranscribe as a tool for homework and exam preparation. Also presented will be Piazza, an online discussion forum, that facilitates student Q&A, and course-staff Q&A in small and large classes. Join Lawrence Angrave and others as they lead us through how to get started with ClassTranscribe & Piazza and discuss how these tools are changing teaching and learning on our campus.
Website: http://classtranscribe.com/
Date: 12/9/2015
Speakers: Speakers: Marci Uihlein (Architecture) and Robert Baird (Media/CITL)
Description: Uihlein and Baird both employed media-based assignments in their respective classes in Spring 2015. They will talk about their experiences, the good, bad, and ugly (really not so ugly). Plus, we will hear about a cross-discipline effort to blend assignments across their courses. Media-based assignments? It’s not as hard as you think.
Date: 11/11/2015
Speakers: John Abelson (Materials Science and Engineering) and Maya Israel (Education)
Description: Abelson and Israel are part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers combining authentic data sets and quantitative simulation software with a graphical interface that permits research on the learning process itself. Join us to learn more about the development process, the simulation software and their preliminary research findings.
Date: 10/15/2015
Speaker: Jason Mock (Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning)
Description: In the past three years through its partnership with Coursera, Illinois has offered 27 MOOCs, 4 Specializations, 50 offerings (10 of which are On-Demand), totaling 1.83 million enrollments, including over 20,000 (fee-based) Course Certificates. We’ve also launched the MOOC-powered iMBA degree program. Hear more about what we’ve accomplished, what we’ve learned, and what lies ahead for Illinois in the MOOC space.
Date: 9/9/2015
Speakers: Jan Erkert (Dance) and Manuel Hernandez (Kinesiology)
Description: Erkert and Hernandez have incorporated the use iPads in their respective courses to better engage their students with more meaningful, real world learning activities. Let’s see how these two use just-in-time feedback, experiential learning activities, and media creation for student quizzing to help achieve their teaching goals.