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Fourteen teaching proposals have been selected for funding
under the Provost’s Advisory Council on Instructional
Excellence’s Fourth Annual Innovation in Education
Awards Program. The projects range from developing an
online “virtual laboratory” as an aid to
mathematics and engineering students to utilizing resin
cast replicas of artifacts to enrich archaeology instruction
and analysis.
Faculty members will share almost $200,000 in funding,
awarded to strengthen teaching strategies in a variety
of disciplines.
“The Advisory Council continues to be impressed
with the quality of the proposals and the breadth of
submissions from academic units across the University,” said
Andrew Blair, vice provost for Faculty Affairs and chair
of the council.
The awards, instituted in 2000 by Provost
James V. Maher, were designed to encourage instructional
development
and teaching excellence throughout the University’s
schools and departments.
Peter
Brusilovsky,
assistant professor, Department of Information Science
and Telecommunications,
School
of
Information Sciences, is one of the winners of this year’s
awards. The title of his project is "Educational Software
for Teaching and Learning Information Retrieval". This
proposal addresses two instructional problems related
to information
retrieval systems: the
difficulty students encounter in trying
to understand
the basic
retrieval
models and the need for access to a body of resources
or tools with which students can build systems in order
to implement these models. The project will build upon,
organize, and distribute interactive software tools to
improve instruction in the field of information retrieval.
David
Robins, assistant professor, department of Library
& Information Science, School of Information
Sciences and Marian C. Hampton, DLIS adjunct faculty,
coordinator of library instruction, Department of Bibliographic
Instruction,
are two of the winners of this year's awards. The title
of their project is “Becoming
an Information Critic: A Video Providing Students with
the Fundamentals
of Information Evaluation.” Recognizing the often
overwhelming amount of information available to students
via the World Wide Web, the project will produce a video
and instructor’s manual to outline for students
the process for critically evaluating Web information.
The video also will be available on a Web site, which
will contain an online tutorial that “walks” users
through the evaluative process. An interactive quiz will
allow users to test their evaluation skills. The video,
instructor’s manual, and Web site can be used in
any classroom setting and in any discipline. |
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