Great Teaching at University of Michigan

Editing Wikipedia to Improve Writing to a General Audience

A short video describing this teaching strategy can be seen here.
A student example can be seen here.

As an alternative to a traditional research paper, Anne McNeil, LSA Department of Chemistry, incorporated a project utilizing Wikipedia.org to enhance her students' understanding of advanced topics in Chemistry and improve students’ scientific communication skills. Small groups of students in her graduate-level chemistry courses are challenged to collaborate on creating or revising public Wikipedia pages that will clearly communicate challenging concepts to both laypersons and experts.  Read more »

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Web-based Game for Teaching Library Research

In order to improve undergraduates' library research skills, Karen Markey, School of Information, created an online game entitled "Bibliobouts". This game takes students through different stages of the research process and enables them to receive feedback on their research techniques. This occurs both through accumulation of points throughout the game as well as conversations with instructors who can use the game to track the student's research process (which sources they considered, how they evaluated those sources, which sources they ultimately decided to use, etc.). For more information about this game, please visit http://bibliobouts.org/.

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Friday Profile: Kathleen Sienko, Winner of 2012 Provost's Teaching Innovation Prize

As teachers at an institution committed to "global engagement," how can U-M instructors best facilitate students' international experiences and connections? And how can we enable students to make meaningful differences in the world? Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering Kathleen Sienko has been a campus leader on these questions, developing programs that take students around the world as well as programs that enable students here in Ann Arbor to make and mobilize global connections utilizing the resources of the internet.

Design for Global Health.  Sienko was honored with the 2012 Teaching Innovation Prize for this capstone program she developed for undergraduate engineering students. Under Sienko's guidance, in collaboration with Dr. Aileen Huang-Saag and building on several long-standing U-M connections in Africa, students in the program have worked with clinicians in resource-limited settings--initially in Ghana, then in other African countries and China--to design medical devices to address needs in specific areas of global health (e.g., maternal health, infant mortality, or HIV/AIDS). Student designs have included an assisted obstetric delivery device, a multi-functional labor and delivery bed, and an adult male circumcision tool. Through a combination of field work, course work, cross-cultural training, and hands-on design experience, students in the program learn to define problems, adjust their solutions to accommodate real-world limitations, and collaborate in culturally-sensitive ways.  

Statements by student participants reflect the program's emphasis on using action-based learning Read more »

Submitted by tbraun on Wed, 10/03/2012 - 11:21am
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Using LectureTools to Answer Students Questions in Large Courses

To replicate some of the advantages of a small coures, Mika Lavaque‐Manty, LSA Department of Political Science, uses LectureTools as a way for students to easily ask questions or request clarification in a large course. LectureTools allows students to submit questions at anytime during lecture. These questions are then responded to by GSIs or directly addressed by Lavaque‐Manty during the class. Regardless of who responds, both the question and response are made available to all students immediately through the LectureTools interface and continue to be available for students after class.

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Interactive Chemistry Demos using Mathematica

As part of an ongoing effort to revise and modernize the curriculum of the undergraduate quantum chemistry course (Chem461), Eitan Geva and colleagues have developed several innovative, interactive computer demonstrations. These color real-time animations were designed to bring the rather abstract equations of quantum mechanics to life allowing students to:

  • visualize the dynamics and investigate its dependence on various input parameters
  • gain invaluable physical intuition via active exploration
  • extend the range of problems that can be solved by incorporating numerical solvers
The interactive tools were created within the framework of Mathematica, but an easy‐to‐use user interface was designed, so no prior Mathematica programming experience is needed to use the demos.   
50 demos have been developed, 25 of which have been accepted for publication on the Wolfram demonstrations Project web site (http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/author.html?author=Eitan+Geva).

 

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