Sponsored by the Office of the Provost, CRLT, and the University Library

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The five winning teaching innovations are:

Professors Shaun Jackson (art & design, architecture) and William Lovejoy (business): Experiential Cross-Disciplinary Learning: Integrated Product Development (IPD) View poster [1]

IPD recreates the competitive environment that real businesses face every day. In 12 short weeks, interdisciplinary teams of students from the Schools of Business, Engineering, Architecture, and Art & Design develop fully functional, customer-ready products and subject them to assessment by voters in simulated markets. IPD is the only course in the country to juxtapose these requirements, and it has been repeatedly identified by Business Week magazine as one of the top design courses in the world.

Each team works together on the market research, design, manufacturing, and costing of their product, as well as graphic identity, websites, and trade show presentations. Last year brought 1,314 web-based votes, while the physical trade show boasted 302 attendees who reviewed the products and cast ballots for their favorite. As in the real world of business and design, student grades reflect the overall profitability that they achieved at the two trade shows.

http://www.tauber.umich.edu/News%20and%20Events/IPD/2008/index.htm [2]

http://ummedia04.rs.itd.umich.edu/~umbs/tauber/IPD.mov [3]

Professors Arno Kumagai and Rachel Perlman (both family centered experience and internal medicine): The Family Centered Experience Program: Patients as Teachers in Fostering Empathy and Patient-Centered Care View poster [4]

The Family Centered Experience (FCE) is an innovative two-year program that is part of the required curriculum at U-M’s medical school and involves using the power of patients’ stories to foster empathy and patient-centered care. In the FCE, pairs of medical students make scheduled visits over two years to the homes of volunteer patients and their families in order to listen to the volunteers’ stories about chronic illness and its care.

These home visits, as well as readings, assignments, and small group discussions, serve as a foundation for the students to explore the experience of chronic illness from the patient's perspective. One of a few pioneering programs at U.S. medical schools, FCE is the most comprehensive -- with an extensive conceptual framework, an active research arm, and considerable faculty development. FCE is built on a framework grounded in theories of empathy and moral development, adult learning, and transformative education. The program’s small-group activities involve student-led discussions and interactions, as well as interpretative projects that capture the students’ understanding of the experience of illness.

http://www.med.umich.edu/lrc/fce/index.html [5]

Professor Philip Myers (ecology and evolutionary biology, LSA): Promoting Student Inquiry and Active Learning: Animal Diversity Web (ADW) and Quaardvark View poster [6]

The ADW database contains thousands of detailed descriptions of species that have been contributed by students from over 40 institutions in North America. A specially designed template allows non-experts to enter data that will be amenable to structured searches. Each section has a place for free text, along with associated keywords and data fields for quantitative summaries. Authors also attach bibliographic citations.

Since 2007 Quaardvark has provided a powerful new way for students to construct queries and download ADW data to explore natural history patterns and test hypotheses. Quaardvark opens up possibilities for active learning in many biological disciplines, including ecology, evolutionary biology, and conservation. An interdisciplinary partnership between the ADW team and Nancy Songer, a professor in the School of Education, brings authentic science experiences to 4th-6th grade students in Detroit Public Schools.

http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/index.html [7]

Professor Perry Samson (atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences, engineering): Innovations for Larger Classes: LectureTools and Online Textbooks (XamPREP) View poster [8]

LectureTools is designed as an alternative to ‘clickers’ and provides a wider range of question types for instructors. Additionally LectureTools allows students to pose questions during lecture, and GSIs in the room can answer their questions for them in real time. Students can also type their notes synchronized to the instructor’s slides and even draw on the slides with a Mac or PC. The tool originated from Samson’s desire to expand the use of student discussion in large lecture classes and the realization that clickers could not accommodate the kinds of questions he wished to pose, including free response, lists to reorder and image-based questions.

XamPREP redesigns textbook content (in collaboration with publishers) to promote inquiry and timely reading. Students log in to answer questions posed by the instructor in preparation for each class, and they rate their confidence in each answer. Whether right or wrong, each response takes the student directly to the content germane to the question. At the very least, students are exposed to key concepts before lecture, are able to search the textbook, view animations and quiz themselves on concepts prior to exams.

https://www.lecturetools.org [9]

http://www.xamprep.com [10]

Professors Lloyd Stoolman (pathology) and Matthew Velkey (cell and developmental biology): Virtual Microscopy for Life Sciences Education View poster [11]

Revolutionary as light microscopes were for medicine, this means of studying diseased organs and tissues does not scale easily. Assembling, maintaining, and updating sets of glass slides for instructing and testing large cohorts of medical students devoured faculty time, without guaranteeing that students and instructors would actually see the same features, given variation in tissue slices and students' microscope skills.

The project's overriding goal was to preserve the highly interactive laboratory experience by generating high-resolution digital replicas of the best tissue sections, compiling online image repositories, and deploying user-friendly, computer-based "viewers" that recapitulated the operation of a microscope. This combination of technologies retained the cognitively engaging aspects of light microscopy while overcoming the limitations imposed by traditional laboratories.

http://www.med.umich.edu/cdb/ [12]

http://www.pathology.med.umich.edu/ [13]

The winners will be recognized at the 12th annual Enriching Scholarship [14] event on May 4.

For questions about the Teaching Innovation Prize email Provost'sTIP@umich.edu [15]