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When faculty or teaching assistants at Carolina think about classes they've
taught, they often recall the differences: This one was really difficult to
teach, this one was popular, that one wasn't.
But there's one thing that almost all classes -- whether in classics, chemistry
or computer science -- have in common. A lot of collective teaching experience
is floating around Carolina, and most teachers don't benefit that much from it.
It's all locked up in individual minds.
This is a particularly acute problem for some graduate teaching assistants. A
lot of them are new teachers. And by the time they have a few years' teaching
experience, they're gone to a job at another school -- and they take with them
knowledge that could save their peers a lot of grief.
But a very simple idea is taking hold in some departments at the University:
With the assistance of the UNC/IBM instructional technology grants administered
by the Faculty Instructional Technology Advisory Committee (FITAC), some
graduate instructors and faculty are creating online clearing houses for
teaching resources and ideas.
Last summer and fall, a group of graduate students in German created a web site
of resources for teaching the first three semesters of the language.
"This was an attempt to pool resources to provide some continuity of
knowledge," said Sean Lawing, a graduate student in Germanic Languages. If a
teaching assistant has found materials that are exceptionally useful for
teaching German I, for example, it should be available to his or her
colleagues.
"Each successive class of TAs shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel and spend so
much time looking for good resources," Lawing said.
"There are a number of TAs in the German department who are committed to undergraduate
education," said Scott Windham, a German graduate student currently finishing
his dissertation. Windham, Lawing and their colleague Ludmila Provaznikova are
the co-creators of the Germanic Languages "T.A. Resources Website."
"This [site] gives us a place to house all the good ideas that would otherwise
be lost when we leave," Windham said.
The German TA resources website had its genesis in 1996. Windham created an
online grammar supplement for students in German III.
"It had grammar explanations divided by grammatical topic with our own
explanations," Windham said.
The site created hyperlinks between relevant topics -- between, for example,
past perfect and present perfect.
And it bore the stamp of collective experience working closely with students.
"A lot of language textbooks are difficult to read," Windham noted.
"This one was as near a student perspective as we could make it."
Grant makes the difference
But the web site's full potential was realized after Windham, Lawing and
Provaznikova got one of last summer's UNC/IBM General College Curriculum
Technology Enhancement grants.
"For foreign language teachers the Internet is very useful," Lawing said.
The advantages are obvious: On a computer with multimedia capabilities,
students can listen to German as it is spoken in Germany and not in a
classroom. The TA resources web site has downloadable television commercials
and links to German radio stations.
And with certain Internet sites, students can practice using their knowledge of
German in real-life situations.
"We assign them worksheets based on specific German business sites," Lawing
said.
"They pretend to book flights, rent apartments -- things they would actually be
doing if they were living in Germany."
When Windham, Lawing and Provaznikova were first planning this web site at the
UNC/IBM Instructional Development workshop last summer, they were assigned a
consultant very well-versed in instructional technology: Jane Hawkins,
mathematics professor.
At first Hawkins was rather bemused to be working with graduate students in a
department so different from hers: "I was somewhat randomly assigned to work
with them."
But not only was she impressed with their ideas and the results -- she quickly
saw an application to her own department.
Like the first three semesters of German, the first three semesters of calculus
are taught by a large pool of teachers that includes graduate assistants. As
with elementary German, there's a certain body of knowledge students have to
acquire in calculus if they wish to apply it afterwards.
Again -- as with elementary German -- there's a lot of calculus teaching
experience that could benefit both students and teachers if it were shared.
Calculus site integral resource
With funding from one of this year's UNC/ IBM grants, Hawkins and her
colleagues Ted Scheick and Kim Johnson are constructing a web site of resources
for calculus instructors.
The principle of sharing experience is embodied in the team Hawkins has formed
to build the calculus site.
Scheick is a visiting associate professor who has years of experience teaching
mathematics to engineers at Ohio State University.
"He has a large bank of practical applications and projects that he's been
keeping on his own web site and is going to share with us," Hawkins said.
Hawkins added that part-time lecturer Kim Johnson not only "teaches Calculus I
a lot, she's also very expert in the use of computers to implement almost
anything."
The webmaster for the site will be graduate Christopher Moseley.
In addition to maintaining the site, Moselely will provide valuable insight on
teaching assistant perspectives.
"We want a good understanding of what graduate students' questions and issues
are," Hawkins said.
The web site, which should be completed this fall, will contain an impressive
array of resources, from an online discussion forum to project ideas to
syllabi.
The discussion forum represents one of the most effective uses of Internet
technologies: sharing knowledge. Calculus teachers will be able to post
announcements of new ideas or resources they have found. They will also be able
to post questions.
"We are always grappling with pedagogical issues in the calculus sequence,"
Hawkins said. "Like how do you represent the idea of the derivative?" A
derivative is the instantaneous rate of change of a function and one of the
core ideas in calculus.
"Do you simply teach students how to compute it, or do you teach them the most
mathematically rigorous definition?
"This is the sort of conversation that goes on all the time but not everyone
benefits because their offices aren't all on the same hall."
Another segment of the calculus web site will focus on project ideas for the
course in the calculus sequence.
Projects that apply the principles of calculus are extremely important, Hawkins
said, because the majority of the 2,100 students who take calculus are going on
to areas of study other than mathematics.
But projects are also extremely difficult to work in.
"Because all the sections of each calculus class have a fixed syllabus and a
common final there may not be time," Hawkins noted.
"But you might want to put in a project that might involve computers or graphic
calculators and a real-life problem."
Together with the discussion forum, the section on projects will help beginning
researchers figure out how to fit a project into the syllabus.
"Where's the best point to put it in? How can you make it a nice self-contained
project and how can you execute the whole thing without taking three weeks out
of the semester?" Hawkins asked rhetorically.
Like creating a discussion forum, posting annotated syllabi is another idea
that seems quite simple but is actually profoundly useful. The annotations
represent collective experience gained in years of calculus, available on-line,
to a first-time teaching assistant.
There will be a non-annotated version for students, Hawkins said. The annotated
version will contain suggestions for instructors such as "if you're running
short of time gloss over this section -- however, by all means spend at least
two lectures on this one."
The annotations reflect knowledge that you gain only by teaching calculus,
Hawkins noted.
"A given topic may seem important if you've never taught the course before but
it might not be used later in the calculus sequence.
And the annotated syllabus will help inexperienced instructors gauge their
time."
Although the web sites for the two departments have very different content, the
purpose of both is the same: to give teachers the benefit of others'
experience, saving their valuable time and energy for effective teaching.
Sponsored by the Technology in Context Consortium
(http://www.unc.edu/faculty/tic)
Writer: Kevin O'Kelly
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