Active Learning Grants

Annie Edwards, Mathematics

Project Focus: Collaborative Problem-Solving in Algebra

Project Proposal:This project seeks to develop in-class activities for Math M124, a foundational algebra course designed to prepare students for Finite Mathematics and Mathematics for Business and Public Affairs. Taught primarily by graduate student instructors with varying pedagogical experience, the course often relies heavily on lecture-based instruction. To promote active learning, structured problem-solving activities will be integrated into each lesson, encouraging student engagement and collaboration. The effectiveness will be assessed through quantitative analysis of student success rates and qualitative feedback from both students and instructors. If successful, the model could be expanded to other coordinated courses within the department.

Jessica Hollenbeck, Chemistry

Project Title: Flipped Classroom Activities to Promote Mechanistic Reasoning in Large-Enrollment Biochemistry Courses

Project Proposal: Students in CHEM-C 383 struggle to connect the chemical principles that they learned in their earlier chemistry courses to the more complex molecules that are the focus of Biochemistry. Rather than encourage memorization, I am to help students build on their foundational knowledge toward an intuitive understanding of complex processes like protein folding and metabolic regulation. Moreover, students in CHEM-C 383 are assessed on both their mastery of the content as well as their ability to communicate their understanding effectively. Most exam questions focus on application rather than recall and require students to offer explanations or interpretations of data. Implementing flipped classroom activities will provide much-needed opportunities for students to practice articulating their reasoning clearly and persuasively. By engaging students in activities that require them to verbalize their thought processes, I, along with my teaching team, will help them develop both the conceptual understanding and the communication skills needed to successfully demonstrate their knowledge on exams.

Tatiana Saburova, History

Project Title: Rethinking a Course Final Project and Designing “Weekly Learning Challenges” in the History of the Russian Empire Course

Project Proposal: I will develop an active learning assignment for HIST D308 “Empire of the Tsars,” a group final project. This 300-level course aims to develop students’ competencies, such as critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity. As discussions are already well integrated into class activities in different formats and with different tools for collaboration, I aim to bring these learning activities further and demonstrate to students how they can apply new knowledge and skills they developed in class. The group final project – to design a board game about the history of the Russian empire – will require students to analyze, summarize, apply, communicate, and create.

Elizabeth Yao, Jacobs School of Music

Project Focus: Enhancing Active Learning in Beginning Piano

Project Proposal:This project aims to enhance the MUS-P 110 (Beginning Piano Class I – Non-Music Majors) course at the Jacobs School of Music by integrating more active learning strategies. The course, which enrolls 460-500 students each semester, combines online lecture videos and in-person lab sessions. The project will re-arrange musical works to match students’ skill levels, use interactive tools like PlayPosit for engagement, and provide discussion questions for lab sections. These innovations aim to improve student engagement, critical thinking, and the connection between theoretical and practical components, ultimately leading to more thoughtful and nuanced student responses in assignments.

Amber Yount, School of Medicine

Project Focus: Interactive Video Content for Human Physiology

Project Proposal:PHSL-P225 is a foundational course in Human Physiology with large enrollment at IUB. In this project, I propose to scaffold pre-recorded lecture videos into the course in a way that maintains engagement at a comparable level to our in-person sessions, where I provide several opportunities for active learning. This Active Learning Grant will support the development and incorporation of multiple embedded interactions in lecture videos using PlayPosit. This will encourage students to stay engaged with the content by practicing spaced retention and active recall and will allow students to grow their critical thinking skills through application-based questions, all in a format for which they have some control over speed of delivery of new content and that can be used again for practice (multiple attempts).

Beatrix Burghardt, Second Language Studies

Project Title: Integrating Digital Literacy in Course SLST-T155 Academic Speaking

Project Abstract: The Digital Speaking Tool is a semester-long project that develops digital literacy skills of multilingual students in a college level oral academic English program. Through scaffolded assignments, students learn about pre-selected digital tools/apps, actively use them to complete guided speaking assignments, and research tool safety and privacy features. The analysis of 152 student responses given to three assignments (pre- and post-course surveys, online safety report) reveals that students perceive explicit teaching of skill-specific technology and structured engagement as beneficial. Self-reports highlighted increased knowledge of tools, efficient use of tools for oral skills practice and learning, and increased self-confidence in speaking. While efficiency may lead to sustained independent tool use beyond the course, self-confidence is a precursor to actual future engagement in communication. Therefore, incorporating digital literacy tools in the oral skills curriculum ultimately promotes student success. Student misperceptions of their linguistic needs and implications for graduate instructor training are also discussed.

Summary of Outcomes: To evaluate the success of the Digital Tool project, Burghardt analyzed data collected from five (5) sections of the course T155 Academic Speaking taught by graduate instructors, which yielded a database of 152 student submissions. The pre-course survey aimed to identify the range of digital tools (DTs) and apps first-semester international students of T155 are already familiar with in general and have used previously, i.e., prior to entering IU. Responses included Google and Youtube (32), DuoLingo (11), Grammarly (6), ChatGPT. When specifically asked about tools used for learning to speak in their previous academic work, then Google is named on the top for vocabulary search and YouTube for pronunciation (12). The use of Google and YouTube as primary speaking tools suggests a limited level of familiarity with available resources and the affordances of online resources. The pre-survey also showed that only students who had previously been taught to use apps like ELSA Speak and EAC know about these speaking-specific tools. This shows the critical role of language teachers and deliberate integration of teaching DTs in academic speaking courses. In other words, students do not ‘just happen to come across’ digital speaking tools and supporting activities on their own or through pop-up ads.

The post-semester survey asked students the same questions as the pre-survey. In their final response, however, in the content of their final responses, T155 students cited DTs that are specific to speaking skills and they described in detail how the tool works. In the post-survey, some students specifically pointed out that their digital tool for speaking increased their confidence, and this is another significant find. The online safety report assignment was completed by each student successfully, as evident in their PPTs and/or media recordings. The assignment on online safety showed students’ increased spoken academic vocabulary repertoire as well as their ability to apply abstract concepts learned from the textbook chapter to a newly learned and actively used tool.

Bethany Murray, School of Nursing

Project Title: Motivational Interviewing for Health Behavior Change in a Vulnerable Patient Population: Community Engaged Learning in Nursing Education

Project Abstract: This project examined prelicensure nursing student confidence in motivational interviewing (MI) methods with vulnerable clients in a real-world, clinical environment. Students demonstrated a significant improvement in MI skills across the course of the experience. Students assigned to a group of clients with intellectual/developmental disabilities improved significantly in MI confidence but in different ways than students assigned to a group of clients with psychiatric and/or substance use disorders. This suggests that there is a need for educators to teach that MI is not a “one size fits all” approach. Motivational interviewing should be seen as flexible and should match the individual needs of the client. Including MI practice in nursing clinical education alongside other communication skills is an effective means of teaching future nurses how to implement MI when promoting health and behavior change.

Summary of Outcomes: This study explored nursing student confidence in motivational interviewing (MI) using two comparison groups encountered in a psychiatric and mental health nursing community-based clinical experience. The study found that, in general, student working with adults who have intellectual or developmental disabilities (ID/DD) had a more difficult time in using open-ended communication and establishing structured goals with the client, but they reported more empathy and relationship-building. A major concern is that this group of students did not demonstrate an increase in maintaining a strong belief in self-competence in motivational interviewing when clients were resistant to change. In comparison, students who engaged in MI sessions with clients who had psychiatric and/or substance use disorders but were not identified as ID/DD did not report significant increases in empathy or listening skills, but they did have confidence in the mechanics and skill development of motivational interviewing, and they were able to maintain a strong belief in their competence despite client’s reluctance to change. These results suggest that MI approaches with clients who have ID/DD need to be tailored specifically for that population. Students should be taught to modify their MI goals and structure when care is provided for an adult with ID/DD.

Teuta Özçelik, Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures

Project Title: Enhancing Vocabulary Acquisition and Cultural Understanding in BCS through Music-Based Active Learning

Project Abstract: As part of a grant-funded initiative, Özçelik introduced music-based active learning strategies in their Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) Elementary courses (SLAV S101 and S102). Each week, students engaged with a popular song through vocabulary and cultural analysis, class discussions, memorization, and group performances. The songs served as daily warm-up activities, boosting energy and participation. This approach aimed to enhance vocabulary retention, oral proficiency, and cultural understanding while building a stronger classroom community. The implementation of these strategies greatly enriched student engagement and learning. Students especially loved starting each class with a song - it became a routine that helped them wake up and set a positive tone for the class. They frequently emailed Özçelik with song suggestions, showing genuine interest and personal investment. Throughout the semester, students engaged with lyrics, explored cultural themes, and proudly performed songs, often with creative dance moves. Course evaluations consistently highlighted this as their favorite activity, citing gains in vocabulary, pronunciation, motivation, and community building.

Summary of Outcomes: The following goals of increasing student engagement, improving vocabulary acquisition and pronunciation, enhancing cultural understanding, and creating a more dynamic and inclusive classroom environment were successfully achieved. Students consistently participated in weekly song-based activities, developed stronger speaking and listening skills, and demonstrated greater confidence in using the language. The music-centered approach transformed vocabulary learning from a passive task into a creative, collaborative experience. Most of the evaluation data from students mentioned the singing component as a highlight of the course. Quantitatively, there was a noticeable increase in oral participation and vocabulary quiz scores compared to previous semesters. Additionally, class attendance remained high throughout the semester, suggesting increased motivation and a strong sense of community.

Eric Wennstrom and Nicholas LaRacuente, Computer Science

Project Title:Discussion Section Activities for Discrete Students

Project Abstract: This active learning grant supported developing ‘discussion activities’ for CSCI-C 241, Discrete Structures for Computer Science. CSCI-241 is a large, multi-section class with smaller, TA-hosted discussion sections. Previously, discussion sections consisted of a quiz followed by a rarely used opportunity to start the homework with TA feedback. As a result of this grant, discussion sections now contain active learning through the discussion activities before the quiz. Examples include working in groups, working with physical or computational media, or discussing more conceptually involved topics. Quantitative results were inconclusive, which we believe was more likely a problem with the assessment method than with the discussion activities themselves.

Summary of Outcomes:Wennstrom and LaRacuente set up a sequence of Canvas quizzes known as “learning surveys.” Students were randomly split into an ‘A’ group and a ‘B’ group. Each week’s activity was associated with two sets of survey questions. Group A or B would respectively receive one set of survey questions before the activity and the other set after. Each survey tested a different skill related to the activity. After filtering out for students who did not participate in the activity, performance was compared to test the hypothesis that activities would improve question performance. The data we obtained from the surveys was very noisy and did not appear to be statistically significant. One reason for the noise was the fact that (due to the need for automatic grading), many of the quiz questions were limited to one or two multiple choice questions, with little to no opportunity for partial credit. Direct feedback from TAs following activities was collected in weekly TA meetings. This process yielded informal evidence as to students’ willingness to participate in particular activities and the extent to which they grasped key concepts. A wide variety of activities were developed and run with students. These ranged from in-class problem sets to discussions or physical demos.

Virginia Hojas Carbonell
Spanish and Portuguese

Students in our Spanish language classes are asked to engage with the material prior to class, completing activities online in our homework platform, graded for completion. However, we still find the need to spend a big portion of our classes explicitly presenting the grammar they reviewed before class with those activities. With this PlayPosit project, students will watch grammar presentations and/or content videos that use the grammar in context in Spanish. They will then interact with the video content (using the Play Posit quizzing tools) to show understanding at specific points in the video before moving on to the next section. It is my hope that these videos will free up valuable class time that we can use to practice the language in context after a brief review of the grammar.

With this project, students will be exposed to the content that will be covered in class in a way that will require their full attention. In addition, it will develop their critical thinking skills as they are asked to infer rules based on examples given (in context) and make decisions based on what the watch. It is also my hope that this project will help students take more charge of their learning, helping them become self-regulated students who do not depend on all the information coming from their instructor.

Minjeong Kang
Journalism

MSCH-H310 Honors seminar in power, inclusion, and organizational communication: In this new undergraduate honors seminar course, students will examine organizational communication as a dialogic vehicle for forging a decentralized, pluralistic, and inclusive organizational culture. Students will engage with current issues that many organizations face for problem-solving recommendations. Problem-based learning is an instructional method where relevant problems are introduced at the beginning of the instruction cycle and used to provide the context and motivation for learning. I plan to rely on the discussion as the core strategy for problem-based learning, with which understanding from assigned readings informs critical inquiries for students to explore, question, and evaluate each other’s approach to problem-solving. The problem-based teamwork and class discussion will follow the sequences of strategic communication intervention sequence. The sequence starts with core-problem identification; gaining insights from the readings and discussions; and brainstorming solutions/recommendations as informed by organizational communication and organizational psychology theories, and ends with providing a policy memo or executive summary with actionable recommendations.

Joe Packowski
Kelley School of Business

BUS-T-275 (Compass 2: The Candidate - Strategic Recruiting Preparedness)
BUS-T-276 (Honors Compass 2: The Candidate - Strategic Recruiting Preparedness)
This Active Learning Grant (ALG) will support the incorporation of multiple classroom assessment techniques (CAT’s) to foster an inclusive, welcoming, and participative environment where students prioritize learning over grading; specifically, strategic CAT’s will be deployed - including, but not limited to, pre/post quizzes, mid-semester student feedback, in-class polling, PlayPosit, CatchBox, and other creative in-class engagement activities. An emphasis will be on the three basic stages of memory processing: 1) Encoding - forming new memories 2) Storage - information maintenance and 3) Retrieval - gaining access to stored knowledge. Through these CAT’s, qualified/quantified data captured will be converted to insights to support evidence-based pedagogical enhancements to drive total stakeholder engagement and learning. Additionally, Packowski will leverage this ALG to further support the student’s awareness, demonstration, and future application of learnings aligned to the course goals to aid students in becoming more marketable, memorable, and differentiating with the competitive job search process and recruiting seasons. Lastly, Packowski will leverage Specifications Grading (Specs Grading) – a system that allows students to be in the driver’s seat of their education and invest in the course accordingly. Specs Grading has three primary goals: 1) restoring rigor 2) motivating students and 3) saving faculty time. The end goal of this ALG is to show the positive relationships within strategic course design, CAT’s, and Specs Grading – with students prioritizing learning over grading and applying their experiences sustainably - academically, personally, and professionally.
Final Report (pdf)

Erin Cooperman,
Applied Health Science

Jared Allsop
Department of Health & Wellness Design
SPH-Y 565 Social Psychology of Recreational Therapy
This course is a recently revised and updated course, first offered during the Fall 2021 semester. It is an online course. The IU RT MS program is a distance learning program, and all courses are online. After implementing this course, I quickly learned that after two years of a global pandemic, traditional online classes do not cut it. Students are tired of long online lectures. They feel isolated and lonely going through our program. In a recent survey of the IU RT MS students, they identified that they wanted to feel more like a cohort and wanted more face-to-face interactions with the RT faculty.  This project will incorporate active learning into the course through a case study approach, in order to help increase student engagement and develop a connection with their peers.

Katie Metz
Department of Accounting
BUS-A 271 Global Business Analysis: Financial Reporting is a core introductory level accounting elective. In this project, I propose addressing instructional opportunities through active learning strategies in two ways: (1) framing course content to address specific areas of the world where students express the most interest, and (2) developing a problem-based learning approach to foster an immersive skill development experience.

Sibel Crum
Department of Central Eurasian Studies
Online Microlearning for Active Learner Involvement
An online microlearning strategy will be used when engaging L2 learners with life topics that are proven to accelerate the L2 acquisition. Selected STEM topics will be introduced in small chunks to reduce the cognitive overload, and three types of online interaction will be used: student-to-student, student-to-content, and student-to-teacher. All the bite-size designed active learning opportunities (discussions, debates, interactive videos, peer readings, and role plays) will encourage learners to use higher order skills, such as visualization, problem solving, and critical (analytical) thinking in a short modular format.

Robert Dobler
Department of Folklore & Ethnomusicology
FOLK-F141: Urban Legend  is offered every Fall by the Department of Folklore & Ethnomusicology and focuses on urban legends—narratives told about shocking, creepy, gross, or humorous events that may or may not have actually occurred—as folk expressions central to the formation and maintenance of social and cultural identity. I would like to implement a computer mapping component to this course that would take students from basic content analysis into a richer understanding of the multiple ways legends function in the specific backdrops of social life and local history at the IU campus, Bloomington, and the surrounding area. 

Jennifer Terrell, Senior Lecturer, and Chase McCoy, Lecturer

Informatics Department

Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering

Project: Online Collaborative Whiteboarding in Face-to-Face Instruction

Class: INFO I-202 Introduction to Social Informatics

A return to in-person instruction offers Info-I202: Introduction to Social Informatics an opportunity to improve upon our in-person active learning sections through the use of Miro, an online collaborative whiteboard tool. Our pilot use of Miro within the context of remote learning during the spring 2021 semester has yielded promising results for fostering active student engagement in ways that provide students with “hands-on” activities to engage with theoretical content. In this project, we will examine the use of Miro within the face-to-face classroom environment because this tool has affordances that allow for exercises and activities that are difficult to facilitate using existing technology (such as smart whiteboards) in face-to-face classrooms. This type of whiteboarding can offer infinite space in which to construct boards, can be easily duplicated, reproduced, preserved for future reference, and distributed to students. This tool will help us continue to iterate on active learning course design. We are hopeful that utilizing Miro will improve some of the course’s historical problems with student engagement in face-to-face discussion sections.

Paul Coates, Core Lecturer

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies

Project: Alternative Avenues of Assessment to Increase Participation, Motivation, and Student Buy-in

Class: HISP S-250 Hutton Honors College section

The intent of this project is to develop and implement alternative avenues of assessment that do not include high-stakes evaluations in order to increase participation, motivation, and student buy-in. The traditional exams will be replaced with in-class quizzes that are of a communicative nature, allowing students the freedom to showcase what they know without being bound by too much context, which will also challenge them to think more critically about how to respond to various situations without the pressure of a high-stakes grade. Similarly, in place of the traditional essay, there will be shorter written assignments that are applied to real-life tasks (such as writing a cover letter for a job), coupled with structured peer review, where most effective.

Revision Clinics: Active-Learning Strategies for Teaching Revision

Dana Cattani and Miranda Yaggi-Rodak

This project will make visible the underlying principles of revision: clarity, coherence, and conciseness. A sequence of increasingly-complex activities will require students not only to talk and debate with peers but also to get out of their seats and engage their senses. The activities will bridge the high-tech and the low-tech, drawing on resources from GoogleDocs, Grammarly, and Zoom to scissors, markers, and giant sticky notes. Using real business scenarios, students will collaborate to recognize and improve under-performing sentences or paragraphs and to demonstrate growing competence as autonomous editors.

Interaction Portfolio

Piibi-Kai Kivik and Elisa Rasanen

Our active learning project aims to encourage foreign language learners’ independent language use in the IU Finnish and Estonian programs. We will develop a course-long assignment, an “independent user portfolio.” The students will keep track of and actively process their language use and learning outside of class (“in the wild”), utilizing technology and online resources. The portfolio will also serve as a formative assessment tool and provide us as instructors with information about our students´ real-life target language needs, leading to enhanced teaching and materials.​

The Flipped Arts Management Classroom and Community Engagement Program Design

Ursula M. Kuhar

Kuhar teaches SPEA-A241/V450: Community Engagement in the Arts, a course that studies the activities undertaken by arts and cultural organizations as part of mission strategy, designed to build robust relationships with the communities they serve, for mutual benefit.  To help student arts managers prepare for entry into professional practice, the course will be flipped halfway through the semester. During this time, students will scrutinize sophisticated case studies and work in groups to design a community engagement program for an arts organization using Americans for the Arts’ Animating Democracy methodologies. Students will also participate in masterclasses/consultations with leaders in the field who will provide feedback on these projects. This opportunity will grant students a great sense of agency as they lead and transform their learning experience.

Development of ASURE laboratory on Bacterial Antibiotic Resistance

Nancy Magill

This project will involve developing a new track for the ASURE (Arts and Science Undergraduate Research Experience) program on campus; taught on campus in the spring of 2020 for the first time.  The lab class will focus on antibiotic resistant bacteria from the non-clinical environment.  Over the course of the first semester, students will isolate bacteria, examine the antibiotic resistance patterns, identify the bacteria, and then use PCR to identify the genes responsible for that resistance.  Further, the students will be working in teams and will be obtaining and analyzing data, writing proposals, and presenting their findings as a team.  A major focus will be on how well they work as a team including assessing each other.

Yingling Bao, Senior Lecturer, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, C320 Business Chinese
Developing Students’ Intercultural Communication Competence Through Problem Solving
This project aims to develop student competence with intercultural communication through the use of interactive modules focused on business culture in China. Each module will incorporate a problem-solving model focused on commonly occurring miscommunication through the use of a flipped classroom. Course content will be updated to incorporate group work, class discussion, and collaboration to focus on business culture in China.

Deb Getz, Clinical Assistant Professor, Applied Health Science/School of Public Health, L102 Personal Leadership Development
Personal Leadership Skills to Support Student Success
Strong personal leadership skills are a critical aspect of success in college, and in life. This course focuses on key personal leadership skills including intellectual and practical skills, personal and social responsibility, and leadership dynamics. The course is based on the American Association of Colleges and Universities Essential Learning Outcomes (2018) engaging students with readings, videos, and activities to reflect, build, and apply the skills needed to support their success. Intended modifications will update the activities to reflect current issues, and build more pertinent discussion points to apply to our ever-changing culture.

Virginia Hojas Carbonell, Senior Lecturer, Spanish & Portuguese, S250 Honors Intermediate Spanish II
Developing Self-regulation Through Peer Editing
This past year, Virginia has been focusing on developing peer-editing skills in her S250 Honors class as a tool for self-regulation and learning. With this grant, she will work on creating self-reflection documents to use after each peer-edit, in which students will answer specific questions related to their peers’ comments and state how their next draft will be affected by their peers’ comments and feedback, including specific examples. In addition, she will re-design some of her current peer-editing documents to gradually move students away from relying entirely on their instructor’s feedback for some of the categories. She will also be collecting feedback regularly to evaluate students’ perceptions and progress regarding peer feedback.

Sandra Ortiz, Senior Lecturer, Spanish and Portuguese, S200 Honors Intermediate Spanish
Active Learning as a Tool to Increase Cultural Awareness
In this class students will draw cultural parallelisms and differences between Hispanic countries and the United States by working on different group projects. There will be a variety of cultural topics addressed during the semester based on their S200 textbook. For their projects students will conduct their own research about the cultural topic at hand and will share their findings with their groups to create a final report that will be presented to the whole class. Students will participate in class discussions and will receive feedback from me and their classmates during the creation of their projects.

Mary Embry, Senior Lecturer, School of Arts, Architecture + Design
F203: Materials for Fashion Design
Materials for Fashion Design is a foundational large flipped course, using in class time to work on assignments that review recorded lectures viewed outside of class.  This grant supports the implementation of student response system technology for in class assignments, leaving time within the classroom for hands on group activities with a swatch kit of materials.

Steph De Boer, Associate Professor, The Media School
Global Media Infrastructures: From Undersea Cables to Local Itineraries
This project revises the assignments for my course, “Global Media Infrastructures: From Undersea Cables to Local Itineraries.”  It does so to better emphasize the significance of case-based analysis, as well as develop and utilize mapping tools (from analogue to digital) to enable students to discover, analyze, and convey the global to local scaled relationships that form these instances of media infrastructure.  In so doing, students will better contextualize as well as more forcefully and critically convey the dynamics of power, control, and access at play in particular instances of media infrastructure.  

J Duncan, Senior Lecturer and Erick Lee, Lecturer, Informatics
Debugging as an Active Learning Tool: Participating in Programming
Our project focuses on I210, a skills-based introductory programming class in Python. We examine a piece of the programming process where students often under-perform, and seek to enhance group performance. When the student typing encounters an error in their code, communicating this to other group members should increase the chances for the other group members to contribute, participate in the process, and increase their own understanding. By implementing this process in some sections but not others, we plan to compare performance to see if there is a measurable difference in student outcomes.

Virginia Hojas Carbonell, Senior Lecturer
S250 Intermediate Spanish II
Virginia will be working on developing peer-editing skills in her S250 Honors class as a tool for self-regulation and learning. In this class, students will work on creating a semester-long project broken into smaller assignments, for which they will provide each other with feedback to submit several drafts. She will also be collecting feedback regularly to evaluate students’ perceptions and progress regarding peer feedback.

Erik Willis, Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
S425 Spanish Phonetics
Willis will use his grant to address challenges in his Spanish Phonetics course, S425. Specifically, students in this course face a lack of immediate feedback on pronunciation mistakes, as well as authentic native Spanish listening practice that is communicatively meaningful. Willis plans to address these challenges by developing peer-to-peer video-call activities between IU students and native Spanish speaking students in the Dominican Republic and possibly in Mexico. He conducted a pilot of this activity using “video-pronunciation pals” from the Dominican Republic, and found that it was in general a great success. To enhance this activity, Willis will develop specific exercises for the IU students and their video-pronunciation pals to engage in, improve their Spanish language skills through authentic listening and speaking.

Kelly Benham French and Joseph Coleman, Professors of Practice, the Media School
MSCH-C 225
French and Coleman will split an award to work on redesigning the foundational reporting and writing course in the Media School, MSCH-C 225. They will update this large course, which is required for journalism and public relations tracks in the Media School, with modern newsroom practices and more time for active learning. The revised course will include a single large lecture each week (with lectures on basic content, guest speakers, classroom assessment techniques, and team-based learning), as well as lab time in which students can do hands-on writing and reporting exercises under the supervision of their instructors.

Gretchen Horlacher, Professor of Music Theory, Jacobs School of Music
MUS-T 351 Music Theory and Literature V
Horlacher teaches MUS-T 351 Music Theory and Literature V, the last in a series of music theory courses required for all music majors. The challenge she will address with her Active Learning Grant concerns the music students are required to listen to for the course, which consists of long, highly individual pieces that are usually unfamiliar to students and often not well liked. To help students focus on the important aspects of each piece as they prepare for each class session, Horlacher will create “just-in-time” activities to encourage students to listen carefully and to prepare them for more complex analysis in class. Students will do these exercises online, on a Canvas platform, and will also be able to express their opinions of particular pieces and to respond to others’ opinions.

Brandon Howell, Lecturer, School of Public Health
T302 Management of Food and Beverage Operations
Howell will be designing a new course, T302 Management of Food and Beverage Operations, for majors in the department of Recreation, Parks, and Tourism Studies in the School of Public Health. Because of the specialized content of this course, students need to take a hands-on, active approach as much as possible. To enable this for his students, Howell will adopt a service-learning approach in which students in his course will be assigned to individual restaurant establishments on the IUB campus, in collaboration with Residential Programs and Services. By observing and helping to solve operational issues in these locations, the students will gain valuable practitioner-based skills in a “lab” environment.

Cody Kirkpatrick, Lecturer, Geological Sciences
GEOL-G144 Extreme Weather and Its Impacts
Kirkpatrick will use his grant to revise his GEOL-G144 Extreme Weather and Its Impacts course, a staple of the new atmospheric science degree track that is also being considered as part of the General Education curriculum. Kirkpatrick plans to refine and formalize some informal, in-class “mini-lab” activities and to develop better explanations of how the activities relate to the course’s other assessments (homework and exams). The in-class student activities he will work on include using an online “tornado warning simulator” program; using weather maps to identify regions of wildfire danger; predicting where tornados will develop on a major severe weather day; inferring hurricane strength from weather satellite imagery; and forecasting the type of winter precipitation. Through these exercises, students will be able to experience science as science is practiced—as a collaborative, interactive process of analyzing information and data about current and recent events. 

Peter Nemes, Lecturer, International Studies
INTL-I100 Introduction to International Studies
This course is taught in the Collaborative Learning Studio (SB 015) in the Student Building, which lends itself to group work and collaborative projects. Nemes will take advantage of the classroom by developing learning units in which an overarching issue relating to international studies (language, identity, religion, conflict, human rights, health, development) is explored in detail through the use of regional case studies. The success of these case studies depends on clear instructions, a strong connection to previous material, and good time management. Through these case studies, students will have an opportunity to engage in and think about the central issues of this discipline while developing critical thinking skills that will aid them not only in other International Studies courses but in other disciplines, as well. 

Jo Anna Shimek, Clinical Assistant Professor, School of Public Health
SPH-V351 Foundations of Environmental Health
Shimek will use her grant to develop a new course, which will be required for students seeking a degree in the School of Public Health. The challenge in this course is to help students understand environmental health issues as they relate to the broader field of public health. To accomplish this goal, students will be introduced to a framework of core concepts in environmental health, which they will then apply to a series of scenarios and case students on specific environmental health issues. Case studies may focus on real-world issues such as the release of a chemical that contaminated the water supply of Charleston, West Virginia in 2014, as well as other topics such as indoor air pollution, lead exposure and children’s IQs, industrial pollution and asthma, and radiation exposure and melanoma. Through these activities, students will master a framework and acquire a process for analyzing other environmental health problems they might encounter. 

Rebecca Dirksen, Assistant Professor, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology
FOLK F253 Music and Disaster
Dirksen will use her grant to adapt a course she taught at MIT to work for a larger class size when taught at IU for the first time. The course revolves around three disaster events—9/11, Katrina, and the Haiti earthquake—and addresses how music has been used for survival, hope, and healing. Music-related humanitarian efforts will also be considered, as well as how music has been used for "re-memorying" lost locations and (re)defining cultural spaces. Up to 40 students will enroll in the course, and to make sure all are actively learning, Dirksen will employ guided critical reading, class discussions and debates, individual research and analysis, peer review, and the collaborative creation of a digital humanities platform, such as a blog or website. Team-based activities will be integrated into the course, and clicker polling will also allow for increased feedback and interaction in class. All of these components will promote critical thinking and engagement by building a high degree of interactivity between students into the course plan.