S-BOLD Awards Project Descriptions 2014-15
Learning from Engineering Disasters
PI Name and Department: Gary Halada, Department of Materials Science and Engineering,
Primary Contact Email: gary.halada@stonybrook.edu
The goal of the project is to develop an online version of ESG 201 (STAS): Learning from Engineering Disasters. The current version is a required STAS/DEC H course for the B.E. in Engineering Science (consistently having over 200 students in the major), with a long waiting list despite filling all 122 seats each semester offered. The course is popular beyond the ESG major, having attracted participation from more 20 other majors in CEAS and CAS over the past seven years, and will grow as a required introductory course for the multi-institutional minor in Energy Science, Technology and Policy initiated with NSF engineering education research support. The learning objectives of the course, including understanding the role of complexity in the failure of engineering systems and the role of ethics and value based engineering, are central to the education of new engineers.
Online Learning Modules for General Chemistry
PI Name and Department: David Hanson, Department of Chemistry
Primary Contact Email: david.hanson@stonybrook.edu
The goal of this project is to develop a hybrid online/classroom course structure
that encourages students to adopt strategies for learning that are more effective
and consistent with contemporary learning theory that says knowledge is acquired progressively
by building on what already is known and is reinforced by repetition. More specifically,
three innovations will be implemented.
(1) Before class, students will be given a short online reading assignment (1 – 2
pages) and held accountable by an online quiz (2 – 3 easy questions). (2) After class,
students will be given an online quiz (3 – 5 more challenging questions to promote
integration, understanding, and application in problem solving). (3) Concise written
and video learning objects will be prepared that highlight important concepts, procedures,
and applications. The written learning objects will be short (1 – 2 pages) and self-contained
(requiring little pre-requisite knowledge). The video learning objects will be brief
(5 – 10 minutes) and similarly will be self-contained. Each will be followed by 1
– 2 example applications, and 2 – 3 practice questions or problems. Students will
report their answers to the questions or problems online, and class time can be used
to provide appropriate support and practice when students have difficulty. Faculty
instructors and former students in the course will work together to produce these
learning modules.
Hybrid Online/Classroom Delivery Model for CHE 132
PI Name and Department: Fernando O. Raineri, Department of Chemistry
Primary Contact Email: fernando.raineri@stonybrook.edu
We goal of the project is to transform, for the 2015 Fall semester, the off-sequence CHE 132 (General Chemistry II) course into a hybrid online/classroom delivery model. The main idea is to replace the conventional lectures with recorded materials that the students can access online. This conversion will allow us to implement the flipped classroom model at the lecture meetings, with faculty and undergraduate teaching assistants guiding and helping the students to solve problems. Other new online features will also be incorporated: (a) pre-Lecture quizzes, to encourage the students to go through the recorded materials and to make them think about the topics in the context of practical applications, (b) weekly online synchronous reviews, with focus on problem solving, and (c) extensive but informal dialog through the discussion board.
WOLFIE (Writers' Online Learning Forum & Information literacy Environment)
PI Names and Departments: Darren Chase, Library; Cynthia Davidson, Writing and Rhetoric; Kristina Lucenko, Writing and Rhetoric
Primary Contact Email: kristina.lucenko@stonybrook.edu
The goal of the project is to develop WOLFIE (Writers' Online Learning Forum & Information literacy Environment) – an interactive digital community to enhance multiple writing intensive courses and teach information literacy practices. The initial target audience is students who take courses that satisfy the University's writing requirement, WRT 101 and 102: approximately 5,000 per year. Of the 1,534 students who took WRT 102 in fall 2014, 229, or around 15%, need to retake it in order to graduate. WOLFIE can support students who struggle to meet the requirements of the course, and help them stay on track to graduate in four years. Once the materials are developed, both online and face-to-face sections of the course will be offered using these materials.
The Expansion and Integration of Biology Course Offerings Online
PI Name and Department: Joanne Souza, Biology Online Program/Biochemistry & Cell Biology
Co-PI's: Paul M. Bingham and Vitaly Citovsky, Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology
Primary Contact Email: Joanne.Souza@stonybrook.edu
The goal for this proposal is to expand the successful Biology Online program with two additional biology courses (BIO361 & BIO310) to be offered online to meet five objectives:
1) Continue to build toward an online Biology minor program of 20 credits. The two courses proposed will complete the minor lecture course requirements. This minor will be attractive to students with medical/health career objectives from other majors. 2) Meet increasing demand for courses required for the redesigned MCAT exams (BIO361) and for health science students by offering them online in summer and during alternate academic year semesters from the face-to-face course version for additional flexibility and availability to students. 3) Assist with the goal of completion in four years by adding increased flexibility. 4) Increase student understanding of biology by offering new online interactive assets that build on the knowledge base acquired in our fundamentals of biology courses and more seamlessly integrate them into the more complex thought/problem solving that is required in our upper division biology courses. Meeting this objective would decrease retakes thus contributing to the university's goal of increasing four year completion rates. 5) Allow students from all of SUNY (via the OPEN SUNY partnership) the opportunity to take courses to assist in their understanding of biology and biochemistry.
The project is a collaborative effort among the Biology Online program, the Undergraduate Biology Program and the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology.
Enhancing Introductory Mathematics Courses
PI Names and Departments: Scott Sutherland, Department of Mathematics; David Kahn, CESAME and Mathematics
Primary Contact Email: Scott.Sutherland@StonyBrook.edu
This project is a multi-pronged approach to revising the way students take entry-level
mathematics courses at Stony Brook.
Each year, Stony Brook has approximately 500 incoming freshmen who fail to remember
their high school algebra well enough to take college-level mathematics courses and
enroll in MAP103; approximately another 900 students enroll in a pre-calculus/trigonometry
course (MAT123), even though a large fraction of them studied this material in high
school. Mastery of algebra and pre-calculus is a pre-requisite for university-level
coursework in pre-health and STEM areas, as well as other fields such as economics.
A major goal of this project is to adapt MAT123 and MAP103 (and possibly other courses)
to allow for some amount of self-pacing, so that students who comes with some level
of preparation can focus on the material they need, rather than the current one-size
fits all curriculum. However, this needs to be done in such a way to maintain the
success of the current courses, and to be sustainable in terms of staffing needs.