Symposium marks a decade of big strides in teaching, learning at UW-Madison

If a UW–Madison graduate were to return to campus today after a ten-year absence, the first impression would be striking: A building boom has altered the landscape with high-tech new buildings and additions, while another wave of construction busily charges ahead.

Not as obvious to the visitor, however, would be the radical changes taking place within those walls.

A quiet revolution has been under way in the teaching and learning environment at UW–Madison that arguably is every bit as transformational as the bricks-and-mortar changes. Undergraduates not only have scores of new opportunities available to enrich their academic experience, they are taking advantage of those opportunities in remarkably high numbers.

A November 2007 report by Clare Huhn, a researcher with the Office of Academic Planning and Analysis, shows that the vast majority of UW–Madison graduates have participated in at least one outside-the-classroom academic enhancement during their time here.

Those enhancements are a mix of traditional and cutting-edge, and include living in a residential learning community, studying abroad, taking a service-learning course, engaging in research project, conducting a for-credit internship, or joining a first-year interest group.

Huhn’s results showed that 82 percent of all 2006-07 bachelor’s degree recipients had at least one of these defined enhancement experiences, and 58 percent had two or more. When the office first started tracking these experiences in 2002-03, the total number was only 69 percent.

The UW–Madison Teaching and Learning Symposium, which will hold its two-day meeting on May 21-22 in the Pyle Center, has been involved in promoting and amplifying these changes over the past 10 years. This year’s sessions include a look at how gaming technology can be integrated into the classroom; how to enhance the community perspective in service-learning courses; how to build entrepreneurship into the undergraduate experience; and many other topics.

While the 2008 symposium theme is “Shaping our Future,” Wisconsin Week found it instructive to mark the program’s anniversary with a look back at examples of accelerated classroom change. The following is just four of the hundreds of examples of classroom innovators who are reshaping the “Wisconsin Experience” for today’s undergraduates.

Greg Moses: Offering deliverance from deadly lectures

Moses, a professor of engineering physics, decided a decade ago to employ multimedia technology as a way to overcome some of the inherent limitations of the classroom lecture. Along with researcher Michael Litzkow, Moses created eTeach, a dynamic online teaching platform that combines video, synchronized power-point, links to related materials and a variety of tools for students to directly interact with the material.

"We were trying to change the paradigm of lecturing to students in class, then having them disappear to solve problems on their own,” Moses says.

The “guinea pig” course that they started with in 2000 was Computer Science 310, which has 300 students per semester. The material in the class incorporates a high degree of detail, which naturally made the lectures “deadly,” he says. After the first month, more than half the students stopped coming.

With eTeach, Moses and Litzkow were able to migrate the lecture material to a 20-minute online format, which provided an overview of what students needed to accomplish that week, as well as access to past lectures, a glossary of terms and other reference materials. Then the class shifted from one lab a week to two labs, giving students much more of the practice time that was essential to their success.

“It was a big influence on the class and really improved how it worked,” he says. “We simply took the lecture off the table.”

Today, eTeach has become successful well beyond that first class. The Division of Information Technology (DoIT) took over development of eTeach in 2005, added many new features and is making it available for broad campus use. The program has also been the foundation for the highly successful Online MBA program at UW-Whitewater.

While DoIT has taken the tool to new audience, Moses is planning the next big challenge for the technology. Moses wants to bring more ability to actually do homework and conduct testing and quizzes through eTeach, in a way that goes beyond multiple choice. He’s working toward an open-ended problem solving capacity on the Web, where the computer itself can provide automated feedback and guide students through the process.

Beth Meyerand: Putting freshmen at the helm of medical imaging technology

Meyerand, an associate professor of medical physics and biomedical engineering, is one of several faculty in 2004 who created “Biology Interest Groups,” nicknamed “BIGs,” that gave first-year students unique exposure to real-world challenges in science. Her three-credit course used a problem-based learning format that put students in charge of analyzing real medical challenges.

Her approach, also lecture-free, splits the 20 students into groups and gives them problems that they must solve independently. The hard part for Meyerand is creating the problem, but once the class is going, she becomes more of a facilitator, migrating among the groups and making sure no one is getting far off course. Teams all have specific roles and the problems can take one-two weeks each.

One challenge involves students receiving an MRI movie of a beating heart where there is a medical problem evident, and another of a normally functioning heart. Students have to figure out what is wrong with the patient and what the treatment might be, without any primer on how to properly analyze the technology.

The class also debates current topics in medical imaging. Students are used to seeing billboard ads that encourage people to get preventive full-body CT scans to give them “peace of mind” that they don’t have cancer or other defects. Insurance companies don’t cover this, so patients have to shell out thousands of dollars for the service. Meyerand divides her students into two teams to research and debate the ethical pros and cons, with students as judges.

Meyerand’s course has since been incorporated into the First-Year Interest Group (FIG) program, a highly successful initiative that is providing small-class, in-depth learning opportunities for hundreds of freshmen each semester, frequently in residence hall settings. The FIGs draw 20 students around mutual interests, and also brings them together in discussion or lab sections of shared prerequisite courses — for Meyerand’s students, chemistry and calculus.

“This immediately gives new freshmen 19 other friends for their first year,” she says, noting the program is invaluable for improving retention rates.
“The great thing about problem-based learning is you allow students to exceed your expectations,” she adds. “They will take it as far as they can.”

Tehshik Yoon: A new formula for classroom blogging

Yoon, a chemistry professor, says he has always been concerned about the communication gap between scientists and the general public, especially in his own field. So he decided to borrow a page from colleagues in English and other humanities fields, who are using classroom blogs more and more to encourage the daily habit of writing.

So what’s the initial student reaction to the Chemistry 346 Blog Project? “They hate it,” Yoon says with a chuckle. “They go in thinking it’s just another task they need to accomplish. By semester’s end, they get it and start to appreciate it.”

Yoon uses the LiveJournal blogging platform based on its popularity among younger users. In the first half of the course, students use it to kick around ideas and naturally work their way through some of the tougher organic chemistry challenges. Its value really becomes evident during the second half of the semester, when each student is assigned to an independent project in chemistry department labs. The course and the blog are great bridges into further undergraduate research, since they push students to convey the value of their work.

“One of the things I really like about the blog is students are encouraged to write at a level where their friends and family can read it,” he says. “I thought at this point in their careers, if I can get students who aren’t already enmeshed in the jargon of chemistry to talk about why what they’re doing is cool, it will have long-term professional value.”

Yoon says he benefits equally from the blog project, which is based on “just in time” teaching concepts that provide real-time snapshots of the learning process. “If I find that I’m teaching something poorly,” he says, “it’s always reflected in the blog.”

Herbert Wang: Bringing home the reality of environmental justice

Last summer, a group of water resources management graduate students spent a month in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, an area devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Their goal was to learn as much as they could about Bayou Bienvenue, an urban wetland that is cherished by locals but absorbed major damage from the salty waters of Katrina.

They took water samples, surveyed area wildlife, conducted surveys of residents and studied historic aerial photos of the bayou. They sponsored a community crab boil to get to know their local hosts. It’s the first effort in what the group hopes will be a long-lasting partnership to restore the wetland to ecological health.

The water management seminar in New Orleans is the latest in a series of courses and seminars offered by Wang, from the freshman to the graduate level, on the issue of environmental justice.

"Environmental justice is at the intersection of economics and jobs, it involves the environment and it involves human health — it is a very interdisciplinary subject area,” says Wang, a geology professor and associate dean of the College of Letters and Science. “When students take this course, it really brings home the fact that pollution and waste ends up more often than not near minority and low-income communities. When we visit these areas, it’s an uncomfortable feeling for many students. It’s the experiential side of this that is most significant.”

The experiential side of Wang’s work, appropriately enough, was actually spearheaded by freshmen in his First-Year Interest Group on environmental justice. After they expressed a desire to do field work, Wang challenged them in fall 2002 to write and submit a proposal to the Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment, which eventually was funded. The grant support field projects in Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens and the “cancer alley” region of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Altgeld Gardens is a Chicago Housing Authority project with 5,000 African American residents that was built a former sludge disposal site.

Wang’s work reflects the growing number of service learning and experiential courses offered at UW–Madison. At the Morgridge Center alone, roughly 80 courses are being offered each year.

What’s most exciting about the New Orleans work, Wang says, is the opportunity for a longer-term presence there. More summer fieldwork is already in the planning stages for this summer and summer 2009. “The students have already established a good relationship in the community, and they really have a chance to make a longer-term impact.”