Spring 2015 Hybrid Learning Design Awardees

In May 2015, eighteen Columbia faculty were awarded grants to support the redesign, delivery, and evaluation of their courses during the 2015/16 academic year.

COURSES IN FALL 2015

Alhelí Alvarado-Díaz
Lecturer, History
Alheli’s redesign will employ new technologies to develop and interpret canonical texts as a part of Contemporary Civilization I & II in Columbia University’s Core Curriculum. Students from all disciplines will be provided the appropriate tools and technologies to conduct interviews and investigative reportage of NYC neighborhood, that will culminate in an end-of-the-semester media project.

Jonathan Barasch
Professor of Medicine and Pathology and Cell Biology
Jonathan, and Columbia University medical student Adam Schweber, will redesign Molecular Mechanism (MM), a required course for all Columbia University medical and dental students during their first semester of study. The new course will incorporate pre-class activities—interactive simulations and video with short quizzes—to allow for more patient visits and group work during class. Barash will also incorporate a Wiki for his students to collaboratively edit class notes and build a glossary for each lecture.

Matthew Connelly
Professor of History
Matthew will redesign his course International and Global History Since World War II to incorporate new methods to analyze the historical record in the age of “Big Data.” His students will contribute web exhibits and interactive tools to a public-facing research platform—history-lab.org—that will serve as a resource for future students at, and beyond, Columbia.

Amy Fairchild
Professor of Sociomedical Sciences
Amy will incorporate a collaboratively authored website into the Masters of Public Health Core Curriculum at the Mailman School. The site will include professionally recorded videos, an index of important publications, faculty and student blogs, and live chat session that will be created throughout each semester.

Martin Haugh
Associate Professor of Professional Practice in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
Martin will redesign his Foundations of Financial Engineering course using the flipped classroom model. He will produce a series of professional videos that will replace his lectures, with plans to reuse these videos each semester for the foreseeable future.

Shantanu Lal
Associate Professor of Dental Medicine
Shantanu will be using Google Glass and Apple iPads to enhance his Pediatric Dentistry course. Google Glass will enable master clinicians and instructors to film cases and view what their students are seeing in real-time using the iPad. Instructors will be able to monitor multiple students at once to provide feedback and supervision.

Bernard Salanie
Professor of Economics
Bernard will use Wacom tablets and screen capture software to flip his Mathematical Methods for Economists course. Modular units will be produced—include filmed lectures and “chalkboard” instructional-videos—to teach students a broad range of mathematical methods, from a number of different economics subfields. Bernard will also use Piazza to enhance classroom participation, and make classwork available online to encourage self-paced learning.

Jay Sethuraman
Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
Jay will redesign his Introduction to Mathematical Programming course using the flipped classroom model. He plans to film a total of 25-30 hours of video content to provide pre-class overviews for all of the mathematical concepts and theories he covers in the course. The content will be split into 6-8 short segments per week, and will free up time in-class for discussion and group work.

Paola Velenti
Lecturer in the Discipline in International and Public Affairs
Paola will flip her Microeconomics for International and Public Affairs course, a part of the Core Curriculum at the School of International and Public Affairs. With a semesterly enrollment of over 200 students, integration of pre-class lecture videos and podcasts will enable Paola to spend more time working through material in-class. Paola will have a unique opportunity to evaluate and assess her project given that she will have three sections of the course going on simultaneously.

Amy Weman
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Social Work
Amy will redesign her Program Evaluation in the Social Services course using the flipped classroom model, in addition to enhancing a semesterly evaluation project for her graduate students. Part of her funding will be used to incentivise a local social service program to partner with her course and receive a free evaluation from her students. Key personnel from the program will communicate with the class via in-person visits and video conferencing.

Bryan Winn
Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology
Bryan is working with cartoonist Benjamin Schwartz (The New Yorker) to develop an interactive, humor-rich instructional tool called Teech’Em. Teech’Em uses humor, comic-book storytelling techniques, and gamification to impart a core knowledge base of fundamental diagnostic and treatment methods in clinical ophthalmology. Bryan will be evaluating the efficacy of Teech’Em by incorporating it into his Ophthalmology Clinical Clerkship, a one-week course for medical students.

COURSES IN SPRING 2016

Susan Boynton
Professor of Music
Susan, and her colleague Professor Brad Garton, will be using Mediathread to allow her Masterpieces of Western Music—a part of Columbia’s Core Curriculum—students to visualize, analyze, and markup digital soundfiles. This is Susan’s second Hybrid Learning Award.

Annette Insdorf
Professor of Film
Annette, and Barnard College Adjunct Associate ProfessorRob Brink, will incorporate Mediathread to allow her Analysis of Film Language students to annotate short clips from cinematic masterpieces. Students’ work will be reviewed and curated in-class to be ultimately added to Columbia University’s Film Language Glossary.

Robert O’Meally
Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Robert will conduct an extensive survey to allocate media assets and collections that focus on the Harlem Renaissance, to be reviewed by his graduate and undergraduate students. This survey will include assessments of online collections previously developed in partnership with CCNMTL—the New York Neighborhoods Project and MAAP. A new online environment will be built to showcase new exhibits from Robert’s students’, faculty interviews and performances, and a compendium of results from the media audit.

COURSES IN SUMMER 2016

Laurel Abbruzzese
Assistant Professor of Rehabilitation and Regenerative Medicine
Laurel is using new technologies to activate her Clinical Geriatrics course with in-class video analysis assignments. Students will use Apple iPads and Dartfish, a video annotation program, to evaluate and tag pre-filmed patient interviews and systems review assessments of standardized patient actors.

Sarah Hansen
Lecturer in the Discipline of Chemistry
Sarah will redesign her General Chemistry Laboratory course using the flipped classroom model. Her students will review materials online before class, and participate in pre-class quizzes that will inform her instructional focus during the subsequent lectures. In-class her students will use ARS to provide another point of feedback, a method that was previously accomplished through students filling out index cards.

Silvia Martins
Associate Professor of Epidemiology
Along with Professor Katherine M. Keyes, Silvia will lead a team of faculty at the Mailman School of Public Health to redesign Principles of Epidemiology using a flipped classroom model. Students will review recorded lectures before class and take a Just-in-Time-Teaching (JiTT) assignments to identify points of confusion for instructors to address during seminars.

Miriam Rabkin
Associate Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology
Miriam will redesign her Introduction to Global Health Research course using a flipped classroom model, a course she teaches at ICAP. This program encourages minority health sciences graduate students to pursue careers in global health research and minority health/health disparities research. Students will review computer-based modules before class allowing for more peer-to-peer learning during class sessions.