Blog

Website update on educational resources

There has been a significant website update on our educational resources. All the stuff formerly under “Other Projects” has been split into Free and Open Educational Resources and Self-Efficacy and Attitudes Study.

Under Free and Open Educational Resources, you can find out about our work developing free-to-students textbooks for Physics 131 and 132. There is also a library of the 3-D models that are being used in Physics 132 to increase accessibility and provide multiple means of representation.

Have a look! Maybe these can be useful for your own courses!


We gave a workshop on GTA training programs based on P691G!

Today, I, along with Jake Shechter and Sara Feyzbakhsh, gave a workshop on developing GTA/TO training programs as part of Diversity Lunch Talk series hosted by the UMass-Amherst Institute for Teaching Excellence and Faculty Development. We had a group of people from all over the university from Comparative Literature to Microbiology.

In the workshop, participants thought about the TA-training needs for their specific departments and also what resources might be available as far as implementing their training goals. The workshop ended with participants thinking about designing an activity to facilitate TA skill development.

As part of building this workshop, we completely revamped the P691G portion of this website. This series of pages on our particular course now goes into rather extensive detail and includes a survey of the different pedagogical techniques that we use. The goal is to provide an easily navigable resource for people to gain inspiration for their own programs.

Thanks to Jake and Sara for helping me refine this course as well as in assisting in the development and facilitation of this workshop.

Introducing a new member – Sam Krishnamurthy

Samyukta Krishnamurthy
Welcome Samyukta Krishnamurthy!

Knowing a subject and being able to effectively teach it to a class are two very different skills. I was always told that teaching was an art, but P691G – Graduate Student Professional Development Seminar course showed me how it could be broken down into a science. I was able to apply some of these scientifically proven techniques in my Physics 132 lab courses and watch the students understand the physics concepts better and become more interactive in class. This inspired me to join the group to contribute to the self-efficacy study. I hope to learn more about the research
methodologies used in Physics Education and understand how some of them impact the students.