Tag: 131

Toggerson Awarded Commonwealth-wide award for work on OER

Brokk Toggerson has been awarded 3rd Place (Bronze) / $500 prize from the first-ever Department of Higher Education Open Educational Resources Olympics for his work on the Physics 131: Forces, Energy, Entropy and Physics 132: What is an Electron? What is Light? open-source textbooks. These awards were established to honor the extensive accomplishments of of public higher educators statewide. Winners were selected by a sub-committee of the OER Advisory Coucil. The first and second place winners were from community colleges meaning that Brokk Toggerson was the only awardee from a research university.

Pretending to be a biologist for a day!

This past Saturday, Brokk Toggerson participated in the ASBMB Northeast Catalyst Conversations for 2020 at UMass Amherst as a panelist talking about OER. In particular, about the gradual transition from OpenStax to, a stack of pdfs, to the custom books we have now developed. The biggest hurdle to many faculty is, as it was for us, the online homework systems. Our experience with EdFinity seemed well received.

In addition to being on a panel, it was interesting to see some work from the biology DBER community as well. Some interesting ideas over lunch with Sarah G. Prescott, an Associate Professor from UNH Manchester, resulted in some ideas about how to better implement Twitter in the classroom. This was tried in 132 a few years ago, without much success. The students found the assignments to be “busy work” and there were significant technical challenges getting everyone setup. However, the motivation for the assignments, encouraging students to find applications of physics in their everyday lives or fields of study is still important. Prof Prescott’s main ideas were:

  • Make each assignment relevant or don’t do it (obvious but always good advice!)
  • Make the first few assignments simply about engaging with academic Twitter. This will make the entire activity more relevant to them as they can see how this can benefit them.
  • Have screen captures etc. about how to get setup, including how to make a dummy account.
  • Make students turn-in a screen shot. Again, a video on how to do this may be needed, but these are much easier to grade than us finding students’ posts on Twitter!
  • Grade using a mastery model: they must include everything or no points. This is easy to grade and scales well. A few drops ensures that this does not negatively impact anyone’s grade.
  • Finally make the the technical use of Twitter part of the assignments: threads, hashtags, etc.

Definitely something to think about going forward. Always fun to see how other disciplines do things!

How to go about directing future improvements to courses?

I am at an interesting point for the first time. I have been teaching the 131 and 132 courses here at UMass for several years and thinking about how to seek continued improvement in an effective way. I know of some faculty who continually do overhauls to keep things interesting and fresh for themselves and for their students. This technique has merits as an interested teacher has intrinsic benefits.

I want, however, to continue to improve my courses in a way that builds upon the successes.

Reflecting on previous iterations, most have been centered on a key pedagogical principle: active learning, team based learning, backward design, flipped, etc. I think this path still has room.

I am thinking about those things that students mention as being particularly engaging: the myosin fibers in the energy unit, the spontaneous structure formation in the entropy unit, the circuit-based study of the neuron in 132. All of these have what is called by Redish et al as “biologically authentic examples.” I would like to both continue to find more, and find ways to integrate them more deeply into the curriculum. Perhaps a case-study type format?

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!