The Foundations of Resiliency

by: Georgina Hickey, Foundations Director, Professor of History, Department of Social Sciences

More than a quarter of our students fail to come back from one year to the next. This attrition rate
is not unique to UM-Dearborn, but it is troubling. Rates are higher among low income students,
students of color, and first generation students, making attrition not just a financial challenge for the
institution, but also an equity problem.  Faculty in CASL want to interrupt these trends and so we are
launching a new initiative in the Fall of 2020, aimed at helping students find their footing at a
university and create a strong base of skills and knowledge on which they can build during their time
on campus and beyond.  Thus equipped, we hope students will be better able to continue their
education. We call this program Foundations.

Designed around evidence based best practices, the Foundations program is actually a collection of
unique seminars designed and taught by faculty from across the College of Arts Sciences and Letters. 
All incoming CASL students, be they FTIACS or transfer students, will take one seminar during
their first year on campus (students from the other colleges are welcome). We have created the
courses with the most vulnerable students at our institution in mind, the ones who are most likely to
face challenges to completing their education and who are the least likely to ask for help. This is why
CASL has chosen to require that all incoming students take a seminar in their first year.  

Designing these seminars with transfer students in mind is unique, as most campuses with first year
seminars focus only on the Freshman experience.  As many faculty have noticed, students coming
from dual enrollment programs or community colleges, however, have not necessarily acquired the
skills they need to thrive in a university setting.  Their time to recover if something goes wrong is
short and the stakes are high as they try to figure out a new institution. We are committed to helping
students finish, so all seminars fulfill at least one DDC requirement and we offer a mixture of lower
and upper division courses.

While the different course topics reflect the passions and interests of the individual faculty teaching
them, the seminars share a common set of goals. These include helping students develop their critical
thinking skills, make connections to their peers and a faculty member, take ownership of their
education, and become help seekers. Foundations seminars are designed to help students understand
how the University works and what professors want from them. Academic skills are taught, but they
are given depth by coming out of the focus of the course. Finally, the seminars will guide students in
making plans for their time on campus and funnel them into other High Impact Practices on campus
such as undergraduate research, travel abroad, and internships.

Developing these courses and working with faculty and staff from across campus to build faculty
skills in creating accessible, transparent pedagogy and increase faculty knowledge of campus
resources for students has proved an energizing process. Foundations faculty are making connections
with each other across disciplinary boundaries and the cross pollination of ideas is spilling into
teaching in our regular courses. 

As the program develops, new faculty and new courses will be added to the program each year and
Foundations will host professional development workshops and other events to continue to build the
cohort and support faculty in teaching and mentoring the new students arriving on campus.  

Click here to see the excellent courses developed for the program’s first year.

Engaging Students in an Online World

by: Bruce R. Maxim, Professor of Computer and Information Science and Nattu Natarajan, Collegiate Professor of Engineering

I knew early in my academic life that students would learn very little from listening to me lecture. I spent a lot of my energy creating programming assignments that would give students glimpses into the exciting world of software development. Yet, despite my best intentions, I found that my students were not really interested in what I had to say.

My solution to the challenge of getting students interested in the course material was to build a course that would engage and inspire students. As a result, I decided to begin redesigning my courses utilizing three key strategies: project-based learning, active learning, and gamification. I was not skilled enough to add these all at once, but over the years I began to include elements of each in the courses I created.

Project-Based Learning

I began my journey of making my courses more engaging by first starting with project-based learning (PBL). In its simplest form PBL is an instructional strategy where students learn by working on meaningful, real-world projects. PBL is a teaching method in which students acquire skills and knowledge through the process of investigating a complex question, problem, or challenge over a significant period of time.

I incorporated PBL in my lower level classes by having students work on projects in pairs, but I quickly realized that was not really project-based learning. In my upper level courses, students had more experience and better problem solving skills so they could tackle more meaningful problems.

I prefer to assign different projects to each team of four students. For term projects requiring two months or more to complete, I ask students to identify a project of their own to tackle. Grading the oral presentations and demonstrations of these projects is certainly not boring for me. To keep the rest of the class interested in watching other student presentations, I usually involve them in either formative peer review of the design artifacts or peer evaluation of the final products.

In my senior design classes I am able to go one step farther and have students work on projects for clients outside the university. This lends an air of authenticity to the project work completed. Students work harder when they know they will need to present their project work publicly. In my project classes we celebrate final project presentations with pizza. Project-based learning is a great way to organize homework assignments but was not helping me work out the problem of keeping students engaged during class.

Active Learning

About five years ago I became involved with a multi university project whose goal was to create an active learning community focused on software engineering education. I attended a summer workshop in Pittsburgh, and it changed my teaching philosophy forever. It was simple: if you want students to be engaged give them something fun or meaningful to do in class besides listen to lectures and take notes.

I had always been leery of flipped classrooms, because I feared that students would arrive unprepared for the day’s activities. Eventually I decided to begin each class with a short introduction to the topic (20 minutes or less in a two or three hour class) and have students write (for a grade) critical reflections on the assigned textbook readings that formed a basis for the day’s class activities. Cutting my carefully crafted lectures, honed over several years, was a painful process. But it worked. Students realized I was telling them things they would need to know very soon, and they listened.

The activities I use in class take many different forms: games (board, card, dice, computer), roleplay, simulations, software engineering tools, case studies, trigger videos, group problem solving, scaffolded design activities, ethics debates, and oral presentations. Student groups, regardless of their engaged activities, are expected to share their results with the whole class. Each class period ends with a class debriefing discussion. The students love doing the activities! With active learning I felt like I was beginning to make headway with student engagement during class. This was confirmed by observational data I collected for a full semester in two different classes.

A concern many instructors have with group projects is how to evaluate the contribution of each member of a team toward the final project grade. One way I have addressed this is to have students evaluate each person’s contribution to the final product with a numeric score (0 to 5) and provide a list of the activities completed by each. I have also made use of timecards which focus on concrete milestones delivered by each person to the final product. The timecards allow students to focus on different skills (such as game art or programming) needed to complete the project. This led me to explore the use of gamification as a form of personalized learning.

Gamification

Gamification, or  the use of game design elements in non-game settings can be quite effective in increasing student motivation and attention to task. Good games provide players with the information they need within the context in which the information will be used. Good games constantly challenge players to work at the edge of their knowledge and abilities. This helps to keep students engaged and eager to learn what they need for the next challenge. These are lofty goals to accomplish in any classroom as I am still trying to better gamify my courses.

If you are interested in gamification there are some simple elements you can play with such as leader boards and badging. Leader boards help students to track their progress to earn a specific grade. Leader boards encourage friendly competition. Badges can be used to reward extra effort on boring tasks. One key to gamified learning is including both required and optional activities students can use to earn their course grade. The optional activities can be used to allow students to customize their completion of a course.

Finally, trying to involve online students in the types of activities I have been doing in my classes has been challenging, but it is possible. I often scale my class activities to make it possible for students to do them at home, working by themselves. I also make sure that project teams include both in-class and distance-learning students. I am still working on better ways to engage online students.

What are you working on? If you have suggestions, please feel free to share them with me. I am always eager to learn new things.