Transforming Science Education with Tombros Fellowships
Every year, the Center for Excellence in Science Education (CESE) selects three Tombros Fellows. In addition, this year the Office of Digital Learning also awarded a Tombros Fellowship to a faculty member interested in transforming online education. These Tombros Fellows are interested in developing, transforming, and creating new and innovative courses, using new teaching methodologies, and finding more effective ways to assess teaching success for classes in the Eberly College of Science. The four Tombros Fellows for 2015 are Kari Lock Morgan, Philip Bevilacqua, Charles Anderson, and Louis Leblond.
Lock Morgan, an assistant professor of statistics, is using her time as Tombros Fellow to transform STAT 250, Introduction to Biostatistics. The course satisfies the general education quantification credits requirement, but generally draws students from science majors. She is changing the class to incorporate a simulation methods approach to teaching, rather than using a traditional approach that relied on heavy background knowledge and can seem disconnected from the concept being taught.
“This approach is visual, intuitive, intrinsically linked to the main concepts, the same for all statistics, generalizable to new situations, and it requires less background knowledge,” she said. “So it’s better for conceptual understanding and allowing students to better focus on the big picture.”
Bevilacqua is working to transform CHEM 110H, an honors section of the general chemistry class CHEM 110, often a general education requirement. Bevilacqua is infusing new technologies like screen casting, YouTube, and the interactive whiteboard app Doceri into the class to better teach complex ideas.
“I am able to show a demonstration and talk through it to my students,” he said. “It really cuts down on time and is a good way to explain difficult concepts.” He is also able to assign lectures outside of class because he has recorded them with the new technology, allowing time to cover more content in the class over a semester than he would have without the use of this new technology.
Anderson is focusing on the development of a new first-year research course titled “Fast Farming.” Students in Anderson’s proposed class will use real-time rainfall, temperature, and soil data obtained from GIS platforms and social media outlets, in particular Plant Village, a community created by Penn State professors David Hughes and Marcel Salathé. Students will use this data to determine plant tolerance for a variety of stresses that could affect agricultural productivity and communicate this information to agricultural producers around the world through the Plant Village online community.
“By empowering freshman undergraduates to do real research, without pre-determined outcomes, and to connect this research to tangible challenges that they can read about in the news, the class aims to clarify the connection between basic scientific research and its application for the benefit of human societies,” Anderson said. “This connection can sometimes seem very abstract for students who are in the early stages of their college careers, but the connection is always there, even if it is not immediately obvious.”
Leblond’s project is different than the other three in that his World Campus physics students are typically adult learners continuing their education online from home while working and raising a family instead of traditional-age resident students. He is using a tool called IOLab, which is a small portable Bluetooth-enabled device with sensors that can measure physics data such as force, acceleration, light, and sound.
“With the IOLab, you can do in the comfort of your home almost all the experiments that we currently do in our introductory physics course sequence,” said Leblond. “The IOLab enables quality hands-on physics labs for students taking online courses. The quality of the data is often even better with the IOLab and comes at a fraction of the cost.” All of these class transformations use real data to show students a real-world application for the skills being taught.
“My hope is that by using real data from the students’ own fields, the students come to see the class as a subject that is useful, important, and relevant and applicable to their own lives rather than just a requirement they have to get through,” Lock Morgan said.