Research Projects

Empirical evaluation of class design techniques that empower students to take creative, active, agile ownership of their learning, thus auto‐immunizing against accidental or deliberate academic integrity issues; scalable as a toolkit by other instructors in other disciplines across ERAU

This project, funded by ERAU's AIR Fellowship Program, builds on several years of rapid prototyping and use of different innovative techniques, applied in different ways, in various courses that I have been teaching for ERAU over the past several years. Activity by activity, these flight tests of specific techniques illuminated the central concept of this project: that a better design approach for classroom activities, supported in agile ways by the instructor, can deliver four primary student-centric benefits:

1. Liberate student creativity  -- turning them loose to creatively build their own problems, develop their own solutions, and test those solutions
2. Concretely make the learning relevant to the students, grounded in reality
3. Leading to increased feelings of empowerment by students, and of ownership of their own learning processes
4. And have so much more fun while they’re doing it, that they simply have no incentive and many emotional disincentives to cheat, cut corners, or under-achieve

Note the natural knock-on effect of these benefits on the faculty member: as students become more engaged with their learning, own their learning, and thereby reduce their potential for over-reliance on learning by copying (instead of critical reading for comprehension), they reduce the instructor’s time and effort spent chasing potential academic integrity violation (AIV) issues. As students have more fun doing better quality work, the instructor should be able to better enjoy the evaluation, feed-forward, and assessment aspects of their duties.

These benefits amount to an inoculation or immunization of students that helps prevent them from committing academic integrity violations, for whatever reason; in doing so, this inoculation (or “creativity megavitamin treatment”) may also light fires under a student’s desires to create work that they want to be proud of, and can and should be proud of.

The Academic Integrity Vaccine Toolkit (AIVT) refers to a set of design paradigms, frameworks, or models which encourage and support the development, deployment, and teaching of courses that target this goal.

Project Plan

This Project proposes to further develop these assertions so that they can be adopted and adapted by other faculty members into their own teaching and learning experiences. This will be accomplished by the following set of tasks:

Task 1.Inventory, characterize, and assess early prototyping trials. I will go through classes I have taught during the last two years (approximate) in which I deployed and used one or more of the techniques I have been trialing in this regard. Characterization would, for example, attempt to identify whether a particular element was best suited for supporting foundational or prerequisite knowledge and skills development, guided inquiry, advanced concepts, or in other ways, as the data may suggest.  I will continue to enrich this data set from lessons learned from my ongoing teaching throughout the AY.

Task 2.Identifying candidate “meta-models” of AIVT elements. This seeks to develop a consistent meta-description of such elements, to facilitate their development as containerized, redeployable courseware elements.

Task 3.Focused, limited query and research as needed, when aspects of the project need greater support from either a theoretical or a practical perspective.

Task 4.Curating and hosting the Project, its concepts, frameworks, paradigms, and the AIVT, in a fashion that facilitates sharing, collaboration, and use by other ERAU faculty members as and when appropriate.  Notionally, this would be in a newly-created Canvas course that I would build and use for this purpose.

Expected Impacts.

At the individual level, I see the project as making my own style of renovate-as-I-teach more scalable and sustainable. It will provide me with better mental models and concepts for how I go about my preparation for teaching each new class; its toolkits and elements should make my job of tuning, pruning, updating, or pivoting activities within each class I teach, each time I teach it, easier and more repeatable.

The experience of this project will also give me greater insight as to whether these concepts, ideas, tactics, and techniques have subject domain – specific characteristics of note.

Sharing these findings and experiences with the broader ERAU faculty and course design communities can lead to many benefits:

• Improved student engagement leads to greater student success
• Faculty engagement with students becomes more enjoyable as it becomes more supportive and effective
• As courses become more agile, an academic discipline or degree program can be more agile and responsive in meeting rapidly-evolving real-world situations
• All of which can enhance the University’s reputation, standing, effectiveness, and enrollments.

And Then What?  Even a modest, partial success with some of the elements of this project can provide the seeds for a variety of subsequent projects and activities; all of which can (I posit) build on a better-informed baseline of insight derived from the experiences to date of teaching and learning using these or similar innovation tactics here at ERAU.