I had managed an Academic Technology Roundtable program for several years that collaboratively researched emerging and existing technology tools and planned for the implementation of academic technology for the UP community. In 2016 we had our last ATR fellows and I began rethinking a faculty innovation program.
It was in 2017 that I met Erin Tochen who was hired as the Director of Innovation with the Development Office at the University of Portland. Erin was a thoughtful colleague and brilliant at helping me iterate on an initial idea for a faculty innovation program. As a team we co-created the Ignite Grants for Faculty Innovation under the Office of the Provost.
“We became an informal team committed to developing a grant program for faculty to explore innovative ideas in teaching and learning. Among our goals: this program would be centrally funded and managed under the Office of the Provost and it would provide the appropriate visibility and recognition for faculty. Another goal of the program was to apply rigor to the application process and evaluate the outcomes and impacts to campus. With support from the Provost, we created the Ignite Grants for Faculty Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Ignite for short.”
This paragraph was taken from Erin’s post on Linkedin. Read more on her post called “How a Little Funding Can Ignite Transformation Change“.
From the UP Website (Spring of 2020)
The Office of the Provost Ignite Grants support new ideas and approaches for curriculum and program development that make an impactful contribution to UP’s teaching and learning future. Ignite Grants, up to $5,000, are designed to encourage faculty to explore new ideas that have the potential to reshape the classroom experience and to create new opportunities to tie curriculum to real-world experiences in both undergraduate and graduate programs. Proposals should complement the current strategic plan and support individual school strategies and priorities. Ideas are encouraged from all corners of campus.
The goals of Ignite are to:
- Advance pedagogy and promote faculty collaboration
- Foster innovative ideas that can be scaled and/or be competitive for external funding
- Transform the learning experience for all students
The first round of Ignite Grants were awarded in Spring 2018 and the second round in Spring, 2019.
First Round of Awards Included:
Karen Eifler, School of Education
“TeachUP: 10 Steps to Being an Inclusive, Confident, Competent Educator at UP”
Molly Hiro, Department of English
Shaz Vijlee, Shiley School of Engineering
“Improving Writing Instruction, Practice, and Feedback in Introduction to Engineering”Lindsay Benes and Joanne Olsen, School of Nursing
“Designing the Learning Ecosystem to Ignite Education”
Nursing education stands at the convergence of transformational changes in the educational environment alongside rapid, complex changes in healthcare, necessitating a new vision for today’s learner. As we enhance our pedagogy within the blended classroom, faculty encounter an array of technology applications (apps). Through the Ignite Grant, we aim to: (1) design an evaluation framework to standardize the selection of apps for the SON graduate program, (2) host an Ignite Day for an interactive experience to explore instructional apps and, (3) foster faculty engagement in the app evaluation framework and selection process.
Alexa Dare and Ali Na, Department of Communication Studies
Lauren Alfrey, Department of Sociology and Social Work
“Radical Praxis: Race and Gender Inequality In and Beyond the Classroom”
We are applying for an Ignite Grant to help us collaborate on the design and delivery of our Spring 2019 courses (SOC336 – Sociology of Race and Racism; CST301 – Media and Society; CST435 – Visual Communication) around a shared theme of Race and Gender Inequality. We will use digital technology to build an interdisciplinary “hub” for the three classes with opportunities for students in all three classes to learn together through guest speakers, case studies, and shared reflection activities. We will attend a September 2018 conference, Race and Pedagogy, in order to enhance the Race and Gender Inequality focus in each of our classes and to help us coordinate our curricula.
Laurie Dizney, Tara Prestholdt, and Christine Weilhoefer, Department of Biology
“Advancing the Biology Curriculum through the Franz Campus”
This project proposes to make the Franz Campus the unifying theme of the Field Ecology pillar of the Biology major. We aim to interweave themes and competencies in our new introductory course and make explicit links to students’ upper-division required courses. By integrating the process of science, high impact teaching and learning, and research experiences in urban ecology, our project will ignite a genuine connection between the students, their campus, and their coursework.
Ian Parkman, Sam Holloway, and Itzel Megchun, Pamplin School of Business
“Makerspace Curriculum”
This proposal describes a program of curriculum development for creating specific course content, programming, and projects to utilize the interdisciplinary “Pilot Space” makerspace in the Donald P. Shiley School of Engineering, the ThinkTank Innovation Lab in Franz Hall, and UP the Clark Library Digital Lab, along with other related facilities planned for the University of Portland campus.
Rebecca Smith, Nicole Ralston, and Ben Gallegos, School of Education
“Going Beyond the Classroom: Using Virtual Reality to Enhance Classroom Learning”
This project employs virtual reality technologies in Education classrooms to promote equity and bring learning to life. This pilot project involves the use of virtual reality glasses, mixed-reality simulation with virtual avatars, smart phones, and a teacher-directed tablet to create virtual reality spaces for student learning. These virtual realities will include field trips to foreign countries and immersion in the lives of people from diverse backgrounds, which can increase empathy. U.P. students, both preservice and inservice teachers, will experience the technology in their U.P. classrooms, in addition to creating lesson plans for and then implementing the virtual reality technology in their own K-12 classrooms.
Jeffrey White, Department of International Languages and Cultures
Carolyn James, Department of Mathematics
“Peer Learning Capture”
Research in peer-tutoring programs reveals that programs with tutor training outperform those without training. Effective training also requires observation, assessment, and debriefing. Studies in applied linguistics and math education conclude that review of recorded interactions (stimulated recall) improves the quality of debriefings about learning events. With the Peer Learning Capture project, Dr. Carolyn James and Jeffrey White propose to use current Untethered Lecture Capture (ULC) technology to capture verbal and whiteboard recordings of tutor-student interaction in order to improve tutor training and interactions while also providing students with recordings of their tutoring sessions in the Learning Commons.