New Round of Bush Projects
By Brady Alsaker

A new round of projects is on its way for the Bush Grant this year!   There will be nine new projects focused on creating dynamic course content in order to address multiple learning styles.

Participants and their projects this year include:

Seung-Ho Joo "Engaging World Politics Students by Offering Course Materials in Multiple Formats"
With this grant, Professor Joo intends to spend his summer months adding the "streaming video" component of WebCT to Pol 1401: World Politics. To be more specific, he will make available to students his lectures in the form of streaming video. He also intends to include additional visual components such as tables, graphs, and photos for the course. These course materials will be used during classes and will also be available online for students' preview and review. He expects the addition of streaming videos and other visual components to the course will enhance students' learning and engagement by exposing them to diverse and stimulating course materials in multiple formats.

Paul Z. Myers "New Course Design for Introductory Biology Course - Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development"
Professor Myers is developing a new course this summer, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development, to replace the Biology Discipline's existing freshman introductory biology course. He will be developing new course content that will be both presented in class and available to the students online.   In addition, he'll also be trying to enhance the interactivity of the lectures with a Personal Response System (see article: "Personal Response Systems").

Ted Pappenfus "Maximizing Efficiency in Undergraduate Chemistry Labs"
Maximizing efficiency in the Chemistry Discipline's courses is on Professor Papenfus's mind this summer.   With a Bush Grant this year, he hopes to 1) develop video lab manuals to supplement existing hard copies of manuals, and 2) utilize NetFiles to maximize the efficiency of data collection in chemistry labs.   For more information on NetFiles, visit www.netfiles.org.

Marynel Ryan "Web Development for History 3204 - Nazi Germany Course"
Professor Ryan will be teaching a new course in the Fall, entitled Nazi Germany.   She would like to develop a web component for this new course that would offer as many diverse exercises and opportunities to expose her students to interactive course material through course management software.   With this added component, she hopes that her students will understand how and why Nazism was so effective in attracting true believers and eliminating the potential for dissent.

Pam Solvie "Engaging Students with Multiple Learning Styles Using Kolb's Learning Cycle, Content Delivery Tools, and Blended Learning"
Professor Solvie hopes to apply Kolb's Learning Cycle to address students' multiple learning styles during lesson presentations and learning activities. She hopes to incorporate the GTCO CalComp Interwrite Pad and various course management software in her work this summer.   In addition, she hopes to create more interactive material for one of her course websites such as concept maps and various resources (e.g. video links, URLs, etc).   Finally, she hopes to create simulations for students' review of course content through the Interactive Scenario Builder.   These simulations will be available on her course website as well.

Dennis Stewart "Creating an Online Introduction to Psychology Course with Video Lectures and Powerpoint"
Developing an online version of Intro. to Psych is on Professor Stewart's list this summer.   He has started taping all of his lectures so that they can be streamed onto computers, and has been converting all of his lectures into PowerPoint presentations.   He hopes to incorporate both the video lectures and the PowerPoint presentations into his course on WebCT.

Engin Sungur "Vertically Integrated Course Material Development for Different Learning Styles in Statistics"
Professor Sungur hopes to develop various content delivery tools (e.g. visual simulations) for various statistics and probability courses.   In addition, he hopes to smooth the integration of statistical software into the various courses.   He hopes to incorporate all of this material onto the course websites.   You can view the backbone of this project by visiting this website: http://www.morris.umn.edu/~sungurea/introstat/index2601.html and clicking on "Alternative Content Presentation" on the site map.

Take a look at the Technology Enhanced Learning website for more information.