Innovators Story Archive
October 22, 2020
How to assess learning remotely—and reduce students’ temptation to cheat
Oral finals and frequent low-stakes assessments are just a few alternatives to in-person exams that Jenny Quinn uses to ensure student learning and success. While it may seem impossible to assess student learning without an in-person exam, Jenny Quinn is one math educator who has been proving that otherwise. Quinn, who teaches undergraduate mathematics courses…
August 4, 2020
Stirring the imagination
As the UW seeks to support data management and analysis more broadly across disciplines, the answer may just lie with Jupyter Notebooks. By Ignacio Lobos When David Shean started searching for a more effective and interactive tool to teach students how to analyze complex geospatial data sets in his mixed graduate and undergraduate class,…
February 7, 2020
A textbook that can be read on a phone? It’s logical!
Philosophy lecturer Ian Schnee‘s e-book about logic has proved to be irresistible to tech-savvy students. And there’s no reason other faculty can’t accomplish the same with their texts. By using a new e-book in his Introduction to Logic classes, Ian Schnee wanted to engage his students more fully with the material and save them…
December 17, 2019
Ideas for teaching when operations are suspended
When the snow began to fall in Winter 2019, instructors across the UW had to think quickly about how to keep their courses on track. Instructors such as Haideh Salehi-Esfahani and Scott Spaulding, who were already using technology tools in their teaching, were well-equipped to ride out the storm. Others, like Riki Thompson, adapted quickly….
September 25, 2018
Using evidence to improve teaching and learning
The Evidence-Based Teaching (EBT) program supports faculty to try new, research-based teaching strategies in classrooms across disciplines. Across the UW, faculty are committed to using the best possible teaching strategies to enhance student learning — whether that learning takes place in large lecture classes or small seminars, in Philosophy or in Oceanography. What are…
September 17, 2018
Linking classroom to community with technology
A geography workshop paired its students with nonprofit organizations to help solve critical community issues, offering a model of how to bring service learning into the classroom. Two fundamental questions help shape Professor Sarah Elwood’s approach to teaching a capstone course in the Department of Geography. “What do I want my students to learn? And…
July 31, 2018
The “global flip”: a new model for international learning
A new course add-on option adds short-term travel to international, online collaboration — helping more students to have rich global learning experiences, at home and abroad. Teaching sustainability through international partnership Kristi Straus, lecturer in the College of the Environment, knew that her students could learn an enormous amount about sustainability issues if they could…
May 10, 2018
The power of online learning
When Associate Professor Scott Fritzen was asked to help craft and teach a long-distance program for mid-career African health professionals at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, he jumped at the opportunity to improve public health in Africa through executive education. A well-crafted program — with the bulk of the work conducted via…
April 20, 2017
Keeping history alive with a digital library collection
More than two decades of research by students in Professor Michael K. Honey’s oral history courses was kept in a library storage room — a rich collection of untold stories of working-class Tacoma sadly out of sight and out of mind. Honey knew the materials gathered by students supported first-person stories that deserved to be…
April 7, 2017
Instant feedback via earbuds
Kathleen Artman Meeker’s six-year-old student had three words inhis vocabulary: “No,” “eat” and an expletive that he used to maximum effect in the classroom. The outbursts disrupted the class and puzzled Meeker, who was desperately trying to help him. And she finally did, thanks to valuable feedback from a behavior consultant who observed Meeker’s interactions…
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