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Career preparation at the college level

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CAREER CENTER @ ENGINEERING

Benjamin Janicki, mechanical engineering master’s student (BS ‘14) consults with Jim Buttrick, Boeing employee, in the new Boeing Advanced Research Center that enables students to work collaboratively with Boeing engineers on aircraft and spacecraft assembly and manufacturing.
Photo credit: Brian DalBalcon

Designed for efficiency and collaboration, the new Career Center @ Engineering will be a branch of the Career Center housed in the College of Engineering. The joint center is scheduled to open to students in fall 2015 and will be located in Loew Hall. It will function as a single entry point for employers seeking to hire engineering professionals. The center aims to improve visibility and responsiveness to students and companies, to increase the number of companies hosted at career fairs and conducting on-campus interviews, and to provide students with more opportunities for internships and jobs.

As College of Engineering Dean Michael Bragg describes it, “The Career Center @ Engineering is an important initiative for the college — one that promises to enrich our students’ educational experience and deepen our industry partnerships. Our students develop strong technical skills in the classroom. This center will expand opportunities for experience-based learning through increased industry interaction, internships and training. This will allow our students to enter the workforce with confidence and, at the same time, meet the needs of industry.”

The Career Center @ Engineering will coach and prepare students in areas of career strategy and successful job search techniques, including:

Basic job search skills: Writing and tailoring a résumé to a specific opportunity, how to build and sustain a professional network, and how to conduct an excellent job interview.

Knowing future options: Familiarity with the variety of engineering careers and how to explore these options.

Connecting academics with professional experiences: Understanding of skills gained through leadership, research, community service, internships and other co-curricular and curricular experiences at UW.

Ability to articulate proficiencies: Concisely communicating about talents, strengths, values, transferrable skills and experiences in ways that align with various industries and engineering career options.

 COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES CAREER PREPARATION

The College of Arts & Sciences is helping students learn how to translate their education to career applications through various college-to-career opportunities focused on job skills, networking, internships and strategic mentorship. Robert Stacey, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, says the goal is to “introduce students to the skills and attributes that employers are seeking, and to do so early in their UW careers. We want them to recognize that, regardless of major, they can increase the value of their education by starting to prepare now for the world of employment.” Students can add to their experiences beginning with the following options:

“I’d recommend Koru to anyone, whatever major. Whatever program you’re looking to go into, I would say Koru is for you. It gives you a new way to think about school and education, and your career path later in life.”

Gabriela Rojas-Luna
Sophomore, Philosophy major

 

Koru@UW A&S:

The College has partnered with Koru, a Seattle-based training company, to offer Koru@UW A&S, an intensive program that will introduce Arts & Sciences students to skills needed to be successful in the business world. Beginning in late summer 2015, students can enroll in a two-week long session on the UW’s Seattle campus. Students will learn about a range of businesses and will work in small teams to tackle real-life business problems presented to them by a local company. The Career Center is planning follow-up sessions specially tailored to take these students to the next level of professional development, including how to land an internship and refining LinkedIn profiles.

A&S Internships (under development):

The College is rethinking how students approach and take advantage of internship opportunities. From scope of work to location and duration, Arts & Sciences is piloting new ways students can integrate internships with their undergraduate experience. These might include novel forms such as “micro-internships” that last just a day or two, allowing students to quickly assess projects and organizations to more closely align with their skills and interests. Numerous partners, both on and off campus, are committed to reimagining what the internship experience could look like.

Mentorship Activities (under development):

The College is also working closely with the UW Alumni Association to develop a program pairing UW alumni with current students preparing to enter the world of work. Alumni/student mentorships will address a multitude of shared UW Arts & Sciences experiences such as tackling a challenging academic major, leveraging a diverse and ever-evolving undergraduate curriculum, and becoming informed citizens. The mentor/mentee relationship will help students connect their degree to their life and goals after graduation.

Learn More

Read the full Provost report on how to link academic passion to life and careers.

‘Productive disruption’ teaches students to be intentional learners

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Center for 21st Century Liberal Learning (C21)

“Our goal for first-year students is that, by the end of the year, they can present a coherent story about their intellectual goals. If we help students do this work in the pre-major, they are more likely to end up in the right majors for the right reasons. And they become engaged students who are a joy to teach.”

Kevin Mihata
C21 Director and Associate Dean for Educational Programs, College of Arts and Sciences

The Center for 21st Century Liberal Learning (C21) is a recent initiative of the College of Arts and Sciences exploring how to best prepare undergraduates to thrive at the UW and beyond. The Center’s core programming revolves around the C21 Fellows, a group of students who experience a unique curriculum tailored to their needs, and who also contribute to shaping the future of C21 itself. Undergraduate students apply to participate in the program. The most recent cohort started in summer 2014, building skills and relationships even before their first quarter at the UW. C21 is collaborating closely with Undergraduate Academic Affairs, First-Year Programs, and the Career Center in this effort to re-think what a college education should offer.

Putting students in the driver’s seat: In order to get the most out of college, students need to learn to be strategic early on, say C21 staff. “At a big research university like this, if students are not intentional about their own learning, they will miss a lot of great opportunities,” says Director Kevin Mihata. Through experiential learning, facilitated discussions and structured reflection, C21 staff guide Fellows as they learn to be proactive about their educations rather than simply ticking off requirements. “It seems clear that they can’t learn this just by us telling them,” says Mihata. Four years of practice as C21 Fellows helps students develop key skills, attitudes and habits they can draw on to shape their futures.

Learning is less about finding the right answers than asking the right questions: C21 leaders find that incoming students often need to unlearn some attitudes and practices in order to get the most out of their UW education. Intensive, early fall experiences are designed to jump-start this new way of thinking before first-year students ever arrive on campus. In 2014, this consisted of a short study abroad experience in León, Spain. “They have done everything right to get here, but they haven’t had a lot of experience operating in ambiguity,” says Gretchen Ludwig, C21’s curriculum coordinator, of students transitioning from high school. “In León, they came to us for feedback but were really fishing for what we wanted, for the answer. After we didn’t tell them, they began to reflect that maybe there isn’t just one answer.” C21 Fellow Alvaro Contreras says the León trip was “preparing us for what college is going to be like. In high school we’re so used to having a rubric of what we have to do. Here they just told us, ‘Go out, explore, and then give us a presentation.’ ”

A ‘home base’ as students adjust to college life: Like the communities many undergraduates find in the Greek system or student organizations, the C21 Fellows program offers students a tight-knit campus ‘home’ with small cohorts and dedicated campus mentors. For example, Bob Stacey, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, advised the Fellows in Spain during their summer study abroad experience. C21 staff see such support as critical to student success. The first quarter of college is “not a comfortable place to be,” says Ludwig. “They really need a community to support them as they try to make sense of their college experience.” C21 Fellows have three overlapping communities: their own cohort, a “learning lab” that mixes together about 15 C21 Fellows at different points in their academic careers, and all 72 C21 students. Fellow Louie Vital notes, “It gives us a way to not be stuck within our own discipline, but to really learn from each other, and what other majors and students have to offer.”

C21 Fellows (left to right) Alvaro Contreras, Ednauh Kamlondy, Louie Vital and Tiffanie Matthews reflected on their UW experiences in a C21 video. Contreras remarks, “We don’t have anyone saying, ‘Do this, do this this way.’ It’s all the way we interpret it.” Kamlondy notes, “Here they say, ‘This is the prompt, what can you do with it?’ ” Images courtesy of Isaiah Brookshire.
C21 Fellows (left to right) Alvaro Contreras, Ednauh Kamlondy, Louie Vital and Tiffanie Matthews reflected on their UW experiences in a C21 video. Contreras remarks, “We don’t have anyone saying, ‘Do this, do this this way.’ It’s all the way we interpret it.” Kamlondy notes, “Here they say, ‘This is the prompt, what can you do with it?’” Images courtesy of Isaiah Brookshire.
“I teach my 9th graders in the Bronx the same things that C21 taught me: creative problem-solving, love of learning and resilience. I am so happy to facilitate the kind of mentoring relationships that helped me succeed in college for students who otherwise wouldn’t have them.”

Jeevon Durkee ‘13
C21 Fellow 2012-13; B.A., Geography

Out-of-the-box assignments: C21 coursework reflects the program’s focus on ‘productive disruption’—getting students to take on challenges that may be uncomfortable but activate creativity. The C21 curriculum is made up of one-credit seminars that meet for 90 minutes each week. Assignments are often open-ended. One recent activity asked Fellows to film a video reflection about their UW highs and lows so far. Responses ranged from tears to laughter, from quiet reflection to dancing—sometimes all in the same video. These displays of vulnerability and resilience sparked a lively class discussion about the unexpected stresses of college, and how to pull through them. Through assignments like this, mentors believe C21 students have an opportunity to learn to take risks safely—what Assistant Director Cynthia Caci jokingly calls “supervised floundering.”

Students co-create the curriculum: C21 coursework is already student-driven­, but juniors and seniors are also asked to submit proposals about next steps for C21 as a whole. For example, juniors recently designed and proposed a C21 major. Mihata says, “We are in year three, and this is an iterative process. We are co-creating the model with the students.”

A UW education is more than the diploma: As C21 Fellow Ednauh Kamlondy reflects, “University is not just a place to focus on your major, but a place to learn as much as possible.” One thing C21 staff want students to learn is that they don’t have to find every answer on their own. “They are so used to the individualized testing culture,” says Ludwig. “That’s how they’ve been judged. But knowledge is distributed­. What we are helping them learn is how to ask for help, navigate networks and use those networks to solve problems.”

Making better majors: C21 leaders have a series of goals in mind. “The first quarter is just about building a support system,” Mihata says. “The first year is about helping students develop an intentional self-story of their own intellectual aspirations. There’s also an institutional goal here: to get students into their majors earlier, and into the right majors for the right reasons.”

Learn More

Read the full Provost report on how to link academic passion to life and careers.

Helping graduate students find alternative careers

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Career Development Organization for physicists and astronomers (CDO)

“There are three things I know I like: research, mentoring people and the Northwest. I’m looking to find a career path that combines those. I think I have plenty of options that will use my skill sets appropriately and they’ll all be good ones.”

Andrew Laszlo ‘14
2013-14 Coordinator, CDO; Ph.D., Physics; Postdoctoral Researcher, UW Nanopore Physics Lab

 

Several years ago, physics and astronomy graduate students co-founded an organization to support students looking for jobs outside of academia. They met a growing need to connect graduating Ph.D. students to employers. “The reality is that most people don’t go into a tenure-track position,” says Andrew Laszlo, who was a 2013-14 coordinator of the Career Development Organization for physicists and astronomers (CDO). “A lot of people are going on to do other things. Our goal is to get people thinking about other options and to see what’s out there.”

Connecting alumni, employers and current students: The CDO’s primary focus is an annual networking event. Student organizers invite local and international employers, many of whom are also alumni. On the first day, employers present to students. On the second day, students present their own work to employers. “The idea is to get people talking,” says Laszlo. The visiting professionals represent the range of opportunities open to graduating scientists. Recent graduate Amit Misra notes, “It was interesting to see their career paths. They’re not your professors; they are people who branched off and did what I’ve been hoping to do—find a career outside of academia.”

Creating well-rounded scientists: CDO aims to help science graduate students become better job candidates. Laszlo summarizes the challenge: “I think employers are happy to hire candidates who are good at working with other people and have skills beyond just being intelligent.” As a result, CDO’s programming highlights the value of ‘soft skills.’ The organization’s mission statement contends: “To remain competitive in the job market, physicists, mathematicians and astronomers need to augment their analytic and problem-solving skills with flexibility, leadership, and cross-disciplinary aptitude.”

UW neuroscience graduate student Liza Shoenfeld (sidebar) mapped out possible alternative career choices and sought out informational interviews to explore those options. She now works for a management consulting firm in New York.

Image courtesy of Liza Shoenfeld and branchingpoints.com.

Partnering with the Career Center: To prepare for its fall employer event, CDO holds two workshops with the Career Center: one on effective résumés and another called Networking for Shy People. Laszlo says CDO members have found these events and the Career Center overall “to be incredibly useful. It’s not the norm for physics people to be social, actively engaging with other people and selling themselves,” he says. “That’s what you do when you’re networking. So it’s a bit of social coaching.”

Seminars with guest speakers inform students about career paths: In addition to the annual networking event, CDO organizes a variety of other workshops and seminars, many of which feature guest speakers (often alumni) talking about their fields. Recent presentation topics include working in rocket science and employment opportunities at NASA, and landing a faculty job at a small college. CDO also recently arranged a tour of Boeing linear accelerator labs and a chance to meet the scientists who work there.

“I just got a job at Microsoft as a data scientist. I was asked to give a presentation on my research to start off my interview day, and I was able to re-use a lot of the presentation I gave at the CDO event last year. It was one of the few talks I’d given that was geared towards a technical audience, but one that didn’t have much astronomy experience.”

Amit Misra ‘14
Ph.D., Astronomy

 

For students, by students: For ten years, “the CDO has been passed down grad student to grad student,” says Laszlo, the third generation of coordinators from his research lab. Leading CDO was a core part of his UW experience. “Mentoring other students was an important part of feeling like I belonged in the department and was contributing to the community,” says Laszlo. “And, on my résumé, it demonstrates leadership and organization skills.”

For networking, practice makes perfect: Some CDO participants find jobs directly through the organization, such as Nathan Kurz ‘10, who was recruited by the electron microscope firm Nion after a senior engineer saw his presentation at the fall employer event. For students who don’t get a job offer right away, the event provides “good practice for how to present yourself,” says Laszlo. Misra agrees. “Just interacting with people, seeing what they were doing and how my skills from graduate school could transfer was really helpful,” he says, adding, “Learning to talk about my research to a non-astronomy audience was a good experience. At academic conferences you’re talking to the 10 or 20 people in your field who already pretty much know what you did anyway.”

Student groups complement Graduate School offerings: The Graduate School has a formal program for introducing graduate students to career options. In collaboration with the Career Center and the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, the Graduate School’s Core Programs offer workshops, seminars and online content geared toward career fulfillment, whether in academia, nonprofits or private industry.

Lessons Learned

  • Tapping recent alumni to participate in professional networking and mentorship opportunities helps students recognize transferable skills and explore a wider range of career options.
  • Graduate students are most competitive in the job market when they have both deep disciplinary expertise and practice communicating their knowledge and skills to people outside their field.

Learn More

Read the full Provost report on how to link academic passion to life and careers.

Independent Study Plans in Community, Environment & Planning (CEP)

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Helpling undergraduates direct their own learning

“Helping students prepare for their next steps has always been part of our philosophy. There shouldn’t be a wall between academics and what we often call ‘the real world.’”

Caitlin Dean ‘06 ‘10
Program Manager, CEP, 2010-2014; B.A., CEP; M.Ed.; MPA

 

In 1994 a group of faculty and students in the College of Built Environments used principles of the new community-based planning movement to create their version of the ideal major. Caitlin Dean recalls, “They asked questions like, ‘How can we prepare students for the real world?’ and, ‘What does a holistic education mean?’ ” Their work resulted in the Community, Environment & Planning (CEP) program. As program manager from 2010 to 2014, Dean worked with Director Christopher Campbell to grow the program while preserving the founders’ mission: helping undergraduates direct their own learning.

Students approach the interdisciplinary curriculum with a goal and a plan: To help students structure their education, CEP requires each incoming student to create an Independent Study Plan (ISP). Students make revisions as their interests evolve. Margot Malarkey ‘12 began the program focusing on environmental studies, but exposure to graduate-level urban studies classes sparked her interest in the intersection of housing, politics and academics, and she altered her ISP to reflect that. “The cyclical process of planning, acting, reflecting and changing your plan—the iterative cycle of learning—is important not just for academics but also for life,” says Dean. “We hope students will adopt that mode of thinking and take it out into their careers and personal lives.”

Graduate Jen Hamblin has done just that. Remembering her own ISP, she says, “It was the first time in my entire life I was forced to sit down and be intentional about something that hadn’t happened yet. CEP requires you to come up with a strategy—’You say you want to get to the moon by Thursday… so, where is your map?’ ” Hamblin now uses these skills regularly in her career as a consultant aiding companies and institutions in diversifying their workforces. “I just developed a growth model for my CEO with a three-year projection and a risk assessment for each phase. Long-term planning is a major, critical skill for the professional world.”

Independence, but with structure: “The first generation of the program was seen as an experiment,” says Dean. The program philosophy still emphasizes learning by doing, including the value of making mistakes. However, the program team has also made changes to the curriculum, such as establishing required classes for students working on capstone projects. “In the past, students were expected to work mostly independently,” says Dean, “but we learned we needed to build in more structure to support all of them, not just the top 25 percent who know how to draw on the resources available to them. The majority of undergraduates still need modeling, coaching and guidance.”

“I think the first time I realized how much CEP mimics the real world was not my first job but my second. It required a lot of strategic planning. In CEP it’s called ‘governance.’ In the real world it’s called ‘boardroom meetings.’”

Jen Hamblin ‘07
B.A., CEP, minor in disability studies

 

Shared governance builds student leadership skills: CEP advertises itself as “built for and by its students,” and this shared governance model permeates the entire program. Students take the lead on the majority of decisions about the major and its curriculum. Final decisions require full consensus of current students, which can be a challenging exercise in patience, negotiation and building buy-in. Campbell says, “In CEP, students are not only responsible for themselves, they are responsible for the whole CEP community. This means they must learn how to make decisions together, resolve disputes and respect individual differences as they work towards common goals. For many students, the skills they learn through governing the major are the skills that prove most important to them in their careers and civic lives.”

Students gain confidence from the confidence shown in them: “CEP not only taught me, it also empowered me to contribute to the learning process,” says Dan Fitting ‘14, who returned to college after his military service. “Until I found CEP, I felt like I was only going to school to learn what other people already knew.”

“CEP’s flexibility allowed me to take risks and test my ideas in a safe setting. It also pushed me to take ownership of my decisions—both the successes and the failures.”

Margot Malarkey ‘12
B.A., CEP, minor in urban design and planning

 

Through his capstone project he created new knowledge, helping local residents inventory historically significant architecture in their community and develop a plan for its preservation, refining skills he now uses as Sustainability and Facilities Coordinator for Skagit County.

Flexibility is challenging but pays off in the long run: “I would sometimes have an identity crisis,” says Malarkey. “I would look at my friends in business school with a clear path forward and say, ‘What am I doing?!’ ” Campbell notes, “Being responsible for your education is hard.” He adds, “It can be frustrating at times but when students come back after they graduate, they say, ‘Ah, now I get it.’ ” Malarkey agrees that work experience helped her gain perspective on the value of her major. As a research associate at an environmental consulting firm she frequently draws on the meeting facilitation, planning, presentation and analytical skills she gained from the program.

Learn More

Read the full Provost report on how to link academic passion to life and careers.

Students step up to collaborate as a professional research team

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Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Newbook Digital Texts in the Humanities

“We basically structured the project like a business. We have various departments, and we do everything from marketing to publishing. So the students that hang with us and do the work get a pretty good picture of what professional life is like.”

Walter Andrews
Research Professor, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

 

Under the direction of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) faculty, undergraduate and graduate students hone skills in historical research and computer programming as they digitize, transcribe, translate and edit century-old texts from Ottoman Iraq and Egypt. As these students advance the growing field of digital humanities, they also experience how diverse teams work in the professional world. A key example is the independent, web-based publishing house Newbook Digital Texts in the Humanities led by Walter Andrews.

Collaboration is the future of research and of work: The project has drawn together an interdisciplinary team to solve complex research puzzles and give students experience working in diverse professional teams. The team includes:

  • Undergraduate and graduate students from an array of UW departments, including Biology, Math, History, Computer Science & Engineering and the Jackson School of International Studies
  • UW faculty, including visiting scholar and Egyptologist Sarah Ketchley
  • Iraq-based researcher and dialect expert Nowf Allawi, project co-founder

Project leaders and participants see such interdisciplinary, international collaboration and open-access digital publishing as the future of research. “Having digitized primary sources has opened up research in ways that were simply impossible even twenty years ago,” says Kearby Chess ‘14, whose master’s thesis relied on Newbook Digital Texts sources. For example, the Svoboda Diaries, a detailed first-person chronicle of trade and travel in one of the world’s last multi-ethnic empires, were scattered among libraries and personal collections. Access to many of the original diaries was lost after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Thanks to the work of UW students and their collaborators, copies of the diaries are becoming available online both as annotated transcriptions and through the “Svobodapedia” wiki.

Students work with primary sources, such as photographs and handwritten diaries, to illuminate life in Ottoman Iraq. Above, steamships arriving in Baghdad, captured by Alexander Svoboda, ca. 1900. Image courtesy of the Svoboda Diaries Project and Newbook Digital Texts.
Students work with primary sources, such as photographs and handwritten diaries, to illuminate life in Ottoman Iraq. Above, steamships arriving in Baghdad, captured by Alexander Svoboda, ca. 1900.
Image courtesy of the Svoboda Diaries Project and Newbook Digital Texts.
“I didn’t know how history and computer science could work together prior to this.”

Kelsie Haakenson
UW senior double majoring in History and Computer Science & Engineering

 

History students learn to code; computer science majors learn to work in interdisciplinary teams: Unexpected cross-pollination can happen when students from different disciplines work together towards a shared goal.

  • Kelsie Haakenson came to the UW planning to study history with an eye towards preserving historical buildings and artifacts. Last spring, after working with the Svoboda Diaries team for a year and teaching herself the Python programming language, she was accepted to the UW Computer Science & Engineering program. Now she envisions a career in the digital humanities, blending her passions and professional goals. “I want to focus on online publishing of primary sources and user-friendly ways to display information rather than fixing artifacts and leaving them in a museum or an archive somewhere,” Haakenson says. “In digital form, sources are more accessible and hopefully have more longevity.”
  • Undergraduate intern Sarah Johnson also developed an interest in programming through the project. “I would never have taken a computer science class, but now that I see the content it’s creating and that it’s a necessary step in making this historical research available, it’s more interesting to me,” she says.
  • Students on the technical team have also explored new territory. Intern Tori Wellington, an undergraduate Informatics student, learned to facilitate communication between the programmers and historians on the team. Ketchley notes, “Tori has been able to take the technical jargon and present it to less technical teammates in a palatable way. That’s a real skill.” Wellington adds, “It’s a challenge, but it’s fun to make it less intimidating.”
“The project is full of invaluable people, both students and teachers. I try to learn as much from each of them as possible and to emulate their skills.”

Rachel Elizabeth Brown
Graduate student, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations; Project Manager, Newbook Digital Texts

 

A student-driven project fosters leadership skills: “Walter has a knack for seeing things in students they don’t see in themselves,” says graduate student Rachel Elizabeth Brown. “He spots potential really quickly.” And Brown should know. She grew from an undergraduate intern who doubted her ability to contribute, to the lab’s project manager. Faculty leaders envisioned an organizational structure for the project that put students in leadership and management roles, and Brown made it happen. Although Andrews describes her as a “whiz” at project management, Brown recalls she had a lot to learn. “I was convinced he was crazy for accepting me, that I didn’t have the skills needed to work on the project,” she says. “Walter is really good at letting students find their niche. It turns out that organizing is my thing. I love helping students figure out what their skills are and find a place in our organization that will make them happy and proud to work with us.”

Through scholarly research, students learn practical problem-solving skills: Student interns and employees on the Newbook Digital Texts team learn to push the boundaries of scholarly research through digital publishing. They also learn how a professional team works to solve complex problems beyond any one person’s expertise. As Haakenson discovered, it is often necessary to identify and fill gaps in one’s own skills and to reach out to peer experts for help. “I found an online tutorial on starting with Python and worked through the different lessons,” she says. “Whenever I came in contact with a problem I couldn’t figure out, I would use the group email list to send out questions for more experienced people to answer. The tech team is really supportive when you’re learning new things.”

Learn More

Read the full Provost report on how to link academic passion to life and careers.

A classroom veteran tackling new technology

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Professor of Philosophy, Lynn Hankinson Nelson, shares how she transitioned to a hybrid-online class set-up

“I encourage collagues to take a workshop. When I go, I learn, I get refreshed, I get invigorated.” Lynn Hankinson Nelson Professor, Philosophy
“I encourage colleagues to take a workshop. When I go, I learn, I get refreshed, I get invigorated.”

Lynn Hankinson Nelson
Professor, Philosophy

 

There’s a learning curve in setting up a hybrid course, says Lynn Hankinson Nelson, “especially for those of us my age, with 35 years of teaching experience. But the support is wonderful.” Nelson, who was a Teaching with Technology Fellow in summer 2013, credits the staff at the Center for Teaching and Learning, UW Information Technology, and UW Educational Outreach (UWEO), with helping her set up her first hybrid and online courses. “The UWEO Instructional Designer, Maggi Kramm, walks on water, as far as I’m concerned,” says Nelson. Here are Nelson’s suggestions for adding technology to teaching:

When creating a video, imagine you’re facing a class, not a camera: Nelson was nervous at the thought of filming a dozen videos for an upcoming UWEO online course. “I’m really camera shy,” she says. However, she says the process was easier than she’d feared, because Kramm and the UWEO videographer were so helpful and professional, telling her they could re-record any portion of a lecture and setting lights at a comfortable level. “What happened finally, with that kind of encouragement and the knowledge that I could do any lecture over, I just forgot I was speaking to a camera,” says Nelson. “I just made believe I was standing in front of 200 students, which doesn’t frighten me at all, and the muse took over.”

Take advantage of the Active Learning Classrooms in the Odegaard Undergraduate Library: The round tables facilitate discussion, says Nelson. So do the computer screens at each table. At the beginning of class, which Nelson opens with a mini-lecture, she sends her presentation to the screens at the tables. When the class breaks for small group discussion, “the recorder for each group can link his or her laptop to the screen and take notes that are visible to the whole table so the students can edit together. When the time comes to report out, I can send the presentation from each group to all the tables,” says Nelson, adding that groups can also choose to write their report on one of the room’s orange glass walls, which function as white boards. “There’s also a microphone at each table, which can be important for students who have softer voices.”

Philosophy of Science Spring 2014 C

ACTIVE LEARNING CLASSROOMS

“The Active Learning Classrooms are just fabulous,” says Lynn Hankinson Nelson, meeting in an ALC with students in her hybrid class, Philosophy of Science (PHIL 460). “The flexibility is great. I can roll my chair from one group to another, or I can say, ‘Roll to the middle of the room, we’re all going to work on something together.’” The course meets officially once a week and a subgroup of students also meets in the room informally for additional in-person discussions.

Learn More

Read the full Provost report on how to use technology in the classroom to engage students.

Replacing the five-page paper with online exhibits

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Students becoming authors through the UW Cities Collaboratory

“I see grad students in our department engaged and entrepreneurial, asking not just ‘How can I learn this tool?’ but ‘How does using this tool change the questions I ask and the answers I discover?’ That’s the great promise of digital scholarship and teaching, that you can present evidence in ways that lead you to new discoveries.”

Margaret O’Mara
Associate Professor, History

 

Margaret O’Mara’s urban history students used to write a five-page research paper that only she and peer reviewers read. But when she most recently taught The City (HSTAA 208), the students’ work was posted on a public website, available to anyone interested in Seattle history. Students learned that they could become authors who drew new insights from source documents. “You learn history in 4th grade,” says O’Mara, winner of the 2014 Distinguished Teaching Award for Innovation with Technology. “You produce history in college.”

Each of O’Mara’s students created a multi-media blog post detailing the history of a single block in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle. “The students did as much work as they would have for a paper, in some cases more, with more enthusiasm and often better results,” says O’Mara. “They took ownership. They’d talk about ‘My block this, my block that.’”

The student work was posted in the Lake Union Lab, part of the UW Cities Collaboratory, an interdisciplinary effort led by O’Mara, History; Kim England, Geography; Susan Kemp, Social Work; and Thaisa Way, Landscape Architecture. Classes taught by Way and England have also posted exhibits in the Lake Union Lab, and additional courses are planned for 2014–2015. The team is mentoring an interdisciplinary group of graduate students in a project to research the history and changing geography of North Lake Union neighborhoods.The UW Cities Collaboratory is an experiment in collaborative research and teaching among the more than 100 UW faculty who study and teach about urban issues. “In addition to serving the students in our classes, the Collaboratory is also proving to be a great platform for research and scholarship,” says Kemp. Here is some of the team’s advice for managing digital projects:

“This kind of digital scholarship allows us and our students to understand place, environment, and urban change through multiple layers and multiple connections that you can’t get off a flat page.”

Susan Kemp
Associate Professor, Social Work

 

Budget time for start-up challenges: “When engaging in new technologies in the classroom, a range of unanticipated issues arise,” says England. The complex website presented a host of technical issues, as well as some academic challenges. Because students’ work is public, the team must hold them to higher standards for attribution and other issues than they would for a traditional final paper. “Our students’ research is now reviewed in ways never possible before, which is both exciting and intimidating. We need to develop new ways of curating materials for accuracy, appropriateness, and usefulness,” says Way.

Bring in speakers who are experts in digital skills: Guests in Way’s classes included an expert on sound environments, who taught students not only about the technology of recording and mixing sound, but also a little about how to listen. “He went out with us into the city and taped places that we thought were quiet,” says Way. “And then we played back the tapes and realized how noisy these spaces really were. We also learned how illiterate we were about sound, that we couldn’t tell the difference between the sound of the wind and a passing bus.”

Find technical support: “Teaching with technology requires more human power than less. So it’s really important to have your village around you, to have that support,” says O’Mara. Technical support, both from UW Information Technology (UW-IT) and IT staff in their home departments has been critical, according to the team. The History Department provided TA support in the quarter prior to the course to create a tutorial for the web platform, and scan historical documents.

“To me, learning always engages student initiative. That means in good teaching you should always get to a point where you’re not sure where the students are going to go, what connections they’re going to make.”

Thaisa Way
Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture

 

Be willing to experiment with technology: The team started with the digital platform Omeka for class projects and is now adding another platform, Scalar, that facilitates research collaboration and deep annotation. The Simpson Center provided training in Scalar, as well as support for faculty and students to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute.

Develop protocols for use of materials from archives and other sources: Team members realized that they needed to help students learn to trace the source and ownership of seemingly anonymous images and resources found online. They are developing protocols for citing sources to help students gain an understanding of professional practices in research, “what attribution and authorship mean,” says O’Mara.

Curate and promote student work: O’Mara is grateful that once her students’ site began to draw media attention (see Resources), the History Department paid for a research assistant to improve the presentation of student work by editing site content and creating an interactive map on the landing page.

Allow students who don’t want their work posted publicly to opt out: The default for O’Mara’s class was that students’ work would be public, but she offered an option that students could, with no impact on their grade, request that their work be visible only to the class.

“There’s a long tradition in geography of having students get out into the city to smell it, taste it, experience it. Now my students can share that experience online by taking photographs and recording sound, and linking those sights and sounds with census data and historical maps.”

Kim England
Professor, Geography

 

Know your metadata: As the team worked with the technology, they realized the possibilities for using metadata, the information attached to every digital file. For example, geocodes in the metadata of photos allow them to be linked to interactive maps. “The good news is that photos students take on their phones include geocodes,” says O’Mara. Unfortunately, files for historical photographs do not. The team is developing a protocol for confirming or adding geocodes before new images are posted, as well as site standards for all types of metadata, which will facilitate searches and the ability to link and annotate site resources.

Assign projects that meet community needs: The teaching team decided to research neighborhoods undergoing rapid change, to document issues such as the historical sources of industrial pollution in Lake Union, and current social stresses such as those caused by loss of affordable housing. Another key decision was that students should present their findings in ways that community members could easily understand, for example by describing issues without disciplinary jargon and illustrating findings with clear infographics. Students interested in research need to become familiar with visualization technologies and learn how to work with designers, so their findings on critical urban issues are accessible, says Way. “Then you can start talking to community groups and explaining complex issues in a way that makes sense and encourages engagement.”

Resources: Article on Lake Union Lab student histories: Robin Lindley, “Cities are the Living Embodiments of Past Decisions,” History News Network, 22 April 2013.

students at Lake Union

IN THE FIELD

Above, a team of graduate students are studying both the north shoreline of Lake Union and its “blue space,” submerged lands and the lake’s waters, to develop an interactive exhibit for the UW Cities Collaboratory. Pictured here at Waterway 15 in summer 2014, the team has also supported the development of digital tools for teaching and helped curate undergraduate and other Collaboratory exhibits.

Left to right, Jennifer Porter, Geography; Odessa Benson, Social Work; James Thompson, Architecture; Eleanor Mahoney, History; Megan Brown, Geography.

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Read the full Provost report on how to use technology in the classroom to engage students.

Expecting the unexpected in a dynamic group project

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“Running a simulation in a class is more work than giving lectures. But the students retain more. And it’s so much more interesting, for the students and for me.”

John Wilkerson
Professor, Political Science

 

John Wilkerson’s initial goal in developing LegSim, a web-based mock legislative session, was to find a more convenient way to manage the one- or two-week capstone of his course on the United States Congress (POL S 353). Now LegSim serves as the centerpiece of the course, and is used by thousands of college and high-school students, whose fees help pay for maintenance and continued development of the site.

Running the simulation presents a multitude of challenges, including balancing the breadth of conceptual knowledge that can be presented in lectures against the depth of operational knowledge that project-based learning promotes, says Wilkerson. He was pleased a recent study showed high school students in classes that used the simulation had better scores on the Advanced Placement exam on U.S. Government and Politics and other measures (see Walter et al. in Resources). Engagement among Wilkerson’s students is high during the simulation, and the majority report that they enjoy the experience. Here are Wilkerson’s suggestions for managing a simulation, advice that can apply to other complex, collaborative group projects:

Develop your inner coach: Wilkerson begins the class with a few weeks of lectures, and then steps down from the podium to serve as a coach and consultant. As the quarter progresses, demand for his time is so high that groups must make appointments to meet with him.

Boost your tolerance for ambiguity: Despite his years of success with LegSim, Wilkerson still worries when the class inevitably stalls midway through the quarter, after students have completed the straightforward assignments required to set up the simulation (e.g., claiming legislative districts and setting policy agendas) and are faced with the complexities of actually crafting and passing legislation. “At this point in the course, as with any coaching assignment, there are moments of doubt,” says Wilkerson. “How long will it take students to figure out that they should not be waiting for me to tell them what to do? Will the Defense Committee overcome its collective action problem? When will someone discover the power of the Previous Question motion?”

Trust the process: Inevitably something, often a surprising defeat, will galvanize the class, says Wilkerson. Participation shoots up. Posts and views on LegSim soar, from hundreds to thousands per day, and students query Wilkerson about details of Congressional procedure he had covered in the weeks earlier in lecture. “The students take ownership and that makes a huge difference in terms of their level of interest and involvement,” says Wilkerson.

Embrace the unexpected: “After using LegSim for 10 years, I am confident that students are going to have a positive experience,” says Wilkerson. “I am much less certain about how events will unfold. This makes the class eminently more interesting to me as the instructor.” Once, he had to improvise a Supreme-Court–style arbitration to settle a dispute between two groups of students. One group wanted to extend the LegSim session by a day to hold a legislative vote; the other had thus far successfully delayed the vote and wanted the session to end so it couldn’t occur. Wilkerson scrambled to find a qualified volunteer willing not only to evaluate student briefs, but to do so overnight. A local attorney stepped up and rendered a decision in favor of the students who wanted to extend the session.

Resources: Walter Parker, Susan Mosborg, John Bransford, Nancy Vye, John Wilkerson, and Robert Abbott, “Rethinking Advanced High School Coursework: Tackling the Depth/Breadth Tension in the AP US Government and Politics Course,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 43, no. 4 (2011): 533-559.

Wilkerson and a long-time student collaborator, Nicholas Stramp, have also developed Legislative Explorer (http://www.legex.org), a site that visualizes the progress of more than 250,000 Congressional bills and resolutions introduced since 1973. Through the site animations, students and citizens can see, for example, exactly where and when bills get stalled. The site has been featured in The Washington Post (John Wilkerson, Nick Stramp, and David Smith, “Why bill success is a lousy way to keep score in Congress,” 6 February 2014) and The Huffington Post (HuffPollster, 28 April 2014).

Learn More

Read the full Provost report on how to use technology in the classroom to engage students.

Using video to create a community of practice among online students

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Early Childhood & Family Studies Online Degree

“Last year I taught a class of 50 students that I never met in person but saw via video at least 18 times in 10 weeks. Using online tools, we were still able to build a community of reflection and practice.”

Gail Joseph
Program Director, Early Childhood & Family Studies; Associate Professor, Education

 

Faculty in the online Early Childhood & Family Studies (ECFS) degree learned that video feedback can help student-teachers progress as quickly, or even more quickly, than in-person coaching. Their techniques could also be used to coach students practicing other interpersonal activities, such as leading discussions, says Gail Joseph.

“In our program, students video themselves teaching children, using a practice that we’ve discussed in class, and receive quick, targeted feedback from the instructors and a small group of peers, their community of reflection and practice (or CORP, for short),” says Joseph. In addition to frequent feedback linked to coursework, a key factor in students’ learning is the ability to observe themselves and reflect on their own work practices. Joseph says that even students who are initially uncomfortable with the video assignments quickly come to see their value. “One student said, ‘I hated the idea of video in the beginning. It was the worst part of the program for me, but now I can’t ever imagine teaching without a camera in the room, capturing what I’m doing so I can go back and watch later.’”

The video assignments used in the online ECFS program, the first online bachelor’s degree offered by the UW, build on techniques developed for in-person ECFS and other classes, and by the National Center on Quality Teaching and Learning (NCQTL), which provides professional training to teachers in Head Start programs. The ECFS program has been recognized for its efforts by Nonprofit Colleges Online, which ranked the ECFS program the nation’s No. 2 online education bachelor’s degree. Here are the team’s suggestions for coaching students through video and online discussions:

“Seeing a recommended teaching practice makes all the difference in the world. That’s what makes video so crucial in training teachers.”

Susan Sandall
Principal Investigator, National Center on Quality Teaching and Learning; Professor, Education

 

Create assignments that build observation skills over time: Video assignments are part of almost every ECFS course. This allows time for students to build observation skills before they’re asked to analyze their own work. Through a process the team calls “Know, See, Do, Improve,” students learn about teaching techniques in online lectures and videos and practice identifying them (see Joseph and Brennan in Resources). Students then post baseline videos of themselves at work, and observe and reflect on their own use of a specific teaching method. They make a plan to improve, and record themselves again. Students comment on their own teaching as shown in the videos they’ve posted, and on the videos posted by other students in their learning community.

Train students in effective evaluation: ECFS instructors provide feedback on three levels: on students’ teaching as shown in their videos; on students’ understanding of their work, as shown by their comments on their own videos; and on their ability to coach others, as shown by their comments on other students’ videos. The feedback on comments is a critical part of helping students hone their skills of observation and reflection. Joseph says, “I might ask a student for more detail, or tell them ‘I think you did this very well.’“ The goal is for students to learn how to give very specific feedback and constructive comments to their fellow students. “We call that providing coach-quality feedback,” says Joseph.

“In our discussion forums, we’ve found that we’re hearing more equally from all of our students, and we’ve been pleasantly surprised at how deeply they’ve taken these discussions.”

Colleen O. Dillon
Clinical Psychologist and Director of Training, Barnard Center for Infant Mental Health and Development; Senior Lecturer, Family and Child Nursing

 

Require students to keep evaluation videos short: For each assignment, students post only three to five minutes of video. “Selecting the video is an important problem-solving exercise,” says Susan Sandall. “The students have to be able to distinguish a specific teaching activity from others that may be similar.”
Schedule time for video reviews: Reviewing student videos “isn’t easy and you have to keep on top of it. It’s a substantial commitment,” says Sandall. “Tell yourself, ‘I’ll watch the videos every week at this time’ or ‘I’ll watch some videos every day.’”

Require students to obtain permissions from video participants: “Students are required to get permissions from parents to video the children in their class or childcare, as well as from any adults who may appear in their videos,” says Joseph. “When they upload a video, they click a box stating ‘I certify that I have all the permissions on file.’” Students keep the paper consent forms. Faculty need to decide how broad they want to make consent forms, especially if they want to build a library of video examples.

Have students use the same equipment: ECFS faculty require students to purchase a specific technology bundle in lieu of a textbook. “In other courses that used video where I didn’t specify a certain camera, all my TA’s time was taken up with technical issues, such as trying to figure out how to get video off of someone’s phone,” says Joseph. When students use the same equipment, Joseph can instead direct TA time to developing tutorials and providing extra help for students uncomfortable with technology. To help offset the costs of the equipment, the ECFS faculty assign free open-source readings as often as possible.

“Our goal is to create online forums that allow for deep reflection in a safe and protected community of learners. That means breaking a large class into multiple subgroups or ‘neighborhoods,’ ideally of no more than 15 students.”

Miriam Hirschstein
Senior Research Scientist and Director of Evaluation, Barnard Center for Infant Mental Health and Development; Lecturer, Education

 

Keep discussion groups small when discussing emotional topics: Most ECFS classes also involve discussions of videos curated by the instructor. Keeping discussion groups to 15 or fewer students is important when discussing emotions, say Miriam Hirschstein and Colleen Dillon, both 2014 Teaching with Technology Fellows. They are translating another ECFS in-person class to an online format, Infants and Young Children: Risk and Resilience (NSG 432/ECFS 302). In addition to asking students to identify interactions between babies and caregivers in videos, Hirschstein and Dillon will also ask them to monitor their own reactions. “We might ask them ‘What did you notice or feel as you watched the older sibling pushing aside the baby? What did that bring up for you?’“ says Dillon. “Essentially, we’re asking students to reflect on how their emotional responses influence what they notice, and perhaps what they don’t notice in the videos. Our experience has been that this kind of sharing and reflecting goes very deep quickly in an online forum, perhaps more so even than in face-to-face coursework.”

Resources: Gail E. Joseph and Carolyn Brennan, “Framing Quality: Annotated Video-Based Portfolios of Classroom Practice by Pre- service Teachers,” Early Childhood Education Journal 41, no. 6 (2013): 423-430, doi: 10.1007/s10643-013-0576-7.

UW Today reported the stories of ECFS students after one year in the online program: Molly McElroy, “‘I see it, learn it and do it’: A peek into the lives of some of UW’s online students,” 2 July 2014.

With support from the College of Education and the NCQTL, the ECFS team developed the “Coaching Companion” tool, an online system for coaching via video. “Coaching Companion” is available for use by UW faculty through UW Educational Outreach.

Learn More

Read the full Provost report on how to use technology in the classroom to engage students.

Helping students learn to work on professional teams

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“I want students to leave the class able to participate in a professional software development team.”

Sean Munson
Assistant Professor, Human Centered Design & Engineering

 

In Sean Munson’s introductory course in Interactive Systems Design and Technology (HCDE 310), students learn computational thinking and gain experience with tools they would encounter on a professional software team. This requires them to learn to program software, a prospect many find intimidating. So Munson crafts programming assignments that build to a capstone project, designing and coding an application in an area of interest to them. “I wanted to empower students,” says Munson. “To get them to think, ‘This is cool! I can make something!’”

Student capstone projects have included an application that translates text messages, a tool that pulls up recipes by ingredient, and a parking spot reminder application that was a semifinalist in the Shobe Startup Prize. “My goal is that students understand how different pieces of a development team fit together and how to communicate with other members of the team,” says Munson. This includes being able to ask appropriate questions, developing design specifications, and submitting useful error reports, as well as using tools common to modern development environments. Several students told Munson they believed their learning in his course was a major contributor to getting industry jobs and internships, and that it prepared them to meaningfully contribute to research groups in the department and elsewhere on campus. Here are some of Munson’s thoughts on using technology to help students gain professional practice:

Record lectures for students who need extra help or want additional challenges: Munson says he is gradually recording lectures that review material for students who need more time to cover the material, or provide advanced content for students wanting to move ahead of the class. He says that recorded lectures are also a good place to cover step-by-step technology set-up for students who need that support.

Standardize software to reduce time required for tech support: At the beginning of the quarter, Munson distributes open-source software to his students so that each has the same “virtual machine” to use for programming. This reduces support time and confusion among students who have little or no programming experience. Munson uses the same software during demonstrations, so students can follow along in the same interface. Some students with more experience ask to work in a different environment. Munson tells them, “We’re not responsible for supporting that platform, but you’re welcome to make that choice.”

Give students practice working with professional tools: Repositories of computer code are a crucial tool for large collaborative software projects. Therefore, the virtual machine Munson provides to students connects to a basic repository that hosts lecture and assignment code. Students also set up their own repositories, where they check in code that they have written and tested so it’s available to their teammates, just as they would on a professional development project. The repository also serves as a backup if a student’s computer crashes.

Provide a safe place to ask questions: After exploring several options for discussion spaces, Munson settled on an optional Facebook group. Students primarily answer each other’s questions, but Munson and a teaching assistant drop into the discussion to coach students who ask incomplete or confusing questions, for example, by neglecting to include the code that is failing or the error message it generates. This practice in asking questions effectively prepares students to ask for help in a professional environment, such as Stack Overflow, a public question-and-answer site for programming and development issues, says Munson.

Model professional practice and problem-solving: Munson polls students during class using a basic tool he built. His polling tool gives him a way to gauge student understanding and also gives students an unintimidating window into software development, in this case, detecting, reporting, and repairing errors. “I deliberately left some bugs in the software, ways that students can submit an answer a thousand times if they want to,” says Munson. “So, as they learn about the technologies the tool is based on, they have fun seeing if they can break it.”

Learn More

Read the full Provost report on how to use technology in the classroom to engage students.