Instructional Improvement Awards given to 12

Twelve University of Iowa faculty members will receive the 2001-02 Instructional Improvement Awards to support projects designed to improve classroom teaching. The awards are presented each year by the Council on Teaching. The funding supports instructional projects designed to make exceptional and specific contributions to in-class instruction.

Russell Valentino, Russian, will collaborate with colleagues at Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa to enhance the study of less commonly taught languages and area-related subjects through the use of Internet-based distance learning technology. The funds will be used to purchase three Polycom desktop camera units (screen-top cameras for use with a personal computer, two of which will be located in professors’ offices and one in the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies) as well as one receiving unit to be used in the University’s Russian Computer Laboratory. Since hiring new faculty is unlikely and student demand is not high enough, this collaborative project will allow students at all three campuses to study first- and second-year Czech, Polish, and Serbo-Croatian as well as selected area studies courses.

Thomas Swiss, English, will create an innovative new course, New Media Poetry: Histories, Aesthetics, and Institutions, that explores the developing traditions of “electronic” poetry as well as contemporary digital arts and culture. He will convert the digital installation/web-based work of eight writers to CD, slide, and video formats for cross-media comparison and study within the class.

Downing Thomas and L. Kathy Heilenman, French and Italian, will hire a part-time research or teaching assistant to help them develop a corpus of authentic French language that focuses on transactional interactions likely to be encountered by travelers, such as ordering food, getting a hotel room, and dealing with customs. The assistant will go through existing videos and transcripts and identify appropriate material, record and transcribe semi-scripted role plays, and work with directors to make the corpus useable by fall 2002. Fourth-semester French students will be able to investigate actual language use by accessing the corpus through concordance software. The project will help improve students’ grasp of the language while also providing them with an undergraduate research experience as they work to gather additional data.

Kathleen Janz, health, leisure, and sport studies, and Linda Snetselaar, epidemiology, will purchase equipment to enhance the hands-on training of students who are learning to measure physical activity and counsel for activity and dietary change. For example, students will be able to use new heart-rate monitors and accelerometers in laboratory experiments and a digital video camera to make observational recordings of physical activity in community settings, such as parks, gymnasiums, and business centers. A laptop computer and software for downloading data from the activity monitors and for coding observations also will be purchased. Inactivity and unhealthy eating are responsible for 300,000 U.S. deaths each year, and studies have shown that counseling on improving activity levels and eating habits is an underutilized strategy in health care.

Sarah Adams, art and art history, will travel to South Africa this summer to collect materials for a new course, Art and South African Independence. She will visit museums and artists’ studios, record interviews with artists about their work, and take slides of new work. South Africa is becoming a center for the arts in Africa, yet there are limited texts available on South African artists. The collected materials will be available to all University art professors and students and will help the School of Art and Art History develop its Modern Studies Program.

Mary Adamek, music, will purchase a laptop computer with a CD-RW drive, digital and VHS tapes, and assorted materials, such as percussion instruments, guitars, and recordings, to develop and record clinical practica experiences in the Iowa City Community School District for UI students of music therapy. The project will allow students to work in schools with students with disabilities, collaborate with other professionals in music and special education, and learn from videotapes made during the sessions.

Alan Peters, urban and regional planning, will purchase a digital camera and visualization software for use in a new graduate class, Virtual Reality and Urban Development. The new software, which provides an extremely useful way of investigating the design consequences of current and proposed city code, will allow graduate students to experience technology at the cutting edge of urban planning. The course—one of the first of its kind in the nation—will use the Iowa City peninsula development as the basis for a course project.

Tom Southard and Karin Southard, orthodontics, will prepare and place on the web 40 digital interactive patient cases that will be used to teach the spectrum of orthodontic problems typically seen in clinical practice. Students will be able to examine facial photographs, intraoral photos, facial radiographs, and dental radiographs. From these records, they will develop a patient problem list, select appropriate treatment, and examine outcomes of treatment actually provided during subsequent months or years. The cases will be placed on the web for use by other dental faculty and students.

Anil K. Sood, obstetrics and gynecology, will design two videotapes and handouts that can be used to teach key components of operative dictations to residents and medical students. Students will view these tapes and be asked to dictate accurate operative notes. Operative notes are legal documents that are the only record of what was actually performed at the time of surgery, and accuracy is necessary for future treatment planning and for bill reimbursement agencies. More than one million operative procedures are performed in obstetrics and gynecology nationally each year, and currently there is no formal educational system targeted toward dictation of appropriate operative notes.

Compiled by Sara Epstein