Funding

The team of UC faculty, staff, and students will use the TLtC funds to add new technologies, expand the coverage, and develop teaching and learning applications for the UC Atlas of Global Inequality. The Atlas will serve as a learning tool and instructional resources to the UC community interested in the discussion of the effects of globalization. This project utilizes widely available Internet technologies to provide an interactive web-based Atlas that covers social, environmental, and economic inequalities. The goal of the Atlas Project is to provide a uniquely designed tool that reflects the multidimensional aspects of globalization to users in multiple disciplines throughout the UC system.

Project URL: http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/

> Second-year proposal [MS Word]

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This three-year project is implementing and institutionalizing Calibrated Peer Review ™(CPR) in very large courses in three departments at UCLA: Life Science core courses for science majors, the school-wide Engineering and Society course, and the general education Atmospheric Science courses for non-science majors; and in introductory and advanced organic chemistry courses in the Chemistry department at UCR. Collectively, these courses enroll thousands of students each year.

CPR is a comprehensive, web-based, instructional tool that enables instructors to use frequent writing assignments in any size course without requiring additional teaching resources. Evaluation studies completed during the first two years of this project have shown significant student learning gains in both Life Science 1 at UCLA and Chemistry 112B at UCR.

Project URL: http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu

> Third-year proposal [MS Word]

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In the third year of the Electronic Language Materials Archive (ELMA) project, the team will concentrate on an intensive dissemination and recruitment program for submissions of teaching modules to the archive, and faculty and teaching assistant training for the repurposing of existing electronic materials for the population of ELMA. ELMA's goals for the third year of the project are consistent with the original proposal: to foster curricular reform in language classes across the UC system by the incorporation of content-based instruction through the use of authentic web-delivered materials. These materials, which include a sound pedagogical apparatus, are indexed and stored and can then be retrieved and utilized by instructors, and in turn by students, through a searchable database.

Project URLS:
French modules:
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/web/elma/vera/
Spanish modules:
http://languages.ucsc.edu/elma/
http://www.spanport.ucsb.edu/projects/llcf/ELMA/spanishsites.html

> Third-year proposal [MS Word]

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ePhysics is a way to interactively engage students in learning physics concepts. The website currently has over 50 applets using the latest web-based technologies and is proving invaluable in teaching introductory physics and astronomy. It is a flexible tool that can be tightly integrated into course materials as planned at UC Berkeley, or used as a library of learning objects available at any time in any classroom or on any class website as at UCLA. ePhysics supports new teaching methods which have been shown to improve student understanding of physics concepts.

The team will use TLtC funds to improve and extend the already existing prototype resource, develop the new instructional tools to meet the specific needs of individual UC campuses, evaluate and assess the efficacy of the applets, and extend the knowledge of, and promote the use of, the resource within UC. New homework, laboratory, and lecture demonstration features are proposed. Collaboration and outreach work throughout the whole UC system is planned. The resource will be permanently publicly accessible through the UCLA ePhysics website and will also be available on CD-ROM. Customized or mirror sites can be set up on other campuses.

Project URL: http://www.physics.ucla.edu/demoweb/ephysics.htm

> First-year proposal [MS Word]

Logic 2000 is a system for computer- and Internet-assisted classroom instruction in first-order logic, in which instructors instruct, while software does the tutorials, grading, and clerical work. It has engendered significant, demonstrable improvements in student performance. Instructors create assignments on a web page for students to complete within the program, which contains a variety of handy tools to simplify the mechanics of entering work. The program corrects the student’s work, and provides several layers of detailed error messages, along with hints and explanations. When satisfied, students submit their work to a course database. Students can access their own assignment page showing the assignments, work completed, and their score on each problem. Instructors can view a summary of the work of all students, individual student assignment pages, and a statistical summary of the time spent and the amount of help requested for each problem. Exams are treated simply as another assignment, with error messages disabled.

> First-year proposal [MS Word]

UCWRITE is a website dedicated to fostering communication and sharing of pedagogical resources about writing. It was proposed with two parallel aims in mind: (1) to create a location -- a password-protected portal -- where writing faculty systemwide could gather to discuss and develop pedagogy, engage in collaborative work, and share their experience of teaching in the separate campus writing programs; and (2) to offer an overview of the writing requirements and expectations for college-level writing at UC campuses, and the writing resources available through the UC Writing Programs, to a broad set of interested audiences. These audiences include teachers and counselors at California high schools; high school students and their parents eager for a window onto the expectations and resources for writing at the UC campuses; graduate students eager for guidance in teaching writing, or teaching other subjects through written assignments; and faculty across the curriculum interested in developing and sharing their ideas for using writing in their classrooms. Sections of the site are devoted to comparative information about the UC Writing Programs, the Subject A requirement, first-year writing, English as a second language, computers, and composition; future sections will address upper-division writing, transfer students and writing, and composition research.

Project URL: http://ucwrite.org

> Third-year proposal [MS Word]

> Read feature story about this project

Physics resources are scattered throughout the Internet. The quality varies widely and some don't perform well or at all. Some don't run on all platforms. Instructors may not be motivated to search the Internet for such resources because of the large amount of time required to perform a thorough search and evaluation. As a result many Physics instructors may not be aware of resources that could supplement the material being presented in the classroom.

The ePhysics project collects, with the necessary permissions, the best interactive physics, planetary physics, and astronomy animations and makes them available in a well-organized way. In addition, we are actively developing new animations and other resources for physics teaching. These interactive animations make possible active learning and self-paced discovery. They are used as classroom demonstrations and linked to course websites. The animations allow new types of physics problems which test conceptual understanding in new ways.

A demo site can be found at:
http://www.physics.ucla.edu/demoweb/ephysics.htm

The UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory was founded in 1997 with the mission of creating scientifically authenticated 3D computer models of cultural heritage sites around the world. It has recently created a 3D real-time computer model of the Roman Forum, ancient Rome's city center, as it appeared in ca. 400 A.D. The model, which was authored by a distinguished Scientific Committee of American and Italian experts on Roman topography, includes all the monuments, temples, courthouses, and government buildings known to have occupied the area of the Forum. The model enables UCLA teachers and students to travel back in time to understand how the Forum looked and functioned at the peak of its development. It currently runs only on a supercomputer in the UCLA ATS Visualization Portal.

The present project is intended to study the feasibility of making the model more widely available in the UC system and elsewhere as a resource in education. UC Professors from the Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, and Berkeley campuses will meet for a two-day conference during the period Winter Quarter 2003 to view the model; to see how the model is used in the ATS Visualization Portal in instruction at UCLA; and to consider ways that the model could be used in courses on the participants' campuses. In follow-up research, technological resources will be identified on the other participating campuses for using the model in instruction. These could include facilities like the UCLA Visualization Portal but also less expensive alternatives such as projection in real-time from laptop computers with powerful graphics cards; projection of DVD-quality videotaped fly-throughs; QuickTime panoramas delivered in the classroom from laptops or the Internet.

Assuming that at least some of the participants determine that they could fruitfully incorporate the model into their courses, the feasibility project will result in an application for a Full-scale Expansion & Implementation Grant in April, 2003.

The seven UC professors in this project represent five disciplines on four campuses. Potentially, the project would help to improve 17 courses typically enrolling over 1500 undergraduate students per year.

Our goal is to improve teaching in the environmental field sciences through deploying arrays of Internet-based sensors such as weather stations, stream gauges and web cameras on three field stations that are part of the UC Natural Reserve System. These environmental sensors will be linked by satellite Internet connections to classrooms both at the field stations and on the Davis, Berkeley and Santa Barbara campuses. Students will have access to multiple real-time and archived data sets from each reserve. Through this technology we seek to overcome the barriers of expense and timing that make it difficult to expose students to the full range of spatial and temporal complexity inherent in the natural environment. This program will build on existing efforts to deploy advanced sensing and networking technology at the UC Natural Reserves, and will add a stronger instructional component to these efforts through our curricular development activities. In the long term we hope to include more UC campuses and NRS reserves in this program.

In the planning phase, we will work with faculty teaching in the natural sciences at the three campuses to design ways to use this new technology to enhance existing campus-based and field-based courses. We will explore the potential to develop new curricular modules and perhaps even new courses. This will enable us to submit an implementation grant with fully developed linkages between technology and teaching.