Center for Instructional Innovation - Western Washington University's Teaching and Learning Center
1999-2000 Featured Instructors
The Election Project was piloted in the Fall of 1998 in Professor Ken Hoover's Political Science 101 course. Students in the Election Project worked in teams assigned to one of four election-related concepts. Each team took information generated by their written reports and created a website. They streamed video election updates and team reports live on the Internet on Election Day.
This showcase features instructor Scott Brennan's Environmental Studies 101 course that was taught Fall Quarter, 1999. The environmental studies course was redesigned using multimedia and was presented in a large lecture hall in an electronic presentation format. Students were also able to access a specially designed website for course information, announcements, and to discuss course issues via an electronic discussion board.
Professor Shaw Gynan's lecture on ebonics, inspired by a controversial radio program, stimulated discussion and critical thought in a sociolinguistics course. Various media, cartoons, audio, and images enhanced the lecture.
Two instructors from Western Washington University (Kenn Apel) and the University of Nebraska at Omaha created a set of common readings for their students. The students met via the Internet four times during the quarter, sending each other live audio and video, and engaging in a collaborative discussion about their shared coursework.
The Innovative Teaching Showcase
In 1999, the Center for Instructional Innovation at Western Washington University (WWU) conceived of a new kind of web publication, one that spotlighted WWU faculty excellence and innovation, but that also allowed faculty from around the world to read about and adapt these innovations in their own courses. Inspired by the open source movement, showcasees were encouraged to write a portfolio for the general academic audience, so that instructors in other disciplines could adapt these ideas in their own courses. Because of this, faculty were encouraged to be detailed in describing their work, especially in terms of its generalizability to other disciplines.
The showcase was designed as a “one-stop shopping” center, so that interested faculty could learn all the details. For this reason lesson plans, assignments, syllabi, and other course associated documents were also published along with the portfolio, the “how-to” guide. In order to tie this in with the assessment of major skills students should be acquiring in college (writing, critical thinking, quantitative & symbolic reasoning, and information literacy) the showcase website also featured a section that encouraged faculty to list how their course or innovation met selected learning outcomes in these areas. Each faculty member showcased was also interviewed about his or her work, and the interview was edited into a series of short videos that provided supplemental information for showcase browsers.
This is an archived version of the first showcase that was published in the spring of 2000. Each year, as the new showcase is published in June, the previous year’s showcase is archived on the web so that it is permanently available to anyone who wishes to use it as a resource.
