Award Recipient: Steven Anderson
Title: Director of USC’s Ph.D. Program in Media Arts and Practice and Assistant Professor of Interactive Media
School: USC School of Cinematic Arts
Department(s) or Affiliation: Media Arts and Practice
Project Title: Mobile Commons
Award: $19,750
Created with support from the MacArthur Foundation, Critical Commons, is an online database of contextualized media clips and critical commentaries created by and for educators who use media in teaching. Mobile Commons extends the core functionality of this project, delivering media and commentaries directly to mobile phones and allowing learners to create annotated playlists and add their own commentaries. Mobile Commons is conceived as both a design challenge for graduate students, and afterwards, as a tool that both supplements traditional classroom teaching and may function as part of a fully distributed distance curriculum.
Award Recipient: Glenn T. Clark
Title: Professor and director of the Orofacial Pain and Oral Medicine (OFPOM) Center
School: School of Dentistry
Department(s) or Affiliation: Diagnostic Sciences
Project Title: Using an Autonomous Virtual Patient in Second Life to Perform Objective
Standardized Clinical Examinations (OSCE)
Award: $35,000
This proposal seeks to expand, improve, refine, document and pilot our recently developed Virtual Patient OSCE system on fifty DDS (4th year) students at the USC School of Dentistry. To make our Virtual Patients autonomous, we employ a Natural Language Processing (NLP) system using WordNet (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/obtain) in a multithreaded environment. These VPs are resident on the USCSD Island in the Second Life virtual world and these VP’s have a set of custom backend control programs and an SQL database. Continuing this work is critical our online efforts and to the transferability of this system to other teaching units at USC.
Award Recipient: Mark W. Redekopp
Title: Senior Lecturer
School: Viterbi School of Engineering
Department(s) or Affiliation: Electrical Engineering
Project Title: The Inverted Classroom: Using Distance Learning to Promote Higher-Level Learning Outcomes
Award: $9,500
We propose a so-called “inverted classroom” where traditional lecture material comprised of basic knowledge transfer and low-level details (which still requires an instructors careful explanation) be moved into video modules that can be accessed by students outside of the classroom in the time they would normally spend on homework. In its place class lecture time would be used for problem-solving, advanced discussion, team-based projects and lab exercises, and assessment exercises (using Blackboard for online assessments).
The goal of this project is to pilot the transition of a traditional lecture-based course to a more interactive and hands-on in-class approach. We aim to maximizing the effectiveness of the time students share with the instructor by focusing on higher level learning skills and using distance learning via video and webcasts for achieving the lower-level learning skills. We hope to demonstrate that this new approach can achieve superior educational and pedagogical outcomes.