Scope of Awards

The College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce a new initiative for tenured or tenure-track faculty members who seek time to develop the instructional technology component of a course they are teaching. Faculty members may: (1) apply the stipend for work during the summer or academic year, (2) use it for release time [pending approval of their departments and the Dean of the Faculty], or (3) use it to purchase specialized software and/or other peripheral equipment as necessary.

at turning professional research products into teaching products for use by real students in lower division undergraduate courses in the next academic year. Approximately $90K of funding is available to support 2--5 curriculum development proposals. We are specifically seeking proposals that

1. Integrate departmental research into an active teaching product that becomes a standard part of the teaching curriculum.
2. Use such research or data as the basis for facilitating student collaborative learning and group work.
3. Develop interfaces (visualization tools, etc) that organize information efficiently to allow students to interactively navigate the material and form more detailed conclusions than are usually formed from static lecture material alone.

Eligibility

Any full time faculty member in a CAS unit may apply. In addition, a team of faculty members within a unit may also apply.

Deadline

All proposals should be received by June 4, 1999.

Proposal Format

Proposals will only be accepted in one of two forms:
• A hardcopy document
• A WEB document done in HTML (this is preferred).

We will not accept proposals in the form of an e-mail attachment.

Proposal should be submitted to N. Deshpande, Assoc. Dean, CAS. If you prepare a proposal in HTML form, simply send email to either N.Deshpande (desh@oregon.uoregon.edu) or G. Bothun (nuts@bigmoo.uoregon.edu) stating the relevant URL.

Proposal Intent

We are not asking for the development of complete WEB-based courses. Instead, we are soliciting proposals that will successfully allow a department's or an individual's research projects to become part of the teaching curriculum that can be used by the students. Its quite possible to achieve these goals without the use of technology and we will be receptive to these kinds of proposals. The intent here is to get students, at the lower division undergraduate levels, to become actively involved with the data/research aspects of a discipline and for that activity to become a significant portion of the course work. More details can be found below.

Support under this RFP

The funds available in this program will support the following:
• Faculty salaries (e.g. summer salary)
• Graduate or undergraduate assistants
• Purchase of equipment for the project
• Purchase of necessary software
• Limited travel to appropriate workshops

In addition, support over the summer for approved projects will also be made available by the New Media Center.

We expect minimum funding levels around $20K.

Proposal Content Checklist

1. Letter of support from Unit Head.
2. Cover letter listing all relevant personnel and their contribution to this project
3. Summary of classes impacted by this project and approximate enrollment (i.e. who is the target audience).
4. Proposal Summary (a one page coherent abstract)
5. Proposal Body (no more than 10 pages) touching on the points in the narrative below -- be creative but also be realistic. Give specific examples of available data/research products that are potentially applicable to the classroom. Don't be vague and generic.
6. Budget and explanation of budget items

Expectation

We are providing a reasonably large level of funding for the proposed activity. The sustainability of this effort after the support is withdrawn is also crucial. The intent of this RFP is to provide adequate resources so that faculty will actually produce a research-based teaching product that gets used.

Narrative

In February 1997, the University of Oregon was only one of ten institutions nationwide to win the first round of the Recognition Award for the Integration of Research and Education (RAIRE). The UO proposal was unique in that our case was built on the use of high speed networking as a means of delivering research products, as part of the standard teaching curriculum, to large numbers of undergraduate students. A portion of those funds are being used to support this RFP.

One of the benefits that we often tout about the Research University, is that we expose our students to research. However, its rather unclear how much of this really occurs at the lower division undergraduate levels where lecture based information delivery appears to be the norm. This RFP seeks to offer incentive funds so that faculty can take their discipline-specific research and deliver it to the students in a way that allows them to interact with this research in a manner that promotes better learning of the subject. This might take the form of exercises the students do with the data or might involve some form of interactive data analysis, reduction, etc. The point is to try to promote student interaction with the data and to develop student collaboration on data/research centered products.

Although UO faculty are using network tools at an accelerated rate, most of that use is for course management and/or lecture presentation. There is very little in the way of using the network as a research instrument for the class and the students. Where research can be integrated directly into the classroom curriculum and/or external assignments, it can used as a collaboration tool as students work together in groups to do the assignment. Such assignments also help put the meaning of 1 credit hour back into course work as the students spend more time outside of class interacting with the course material (and each other). Hence, projects that facilitate student-student collaboration are strongly preferred. A specific example of one such activity can be found at:

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/exclimate.html

The above is merely an example of the kind of interactive exploration of a data set that technology facilitates. However, it is clear that one can accomplish similar pedagogical goals without the use of technology.

The goal of this RFP is to fund a few projects to help departments gain an understanding, through experience, of how electronic (or traditional) tools can facilitate the use of the department's own research in their classes. Successful projects would promote many things including, allowing departmental faculty to teach from a more readily accessible knowledge base, demonstrate that there is real value in integrating research into teaching, make the class more real for the students as the topics in the class can be directly link to the ON campus research currently occurring and involve the students directly with data and thinking about data and research.

If we want to develop methods to improve teaching and better student interaction of the material and if we want to make it worthwhile for the student to attend a Research University, it seems logical that the research of the University needs to be made more accessible to the students. While there are many ways to accomplish this, the use of the WEB is likely to be the most cost-effective way that engages the most number of students in the most robust kinds of activities.

For more information or if you have specific questions please direct them to G. Bothun, Dept. of Physics. (nuts@bigmoo.uoregon.edu)