2024 Symposium - University of Southern Indiana

8th Annual Celebration of Teaching and Learning Symposium

Wednesday, February 14, 2024 | 8:30 am - 2:30 pm (Central Standard Time)
University Center East, Evansville, IN

You are invited to the eighth annual Celebration of Teaching & Learning Symposium, hosted on-campus at the University of Southern Indiana. The Symposium includes works focusing on improving and transforming student learning, academic success, and curriculum in higher education as we celebrate the love for teaching and learning. It provides opportunities to share and discuss teaching and learning efforts framed as Teaching Practice or the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) with colleagues from across the region.

The program features a keynote presentation "Clicking into Place: Harnessing Learning Data for Practical Classroom Improvement" by Dr. Benjamin Motz (Indiana University) during lunch and includes lightning, standard, and poster presentations.

word-cloud-abstracts — This word cloud was generated from the 2024 presentation abstracts.

*Please provide any dietary requests by February 7 if you plan to attend the keynote luncheon. Register by February 12 to enter the door prize drawing.

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Clicking into Place: Harnessing Learning Data for Practical Classroom Improvement

Presented by Dr. Benjamin Motz, Indiana University ben-motz-image

Keynote Slides

Abstract:
What are your students doing? How are they studying? How are they engaging with learning materials? Historically, the answers to these questions have been completely unobservable to teachers, because studying occurred outside the classroom, in the privacy of students’ apartments, libraries, and local coffee shops. But nowadays, our digital learning platforms are brimming with data, as student’s clicks on learning resources, readings, and course activities are being logged moment-by-moment. How can we make constructive use of these data, in a way that benefits student learning and success? In this talk, I'll put a spotlight on the transformative potential of these clicks, with a focus on providing instructors with practical takeaways they can bring to their own classes, and I'll also describe large scale studies where we've observed substantial improvement from relatively simple student interventions. Throughout I'll also share tips about how we should be interpreting these data, protecting student privacy, and giving students agency in how their data are utilized. Participants will learn how to turn the seemingly abstract world of learning data into practical tools for boosting student achievement.

About the speaker:
Dr. Ben Motz (he rhymes with boats) is an Assistant Professor in Indiana University's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. He received his BS from Indiana University, MS from University of California San Diego, and his PhD at Indiana University, all in Cognitive Science. His research is at the intersection of cognitive psychology and education, characterized by large-scale experiments and analyses on students from real education settings that test theoretical predictions from the psychological science of learning. Motz's work has deep roots in the classroom, where he spent a decade as a full-time teaching faculty member, and a common theme is the use of technology, both for its potential to improve student learning, and for its ability to improve research methods. Currently, Dr. Motz runs Terracotta, a learning management system plugin that makes it possible to rigorously and responsibly conduct controlled experiments in students' online coursework, and the INTERACT Incubator, a diverse collective of researchers, education stakeholders, and technologists, seeking to improve research infrastructure for improving equity in STEM education.