Catherine Beise, cmbeise@salisbury.edu

Project: Integrating WebCT, On-Line Learning Logs (Blogs) and VTC (Videoteleconferencing) to Stimulate Global Virtual Teamwork

This project focuses primarily in two of the four areas: instructional technology and instructional strategy.  The course to which the proposed technologies and strategies will be applied (at least initially) is INFO 465, Global Information Technology (IT) Management, which is an elective that satisfies the international coursework requirement for all business majors.  It is selected by most Information Systems majors, but often includes students from other majors, such as International Business, as well.  It is offered every semester (Fall and Spring).

As part of the course, students will be organized into "virtual" teams to accomplish a semester long project studying and reporting on assigned countries throughout the world.  The students will share information and collaborate within their teams, with the rest of the class, and with the instructor using WebCT, web pages, web logs ("blogs"), discussion boards, and chat sessions, enhanced where possible with desktop videoconferencing.  The purpose of the proposed mentoring grant activities are to enhance my own ability as an instructor to to facilitate cooperative, active, technology-support learning, and in turn to increase the students' skills, knowledge, and experience to better prepare them for the global workforce and tools used by distributed transnational organizations.  Upon completion of the grant activities, I will be able to mentor other faculty in other disciplines in using similar tools and methods to accomplish their own pedagogical goals.  In addition, the grant activities should be sufficiently innovative to be published in education-related forums for the benefit of external audiences.

Miquel Mitchell, momitchell@salisbury.edu

Project: Chemistry Laboratory Curriculum Integrating Biology, Chemistry, and Real-World Technology

Although biology and health professions majors present the largest fraction of students taking general and organic chemistry courses at Salisbury University, there is no laboratory component to these courses that illustrates why chemistry is relevant to the life sciences.  In addition, the chemistry labs contain no examples of practical uses of chemistry.  After taking two years of college-level chemistry, students may only have a vague notion of what anyone actually does with chemistry in the non-academic world.  To give the chemistry courses greater relevance to students, I propose the creation of laboratory exercises that would allow students to discover the usefulness of chemistry.  Each laboratory program will incorporate application-oriented experiments.  At the end of each semester, lab instructors will evaluate how well students can use chemical concepts in problem solving and compare the results of knowledge retention and problem solving skills obtained from traditional vs. application-oriented laboratory exercises.