Course Redesign ePortfolio Showcase

Redesign AAS 210: History of Asians in the United States to enhance student learning and teaching effectiveness through integrating instructional technologies and pedagogical techniques to: engage students; increase peer-to-peer learning; achieve higher critical thinking domains of knowledge; address issues with accessibility and availability.

This project is intended to address both pedagogical and practical issues that create challenges for students in completing their lower division General Education requirements in History at CSUF. In phase 1, the focus is on creating models for innovative and rigorous online or technologically supported sections of History 110A, 110B, and 180 that provide greater access for students while maintaining intellectual rigor. In phase 2, the focus shifts to pedagogy, student preparation, and instructional support. Key elements of this phase include the creation of faculty coordinator positions for History 110A and 110B. the creation of a faculty development curriculum, and the development of a tutoring and supplemental instruction program for World History courses.

This project is intended to address both pedagogical and practical issues that create challenges for students in completing their lower division General Education requirements in History at CSUF. In phase 1, the focus is on creating models for innovative and rigorous online or technologically supported sections of History 110A, 110B, and 180 that provide greater access for students while maintaining intellectual rigor. In phase 2, the focus shifts to pedagogy, student preparation, and instructional support. Key elements of this phase include the creation of faculty coordinator positions for History 110A and 110B. the creation of a faculty development curriculum, and the development of a tutoring and supplemental instruction program for World History courses.

The project develops a variety of approaches to increase student success in two lower division General Education requirements at CSUF: HIST 110A and HIST 110B. Five pilot projects have been planned and will be rolled out in Spring 2015: peer instruction, supplemental instruction, peer tutoring, early warning, and ChronoZoom.

Explores the culture, history, and geography of people from North and South America. It is the study of specific tribal regions within the U.S., Canada and South America and their traditional way of life pre-contact through the various stages of federal policies against them and their various ways of adaptation to those assimilative policies, told from the Tribal perspective through oral tradition.

Project Abstract

This sixteen week on-line course will provide students in a non-traditional setting access to the same material in a typical face to face class. Materials have been carefully selected to guide students seamlessly through the semester, and provide the same level of rigor to be expected in an undergraduate class setting. While I alone am responsible for the hundreds of hours reflected in the finished product of this class (and responsible for the errors), it is the result of collaboration with web designer, Morgan Barker, without her support it wouldn't have gotten off the ground, and the vetting by two fine historians in our department, Thomas Mays and Anne Paulet.

This course was developed by professors in the Department of World Languages and Cultures, both men and women, with the idea of presenting the roles, life, writing and contributions of women in a wide range of cultures. Professors who originally developed the course, from the French, Spanish, and German programs, not only co-taught the course, but personally translated many of the stories to English for the first time. Two of the women were also Women's Studies professors. Outside professors in Vietnamese and English added to our cultural expertise. The professors have continued their research and publishing, some have retired, and new professors have begun to teach the course. This course was developed to also meet the basic concept of the Women's Studies major, including the core courses and the Humanities concentration "Arts, Expression & Language," of which this course is an important element.

In an effort to create the first online course offered in the Department of Geography, we will be developing a series of accessible video lectures through Camtasia and Youtube, and archiving a selection of no-cost web-based supplementary resources for student use. We will work to build an accessible and attractive website for the course, through our current LMS (Moodle). We will also work to develop a series of high-impact assignments, through which to assess and evaluate student knowledge.

The goal of this redesign is to enrich the classroom experience of students enrolled in US History to 1877. I will reduce class lecturing and create activities that require the students to be historians by deeply engaging in secondary and primary sources to create projects.

This project seeks to implement proven redesign strategies in order to increase student success in a California Title V course. Seeking to increase student investment and interaction, the course redesign will adopt and create group and writing assignments more responsive to student needs. Course modifications are the result of close collaboration with colleauges throughout the CSU system.

The redesigned course will engage students in activities "Reacting the Past," peer review of writing assignments and consensus-building analysis of historical sources. Team activities will give students first hand experience with two important themes of HST 202 – freedom and democracy. A "learning communities" approach with students working collaboratively in small teams will facilitate growth of academic and social skills. The learning communities are defined as "teams" rather than the traditional "groups" and will provide a place for freshman and sophomores to acquire or expand the fundamental academic and social skills necessary for success in college. Instituting this course redesign will increase student motivation, critical thinking skills and improve Student Learning Outcomes. Students will graduate with an understanding of the past that prepares them for meaningful participation in the future. Increased success rates in History 202 can play an important role in university retention and graduation rates.

As a department, we have observed that there is a high failure rate across multiple sections of History 130 and History 131. Many of our entering students lack the skills necessary for college work. Writing, notetaking, critical reading, and analytical skills are generally weak. The US history survey requires students to read difficult material, synthesize a vast amount of information, and complete writing assignments for which they are poorly prepared. In addition, many of our students have to overcome obstacles common to first generation college students including financial pressures and a lack of family support for their academic endeavors.

My US History survey course centers on collaborative learning through the creation of small Learning Communities of four or five students. Throughout the semester, students will complete small collaborative assignments alongside a larger, semester-long group project. I have also revised my course content to focus on the particular theme of Freedom in American history. Throughout the semester, students will regularly reflect on the changing meaning of freedom (or what it means to be free) in American society. This course is also a tablet-based course, which means much of the student's work will be administered through various apps that allow them to collaborate in realtime with their group members.

This course redesign is based on several years of redesign to improve student success, reduce the percentage of students who do not pass with a grade of C or higher, and to improve the quality of education that takes place in the course.

I propose to redesign HIST 110 with History colleagues in order to achieve pedagogical consistency among different instructors. Drs. Kittiya Lee, Timothy Doran, and I each teach part of the year-long GE required course (HIST 110ABC) and are all applicants for the Proven Course Redesign Program. We intend to consult with part-time faculty, encouraging adoption of the course redesign. We will institutionalize the successful strategies by posting on Moodle the classwork, grading systems, and learning exercises, and by encouraging new and current faculty to adapt these for their classrooms. Timing is another important factor in institutionalizing the course redesign. The opportunity now to complete and test the course redesign will ensure continuity when what is currently a three-part annual course becomes a two-part year-long GE requirement under the semester system.

I propose to improve student engagement in American Institutions-US History courses by incorporating team-based learning to facilitate group work. I will also adopt new reading- and writing-reinforcement pedagogies. Finally, I will use the Reacting to the Past (RTTP) role-playing pedagogy to develop critical thinking, oral communication, written communication, and student engagement. For the RTTP component, I will use the game "Launching the Ship of State: The New York Ratifying Convention of 1788."

Two of the biggest barriers to success that our students bring to the classroom are a lack of creative critical thinking skills and poor writing habits. By adopting Proven Course Redesign strategies in the large lecture class we can better address these two critical deficiencies by employing in-class projects (facilitated by the professor and peer mentors) that integrate content learned at home into a variety of exercises that promote critical thinking and writing. Rather than spending an hour and fifteen minutes delivering content and hoping the students can put it to some use, we can instead work closely with our students, fostering a sense of community and engagement, honing their ability to write about and analyze the content they have already consumed, and making them much better thinkers and writers. They will also benefit from the experience of working with peers to solve problems. These are all real-world skills that will benefit them in whatever career or academic path they choose.

History 15A is a course for history majors and non-majors with an annual enrollment of 1,000 students per academic year. For many of these students it is the only history course they will take in their undergraduate education. In the past the course was team taught with political science instructors and now for the first time it is being offered as a sole history course. We are redesigning this course to improve learning outcomes, engage more students, and provide a true introduction to the essentials of U.S. History.

This course redesign will refocus the course so that it emphasizes activities that will help students develop their critical thinking, analytical, critical thinking, and communication skills. Course redesign will emphasize the use of primary sources, students' development of necessary understanding of historical context, and ability to construct and defend a convincing argument, based on analysis of primary sources.

History 15A is a course for history majors and non-majors with an annual enrollment of 1,000 students per academic year. For many of these students it is the only history course they will take in their undergraduate education. In the past the course was team taught with political science instructors and now for the first time it is being offered as a sole history course. We are redesigning this course to improve learning outcomes, engage more students, and provide a true introduction to the essentials of U.S. History.

This project through the CSU Chancellor's Office allows for a redesign of a course that meets California State's requirement of American Institutions. The course to be redesigned is SBS 245: Native American Societies. This course will be redesigned to foster student success in the course and in the state and campus GE Area of American Institutions.

As a department, we have observed that there is a high failure rate across multiple sections of History 130 and History 131. Many of our entering students lack the skills necessary for college work. Writing, notetaking, critical reading, and analytical skills are generally weak. The US history survey requires students to read difficult material, synthesize a vast amount of information, and complete writing assignments for which they are poorly prepared. In addition, many of our students have to overcome obstacles common to first generation college students including financial pressures and a lack of family support for their academic endeavors.

The course enrolls huge numbers of students from multiple sections as it is one of the few that satisfies the California Title V American Institutions and Ideas graduation requirement and the Sacramento State Race and Ethnicity graduation requirement. Most of the students take the course to satisfy these graduation requirements. We seek to allow a way to allow for better student outcomes in the mega and super-class format to better enable students to satisfy the graduation requirement. In my redesigned section, I plan to replace traditional print textbooks with a combined online learning management system/e-book to see if this technology enhances student achievement of the learning outcomes for the course.

Two of the biggest barriers to success that our students bring to the classroom are a lack of creative critical thinking skills and poor writing habits. By adopting Proven Course Redesign strategies in the large lecture class we can better address these two critical deficiencies by employing in-class projects (facilitated by the professor and peer mentors) that integrate content learned at home into a variety of exercises that promote critical thinking and writing. Rather than spending an hour and fifteen minutes delivering content and hoping the students can put it to some use, we can instead work closely with our students, fostering a sense of community and engagement, honing their ability to write about and analyze the content they have already consumed, and making them much better thinkers and writers. They will also benefit from the experience of working with peers to solve problems. These are all real-world skills that will benefit them in whatever career or academic path they choose.

This project will attempt to increase student engagement in face-to-face classroom work through a combination of initiatives. It also involves working with faculty colleagues within the department to encourage adoption of best practices.

This project is an effort to redesign an introductory American history course in a way that focuses on skills and themes. I hope that the video guides and the online quizzes, when combined with a more focused and limited use of the class textbook, and a greater emphasis on reading and discussing primary source documents in small groups, will help the students to engage more closely with the material, and lead them to become better historical thinkers.

A world history course that fulfills a GE requirement and is required for history majors was redesigned using a student assistant to mentor students, redesigned lectures utilizing "Backward Design" strategies and additional outside resources to supplement lectures and reading, group writing experiences, and quizzes using the text online materials to reinforce concepts. In addition, shorter essays that receive immediate feedback were implemented.

This course redesign project will adopt and adapt strategies for greater collaborative learning and peer mentoring in this large format introductory American Institutions course, with the goal of encouraging greater student engagement with material and subsequently student success in the course.

This 2016 ePortfolio provides documentation on a revised version of an experimental U.S. History course first offered in Spring 2014. The course concept, developed by Carole Srole, Birte Pfleger, and Chris Endy, uses flipped teaching for content delivery, small-group learning communities for active learning and community building, and "near-peer" facilitators or peer mentors to support in-class activities and student success. The 2016 version will add several new features: periodic online homework, online surveys to assess student learning attitudes and student historical thinking skills, and a for-credit companion course for the advanced history students serving as peer mentors in the classroom.

Student engagement in community through civic engagement, service learning, and adopting the practice of deliberative democracy has been an important theme of my U.S. history course in the 12 years that I have been teaching it. But I can do even more to further engage my students in this civic learning in three ways: First, I plan to conduct research and benefit from the ongoing conversation about civic engagement in the digital age (by the Pew Research Center, for example). Second, I will redesign the course through a "blended" (or hybrid) community of inquiry approach that allows students to take full advantage of the digital history in their pursuit to become more engaged, active citizens. Third, I will identify and encourage the students to employ various online engagement tools, such as those available at the Center of Civic Digital Engagement, and other online tools for engagement as recommended by the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.

Mexican American Studies (MAS) regularly offers MAS 10A/B Mexican American contributions to U.S. History and Government to serve San Jose State University's (SJSU) ethnic Mexican population and others interested in examining U.S. history and government with an emphasis on the ethnic Mexican experience. The course is designed to be taken sequentially over two semesters to cover the broad scope of the nation's emergence and political development from the ethnic Mexican perspective beginning prior to the arrival of the Spanish up to the present day. In addition to supporting the ethnic Mexican community generally, MAS expects this course to attract students to the MAS minor and soon to be established MAS major. As an entry level offering, MAS intends for the course to provide skill development for ethnic Mexican students who arrive on campus with various levels of preparation. The proposed course redesign focuses effort in four critical areas. First, MAS 10A/B has been redesigned as a flipped, or blended, course to expand the pedagogical platform to deliver greater amount of content in several curricular areas and provide more consistent support to develop reading, writing, communication, and research skills. Second, introduction of a flipped model will support additional efforts to convert MAS 10A/B from a traditional lecture course to a student-centered learning space incorporating active learning approaches. Third, the redesign of MAS 10A/B takes advantage of a modular format to organize content, concepts, and historical debates with a focus on skill building in reading comprehension, lecture capture, written communication, research, note-taking and effective study habits. Fourth, cultural citizenship is a critical conceptual tool in the Mexican American Studies canon and has been incorporated into the redesigned classroom to realign the course curriculum to highlight ethnic Mexican political agency in specific conjunctures of the American experience.

This project is about removing two major bottlenecks (space and time constraints) for an upper division major requirement. Moving the course fully online will remove both physical and temporal barriers that are limiting the class to about 40 students a year, which becomes the upward limit of number of graduates in the major.

My course redesign builds on the Team Based Learning model I already use in my classroom to use small groups to help students decode complicated text. In my redesigned course my intial proposal was to create Youtube videos giving tutorials for students on how to decode primary source documents. In my redesign, I moved to an online textbook and learning tool Globalyceum which includes primary source problems for students to work on. I also moved to multiple lower stakes assignments away from a midterm and final worth 50% of the total grade.

This course has been a traditional mainstay of history departments. It is a requirement for lower division history majors and minors and also for lower division non-majors to fulfill a GE in comparative systems. In the past, barriers have been the wide variation in both student skill level and interest. My goal is to address both of these problems by flipping the class, transforming a course which was the epitome of exclusivity into an inclusive learning laboratory. In the process, I will minimize in-class lectures and incorporate team-based and active learning. This will allow me to move away from providing a narrative, and instead help students gain necessary skills and historical perspective so that they are empowered to critically evaluate dominant and competing narratives of Western Civilization and to become co-constructors of historical narratives.

Project Abstract: to design a course that engages students, that helps them become more self-directed and more active learners; to help students learn basic college skills such as note-taking, document reading and assessment, map making and information analysis.

In truth, I chose to redesign my course because I was the only one in my department at the time that was already using a great deal of technology. I find that I can provide my students more directed learning with my online site. A dedicated student will find more materials to aid in their understanding of the subject field. I added more outside materials items (additional readings, music and video clips) for student perusal. The redesign strategy is important for students learning. Online learning makes students more active learners, but they will get out as much as they put into the class. Students like the flexibility of taking classes at all hours, any day of the week. It has been especially helpful for students with impacted schedules, busy extra-curricular or work schedules that don't fit an ordinary class schedule.

This course was redesigned using Canvas. The goals of the redesign were to address the bottleneck issues, improve the pass rate in the course, draw new majors to Anthropology, and retain declared students. Student readiness issues, primarily time management and self motivation, were addressed by using the calendar feature in Canvas to help students 'see' due dates and upcoming assignments. In addition, a mobile app that allows the instructor to send text reminders to students was embedded into the course.

To help motivate students the course redesign includes online videos and interactive assignments. Students have reported not completing assignments that require them to leave Moodle and create an account or complete work on an outside platform such as Blogger. During the redesign these assignments were built directly into the Canvas course so that students do not need to leave the learning environment in order to access them. Students are able to download the Canvas app on to the phones and/or other mobile devices and access course materials from anywhere. Additionally, they can participate in class discussions and easily upload course assignments using this app.

The ancient and medieval world is a wildly fascinating place, filled with all the complexity of human existence and expression that we possess today. Introductory and general education humanities courses, however, can be challenging for non- humanities majors, who often view history, geography, and culture as a static body of facts instead of a rich tapestry of creative human endeavor. Students struggle to critically and creatively engage with the course's wide-ranging content, resulting in high DFW numbers. This redesign proposes to use open access web based applications and social media tools to create a class that privileges student-centered, project-based, and active learning.

This is a redesign of HIST 173, the second half of the GE U.S. History Survey at CSU, Long Beach. The aim is to transform my large lecture class by switching the focus from lecturing - the "sage on the stage" approach - to active learning involving small group work or "learning communities." Methods to be explored include online discussion groups and related assignments designed to be more "relevant" to students' lives outside the classroom. I will also continue to investigate free online learning materials. My hope is that the redesign will enable students to develop a more engaged, critical, and affective understanding of the historical past.

This redesigned course will offer students the opportunity to complete one domain of knowledge and one of the four SF State Studies requirements (Social Justice), both of which are in high demand and present bottlenecks for students. Together with AU 301 and a social science class currently being designed, this course will allow a large number of transfer students arriving at SF State to complete all of their Upper Division GE and SF State Studies requirements, often in a semester in which it is difficult for some students to find courses in their major.

Moving some lessons online (including lectures, slides, assignments, readings, videos, and films) will allow instructors to devote in-class meetings to active learning as well as to encourage integrative reflection on the subject of life in the San Francisco Bay Area from multidisciplinary perspectives. Additional newly-built online units will feature interviews and engagement with artists, scholars, and leaders in the Bay Area. We will also develop well-designed, self-guided community learning opportunities to help students connect with their local environment. The redesign team will work with SF State's Affordable Instructional Materials program to look for lower cost instructional materials. We will use iLearn for course materials and written assignments.

The goal was to redesign the history survey course to improve student competencies and reduce DFW occurrences. This course has a fairly high repeatable grades rate for a general education course. Students need strategies that will help them learn and overcome issues that keep them from succeeding. The course was changed from a lecture format to a "flipped" format where students will do more classroom activities than I previously used. Students formed groups to debate significant issues in American history, such as the writing of the U.S. Constitution. Allowing students to debate important issues helped them understand those issues in more depth than they would if I simply lectured to them about those issues.

This will be a redesign of History 100, the first of a series of History core classes for majors at CSU, Sacramento. The aim is to transform a portion of the lectures into active learning involving smaller learning groups. Different methods to be considered will be on-line assignments and discussion groups promoting student-student and student-professor engagement. I will be using some already accessible (free) tools as will as investigate free online learning tools. My goal will be to redesign the class to enable students more hands-on experience and engagement, more critical thinking opportunities, and a higher understanding of the relevance for historical research skills.

This project will attempt to create an online version of the course currently offered in the History Department at Sacramento State University. The conversion to online will entail using various technologies to ensure an active learning environment.

The course is a high demand, required GE course where the number of sections and available seats, combined with the ability to successfully complete the course at a grade point of 2.0 or better (DFW rate), all clash to create a bottleneck. The DFW rate and bottleneck issues are such that native students need to take the course while facing roadblocks around access and successful completion of the course. Creation of an online hybrid / blended course can help alleviate this bottleneck, while with proper design and support, can also increase successful completion rates. Proper design can include targeting more students from a diverse environment, introducing inclusive learning themes, enhanced large class student participation, integrated writing assignments, all the while targeting first-generation college students.

We teach lower-division United States history courses fulfilling the CSU's American Institutions Requirement that every single graduate of our public university system should be able to describe the origins and practice of representative democratic government. Our small department enrolls more than 2,000 students every year in these courses, mostly in "mega-sections" with approximately 120 students. Because of these great student numbers and the widespread reach of our courses among native freshmen and sophomores, we believe we can play a critical role in improving the university's retention and graduation rates. To redesign our courses, we undertook three major changes. We reconceived our courses as: 1) a critical college "gateway" experience rather than as separate stand-alone classes; 2) an exciting laboratory for the face-to-face practice of democracy; and 3) an active learning opportunity, defined by team-based classroom strategies for student debate and complex problem solving.

This project provides a redesign of HIST 202A (U.S. History to 1877) and HIST 202B (U.S. History since 1877), two lecture General Education courses. The redesigned HIST 202A/B takes the form of a modified flipped course, making extensive use of historical sources, activities, and assignments available online at no cost to students. Our redesign also follows a "learning communities" approach. For every class meeting, faculty create small-group learning opportunities that feature collaborative learning and scaffolded skill-building. Student skill-building areas emphasize source analysis, thesis identification, note-taking, academic writing, and reading. The professor's work with the small-group learning communities is assisted by specially-trained advanced students acting as peer mentors or "facilitators." By cultivating academic skills and personal relationships, our redesign promises to promote student motivation, retention, and academic performance, as well as to cultivate key academic skills students need to succeed later in their college careers.

Student success in the World Civilizations sequence, a universal lower division general education requirement across the CSU, is key to higher graduation rates and timely degree completion. This redesign makes the sequence accessible for diverse learning strengths and unpredictable schedules using an online module based on team-based learning approaches and the integration of digital tools. The content is equal in substance to a traditional onsite course, while addressing the unique possibilities of online environments.