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Please join us in congratulating four member of the IWL community, as they received the Learning Technology Incubator (LTi) Grant initiated by the A&S New Learning Technology Committee and A&S Office of Learning Design & Technology.

Hsin-hsin Liang

Title: Interviewing Chinese scholars to build a video collection for Chinese language courses at the advanced level

Description: Professor Liang’s project has two phases: The first phase is the videotaping (in the UVa studio) of interviews with Chinese visiting scholars or Chinese professors on their specialties or specific topics; the second is to videotape Chinese scholars’ interactions with our students in Chinese during their visits to my Chinese language classes. 

During the 2016-17 academic year Professor Liang plans to have 8 events featuring interviews of scholars and professors either in the UVa studio or in the classroom.  These videotapes will serve as the “seeds” for a future videotape collection to be called “Lectures by Chinese scholars”.  The collection can be used in Chinese language courses as authentic teaching material especially in courses at the advanced level.  Once they are translated into English, they can also be used by any professor who is interested in the interview content. They will be the record and witness of the collaboration between the UVa community and visiting scholars from China. 

Emily Scida and Karen James

Title: Electronic Portfolios in Language Teaching, Learning, and Assessment

iption: Emily Scida (Spanish, Italian & Portuguese) and Karen James (French) and a team of 14 FL faculty were awarded a third year of funding from the Learning Technologies Incubator grant program to support their multi-stage project “Electronic Portfolios in Foreign Language Teaching, Learning, and Assessment.” Their project focuses on the integration of e-portfolio in FL courses at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels to support more holistic and comprehensive assessment of language learning, the development of digital literacy, critical reflection, collaboration, deep and integrative learning, and autonomous, self-directed learning.

The initial grant pilot (2014-2015) included 11 sections of Spanish and French with 155 total students and expanded in the second year (2015-2016) to include 210 sections of 30 different courses and 7 languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish), impacting 3,456 students and 58 faculty. 

With a third year of grant funding for 2016-2017, the e-portfolio team will work toward the following goals:  fuller integration of e-portfolio by making it the centerpiece of student learning, authentic assessment mapping to program learning outcomes across elementary and intermediate levels, alignment of cultural competence outcomes of language learners with the global agenda of the College, and a new UVA-Duke e-portfolio partnership.

The grant project team for 2016-2017 includes:

  • Emily Scida, Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
  • Karen James, French
  • Nicholas Bader, French
  • Joanne Britland, Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
  • Carrie Bramlet, Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
  • Lilian Feitosa, Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
  • Rachel Geer, French
  • Elizabeth Hall, French
  • Stella Mattioli, Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
  • Esther Poveda, Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
  • Cécile Rey, French
  • Pam Rini, Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
  • Spyros Simotas, French
  • Matthew Street, Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
  • Adrienne Ward, Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
  • Ran Zhao, Chinese
  • Yitna Firdyiwek, Learning Design & Technology, College

Ran Zhao

Title: Developing Automated Self-Assessments to Help Students Learn Better from Tutorial Videos in Flipped Courses

Description: Ran Zhao's project is on embedding auto-graded self-quizzes in tutorial videos so that students can learn the content in the video more effectively. Another objective is to is to improve the Lesson tool in Collab so that we can streamline the pre-class study (video-watching, self-quizzing, receiving feedback, re-playing any section of the video if necessary, re-taking the quiz, moving on to next video) on a centralized platform and in a more fluid manner.