And as students learn better through active learning and collaborative activities, I also believe we instructors become better educators when working within a supportive community of people who care about teaching and are actively trying to find innovative ways of enhancing the classroom experience.
1) Overhaul of the mechanics course sequence: Statics, Dynamics and Solid Mechanics
As I worked on the development and implementation of course improvements in the Mechanics courses, it was important to develop a community of practice (CoP) consisting of faculty who were committed to continuing these reforms and able to collaborate closely. Instructors that belonged to this CoP had weekly meetings to discuss course development, teaching assistant training and assessments tools. Within this community, I developed lecture content, collaborative learning discussion section activities and a large data set of online assessments for the Solid Mechanics and Statics courses. I have also mentored and assisted other faculty when teaching these large classes for the first time.
West M., Silva M., Herman G., “Sustainable reform of an introductory mechanics course sequence driven by a community of practice”, Proceedings of the ASME 2015 International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition (IMECE 2015), IMECE2015-51493, 2015.
West M., Silva M., Herman G., “Randomized exams for large STEM courses spread via communities of practice”, Proceedings of the 122nd American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition (ASEE 2015), 26.1302.1-26.1302.15, 2015.
“TAM210/211/212/251”, Strategic Instructional Innovations Program (SIIP) at UIUC. Research team: Matthew West, Geir Dullerud, Elif Ertekin, Randy Ewoldt, Blake Johnson, Mariana Silva and Daniel Tortorelli, 2012-201.
2) Extending the impact of the use of PraireLearn at Illinois and other Universities
As many programs are facing a surge in admissions, lectures are becoming larger and instructors are more frequently adopting some type of automation to manage this growth. PrairieLearn (PL) is a framework for online learning that was built at Illinois, starting with one course in Spring 2015. The “Growing PL” team strive to grow the community of instructors who use and think critically about PL, in order to extend its positive impact across the Campus and soon to other Universities. In Fall 2019 semester, 51 different courses are using PL as an assessment tool, with more than 8,000 distinct students as users.
I started using PL in Fall 2015, becoming the second user of this online learning system (first user being the original creator of PL). I have developed content for four different courses, and created more than 500 different question generators(1). Since 2015, I have directly taught ~5000 students, but over 10k students have solved problems authored by me either in their homework or exams, generating over 1 million problem instances. I have also helped many instructors and teaching assistants creating their courses and first few questions, by offering group workshops and individualized support. As part of this community of practice, I help staffing the weekly PL office hours and also make contributions to the system development.
(1) Read more about PL question generators here.
“Growing the PrairieLearn”, Strategic Instructional Innovations Program (SIIP) at UIUC. Research team: Tim Bretl, Jenny Amos, Geoffrey Herman, Mariana Silva, Craig Zilles, Dave Mussulman, Tim Stelzer, Dallas Trinkle and Matthew West, 2017-2020.
“Remote testing with PrairieLearn”, Strategic Instructional Innovations Program (SIIP) at UIUC. Research team: Tim Bretl, Geoffrey Herman, Craig Zilles, Mariana Silva, Dave Mussulman, and Matthew West, 2020-2021.
“PrairieLearn”, Strategic Instructional Innovations Program (SIIP) at UIUC. Research team: Tim Bretl, Geoffrey Herman, Craig Zilles, Mariana Silva, Dave Mussulman, and Matthew West, 2021-present.
3) Bringing computational tools to a linear algebra course
Since Fall 2019, a team of faculty from Mathematics, Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering Departments started working on a project to improve the curriculum of the Linear Algebra course offered to students at the College of Engineering. The plan is to make the class more suitable to sophomores, by removing Calculus III prerequisite requirements, and add computational tools so that students can solve more complex and realistic examples.
One of my contributions to this project is to create the computer laboratory assignments, which will be implemented as collaborative learning activities during small discussion sections. To start developing the material, we opened a 1-credit-hour course to James Scholar students registered in MATH 415 in Spring 2020. In Fall 2020, we will be opening these laboratory sections to all 300 students registered in one of the sections of MATH 415.
In order to measure the impact of these innovations and perform longitudinal studies, I developed a linear algebra concept inventory using the PL system, and offered these assessment as an optional quiz during the first week of my Numerical Methods class in Fall 2019 and Spring 2020. This concept inventory was also offered to students from other classes, and we have data from more than 1000 students, ranging from freshman to seniors.
Silva M., Hieronymi P., West M., Nytko N., Deshpande A., Chuang J., Hilgenfeldt S., “Innovating and modernizing a Linear Algebra class through teaching computational skills”, Proceedings of the 2022 American Society for Engineering Education Conference (ASEE 2022), 2022.
“Early Instruction in Linear Algebra and Computational Tools in the Curricula of CS, MechSE, and the College of Engineering”, Strategic Instructional Innovations Program (SIIP) at UIUC. Research team: Sasha Hilgenfeldt, Philipp Hieronymi, Luke Olson, Mariana Silva and Matthew West, 2019-2022.
4) Incorporating Python into the engineering curriculum
Based on the successfull re-design of the linear algebra course, we are now incorporating similar computational Python-based lessons to other introductory courses that are required to many engineering programs, starting with Statics and Differential Equations. My current role is to mentor instructors teaching these courses, and interacting with undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants, to support the development and implementation of the Python-based activities.
“Python Working Group”, Strategic Instructional Innovations Program (SIIP) at UIUC. Research team: Sasha Hilgenfeldt, Jared Bronski, Wayne Chang, Neal Davis Mariana Silva and Matthew West, 2021-present.