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The Center for Teaching and ITS-Instructional Services will offer a year-long TILE Faculty Institute, beginning with an intensive training event October 13 – 15, 2011 (Thursday evening and all day Friday and Saturday). The Institute will provide support and training for faculty who seek to implement TILE-based teaching strategies into their courses. Institute fellows will also learn how to effectively use the TILE spaces and technology.

The event will be conducted by Dr. Jon Gaffney, Post-Doctoral Fellow in Physics, University of Kentucky. Dr. Gaffney conducted both the Fall 2010 and Spring 2011 TILE Institutes and has worked closely with Dr. Bob Beichner, who directs the Student-Centered Active Learning Environment for Undergraduate Programs (SCALE-UP) at North Carolina State University and conducted the Summer 2010 TILE Faculty Institute. The nationally recognized SCALE-UP Project is a resource for institutions that want to create and assess classroom environments that support interactive, collaborative learning.

We welcome applications from University of Iowa tenured, tenure-track, and clinical faculty members. The UI Learning Spaces Executive Committee will select the faculty participants who will receive $500 for research/professional development in support of curriculum development in a TILE learning space. Please note, all TILE funds must be spent by June 30, 2012.
More information and an application can be found at: http://its.uiowa.edu/instruction/tile/resources/TILEadmindocs/tile_proposal_application.pdf

Posted: Thu, 08 Sep 2011 (Story link)

The newly constructed Van Allen Commons on the third floor of Van Allen Hall provides students a technology-rich informal learning space. From The Daily Iowan:

“You look in the library, and you see students pushing chairs together anyways,” [Chris Clark, ITS-Learning Spaces Manager] said. “The idea is, why aren’t we making these areas in which students can learn like this.”

…

UI senior Darys Kriegel, a sociology major, said he loves that the study room is near all his centralized classes.

“It’s really useful, because on Sunday nights, I hold a sociology department-wide undergraduate study session in here, and it’s enough room to get everyone together,” he said. “We use the computers, different rooms, and the giant monitors are great for presentations.”

Read the full Daily Iowan article (includes video interviews with students).

Posted: Wed, 16 Feb 2011 (Story link)

From The Daily Iowan:

The “sage on the stage” might be giving way to the “guide on the side.”

The style of teaching in which a professor stands at the front of a lecture hall and talks for an hour is being replaced in some UI classes, officials said.

And the innovative technique has found a home in the UI’s “Transform, Interact, Learn, Engage” classroom, a high-tech space in which a lecture hall meets a computer lab.

These classrooms are found in many universities nationwide. But the UI is one of the only schools to use such spaces for humanities.

Read the rest of The Daily Iowan news article.

Posted: Thu, 03 Feb 2011 (Story link)

Fall classes have begun in the new TILE classroom. It is located in room 1022 on the first floor of the Main Library. Course offerings range from Music to Math this Fall semester.

Posted: Wed, 06 Oct 2010 (Story link)

What do history, music therapy, Spanish, computer science and sociology have in common?

The TILE Institute.

Co-sponsored with the Center for Teaching and led by well known active learning instructor Prof. Robert Beichner of North Carolina State University, the TILE Institute will introduce 15 faculty members from broad range of disciplines to innovative teaching techniques best suited for the recently completed active learning classroom.

Running June 21 to June 23,  the intensive workshop will be taught in the new TILE classroom.

Located on the first floor of the Main Library, this first TILE Classroom seats 54 students at 6 round tables, with an instructor’s station in the center of the room.  The room features flat panel monitors for displaying student work, white boards on each wall for collaboration and broadband connectivity for every student.

The University is building several of these classrooms  as part of a broad effort to support active learning, collaborative teamwork, and similar models associated with improving learning and increasing student retention.

With support from the Center for Teaching and Instructional Services, the 15 instructors will spend the 2010-2011 academic year teaching in the TILE classroom applying the techniques learned during the three day institute, meeting with each other to discuss their experiences, and providing presentations to other potential users of the space.

Posted: Tue, 22 Jun 2010 (Story link)

The TILE Teaching and Learning Portal contains helpful information for instructors at The University of Iowa. Recently, sample course modules designed for the humanities have been added. These modules were developed by staff at The University of Iowa Center for Teaching to address the lack of available resources for teaching the humanities in TILE spaces.

See the humanities modules on the Teaching Strategies page.

A TILE classroom demo and poster presentation were given at this year’s 4CAST conference.

Posted: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 (Story link)

On November 12th Robert Beichner shared his experiences teaching and learning in classrooms similar to TILE. UI faculty and staff were in attendance to listen and ask questions to better understand how to go about planning TILE.

Beichner, a Physics Professor at North Carolina State University, also discussed how the SCALE-UP project supports a community of institutions implementing teaching and learning similar to TILE. Notes from the talk can be found in the here.

If you are new to the site, don’t forget to check the Teaching Strategies section of the TILE website. Examples of discipline-specific TILE modules will be added to this page soon.

Posted: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 (Story link)