The Data-Informed Teaching Community of Practice will host a virtual panel discussion on Monday, Oct. 23, from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. Join us to learn how faculty at Iowa and beyond integrate data into their teaching and course structure. Adam Brummett, lecturer in chemistry at the University of Iowa; Brent Benson, director of Architecture and Data Platforms for Harvard Business School Online; Perry Samson, professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan; and Zhongzhou Chen, associate professor of physics at University of Central Florida, will describe the innovative ways they are using data to transform undergraduate university learning environments. We'll end the event with a question-and-answer session and encourage participants to submit questions.
Adam Brummett
Adam Brummett received his BS in chemistry and minor in physics from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In 2009, he joined the chemistry PhD program at the University of Iowa. Wanting to remain a Hawkeye, Brummett stayed at the University of Iowa to teach chemistry as a visiting assistant professor and in fall 2019 was hired as a lecturer. In recent years, he has specialized in teaching large first-year chemistry courses and was recognized with the Lane Davis Award for Honors Team Teaching (2019). He serves as a faculty leader in the Data-Informed Teaching Community of Practice. He collaborated with OTLT Research and Analytics in the development and implementation of learning analytics tools for faculty, specifically Course Activity Insights, a analytics dashboard helps faculty make informed decisions about their teaching. He also worked with OTLT Research and Analytics on an innovative personalized feedback system which makes it possible to deliver tailored feedback to students based on their engagement in a course, even in courses with 1,000 students.
Brent Benson
Benson is director of Architecture and Data Platforms for Harvard Business School (HBS) Online whose mission is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world, wherever they are. He is responsible for the data platform and infrastructure to support HBS Online’s active, social, case-based learning environment and a growing set of reports, analytics, and machine learning models to support program delivery, teaching, learning, and student equity and success. Benson’s recent published research used learning analytics data to better understand the relationships between student time management and social interaction behavior with outcomes like course completion and course assessment metrics.
Perry Samson
Samson is professor of climate and space sciences and engineering in the College of Engineering and Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He holds an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship at the University of Michigan and was named Distinguished Professor of the Year in 2010 by the President's Council of Universities in the State of Michigan. Perry teaches courses in extreme weather, air pollution meteorology, and entrepreneurship.
He is a co-founder of The Weather Underground and a co-founder of LectureTools, acquired by Echo360 Inc. Samson's learning analytics research interests include how to best measure student engagement in class and to what degree those measures are related to student learning. He is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences with interactive presentations that demonstrate the active learning approaches he has developed for his larger classes.
Zhongzhou Chen
Chen is a physics education researcher at the University of Central Florida and is enthusiastic about re-imagining and reshaping physics and STEM education using online instructional technologies, cognitive science, and most recently, generative AI. Dr. Chen obtained his PhD in physics from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, studying how grounded cognition can be applied to improve the design of instructional animations in physics. He worked as a postdoctorate research assistant at MIT for three years, being mentored (and significantly influenced) by Dave Pritchard and studied student learning in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). His recent research focused on building a mastery-based online learning environment and analyzing students' learning strategies in that environment.
