The website is intended to function as a workspace for a mentoring project in the spring 2016 aimed at developing the pedagogies of invited participants and the co-organizers. The mentoring project has been generously funded by the Office of the Provost at Rochester Institute of Technology.
The project involves faculty seeking to develop their own work in the areas of project-based learning (PBL) and game-based learning (GBL). In addition to co-organizers, Juilee Decker & Trent Hergenrader, the participants including the following faculty fellows: Michael Brown, Andrea Hickerson, Ammina Kothari, and David Meiggs—all from the College of Liberal Arts.
The mentoring project will introduce instructors to proven project-based and game-based methodologies that improve student learning, as endorsed by organizations such as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative (DML), the New Media Consortium (NMC)’s annual Horizon Reports, and the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC). Both project-based and game-based learning have been shown to leverage deeper learning when designed well.
The goal of this mentoring project is to highlight both best practices and common pitfalls in these methodologies, and to center the group’s work on actual classroom activities from the participants’ own courses. Through demonstrations and discussions, participants will be able to choose from a wide range of different approaches for achieving specific learning objectives in their classes, and for contributing to the development of the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences (DHSS) program at RIT. DHSS is a new major that will be offered at RIT beginning in the Fall 2016.
Overview/Timeline
• In December 2015, the cohort will meet and introduce themselves and establish meeting times for the spring.
• Our January/early February meeting will serve as a springboard for the semester and will introduce goals, expectations, and deadlines.
• In the following two sessions (Feb & March), Juilee & Trent will focus on introducing models and theories of game based learning and project-based learning, before opening up the sessions to a workshop-approach of hands on application of what we’ve introduced.
• Our focus will turn to dissemination in April and May, including presentation at THATCamp to be organized by RIT's DHSS program.
After participating in the spring session, it is our hope that the cohort can continue to meet and/or be involved in DHSS in some way in the following year.
--Juilee Decker (Assoc. Prof. Museum Studies) & Trent Hergenrader (Asst. Prof. English)
College of Liberal Arts, RIT
