Boston University

12/10/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 12/11/2024 03:18

Check Out Wednesday’s Experiential Learning Expo

Check Out Wednesday's Experiential Learning Expo

Students behind the Korean language learning app Hada, presenting their project at the spring 2024 Spark! Demo Day.

Innovation

Check Out Wednesday's Experiential Learning Expo

Event features 100-plus student projects from the Cross-College Challenge (XCC), the Learning Assistant Program, and BU Spark!

December 10, 2024
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A platform that helps campus building managers and organizations visualize and understand their energy use, water consumption, and waste so they can make smarter decisions. Explainer videos created by upperclassmen to help undergrads who struggle with post-lab write-ups and data analysis. And a photo project that captures students who use the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground space, including the BU Filipino Students Association and the Chinese Students and Scholars Association.

These are just some examples of the innovative student experiential learning that's happening this semester at Boston University, and they're among the more than 100 student projects that will be showcased at Wednesday's Fall 2024 Experiential Learning Expo.

Presented by BU's Office of Undergraduate Affairs, the biannual expo highlights work produced by the Cross-College Challenge, the Learning Assistant Program, and BU Spark! all of which have experiential learning as a "central tenet of their programs," says Amie Grills, BU associate provost for undergraduate affairs.

The day is designed to draw attention to programs with "experiential learning at the forefront of their mission, which is particularly compelling since experiential learning is such a vital aspect of a BU education," says Grills, who is also a BU Wheelock College of Education & Human Development professor of counseling psychology and applied human development. "Experiential learning offers students invaluable opportunities to apply theoretical knowledge in real-world contexts. Through hands-on projects, students cultivate essential skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking, and collaboration."

The event will take over the first two floors of the Duan Family Center for Computing & Data Sciences from 3 to 7 pm Wednesday.

Read more about each program below.

Both students and professors collaborate in the Cross-College Challenge (XCC)

Now in its seventh year, the Cross-College Challenge is the BU Hub's signature experience and is open to juniors and seniors from all majors. Designed as a capstone-like experience, these project-based courses challenge teams to address real-world problems in areas like social impact, sustainability, the arts, and entrepreneurship. Each section is co-taught by two faculty members from different disciplines, and most projects address a problem identified by an outside community partner.

Phillip Jacob, XCC manager, says that nearly 2,000 students representing over 90 majors have participated in the challenge since its inception. They "value this experience as an opportunity to apply skills such as teamwork and communication into their careers," he says.

There will be eight XCC courses presenting at Wednesday's Expo. They run the gamut from a history class that employs immersive role play (check back on BU Today next week for our story about this class) to one that explores marketing and social equity in the cannabis industry. The Photography for Activism class uses a methodology called photovoice, which combines photos and narratives to tell a story. For their final projects, four teams documented cultural student organizations affiliated with the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground: the BU Filipino Students Association, the Cape Verdean Students Association, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, and the HTC as a whole (students who frequent the space). They will display their photo essays at the Expo.

With less tree cover and more blacktop, cities can be as much as 50 degrees warmer than rural environs, forming a heat island. The problem disproportionately affects lower-income, older, and chronically ill populations. Students in the XCC Environmental Equality & Urban Tree Canopies course learn about tree canopies and partner with community partners (including Boston University Sustainability and Tree Eastie) as they learn about the unfair policies that contribute to tree canopy variations and environmental injustice, gain insight into attitudes of residents, and more.

Unique to these XCC courses is its co-teaching model. The Environmental Equality & Urban Tree Canopies course has been led for the last four years by Joelle Renstrom, a College of General Studies senior lecturer in rhetoric, and Salvatore Genovese, a CGS lecturer in natural sciences and mathematics.

Students benefit from Renstrom's writing and public speaking skills and Genovese's knowledge of data and scientific reporting. Renstrom considers herself the "right brain" of the class, while Genovese is more the "left brain," she says. "It's also great to be able to offer real-world experience to students from different vantage points. I think and hope we can model what collaboration-especially from two people in different disciplines-can look like. Working together has gotten smoother and better with each year, which is a wonderful reward for teaching a class like this."

Spark! Demo Day

Spark! housed at the Boston University Faculty for Computing & Data Sciences, is the University's technology incubator and experiential learning lab for student-led computational and data-driven projects. As part of the Experiential Learning Expo, Spark! hosts its own showcase of student work. Called Demo Day, visitors can watch student presentations, visit project demo stations, and vote on their favorite projects.

The projects cover a wide range of issues. For example, one team created a new developer platform that lets multiple users edit a page simultaneously, another built an HR tech platform to conduct thousands of conversational AI interviews to screen candidates, and a third invented an online live English language competition game for Korean students.

Some XCC classes overlap with Spark!-which is why the two programs were initially paired for the Expo. "We were one of the first programs to pilot the XCC course when they first launched many years ago, in collaboration with the computer science department," says Ziba Cranmer, director of BU Spark! "In addition to the two XCC courses we currently run each semester, we have [approximately] six other practicum courses…that follow a similar structure. We include the final projects from all these courses on Demo Day."

Spark! courses presenting at the Expo include ones on web development, data science, machine learning, and the Justice Media Computational Journalism co-Lab, which helps students find opportunities at news outlets like the Boston Globe, GBH, and USA Today as they engage in data-driven investigative and justice-focused reporting.

Cranmer says that in the future, the team has discussed expanding the event to include even more experiential learning programs from departments within the CDS building and beyond.

Learning Assistant Program

Learning assistants (LAs) are undergraduates who return to a course after finishing it to take on a new instructional role. They undergo weekly prep sessions with faculty and take a Wheelock College pedagogy course so they can facilitate discussions among groups of students in classroom settings that encourage active participation. A recent study in Life Sciences Education shows that LAs build community within a classroom, which can be very powerful, especially in large courses.

Since launching in 2011, the BU program has expanded to include more than 50 courses across campus, including areas like biology, mechanical engineering, health sciences, and women, gender, and sexuality studies. LAs do not replace grad student teaching fellows, and they are not the regular leaders in a discussion or lab.

"Instructors report that they love working with LAs," says Kathryn Spilios, a College of Arts & Sciences master lecturer in biology and Learning Assistant program director. "We routinely have requests to add LAs to new courses-which we consider an indication of the success of the program-and we are hoping to continue to expand, but there are numerous programmatic structures we are working on right now."

As part of the program, LAs redesign a small aspect of the course they teach, combining the pedagogical theory they learned through Wheelock with their experiential practice of teaching. They present these projects at the Expo. This year, students proposed tweaking lab assignments, implementing stress-relief techniques, and reformatting answer keys, which they believe will help make future semesters smoother for the students enrolled in the classes.

Among the presenters is a group of eight LAs who assist in Chemistry 109: Advanced General Chemistry. The students collaborated to propose an idea to create step-by-step videos on how to do difficult portions of the post-lab write-up, which requires understanding how to analyze data and format equations, tables, and graphs in Microsoft Excel and Word.

Their initial findings revealed that 64 percent of students surveyed said they would use these videos if available. "Having taken the course last year, we LAs all agreed that these videos would have made our transition into this rigorous course and college post-lab assignments much less stressful," says team member Carly Stiller (CAS'27). "I recall feeling more worried about figuring out how to use Excel and doing post-lab formatting correctly than I was worried about the actual content during the first few weeks. Hopefully this will help."

Event Details

Experiential Learning Expo

The Expo, presented by Boston University's Office of Undergraduate Affairs, will showcase more than 100 student projects undertaken in conjunction with the Hub Cross-College Challenge, the Learning Assistant Program, and BU Spark!

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