Teaching Innovations

I love to experiment with evidence-based methods to engage students in learning. I am particularly interested in supporting students’ development of essential skills to thrive in their future careers, which include, but are not limited to, problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, curiosity, collaboration, and communication.

As an instructor and data scientist who has training in interdisciplinary educational research, I often use the course that I teach as a lab for teaching and research innovations. I  love to collect data from my students and my teachings as formative feedback. Meanwhile, those data may help me to answer interesting research questions on how people learn.

List of courses that I conduct educational research

IS 733

  • Piloted caselet/Data Science Problem Solving practice
  • Piloted methods for developing metacognition skills including learning journals, self-tracking, and reflection

IS 296

  • Piloted Digital Data Storytelling in collaboration with Montegeory College Digital Storytelling Interns
  • Learning and Asssess by Teaching
  • Personal Informatics

 

Participation in FDC faculty development activities

 

 

Hrabowski Fund for Innovation (2024 – 2025)

Project Title: Data-Driven Student-Centered Health Communication and Promotion: Interdisciplinary Collaborative Problem-Solving and Peer-Learning for a Thriving Campus

Collaborator: Katie Birger (UMBC Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health)

Overview: 

Complex real-world challenges, like climate change or public health, require interdisciplinary collaboration. Data scientists, specialized in analyzing large and complex datasets, often work with domain experts to derive effective solutions. Similarly, domain specialists benefit from working with those with data science expertise. Yet, our educational system remains siloed in disciplines, providing limited opportunities for students to acquire essential interdisciplinary collaboration skills. This projct explores a project-based learning and teaching approach, empowering students to identify problems and craft theory-grounded and data-driven solutions to improve UMBC students’ health and well-being.  The collaboration will take place in two existing undergraduate courses in two different disciplines, IS 296 Foundations in Data Science and PBHL 340 Health Communication.  The project has two primary goals: (1) Enhancing students’ problem-solving skills across disciplines and (2) Facilitating peer-learning experiences across disciplines. Through this project, we want to demonstrate that collaborative teaching and learning across disciplines is possible, even with the existing administrative barriers.  The knowledge and lessons from this project will inspire more productive and innovative exploration, crossing the boundaries of departments, colleges, and disciplines.