CITS Associate Director Recieves Distinguished Teaching Award

UC Santa Barbara's Academic Senate recently announced the 2006-07 Distinguished Teaching Awards and CITS is happy to report that CITS Associate Director and Computer Science Professor Kevin Almeroth is among this year's recipients.

The Distinguished Teaching Award acknowledges the efforts of Senate faculty members who have successfully united the two roles of excellence in teaching and excellence in creative and scholarly research. The award is based on several criteria among which are: excellence on several levels of undergraduate and graduate teaching, graduate student supervision, placement record of graduate students and examples of innovative teaching efforts. Complementing Kevin's recent teaching accolades is the research he conducts as leader of the CITS Technology in Education (TIE) research initiative. The TIE initiative has developed out of the scholarly needs to better understand the effectiveness of existing classroom technology and guidance for the development of new technologies. As part of Kevin's TIE work he is a principal investigator in a three year study titled "Assessing the Pedagogic Implications of Technology in the Classroom" funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Recently Kevin explained his involvement in TIE research initiative from the point of view of a computer scientist.

Kevin notes, that from a technological perspective, "our Mellon research has provided a unique opportunity to identify additional technology important in both helping instructors better understand what is happening in the classroom and helping researchers better organize collected data In the first instance, given that students log into course management software (e.g., Moodle for this project), much of what they do is tracked and stored in web logs. An analysis of these logs combined with an intuitive user interface means that, first, the instructor can see what class resources have been accessed by which students, when, and how often. Second, an anonymized and summarized version of the information can be presented to students. The idea being that students can see what are the most often accessed resources. This idea is taken even further by adding features that will allow an instructor to send reminders to those students who have not yet accessed key resources like homework assignments."

In the second instance, Almeroth points out, "our Mellon research has produced hundreds of student records, and for each student, hundreds of data elements. The key to analyzing such a large volume of data is to be able to sort, select, aggregate, and export the data in a variety of formats. We have developed a database called the Data Cafe that is interfaced using a novel web-based browser. It allows a researcher to select among available courses and fields. Furthermore, a data set can be generated using a wide variety of summarization primatives. For example, not only can student records be sorted based on what classes they took, but also on their class web page activity or socioeconomic factors. We also ensure that student identities and privacy are protected. Through such a powerful tool, we can provide researchers with the ability to quickly analyze large data sets from numerous different angles."