CALAS Faculty Spotlight

Dr. Fiebig implemented a course redesign to THEA 450: Senior Seminar, the capstone course for all theater majors. This course redesign brings an innovative approach to project management, software efficiency, and data analysis. Upon completion, students will be able to apply project management concepts and principles and have increased decision making skills in leadership.

Drs. Hemstock and Ma redesigned their course, ENEC 270: Climate Change and Public Policy. This course redesign focuses on integrating soft skills in studying public policy and technical skills in studying climate change. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to understand fundamental scientific concepts and will have the ability to apply scientific knowledge to situations common to daily life.

Dr. Ebert implemented a course to fulfill a regional need by employers by offering an upper-level course addressing the rapidly evolving field of biomaterials. Students will gain valuable experience in understanding complex issues, defending decisions supported by evidence, and articulating and communicating their hypotheses to others. Upon completion of this course students should take away knowledge of how to successfully work and collaborate across fields and skills to interact cooperatively to achieve challenging research goals.

Dr. Senter has redesigned BIO 230L: Human Anatomy and Physiology 1 Lab. Dr. Senter’s course redesign is to addressing students need to master new biology vocabulary by incorporating vocabulary practice quizzes into this course. Upon completion, students will be able to correctly spell the various biological terms covered throughout the semester.

Drs. Zhou and Bushelle-Edghill have redesigned a required core accounting course, ACCT 300: Accounting Information Systems. The overall goal of their redesign aligns with a recent Certified Public Accountant (CPA) Evolution Initiative, which places a strong emphasis on integrating IT technologies with accounting education to train the future accounting workforce.

Dr. Montoya integrated soft skills into his course PSYC 421: Cognitive Psychology. To accomplish this, he introduced and implemented the five-minute paper into the course. The prompts that are used will enhance creativity and critical thinking skills amongst his students. These skills are particularly important to a course that is designed to instill scientific literacy among its students.

Dr. Swinford redesigned ENG 401: Chaucer, to help students develop a series of technical skills. This course will foreground the intersection of art and science in the work of Chaucer and other writers who have informed and influenced Chaucer’s work. The technical skills students can expect to obtain while taking this course are: scientific literacy, data analysis, and technical writing.

Dr. Lheem was hoping to encourage students to develop their technical and software skills while studying politics, social justice issues, and propaganda. To accomplish this, Dr. Lheem redesigned POLI 411: Propaganda and Public Opinions. One of the major nuances to this course will be the addition of a critical review video making project. The goal of this project was to help students improve critical thinking skills and digital literacy.

Professor Pearce redesigned MSCM 4655: Independent Film Production for the Spring 2022 semester. This course takes students through all aspects of the independent filmmaking process. Professor Pearce hopes that this will eventually serve as a capstone course for the future digital filmmaking concentration. Through redesigning this course, he planned to incorporate STEM/Technical skills into the curriculum.

Drs. Das and Bhaachariya redesigned a homeland security course entitled “Terrorism” in the Department of Social Sciences at ECSU. The course emphasizes the histories, types, and theories of terrorism. It also has a special focus on social and social movement theories, network analysis, and ideology in analyzing the socio-economic and political costs of terrorism, and the prediction of terrorist acts in the future. Upon completion of this course, students will be familiar with the various types of terrorist acts in addition to conducting research on the related field.

Dr. Ademiluyi redesigned GEOG 440: Urban Geography to transform the course into a Geographic Information Systems spatial analysis application course. Students will learn core theories in urban geography and their policy applications in the US, practice GIS skills in analyzing urban communities, and acquire professional problem-solving skills. Applications such as Google Earth and ArcGIS will be embedded in the course. This course redesign enhances the technical capability of students thus preparing them for the workforce.

Dr. Hakeem redesigned CRJ 304: Computer Applications in Criminal Justice. Students taking this course are introduced to criminal justice computer operating systems. They also learn basic SAS programming and are guided through the process of exploring the vast amount of machine-readable data available from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Finally, students enhance their technical skills through various assignments that promote problem-solving and critical thinking skills through various assignments.

Dr. Johnson redesigned NURS 602: Introduction to Population Health and Epidemiology, which is a 15-week graduate online course. Dr. Johnson redesigned this course to enhance the application of soft skills required in the field of public health nursing and epidemiology. Upon completion, students will demonstrate four key soft skills: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem-solving in the advanced nursing role in public health epidemiology.

Dr. Murray designed a research study that incorporated a software tool (Twine, a free, open-sourced software developed by Chris Klimas for the creation of interactive fiction) into several English courses to evaluate its effectiveness of promoting 21st century skills within his students. Upon completion of his study, Dr. Murray posited that his research would lead to increased levels of liberal arts student interest and engagement with STEM technical skills while also providing the skill development in an increasingly transdisciplinary world.

Ms. Edmonds redesigned English 120 to infuse technical writing skills that focus on research design and data analytics into this course. Her course redesign required students to focus on areas related to healthcare or science. After completing the course, students developed critical thinking skills to address issues in healthcare or science through research and technical writing skills.

Drs. Mills and Holder conducted a study to examine the impact of incorporating data analysis and technical writing into education courses. The researchers redesigned SPED 647, SPED 460, and READ 316 to embed technical writing and data analysis skills. Upon completion of the research, students gained technical skills and data analysis skills to lead a more career-ready path. The researchers hoped the results of this study would help create strategies for faculty to increase the use of technical writing and data analysis skills within other teacher education courses, as these skills are becoming more important within the field of education.