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Improving Student Accessibility, Equity, Course Performance, and Lab Skills: How Introduction of ClassTranscribe is Changing Engineering Education at the University of Illinois

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Conference

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual On line

Publication Date

June 22, 2020

Start Date

June 22, 2020

End Date

June 26, 2021

Conference Session

New Engineering Educators 1: Learning Aids

Tagged Division

New Engineering Educators

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

21

DOI

10.18260/1-2--34796

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/34796

Download Count

767

Paper Authors

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Lawrence Angrave University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-9762-7181

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Lawrence Angrave is an award winning Fellow and Teaching Professor at the department of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His interests include (but are not limited to) joyful teaching, empirically-sound educational research, campus and online courses, computer science, unlocking the potential of underrepresented minorities, improving accessibility and creating novel methods that encourage new learning opportunities and foster vibrant learning communities.

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Karin Jensen University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-5042

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Karin Jensen, Ph.D. is a Teaching Assistant Professor in bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include student mental health and wellness, engineering student career pathways, and engagement of engineering faculty in engineering education research. She was awarded a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation for her research on undergraduate mental health in engineering programs. Before joining UIUC she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Sanofi Oncology in Cambridge, MA. She earned a bachelor's degree in biological engineering from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Virginia.

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Zhilin Zhang University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Zhilin Zhang is a 5-year BS-MS Computer Science student at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). He has experience in text retrieval and mining, machine learning, data analysis, mobile development, web development, and user study. His interests include (but are not limited to) Human-Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, Data Retrieval and Mining, and Computer Security.

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Chirantan Mahipal University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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I'm a Computer Science grad student at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, working under the mentorship of Prof. Lawrence Angrave. Prior to this, I was working as a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research in the Technology for Emerging Markets (TEM) group.

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David Mussulman University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Dave is an Instructional Technology Facilitator with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Engineering IT Shared Services. He helps instructors select and integrate technologies into their courses to enhance student learning and improve course administration.

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Christopher D. Schmitz University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-9673-9832

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Christopher D. Schmitz is an Electrical Engineer and Teaching Associate Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include algorithmic fault-tolerant adaptive systems, software defined radio, multi-user cellular communication, electrically-small devices, and pedagogies of teaching and learning. An amateur beekeeper, he currently mentors a project for improving the plight of honeybees.

He worked for TRW Space and Electronics Group from 1995 until 1997 and at the University of Illinois from 2002 to present. His research interests are in adaptive digital signal processing, digital communications, and education pedagogy. He currently serves the ECE department of the University of Illinois as a Teaching Associate Professor and an undergraduate advisor and is working to improve undergraduate education as an Education Innovation Fellow (EIF) in the Grainger College of Engineering.

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Robert Thomas Baird University of Illinois Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning

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As Associate Director at the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning Robert helps guide the testing, evaluation, and use of campus emerging technologies in the classroom and online. He has extensive experience in technology-enhanced classrooms, online teaching environments, and web-based student writing and multimedia projects. Robert teaches cinema, new media, and digital video courses. His 1995 dissertation used cognitive psychology to understand how filmgoers can be frightened and startled by film scenes they know are fictional. In the early 1980s he worked as an assistant film editor in Hollywood on over a dozen films. He has published essays on literature, film, and cognition. For the past 20 years Robert has been an active soccer player and coach, coaching youth teams for the local Illinois Futbol Club (Little Illini).

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Hongye Liu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Ruihua Sui University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Ruihua is a junior student in Mathematics and Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the research assistant and frontend developer of ClassTranscribe. He was nominated for Illinois Innovation Prize 2020 because of his contribution to educational software.

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Maryalice S. Wu

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Maryalice is the Director of Data Analytics at the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She holds a position as an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois and has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Illinois. Her recent research focuses on the economic and health empowerment of women in developing nations. Her other projects relate to program evaluations and learning analytics in academia. . She has taught several courses at University of Illinois, including Introduction to Social Statistics, and Social Research Methods.

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Rob Kooper NCSA / University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-5781-7287

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Rob Kooper is a lead research programmer at the software directorate at the National Center for Super computing Applications. He is interested in enabling scientists to do research work using software developed with the help of NCSA as well as teaching good software principles during this process. He is interested in software deployment and scaling software deployments from small research projects to larger installations with many users.

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Abstract

This paper presents three case studies that examined the use of ClassTranscribe in a diverse set of undergraduate engineering classes in 2019 and 2020 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ClassTranscribe, a video viewing system designed with accessibility and learning in mind, was first presented to the ASEE community in 2019 [1]. The pedagogical features of the tool include: pause, leave and resume viewing; captions available in multiple languages; downloadable transcriptions; shareable links to video moments; and searchable content within each video and across an entire course. The importance of the tool in the context of a commitment to accessibility for engineering education is discussed. In addition, online video content that follows Universal Design for Learning principles enables all students to prepare for assessments and provides more equitable learning opportunities. Low-stress online learning opportunities may be particularly valuable for underrepresented minorities (e.g., [2] explored relative student improvement in multiple exams assessments in an online course with video lectures). The first study presented here describes two extremes: a supplemental-resource approach and primary-resource approach in the adoption of ClassTranscribe into an Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Computer Science (CS) course, respectively. In Spring 2020, ECE students used the tool as a supplemental learning resource to review and search live lecture captures. Whereas in the sophomore CS course (N=271 students), physical lectures were canceled and ClassTranscribe was used as a primary learning resource using short-length (<10 minute) videos. The methodology and analysis of the CS course outcomes were described in [3] but relevant findings are reproduced here: Students in the lowest quartile improved by 3.3 percentile points compared to previous semesters and statistically-significant positive learning outcomes were found at all levels of student performance. Each quartile of students who used the tool an above average amount of time led to increased final exam scores, with the lowest quartile increasing 14.4 absolute points compared to their in-quartile peers. A new contribution of this paper is an analysis of the interactions with the tool, which found three event types: Fullscreen-viewing, Change-playback-speed and Search-Transcription predicted improved exam performance and were statistically significant (p<0.01). In the second case study, video instruction was used to present safety and lab-handling techniques in a Bioengineering class prior to rigorous lab assessment. The student-specific analytic data available to the course instructor using the web interface allowed the instructor to check that each student had completed training materials prior to lab work. Student surveys measured several factors including the utility of the tool and students' preferences in video systems and video-based Bioengineering instruction. In the third case study, student feedback from CS and ECE courses were solicited on learning utility and digital accessibility. The majority of the 206 responses reported high utility (“moderately useful” or greater) of the tool when working on assignments (67%) and preparing for an exam (77%). The majority of respondents (96%, n=239) recommended the tool be re-used in future semesters of their course. We present example survey questions that respect student choice to not-self disclose a disability.

Angrave, L., & Jensen, K., & Zhang, Z., & Mahipal, C., & Mussulman, D., & Schmitz, C. D., & Baird, R. T., & Liu, H., & Sui, R., & Wu, M. S., & Kooper, R. (2020, June), Improving Student Accessibility, Equity, Course Performance, and Lab Skills: How Introduction of ClassTranscribe is Changing Engineering Education at the University of Illinois Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34796

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2020 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015