Past Bass Digital Education Fellows

Brooks’ project was to create and implement a curriculum for a Laptop Ensemble - an ensemble made up of Duke Undergraduate students who create and perform music live with their laptops. The ensemble was open to any Duke student regardless of musical or performance experience. The project culminated in a public performance coordinated with the Duke Chamber Music program. Students leveraged free and open-source music software that was easily installed on their personal laptops, tablets, or phones to create new works and interpret repertoire from the canon of improvised music. Brooks’ project work has been featured in Duke Today.

Ryan’s project focused on designing an immersive digital exhibit to promote undergraduate student’s mindfulness in learning. Ryan’s project provided students with a naturalistic environment aimed at increasing aspects of mindfulness. This project also advocated Duke University’s Sarah P. Duke Gardens and its application as a teaching and learning space with an integration of digital media from the Duke Gardens (bird songs, digital images, and naturalistic media).

Catherine’s project was hosted by LILE’s Online Duke team, where she designed an internship around two distinct project areas. Catherinehelped Online Duke to develop “Drones for Environmental Science,” a Coursera version of an existing course series, UAS Applications and Operations in Environmental Science. She is helped Online Duke to develop “Open Design” and “Data Reproducibility,” two incubator courses for LILE’s work with the Duke Center for Computational Thinking. The purpose of these courses iss to provide students with opportunities to develop digital and technical skills to supplement their education at Duke.

Ernest contributed  to a CCT and Duke Learning Innovation  project to create a self-paced, online course introducing the programming language R and the key principles of data science both to undergraduate students and the wider Duke community.

Antonio’s project was a web based digital repository to facilitate the visualization, rich intertextuality, and student engagement with contemporary and historic field research data. The underlying field research itself, a ground-penetrating survey at the un-excavated site of an ancient city, stemmed from his own research and the digital project was an online didactic repository and visualizations of the data produced by this field research.The project was created through a web-based app and embedded 3D visualizations from Sketch Fab.

Katherine Burgett assisted with the development of several hybrid courses in Duke Divinity School's new hybrid Master of Divinity degree, contributing to course design and assessment, along with a series of videos to teach biblical exegesis. These videos supplement classroom instruction, and are an important resource for the students who begin the degree without a background in Religious Studies.

Jessica Centers' joined the efforts of a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) that explored making assessments more inclusive in various quantitative disciplines. Many of the FLC members experimented with inclusive assessment while teaching online during the pandemic. From their experiences, many pinpointed concerns of how inclusive assessment seems to sometimes conflict with grade integrity and equity. For Centers' project, she joined the FLC in collaboratively learning about how established and non-traditional pedagogies from both face-to-face teaching and online teaching either contribute to or mitigate this conflict.

Emmaline Eliseev worked on the design of the Nudge app, which is a learning tool developed by Duke Learning Innovation that supports learning by prompting students to respond to review questions after class. Over the Fall 2021 semester, Eliseev consulted on the design of the app, recommended new features based on the psychological literature on learning, planned for user experience testing to ensure the app is user-friendly for undergraduates, and helped promote the research-backed benefits of Nudge to Duke faculty members.

Prajakta Prabhune developed an online short-course for aiM-NRT. It is a NSF funded graduate research training program in a highly interdisciplinary research field of 'AI in material science’'. This asynchronous short-course consists of 6-8 videos on topics ranging from data science and AI to material science and engineering with a pre- or post-quiz designed for assessment and graded for completion. The intention behind the course is to introduce the incoming cohorts of aiM-NRT and the broader undergraduate population at Duke and beyond to key concepts at the junction of research in ‘Biological and Physical sciences and engineering’ using methods in machine learning and data science.

Christoph Schmitz's project used German language podcasts to immerse students in authentic material and introduce them to a group of media creators that advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion. The project presents lesson plans for a variety of instructional levels. These enable students to access authentic media content that widen their understanding of German culture and inspire their own experimenting with this contemporary media format. By examining ways to express their own stories, students learn to better understand their place at a crossroad between languages and cultures.

Jordan Sjol is partnered with Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art for his project. He joins the Virtual Nasher Initiative, a Carry the Innovation Forward-funded effort to extend the best parts of COVID-era digital exhibition and education offerings into the museum’s post-COVID future. During the pandemic, there was increased interest among undergraduate instructors in working with the museum on digital projects. Sjol built a digital resource consisting of a review of the current research into digital museum exhibition and education, an extensive annotated bibliography and reading list, and an account of the types of digital initiatives undertaken by peer institutions. This resource gathers into a single place materials for generating, developing, and critically evaluating ideas for creating digital projects for undergraduate education involving museum resources.

Christina Bejjani, who graduated with her PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience from Duke University, crafted her Bass project to address research needs in the social sciences at Duke. “Introductory Programming for Online Social Science Experiments” is an online, in-depth, and self-paced course on using crowdsourced populations for online experiments (ethics, basic details, pitfalls and benefits) and acquiring programming skills for presenting stimuli and collecting responses using JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and Qualtrics. During Fall 2020, the fellow developed this course on Github so that the materials were open-source and students could become collaborators in the learning process. During Spring 2021, these four Modules on Github began to be developed into a Coursera course, intended for piloting with Duke undergraduate students.

Emma Davenport, a PhD candidate in English, partnered with Professor Kathy Psomiades to design and implement a student podcast project. The aim of the Podcast Pedagogy toolkit project is to provide a kit of materials that enables faculty across a range of disciplines to teach and assess a podcast unit. The project’s output consists of a downloadable “Podcast Module Kit” that packages all essential materials for implementing a podcast design unit, including faculty instruction, assignment materials, directions for students, rubrics and other assessment options, and sample student podcasts. An associated website introduces the materials, offers those materials for download, and reflects on the project. The unit was piloted in a Spring 2021 course, English 490S-10: “Self-Help Narratives,” an advanced Special Topics course designed to fulfill the Criticism/Theory/Methodology requirement of the undergraduate English major.

Anderson Hagler,  a PhD candidate in History, worked on a variety of projects related to online education, particularly in relation to asynchronous communication. In addition to working directly with a history course in Fall 2020 as a consultant, two of Hagler’s major projects during his time as a Digital Education Fellow dealt with running training and producing materials for online education: graduate student training through the Online Teaching Assistant Skills Training series and the Graduate Academy course “Online Teaching" and examining the tool VoiceThread. As part of his examination of VoiceThread, Hagler spoke to instructors and staff across Duke in multiple disciplines to help put together teaching materials around the digital education tool. This culminated in a video that will guide instructors on the numerous uses of the tool for courses.

Dayton Kinney, a PhD candidate in Music Composition, focused her efforts as a fellow on teaching assistant training. The digital transition and move to online teaching has necessitated a growing need for the preparation and development of Duke teaching assistants (TAs). TAs need both pedagogical training and training on digital tools to advance teaching excellence and provide an inclusive pedagogical approach to teaching. In collaboration with the Graduate School, Duke faculty, and Learning Innovation consultants, the project’s primary focus was the collaborative development and implementation of workshops, academies and resources for Duke University teaching assistants.  The impact is far reaching for the Duke University community for both undergraduates and instructors, by further preparing TAs and student IORs for their specific instructional needs, which directly impacts Duke undergraduate education.  

Qingran Li, who graduated with her PhD in Environmental Policy (Economics) from Duke University worked with the spring 2021 course called “Climate Change Economics and Policy” (ENVIRON.640 / PUBPOL.585). The course was taught in a hybrid format with enrollment from Duke students from Durham as well as Duke Kunshan University (DKU). To deal with the challenge of teaching interdisciplinary materials to a diverse audience, components of the course were digitized to facilitate learning. Digitized outputs from this project include a bootcamp module that introduces students to basic concepts and tools for starting this course and asynchronous short videos and tutorials along with in-class lectures. Digital outputs of this project were made accessible to the broader Duke community via a new Sakai site.

Tatiana Lluent, who graduated with her PhD in Business Administration from Duke University, worked with Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) to develop an Entrepreneurship Resource Library that would bring together resources for students and instructors interested in launching a venture. The project supported by the Bass Digital Education Fellowship is part of this larger Entrepreneurship Resource Library and consists of creating a series of videos on core concepts pertaining to entrepreneurship. The videos feature a diverse set of instructors from the I&E community.

Brad Boswell is a PhD candidate in Early Christianity in the Duke Graduate Program in Religion. As a Bass Digital Education Fellow, he gained broad exposure to the range of available digital tools while also learning how to navigate the benefits and challenges of these tools, leveraging the benefits for pedagogical gain. Boswell worked with Martin Eisner, PhD, Associate Professor of Romance Studies, and focused on a Dante-related project with particular emphasis on digital scholarship and pedagogy to impact undergraduate education at Duke.

Katya Gorecki holds a PhD in English. Her project included developing a series of game design workshops for the Duke Games and Culture Lab. This project also involved leading the Global Game Jam, with the Duke Game Lab as one of the hosting sites (Jan. 31 – Feb. 2. 2020). Her project was led by Shai Ginsberg, PhD, Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

Jonathan Holt is a PhD candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering. He partnered with the Online Duke team and worked with Michael Gustafson, PhD, Associate Professor of the Practice of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He designed a “level-up” course on computational methods, intended as co-curricular support for undergraduates taking courses in engineering, computer science and math.

Hannah Rogers holds a PhD in English and worked with Tsitsi Jaji, PhD, Associate Professor of English. She worked with students to help them develop public-facing digital humanities projects. These collaborative student groups developed projects on sound and critical race studies. With this fellowship, Rogers had an opportunity to create a framework for how to design courses that integrate digital humanities project into the course curriculum.

Filippo Screpanti holds a Ph.D. in Romance Studies. His digital humanities project was led by Alicia Jiménez, PhD, Assistant Professor in Classical Studies. The project was part of an undergraduate seminar in Archaeology and Visual and Media Studies titled “Roman Spectacle.” Screpanti developed a digital geo-chronological platform for displaying the monuments that were linked to spectacles in ancient Rome, to enable students to create a digital storytelling project using digital and visual mapping.

Edgar Virguez Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in Environment. He worked with Deb Reisinger, PhD, Associate Professor of the Practice of Romance Studies, on a teaching innovation project to integrate digital technologies and increase student engagement for Voices of the Environment, a course with Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum (and taught in Spanish). He developed digital assignments to increase the participation of the course’s service-learning partner, Fundacion Ayuda por Colombia, and designed course activities and videos that promote its development under the program.

Evan Donahue, a PhD candidate in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures, worked on a Coursera project during his time as a fellow. This fellowship placed a PhD student with Coursera’s Teaching & Learning team, providing the fellow an opportunity to work with a global learning partner, under the guidance of Learning Innovation. Read more about Evan Donahue’s fellowship in this blog post.