Lixia Cheng from Purdue Language and Cultural Exchange (PLaCE) in West Lafayette and David Pratt, associate professor of Education at Purdue University Northwest, have been selected as winners of the 2023 Brightspace Innovation Program grants.
Brightspace is Purdue’s learning management system. The Brightspace Innovation Program grants are designed to encourage the leveraging of Brightspace to promote high-quality instruction, improve outcomes for instructors and students, or foster new and emerging approaches to teaching and learning.
The program is open to faculty and staff at Purdue West Lafayette, Purdue Fort Wayne, Purdue Northwest and Purdue Global. The grants fund costs needed to advance the goals outlined in the grant proposal and can run up to two years to allow sufficient time to develop and implement the proposal idea and assess the project outcomes.
Cheng, associate director of evaluation for PLaCE, plans to design a Brightspace course for teacher-raters of students’ English proficiency and evaluate its efficacy for rater calibration to ensure reliable and fair grading of student performance.
Pratt, a faculty member in the School of Education and Counseling at Purdue Northwest, plans to use Brightspace to incorporate elements of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) in students’ classroom experiences to find out if including an SEL component improves student success.
This is the third year the Brightspace Innovation Program grants have been awarded. For proposal submission and other information, visit the program’s webpage.
Proposals can cover a broad spectrum of innovative teaching and learning projects. Past grants have gone to examine gamifying courses through Brightspace, digitally enhance course syllabi to make them more engaging, promote experiential learning by fostering student communities of practice, make use of predictive modeling to engage and assist struggling students, and more.
The program is sponsored by Purdue Teaching and Learning Technologies and Purdue University Online.
Writer: Greg Kline, Purdue University Online, 765-426-8545, gkline@purdue.edu