Okay thank you. Mhm. Okay. Yeah.
All right welcome you guys. Thanks everybody for coming
. This is our first annual um event, the
assessment showcase. And it's a partnership between the D
. S. A. Division of student affairs um
the Office of Assessment and Evaluation and the library and
the library. So all three parties are coming together
to try to showcase some of the great assessment work
that we're doing around the university in different areas and
how effective assessment has been making, some decision making
informed decisions better. So we're also trying to build
a network of people around to share some of the
projects that we're doing. Um So in addition to
the live sessions that were doing which will be um
from 12 to 1 today we do have um poster
presentations that are on the main level that you can
walk through at any point but on friday specifically from
12 to to we're going to have a popcorns and
poster session and um so hopefully you can join us
for for something on another day this week at this
time or the poster and popcorn sessions. So for
today, for the live assessment briefings, um what
we're gonna do is have each presenter, we've got
four people to talk today each for 15 minutes and
we're gonna hold true to making them 15 minutes,
so we can have you out by one and I'll
um depending on if they have time, if you
want to ask questions, you can ask questions or
stay and talk to the presenters at afterwards or another
time. So I'm gonna turn it over to our
presenters today and these are the four that we have
in the order that they're going to go and I
won't come back up in between each one, so
we'll just go right from one presenter to the next
. So our first presenter today is Katherine um link
, and then after that is Michael, cut neck
, and then um Sophie Wenzel and then Jack Evans
, and they'll introduce themselves and what topic they're talking
about as well as the department that they're representing.
So I'll turn it over to Catherine, I'm Katherine
and Link, I'm the director of Graduate Programs and
Assessment in the College of Engineering. Um and I'm
going to highlight some of the work that I've done
recently on Assessment of entrepreneurship education, a program that's
being run through the College Engineering based on an NSF
funded grant and also a related course that's for undergraduates
here at the university. Um the mhm You know
, the program that was going to talk about is
an NSF funded I corps program and it's basically designed
to lead um technical academic teams through a six week
process to encourage them to pursue their entrepreneurial endeavors and
the goal is to prepare them to create and lead
a start up by the time they're through the program
, the program is based on a curriculum known as
lean launchpad and there's a whole body of literature around
that and how that works. But it's um very
much based on sort of a hands on approach.
How do you learn to be an entrepreneur by doing
some of the things they would expect an entrepreneur to
do based on some of the faculty who were involved
in the I corps program, either going through it
themselves or teaching through the I corps program. Um
, those observations led them to think that there were
some really interesting things going on that they really saw
happening with participants. And so then they decided to
start a similar course here at Virginia Tech, that
would be open to undergraduates and then based on the
interest, they actually opened it up to graduate students
as well and they use basically the same curriculum,
the same approach for those classes. When we talked
about assessment of the course, um we realized that
, like I said, it was very much based
on this idea of active learning and that participants,
although there is some core concepts that they have to
learn about in each of these six week um,
segments or over towards the six weeks. Um they
learn by doing and so they go out, they
learn a little bit during the course, Most of
the courses are taught by Webex and then they come
back and report on what they've learned and they demonstrate
their knowledge through basically continuing to work on what they
call in the I corps program in this lean launchpad
approach the business model canvas, which is very different
from traditional entrepreneurship classes that you might find like the
college of business where people work on a business plan
and they're considered successful or they're judged in terms of
their success on a business plan that they have successfully
put together. So it's a very different approach.
Um, interestingly enough, there were very clear objectives
associated with the course at Virginia Tech and you needed
that obviously to put the syllabus together and get it
approved to go through the governance process. What was
not so clear were the I Corps objectives. There
are actually no clear objectives tied with this particular program
, although it's funded to have the goal of creating
entrepreneurs that can then go out and create these startups
successfully. So what we tried to do was encourage
the NSF to adopt a set of objectives. Unfortunately
, that's tied up still in the curriculum committee being
deliberated with the NSF, so that's um, to
be determined. But because the way that I corps
program works, we can still carry out the assessments
that we want to on the program. Um although
we'd be greatly aided if we could map some of
the work that we're doing to clear objectives. We
are able to do that with the course and I'll
talk a little bit about the approach that we used
. Um, but we broke it down to a
couple different areas. We looked at what content knowledge
participants need to leave the course with. Are they
expected to leave the course with? Um, how
do they deal with ambiguity? Because that's one of
the big things that this program focuses on. We
look at their confidence. A lot of what people
say is that entrepreneurs have to have a fair amount
of confidence in terms of body of literature that's out
there, and some of the other studies that are
done, and then we looked at their ability to
network. Has that improved Following the course? They
feel like they have a better network people that they
can go to. And then we asked them about
their own perceptions of their entrepreneurship skills and how they
think they developed over the course of the program in
the beginning, when we try to map out sort
of what we wanted to do with the assessment of
this particular program, there were some big goals.
We wanted to um yield information about changes that might
take place an entrepreneurial mindset. So how did how
did their thinking change as a result of going through
this this course? Um we wanted to use observation
in terms of where they actually able to demonstrate some
of these things that we expected them to have.
We wanted to administer a pre post survey that we
get at. Some of the things that I talked
about before in terms of content knowledge about their perceptions
of their skills, about their ability to network.
So their own judgments about those things. We want
to do follow up interviews to say, you know
, following this course, how has your thinking changed
? Um what skills do you think you learned?
How have you applied those things in different contexts?
And then we wanted to compare those findings with a
control group because really when you think about it,
what is what would make these entrepreneurs different from another
group? And can we really look at where there
any differences between these two groups in terms of the
reality of funding and time we've been able to successfully
do is um really conducted pre post survey. So
we've asked participants before, they've gone through both the
I corps program and through the course here at Virginia
Tech, um their own perceptions about their skills,
their ability to deal with ambiguity and things like that
. And we've been able to do the pre post
survey. We do have plans to do some follow
up interviews, but for right now we've had to
settle for some open ended questions that might be able
to give us some more information about how they think
they've changed in their way of thinking, following participation
in this course. And then one of the things
that we've done is to refine some of the course
objectives that we've used here at Virginia Tech, following
the process that we've used for the assessment and with
some of the data that we've collected. And then
what we've also wanted to do is take some of
the data that we've collected and we're going to approach
the NSF again, approach the curriculum committee again and
get them to really think about some clear objectives that
could be linked with the I corps program that could
be more clearly evaluated and assessed and could provide some
more useful data in terms of how to improve the
program. Um If the goal is really to create
um entrepreneurs that think very differently than when they started
the course, that's sort of the approach that that
we use and how we've approached assessment of entrepreneurship,
some of the challenges that we faced. Um questions
, comments. Yeah. Do you, when you
were doing this to review when um like after you
follow an individual or you just, we're afraid.
Yeah, we know we follow the individuals and so
we compare their their proposed assessments and we have found
from comparison of those results that both with the I
corps program participants and with the student participants, um
they've really changed in terms of their confidence has remained
the same. So they came in to the program
is very confident, they left as confident as when
they came in if not more so no surprise.
And then um what we did find out is that
they were learning new content. So they were learning
this lean launchpad approach and were able to articulate it
much more clearly um in a very clear manner following
um exit the program of course. And so those
, that was one thing what we expected to see
was that their ability to deal with ambiguity may have
changed and they would be um better able to deal
with uncertain, uncertain circumstances after participation in this program
. But we did not see the changes that we
anticipated. And so one of the things that we're
looking at is, you know, is this a
matter of changing the questions on the survey tool?
Or is it really just the fact that in actuality
you can only accomplish so much in six weeks and
that those changes are not actually taking place as we
once intended them too. So that's sort of being
looked at as well as the curriculum. Um,
one of the things that we did find out was
that what's really new to the participants in these programs
is this idea of customer discovery. And so,
um this whole idea of going out, not just
taking your business plan and putting it together and getting
a clear plan in mind in terms of how you
want to accomplish your goals for your startup, but
actually taking the time to go out and interview potential
customers and really find out who is your market.
Is there a market? And what should that,
you know, what should your product look like for
that? So that was that something that has really
risen to the top in terms of point of interest
and something that the courses successfully changing the way people
are for thinking. Now, did you look at
how many students are intending to actually move forward with
the project and further now? Mhm. We we
plan to do a follow up. So a lot
of times what happens is they go through the program
and they have to make a decision. The lean
launchpad approach essentially leads them through six weeks with us
and they are a go or no go decision.
And so they have to decide for themselves, sort
of do I have anything to go on in terms
of all my ideas. Can I pursue this any
further? But what we hope is that even if
they ended with a no go decision um that they
could use the skills that they've gained through this program
to pursue, pursue something else. And so we
were planning to follow up with some of the participants
, but not for probably another year, thinking that
it may take that long for them to get another
idea together and the courage to pursue it first questions
, not I can turn it over to mike and
I can always field something that comes up later.
It is surprising thing you learned. Um what did
you, you said you got outcomes, you didn't
expect, like you say, what what are things
that came? Really didn't see coming. I think
I think the idea that essentially the designers of the
lean launchpad approach really believe that they are changing the
way people operate. You know, that they are
creating who people who came into the program will be
changed for the, you know, sort of the
rest of their um time here. It's a very
ambitious, but there are strong believers in that.
Um and I think that what we found out is
that that was like, it was the most surprising
thing that we're not having that big of an impact
in that short period of time as as once believed
. But I think what's interesting is that you can
take people who are traditional engineers, who are very
science focused, who may not have had any prior
experience with this whole idea of interaction with outside entities
, with this idea of how do I actually do
an interview? How would I talk to somebody about
my product and they're gaining skills that actually allow them
to do that? And that's really interesting. So
there's there is something happening but probably not as significant
as the launch pad. Thanks. Thank you.
Thank you. Okay. Hi everybody. My name
is mike cut back. I am representing today Office
of University 88 services. We are part of equity
and access, which is within human resources here at
Virginia Tech, and I'm also a doctoral candidate in
the higher education program here. Um and that's important
because that's how this project began. Uh This project
started as a class assignment and dr Berg's evaluation class
um that was designed to make my life at work
a little bit easier uh to help me do a
rather enormous task. So today, what I'm going
to talk to you about is creating a master transition
plan at Virginia Tech and what that means and what
that involves and how University ADA services touches that.
Um But in my job in University 88 services,
I'm the A. D. A specialist and I
focus on physical access here at campus. So what
that means is any any building we have any space
that we use. Um I go and I look
at it and I make sure that people who have
some sort of physical disability would be able to use
the space the same way the rest of us would
. Um I look at all of our places that
we go um here on campus and also anywhere else
in the world that we go, we have to
be compliant with the laws here in the United States
because we are an entity that exists here in the
United States as part of the government here. So
even our campuses around the state and around the country
and around the world have to comply with all of
the regulations related to physical access. So specifically,
that's titled two of the americans with disabilities act.
And that applies to all state and local government facilities
and entities, uh and it covers not only physical
access in their buildings and their spaces, but also
programmatic access. And so the way that we deliver
our educational programs, the way that we deliver our
community service programs, the way that we deliver our
services to our students, the way that we deliver
our services and our benefits to our faculty and staff
, All have to comply with Title two of the
Americans with Disabilities Act. So roughly here at Virginia
Tech, we have about 30,000 students. We have
roughly 6000 employees on campus at any given time.
And that's just here in Blacksburg. That doesn't count
all of our satellite campuses, It doesn't count the
capital region, It doesn't count Switzerland or any of
the other fun places that Virginia Tech is. Um
And so our office is designed to help out all
of those faculty and staff that work in Virginia Tech
. And specifically, I look at physical access and
programmatic access. So I work with departments, programs
, different services that we have here to make sure
that what you're doing and how you're doing it is
accessible to people. So this involves lots of different
types of things that you need to think about.
Not only the physical space that you use for a
meeting, uh but also how you deliver your information
. So if you have handouts, do they come
in an accessible format? If you have bulletin boards
that display a lot of information in your office?
Is that at a height that somebody in a wheelchair
would be able to read it? Is it in
a font that somebody with poor vision would be able
to see? Do you use the right coloring so
that we don't have grey lettering over a white background
. Makes it really difficult to see those kinds of
things. Uh So my job here as the A
. D. A. Specialist is to look at
all of these different things. Now. Virginia tech
is huge. Does anybody know how many buildings we
have here on campus? There's over 130 And I'm
supposed to go look at every single one that's just
here on campus. That doesn't count the research park
. That doesn't count the CRC. That doesn't count
any of our 107 locations around the state of Virginia
for our extension services. It doesn't cover any of
our six satellite campuses, like the Richmond campus or
the northern Virginia campus of the Norfolk campus. Uh
so there's a lot of space and there's a lot
of places that we have to look at. So
this project is designed to help us do that.
Uh and part of what the law requires is that
the institution or the entity create a document called the
master transition Plan. What a master transition plan does
is simply document all areas of physical and programmatic access
that may be problematic or maybe not up to code
or may be in violation of the law and asks
you to create a plan of how are you going
to fix it? And so what you have to
do in a master transition plan is you have to
document what is the specific thing going on, Who
are the people that are involved with that particular program
? So, um, if we're looking at how
you deliver a service or program, it's who runs
that program. If we're looking at a particular building
, it's well, which department occupies that building and
is using that space? Um and we involve those
people, we list them on our document and we
list the steps that we're taking to remedy the problem
. Um and so this is a living document that
we're required to keep here at Virginia Tech, um
and pretty much document anything that I find as I
go about and do this job. So what we
had to do for this project was figure out,
well, how are we going to do this in
sort of a systematic way, because I can run
around and look at all these buildings, but I
might not catch everything and I might not talk to
all the important people without some sort of plan.
And so what we decided on doing was breaking this
up into phases And looking at one step at a
time. Um, and so the first phase of
our project is to look at physical access here on
campus. So what we're doing is we're assessing the
buildings first. Um, once we finished with the
buildings were going to then talk to the people in
the buildings and assess the programs and services that take
place within each of those buildings. Now, the
reason we're doing it that way is once we've documented
everything that we know exists in the building, if
any issues or any of the spaces that are more
friendly to people with disabilities, when we come to
talk to you about how you deliver your program or
how do you do your classes? How do you
do your labs? We already know the spaces and
places that are going to be best to do those
kinds of things. So when you say, well
, I need a lot of space and my students
can walk around and interact with each other and work
on a machine that we're building together. We'll already
know what spaces can accommodate the educational needs. And
also the physical access is. So what we've done
is we've decided to split it up, Start with
physical access. Go to that programmatic access second and
start with the campus here at Virginia Tech. We're
doing just that first. Then the next step is
to go out to the research park in the other
places that we are here in the Blacksburg area and
get all of the rest of the spaces um,
right around us. Then we're going to go out
to the other regions, uh, other satellite campuses
. Uh, and the last thing that we're gonna
hit are the extension sites, because there's so many
of those. Uh But the idea is to systematically
go through, look at the space, see what's
going on there, how it's used and document any
issues that we may find. So what does that
look like? Well, here's an example. This
is a space on campus that is designed to be
used by both faculty and staff. This is used
by the School of Visual Arts for one of their
programs. Um It's designed to have multiple people using
it at one time, and those people can be
faculty or staff, so you can have a bunch
of faculty and they're doing projects, or you can
have students in there doing stuff or you can have
a mixture. So take a look at that and
see what you think might be initiative. I mean
, does anything kind of jump out and look like
that might be a problem if you had a physical
disability? Say you were in a wheelchair or say
you were blind. Mhm. Do you see any
problems? Part of you Kind of hard to get
around? Yeah a lot. There's a lot there's
it's cramped up so actually there's six things wrong in
here. Um The first is that the door doesn't
open up wide. Um It's one of those those
old time like shopkeeper doors where the top opens and
the bottom opens separately. It's got a little ledge
that you can do business on. Um But because
of that and because they have so much stuff in
there the door doesn't open all the way. Um
So actually somebody in a wheelchair couldn't even get through
the door because it doesn't open up wider. Um
They've got to separate printers that work fully functional color
printers on the floor, so that might be a
little hard to get to either if you are using
a mobility device or even if you have maybe back
problems, I would hate to have to bend over
all every day all day to pick up anything that
I printed um at the sink there, that's that's
used for storage under the sink so that if you
were in a wheelchair you wouldn't be able to wheel
up and roll under there because you run into the
things that they're storing over there. They've got the
laminating machine up in the corner of the room,
but they have so much stuff in front of it
that you can't really get to it unless you dance
around the other objects. So overall there's a lot
of different things going on in there that people wouldn't
necessarily think of. So what we do is we
go around and we try to help and assess these
things and we've got a couple of things that we
do to do that. Um The first is we
use this checklist and this is a visual guide to
the aid ag or the accessible building standards. The
federal building code is all in here. Uh the
nice thing about this is it gives you diagrams and
it tells you when it's talking about the midline of
the toilet or when it's talking about entrance ways,
it shows you exactly what it's talking about. So
, you know when they're talking about curbs, ramps
, all of those different kinds of things, but
this is a guy that we use that you can
see its well worn from a lot of the assessments
that I've done on campus, uh and this this
speaks to all of the physical access issues that may
occur within a building. Um So this talks about
pathways. It talks about bathrooms, it talks about
workspaces, it talks about learning spaces, um and
how they can be configured to optimize accessibility. Um
And then some of the other things that we use
are pretty common, Like I use a tape measure
a lot just to measure things to see what is
the doorway really wide is the doorway big enough?
Just the pathway long enough. And the other,
the other thing that's kind of interesting about this is
so we see these lots of these issues, right
? Um and the first thing that most administrators go
is, oh my God, this is gonna cost
a boatload of money to fix this problem. Not
necessarily true. Most of these issues right here can
be fixed free of charge. Um Number one,
put it up on the table that's free and it
solved your problem. Number two, get rid of
the stuff that's behind the door, it'll open all
the way. Problem solved. Number three. Turn
that machine so that it's underneath the window and facing
out and then you don't have anything in front of
it. Number four. Put it up on the
table. Problem solved. Number five is the bulletin
board back there, it's not accessible because it's too
high and their stuff in front of it, so
move it now and move the stuff out of the
way in front of it and number six just take
the stuff out from under the counter there. You
solved all of the accessibility issues in there and you
didn't spend any money. Um So that's kind of
the nice thing about this is a lot of this
can be solved for no cost to free cost.
Uh This is another tool that helps us save countless
dollars. Um Lots of people think that doorways are
only accessible when they have an automatic push button on
, but that's not true. Uh The guidelines for
doorways actually relates how much pressure it takes to open
and close the door. So this thing is a
pressure gauge, and all you do with this is
you push it against the door and you open the
door with this and it tells you exactly how much
pressure it takes to open the door. So a
door to be compliant can only require£5 of pressure
to open it. Um So the easiest fix for
that is any door that has a box at the
top of it and an arm attached to it.
Uh There's a gauge in there that you can adjust
with a screwdriver, uh and you can reduce the
pressure free of charge Putting in a power door operator
costs anywhere from 8000 to$13,000. So sometimes the
things that that first come to mind is the solution
are the really expensive ones and it scares administrators and
people who do budgets and they say, oh my
God, how are we going to comply with this
? A lot of times we can find ways for
you to do this cheap and at no cost just
by coming out and look. So that's what I
do in my job. I come out and I
look at these spaces, anybody that has questions about
their space, we're happy to come out and look
for you um and help talk to you about what
you can do in those spaces to make them a
little bit more accessible. Does anyone have any questions
? It might be done assessments in all of these
individual buildings? Yeah. Quite a collection. Mhm
. Lost buildings to see if there are common issues
. Yes. We work regularly with the university architects
and university planning here on all of the construction and
renovation projects that go on on campus. So anytime
we build a new building, um we get to
see all of the blueprints that are done for those
buildings during the design phase so that we can provide
comments about accessibility issues, things that may have been
missed as the things were being designed and drawn out
. And then when it comes to renovations and stuff
, when we do our assessments, we work very
closely with two architects in particular and university planning to
communicate the projects that we find and what can be
done. And then they work with us to provide
solutions to that if if we have to do structural
or outside changes. So we have a landscape architect
that we were and we also have a regular structural
architect that we work with. So if we have
, if we find that there's a doorway that's encased
in cement and it's not wide enough, well,
they work with us to redesign that and figure out
how that can look. If we have to do
outside stuff, our landscape architect works with us to
make the pathways accessible while also making it look like
everything else around that area. That's sure planned assessment
with these utilities. Do you have any the fact
uses this process, crowdsource approach? A number of
facilities global? He has. Yes. We we
often talk to people before and after and during our
assessments. Um, so when I'm out measuring things
, I'll often ask the person who is using the
room at the time, what do you think of
this? How did this get to be this way
? Who's, who's in charge of this space?
Uh, and who decided it should look like this
? Um, and that helps us figure out the
right people to talk to, help address some of
the problems. The other thing is that we always
take information. When people call in, you can
always call in and ask us to come and look
at something. If you think it's out of compliance
or if you think that there's an issue with the
program or service that you've got going on, we
will come out and do assessment for you if you
request it. So we have our own schedule of
how we go through the buildings and what, what
we look for when. But if you have something
you want to point out to us now, please
tell us and we'll be happy to come and look
at it and talk to you about how to make
it right. Thanks everybody. Yeah, I love
how different all these topics are. This is great
. So my name is Sophia Wenzel and I am
with the Department of Population Health Sciences, which is
part of that med. That's where the new mph
program is located. And I'm at the Center for
Public Health Practice and Research. And through my position
, I am partly funded by the New River Health
District. Um, so a lot of the work
I do is in combination with them. So this
came out and most of my presentation is really focused
on results, but I'll give you just a little
bit of the process now. So the Never Health
District was funded with a Tobacco use Control prevention program
. Um, to do work throughout the New River
Health District. Um, Hokey wellness was interested in
seeing what people were thinking when it came to tobacco
use on campus and the healthy hokey task, healthy
hokey task force, which is a bunch of people
on campus interested in health. We're also interested.
Um, so we developed this survey assessment survey.
It's not a scientific tool. We really just wanted
a glance to see what people were thinking on campus
when it came to tobacco use to potential tobacco policies
. Um, so I've got mostly results for you
and I'm happy to take questions at the end of
course. So, um, we collected the surveys
over the summer of 2014. So last summer I
worked with a couple of students on this and we
got 1000, 269 responses. So, but here
you've got a breakdown of, of who answered the
survey right here, right here, just screens everywhere
. Um We wish we had had more non student
wage. This that's just the number of people that
responded. So we got this survey out through a
whole lot of different mechanisms hasn't. Did anyone here
take this survey? Okay. I know. So
one person to thank you Alex. Um So obviously
, you know not a representative, not a random
sample completely. A convenience sample. We sent it
out to all the department heads, we went to
um dining services to facilities to drop off paper surveys
. Um We tried to get in and out as
best we could. It was up for about two
months Um and the 13,000 employees was counting people everywhere
just in case somehow it went out to one of
the other campuses. Um So we wanted to know
, first of all how many people were responding actually
used tobacco. So about 10% of our respondents actually
reported that they use tobacco either daily or weekly.
Most of them were cigarette smokers. Um, a
large percentage had never smoked. Um, and oddly
enough, it was just 33 people, but the
non student wage employees respondents, respondents, none of
them have smoked, which in what we tend to
see, just, you know, looking, um
, that doesn't seem that it represents that population very
well, but that's who answered. So we put
it in our results. Um, so we asked
them if they thought that universities have a responsibility to
lessen the risk of tobacco addiction by adopting policies.
Um, so slightly more people thought that, yes
, um, universities have a responsibility um specifically for
tobacco. And then, um, when we talked
about, do universities have a responsibility to adopt policies
that ensure people have smoke free air? That was
a very no high resounding? Yes. So definitely
a difference between the smoking and tobacco use and when
we say tobacco, we're talking about smoking of course
, but other types of tobaccos, So smokeless tobacco
, hookah et cetera. And one of our big
limitations here is that we did not ask about e
cigarettes. Um I really wish we had because we're
seeing more and more of that come up hr recently
has had several complaints about people using e cigarettes inside
buildings because there is no policy relating to e cigarettes
right now. Um and that will be one of
um hopefully something that will come out of this.
Um So we asked if they thought that students could
you should use tobacco on campus, um chew and
smoking. So for all of these um more people
were likely to be okay with people chewing versus smoking
again. That goes back to that, um smoke
free air. Um and then the sporting events people
, it was a pretty low percentage of the respondents
that thought that it was okay to use tobacco.
It's sporting events, it's actually at Lane Stadium,
at least it's um, it's prohibited, but there
are certain spaces, um, smoking is prohibited,
not tobacco use, and then there's for specific places
where you can go smoke around um around the stadium
. So when we ask people if they agreed with
the current policy, so the current policy being no
smoking within 25 ft of of tech owned buildings.
Um 72 agreed with it, 19 disagreed or strongly
disagreed. We regret not asking people why they disagreed
, because it could be they disagreed because they didn't
think there should be a policy, or it could
be that they disagreed because they thought the policy was
too lenient. So again, we've we've found limitations
as you usually do during these things. Um we
asked if there should be designated smoking areas on campus
. About 60 thought that yes, there should be
smoking um designated smoking areas on campus. Again,
this was all to assess what we could potentially be
doing with all this information. Um So this was
the big question. You're trying to figure out of
the respondents, would you be in support of a
policy of a smoke free policy on campus? So
slightly more than um And then 50 agreed with a
smoke free policy on campus and um slightly less agreed
with having a comprehensive tobacco free policy on campus.
So, you know, I work in public health
. This was a little bit disappointing for us.
We were hoping that there would be a little bit
more support, um but at the same time,
it's good. This is why you do this type
of thing, because it might be that maybe the
university, um, community is not ready for a
tobacco free policy, but maybe there's something else that
we could do and between, for example, so
, and this was just assessing if a tobacco free
policy would affect someone coming to work at a tech
. Um, and basically, we found that wouldn't
really affect me working here, um, not would
not really affect enrollment. Um, So we thought
maybe if there was a policy, faculty would be
more likely to come work here. Um, but
it was 50, was 50 was, it weren't
really influence it. Um, they were taken into
consideration, but not a big factor. And,
uh, this was just gauging what people's attitudes were
. Um, you know, definitely 85 strongly agreed
or agreed that tobacco is more negative, negatively viewed
now and then 96 agreed. Even a lot of
those people that were smokers and that said that they
didn't want a policy agreed that breathing secondhand smoke can
cause health problems. So at least it's, it's
on people's minds. And then we did, um
, we had a comment box at the end,
so we did a quick qualitative analysis of the top
comments, um, just to gauge what people were
thinking and no here, you've got, you've got
results. Well, yeah, first of all,
before we do any sort of Further policy, the
policy, the current policies need to be enforced.
And I'm sure you've all walked through clouds of smoke
going in, going in buildings just because there's a
lot of times that 25 ft is not respected.
It's also sometimes its faculty and staff and its people
coming in from the outside. So like painters that
are painting a building and smoking, they're not within
25 ft when they're actually painting. Um and then
just, you know, strong support and then strong
um, you know, feelings against the policy.
We are in southwest Virginia. Um an area that
has had a lot of tobacco. Tobacco has been
very fruitful in this, in this region. Um
so, you know, people talked about Virginia history
, they talked about the legality of it. They
talked about their freedom to um to smoke, which
are all very um very valid concerns. Um,
so I talked a little bit about the limitations of
this. It was not a representative sample. We
conducted it over the summer, which makes us think
that there was a lot less um non student wage
employees than there would have been at another time during
the year. And this is something that HR we
presented this to HR and they would have like to
know what type of faculty that was a p research
instructional etcetera. And um yeah, so that's that's
the end of it. So I'll just tell you
what what we've done so far. We've presented this
to HR and hokey wellness and the healthy hokey task
force. Um We have given them all these results
and healthy hokey task force is moving forward with whatever
they're gonna do. We don't know exactly what that
is yet. I don't think they know exactly what
that is. I think they needed this just to
be able to um to be more informed moving forward
. If we do in fact want to suggest the
tobacco free policy, we know there might be more
resistance than for example, maybe starting with designated smoking
areas are starting with a smoke free policy, for
example, or maybe including e cigarettes in there.
Um, So I think if anything that helped us
see that it might need to be more baby steps
than, you know, gung ho. But there
is a movement in southwest Virginia right now to go
tobacco free. There's schools from, from tech all
the way down west, we're working with U.
V. A. Wise, um, a bunch
of places in between um that want to go smoke
free. So Radford is well on its way,
jefferson College of Health Sciences and roanoke has gone smoke
free. It's easier for them because they are associated
with Carilion. Um, so, so there's work
being done. Not sure when how who, but
hopefully in the process. So I'll take questions.
Yes. But the other university happened and now whether
there when they think completely tobacco tobacco free or are
they allowing the so right now, when you say
a comprehensive tobacco policy, it includes e cigarettes,
it's not technically tobacco in e cigarettes, it's nicotine
. But when we work with universities or were,
you know, we've been working with businesses around the
area to to have them adopt comprehensive tobacco free policies
and that does include e cigarettes. And I'm hoping
that whatever happens at tech, that that could be
included maybe even before other things. Yeah. Any
other questions? Thank you. Just, just the
current policy, like 25. It does not.
There is nothing about your cigarettes in the current policy
. So technically people can light up an e cigarette
in the middle of the building and not be in
violation of tech policies. Is there such a thing
as like there's a vapor? Yeah. So there's
a vapor that comes out and um proponents of it
say that it's a perfectly safe water vapor, but
research has shown that there's actually, um, chemicals
that come out in the paper. Yeah. This
is slightly on her later. But do you know
, there are consequences to violate? That's that's the
other thing, not that I know of, So
john fridge, who's the health educator um, was
telling us basically, first of all, it's not
really enforced. And then second of all, I
think it's more like, please don't smoke here,
and that's it. Um, so I think,
you know, before anything, before going further,
um, that's something that really needs to be taken
into consideration is what's being done. How are reinforcing
what we have now? Do we really want to
, you know, start this whole policy and then
it's not gonna be enforced? So what's the point
? And then, who's going to enforce it,
etcetera? All right, thank you. My name
is Jack Evans. I'm from the Department of Biological
Sciences and I teach enormous courses at the freshman level
Were between 300 and 500. I forgot I can't
walk around. You can put me on a leash
is killing me. Ah So a couple years ago
, give or take, I forget what it was
. My associate department head Came into my office and
said, Jack, we just got a grant of
48 grand and we want to change the way we
do our lectures. And he said, you have
any ideas how we can make that happen. And
said, yeah, that's easy. We give these
students something to do. And said something to learn
. And he looked at me like I was crazy
. He said, what do you mean by that
? And It's an actual classroom. We want them
to actually have to think when they come in and
see us. I don't want to have to stay
in front of the classroom for 75 minutes. And
then what what what what what what what what what
what and put some students to sleep and have them
go away. And when they come on an exam
day, they may or may not know what's going
on. So we took our class and we turned
it up all our freshman lectures and turn them upside
down. And so typically when we're doing lectures were
exposing students to brand new material that debt and we
talk and talk and talk and they may get it
and they may not and they walk out the door
in the flip classroom, we provide that information to
them online lectures before they come to class and then
they have to take an online quiz before they come
to class. And then when we get in class
, That's when all hell breaks loose. And we
divide 220 students up into groups of about three or
4 and they do activists. And the whole time
I am, the undergraduate teaching assistants are cruising around
the groups to make sure they are on task and
know what they're doing. Now. When we started
out, our original goal was to do no harm
. We didn't want to take our lectures that had
average GPA s of 2.5 or six or whatever And
then assess them at the end of the flip classroom
and see everybody had a 1.5. So we wanted
to go in with that idea of, let's just
make sure we don't screw anybody up too bad.
Uh and so the idea here with doing all these
different things is we're providing the students many more opportunities
to learn the material and when our hopes which information
we don't have at this point is they will port
that information into the sophomore and junior and senior level
biology forces saving us time from sitting in a 4000
level course and saying, if you remember from freshman
biology And spending 15, 20 minutes talking about something
they should already know. And so again, what
we're trying to do is increase the knowledge base here
. And so why did we do it? And
it's easy if we look up here, um,
in the typical lecture, they're being exposed to brand
new stuff here. The lower end of our friend
Williams tacks on and the rest of the time they
are supposed to be applying this, analyzing it,
figured it out on their own. Okay. Works
for me. Doesn't necessarily work for the students,
but that's what it said. So what were you
doing is provided again the lectures to them before they
come to class when they come to class, That's
when little pointers that work. We are actually charging
the students with thinking, figuring stuff out. And
we spend Typically I teach a 75 minute class,
Probably about 60 minutes is involved in the activity,
220 students in the active. So the idea here
is it's practice practice practice, right? That's how
it works. That's how we learned to walk,
right? That's how we learned to go to the
bathroom and the toilet when we were little tiny because
we practice it over and over and over and over
. Education works the same way. And when we're
doing in the active classroom, we give them a
lecture before they come to class with him, a
quiz. Before they come to class. From that
quiz we make a little mini lecturer. So the
quizzes do I teach on Tuesday and Thursdays? The
quizzes do they have to have it completed by midnight
the night before class. And then I go into
my office in the morning and I look at the
results and say okay they have a problem with this
concept, this concept in this concept and that's what
I make a mini lecture And then we get into
the classroom and I spend 15 minutes or so going
over my mini lecturer of things. I know they're
going to have issues with and then we open it
up to the class and active. And so I've
got 11 groups and each group has a UTA assigned
to them and their 20 students in each trip.
And then those groups break down into sub groups of
three or four and that's how they do the activity
. They finished their activity. They put their names
on them and they send it to me via scalp
. Yeah. And then of course we have I
clicker questions at the end of the mini lectures.
So again, it gives me the opportunity to be
able to look at the results when I get back
into my office and say, okay, they're getting
this now and if not, it's something I can
talk about again at some point. So what we
see here in the active classroom is we got a
gazillion different opportunities for them actually to process this information
and start to cruise up, bloom's taxonomy instead of
hanging down and they understand and comprehend. Now when
we look at the lecture, the traditional lecture world
, we got two gigs to assess what's going on
, Meet yapping for 75 minutes and then I'm taking
an exam, so not so much. Not so
many opportunities to have our students get the information that
we would like them. Now there's a bonus here
too. This is, yeah, the very first
day, this semester of my foot plaster lets me
way in the back right there. And so the
bonuses actually work with students. Ooh, that's why
we're all here at the other towers. Right?
But, but I would argue there are a handful
of those, not so much, But when I
first got here, I taught laboratories that have 20
students in it. I absolutely loved it because I
got to know everybody on a first name basis.
I knew where issues were and where they weren't and
I could point um, my energy in an appropriate
direction. We're doing the very same thing here.
Except I don't have students 20 anymore. I've got
students of 250 275. I teach a class of
500 from time. So what are we looking for
? Well, when we started out, we wanted
to correlate, um, some traditional grades with flipped
classroom grades. So, and we'll talk about those
outcomes in a minute. And again, the whole
idea here was to not do any harm. We
didn't do anything wrong. Now with this, this
slipped classroom, we also want to know what the
students thought about it. Are they enjoying what's going
on here? Did they like the new way of
us presenting this information? And are they better prepared
? That's one of our major goals. To are
they really better prepared to go into my sophomore level
biology courses than they were when we were doing lecture
. That information we don't have yet. This is
a longitudinal study as well. So as soon as
our students are biologists to get into the software mandatory
software level courses, we'll start looking at their grades
as well And we'll get obviously get feedback from the
fact that they're teaching it. So when we look
at the numbers here, we had three traditional courses
that had about 170 students per, And we had
three flipped classes that had about 180 car in.
And so at the end of the semester, a
quick and dirty look at the average G. P
. A. S. Was 2.5. Um In
the traditional classes, which is pretty typical for our
students In the flipped classroom, It was a little
bit hot. It was two it just in the
first semester. And remember in the first semester of
doing it, this was brand new to everybody.
So we all were just kind of feeling our way
around in the dark trying to figure this out.
But still if we can if there is any value
in looking at Gps alone, we can see that
we didn't do anything. So that's a these quotes
down here actually some qualitative information that our students gave
us when we asked them about stuff. So we
asked him about working as a team. So sharing
information makes the whole experience more dynamic. I mean
this is just a quote straight from the kids themselves
. And so if we looked at the numbers We
saw that 60 were pretty happy about it. We're
really, really happy about it. We had 25%
. Give or take. You know, lived without
it or doesn't really matter. And then of course
we had 15 or just oh my gosh, this
is the worst thing in the world. So those
are some of the numbers. We looked at their
we also looked at the pretty quizzes and I found
these numbers to be interesting. We had 65 of
our student population and said, yeah, they were
helpful And then we had 35 to 7. Yeah
, they weren't helpful. I can't wrap my brain
around. That's like we give you this information,
we put it on here, It's gonna be on
the exam. You might want to learn it.
Yeah. So in one of our students that of
course forced me to actually, you know, other
than just write down, I had to learn.
Heaven forbid. All right, listen to learn.
I'm almost um so one of the things we did
find with the numbers, we're looking at both qualitative
and quantitative is that we really didn't didn't do any
harm. And to the greater population of course,
and most of the students uh like what they were
doing um from the first semester we did it our
students told us that the online lectures that we provided
were too long. So well that's easy enough just
shortening and still have the same apartment information in there
that we feel like they need to have said the
same thing about the assignments. So you know,
if you got a 60 minute period and they've got
to get these assignments done in the classroom and then
upload them on scholar and what we found was they
told us this and we saw it as well.
They were not quite getting done or starting to freak
out. Oh my God, there's only five minutes
left and say okay we're all in a group,
you do number three, you do number four and
number two. And it's like, wow that's really
not what we're looking for because it's no longer a
group activity. So you shorten those activities to put
them in a more doable time so that students could
feel comfortable with actually being able to sit in,
Yap about stuff and figure out how it was working
. This one is probably the most important. Be
careful of the Burbage one uses my colleagues that were
I talked the traditional class, first semester smith and
my colleagues taught the flip class and so we had
to get consent from all the students of course.
So on day one, my colleagues went in and
said you guys are part of an experimental course and
life was over after that being in this year when
we asked for data, we didn't even bother telling
me it was an experiment. Of course there's really
not. And experience, Yes, we were looking
at data, but we're we manipulating students, but
they just thought they were, you know, lab
rats in an experiment. That's right. Um let's
see what else, Just more stuff in their own
words. And I found this interesting because there's a
lot of Dui in here, if anyone knows who
he is, but you know, prior knowledge and
being reinforced and critical thinking exercises, you know,
when I read those kind of things, you get
all tingly because that's exactly what you wanted to see
happen. And so where there were their students that
were not happy with what went, I'm sure,
but that's it's always right. But so far the
data has shown us that we have, we're keeping
the masses happy and we're in turn making ourselves happy
because we think it's a much better learning experience for
the students. I believe that result, yep.
Any questions concerns Kwan dreams? Yes sir, you
talk about mechanics platforms. Yeah, How long they
, Yeah, there is so much behind the scenes
stuff that goes on to make this happen in the
classroom is crazy. So the summer before we were
gonna start to flip classroom, we had to all
get together all the folks that teach the freshman biology
and decide obviously which lessons we're gonna use and make
sure we're all on the same page there. But
we had to record the lectures, we had to
make lectures for all these courses. Then we had
to, and luckily we hired a couple graduate students
for this. We had to come up with activities
15 activities every time we go to class, their
activities you've got to do. And so those two
things were a huge issue and then we had Washington
issues, uh they were part of there were big
, big part of the and then we had to
make up my clicker questions for all of the mini
lecturers, so to speak. And so that behind
the scenes stuff was nightmares. It took forever and
ever, never, never, never we are all
using don't get me started on Scholar. We're using
Scholar as everybody else's scholars. Got more issues.
Then I'd care to chat about. Ever. One
of the issues we have is our teaching assistants are
undergraduates and undergraduate students cannot have access to Scholar because
all of the students ID numbers, it's a purple
thing. Um, so we have to create Excel
spreadsheets templates that are sent to the undergraduate to as
they grade the activities with the rubric. We provide
them with the rivers and then they send them back
to me and then I upload them and that's what
I did all morning on for two activities. So
just, maybe we should talk later. I've been
using the Bt google apps, which is google classroom
dr Yeah, a universe there. Yeah. And
we don't, you know, we've heard and you
all probably heard the same thing that scholar is on
its way out. And so that just gives us
one more thing to learn with all of our free
time. Mhm. And so we'll see what that
thing is. I'm in the classroom. It works
wonderfully. I mean, the active part of the
classroom, I'm a huge fan. Yes, A
chance to experiment much space. You saw a traditional
lecture hall, The amount of students you have a
very limited options for. Exactly, that's one of
the things we're battling with right now, because I've
got a class of 220 but in order to make
this active classroom work for the kids to be able
to get around, move around, I need a
class that really speaks about 304 100 we've only got
So many spaces around you. We can do that
. I'm in the M and Goodwin right now.
What, 90? And it's beautiful for that.
It's perfectly because you can actually walk in between all
the aisles and the kids all move around in groups
and stuff. But you're right, we've got three
or four places that we know we can go to
make this work. You're welcome. All right.