Brightspace Innovation Program announces 2022 grant awardees

Purdue’s Brightspace team announces the selection of three 2022 Brightspace Innovation Grant proposals to explore new and emerging approaches to teaching and learning. Research projects and recommendations will be shared to improve Brightspace throughout the Purdue system.

“We are very excited to support the exploratory research of the Brightspace Innovation Grant projects,” says Jenna Rickus, vice provost for teaching and learning, and professor of agricultural and biological engineering and biomedical engineering. “Each project examines new and emerging approaches using Brightspace to improve outcomes for student learning on their own campuses, but which might be scaled to benefit all Purdue students across the system.”

Following are the grant awardees for each campus, project teams, and summaries of their projects.

Purdue Fort Wayne: Cohort Program: Gamifying Courses through Brightspace Tools Adoptions

Project team: Xiaokai Jia, Associate Director, CELT
Summary: This project aims to design and implement a cohort program for four faculty at the Fort Wayne campus to gamify one of their existing courses to engage and motivate students by using the Brightspace Awards tool, Intelligent Agents, and Release Conditions. Each faculty will be supported through a series of five workshops and at least eight one-on-one consultations. The cohort will be offered in Summer 2022 or Fall 2022 based on faculty’s work and course offering schedules.

Purdue Northwest: Brightspace LMS for Mastery-Oriented Approach

Project team: Magesh Chandramouli, Ph.D., Professor, Computer Graphics Technology
Summary: Brightspace has immense potential in enhancing student learning experience in Computer Graphics courses. This project proposes the use of Brightspace functionalities to facilitate “Mastery-Oriented Approach” whilst investigating the features of Brightspace LMS that have been underutilized, overlooked, and/or used improperly. Mastery orientation has been associated with enhanced student performance, higher retention, and also better transfer of skills to the workplace eventually. To this end, this effort endeavors to capitalize on an inventory of more than 100 high-resolution video demos created for this instructor’s courses. The project will use Brightspace features such as Kaltura Interactive Quizzes, Intelligent Agents, and Strings to enhance and enrich the videos to present them to students in an engaging manner.

Purdue Northwest: Using Brightspace to Digitize the Course Syllabus

Project team: Hubert Izienicki, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Sociology
Summary: The syllabus contains a great deal of important information, but getting students to actually read it is a challenge for most instructors. As a text-heavy document, it poses a number of challenges to the students. It privileges experienced readers who are able to effortlessly read pages of information, and its typical length tends to prevent many students from reading the entire document. To address these drawbacks of a traditional syllabus, I propose to transform it into a more engaging and equitable pedagogical tool using Brightspace’s module function. My goal is to test if this new digitally redesigned format increases students’ retention of information and engagement with the syllabus.

Applications will be accepted for the 2023 program in the fall of 2022. Proposal criteria for receiving a two-year grant include the use of Brightspace, innovation in instruction, measurement of outcomes, feasibility, timeline, sustainability, transferability to other courses/units/campuses, campus priority/impact, and scope of the potential impact. Special consideration and higher value awards will be given to proposals that contain cross-campus collaboration.