Category: Multiple Class Meetings

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Designing New Services

Designing New Services

Harry Shapiro

Hospitality

Services Marketing & Management

Activity Description: Provide a brief description of the activity

Students working in groups are requested to design a new hotel with the business or economic goal of service a specific class of customers. For example: high school students on a class trip, teams from start-ups that are traveling together for business, groups of millenial age friends who are traveling together, LGBTQ travels, folks who have any disability covered by ADA who are traveling for business or pleasure.

Specifically the students are to create several services within the hotel that are designed to appeal to the travel, describe a Servicescape for those services to "live within," and use the Service Profit Chain (SPC) to create rewards, tools and other innovations to find, hire, and create an awesome team of staff and managers.

Learning Goals: What do you aim to achieve with this activity?

The objective is for students to use critical thinking and pull-in much of what they know about hospitality to design amazing servicescapes that can support amazing new and innovative services and use the tools offered within the SPC to insure that those services are delivered effectively and efficiently.

Timing: At what point in the lesson or semester do you use this activity? How much classroom time do you devote to it? How much out-of-class time is expected?

Throughout including the first few weeks, after the mid-term, and again towards the end of the course. In case students will have 20-30 minutes in groups. The groups are based on the normal table seating. However, diff. exercises will mix and match the students so they can interact and engage with the entire class through the exercise.

Logistics: What preparation is needed for this activity? What instructions do you give students? Is the activity low-stakes, high-stakes, or something else?

Students should be current on reading. There is both instructor assigned reading and self assigned materials.

Assessment: How do you assess this activity? What assessment measures do you use? Do you use a VALUE rubric? If not, how did you develop your rubric? Is your course part of the college-wide general education assessment initiative?

The goal is to refine this over the course of the term. There are several initial assessments verbally in class as well as peer assessments.

The core exercise is going to be a critical part of the final exam which will offer a summative assessment assessment: have students learned how servicescapes and the SCP work together? Have students learned how the design of a new service impacts staff & customers. How students learned how to design innovative management and reward structures to support their innovative new services.

Reflection: How well did this activity work in your classroom? Would you repeat it? Why or why not? What challenges did you encounter, and how did you address them? What, if anything, would you change? What did students seem to enjoy about the activity?

It is going well. This is the firs term

Additional Information: Please share any additional comments and further documentation of the activity – e.g. assignment instructions, rubrics, examples of student work, etc. These can be links to pages or posts on the OpenLab.

Please see the examples from class.

Please share a helpful link to a pages or post on the OpenLab

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What Is True/What Is Fake? Journalism Today

What Is True/What Is Fake? Journalism Today

Aaron Barlow

English/Arts & Sciences

Introduction to Journalism

Activity Description: Provide a brief description of the activity

Relation of a story by the professor about an encounter with an elephant (though it can be any story relevant to the instructor’s life that can be verified to some degree, at least, through research). The students are then asked to determine what truth there is in the story, if any, and to justify their conclusions. After the first class, the students are asked to search diligently across the internet for proof/dismissal of the professor’s claims. At the end of the discussion, students vote on the truth (or lack of it) of the story. If they ask the professor to tell them if the vote is correct or not, the response should be a shrug and the comment, “The question is, can you trust me?” This generally leaves the students baffled for a moment but, as the course moves on to other considerations, they generally start to understand.

Learning Goals: What do you aim to achieve with this activity?

Students are expected to come away with an understanding of the limits of classroom authority and of research itself.

Timing: At what point in the lesson or semester do you use this activity? How much classroom time do you devote to it? How much out-of-class time is expected?

This exercise is best done early in the semester. It generally takes a full class period plus a couple of homework hours and then about half an hour of the next class.

Logistics: What preparation is needed for this activity? What instructions do you give students? Is the activity low-stakes, high-stakes, or something else?

The professor needs to prepare relation of the story carefully, including within it enough clues for the students to be able to research the claims made. Students need to be taking notes while the professor talks and need to understand the use that will be made of those notes in the homework assignment. Before beginning to tell the tale, the instructor needs to carefully prepare the students.

Assessment: How do you assess this activity? What assessment measures do you use? Do you use a VALUE rubric? If not, how did you develop your rubric? Is your course part of the college-wide general education assessment initiative?

Because of the nature of this activity, which lies outside of assessment structures and can be harmed by them, this is not assessed.

Reflection: How well did this activity work in your classroom? Would you repeat it? Why or why not? What challenges did you encounter, and how did you address them? What, if anything, would you change? What did students seem to enjoy about the activity?

I have been using and developing this exercise for a decade and in a number of different classes and will continue to do so. It helps students understand the differing reactions, in terms of truth value, to different speakers in different positions. Plus, it introduces them to research tasks of a sort they generally have not encountered in other classes.

Additional Information: Please share any additional comments and further documentation of the activity – e.g. assignment instructions, rubrics, examples of student work, etc. These can be links to pages or posts on the OpenLab.

As part of a book I edited, I include the story I use for this exercise: https://www.academia.edu/888435/Elephant_Morning. When I relate it, I tell it differently, making sure to include dates, places and verifiable events as a basis for student research. The structure of the essay itself comes out, in part, from earlier uses of this exercise–but it also contains its own inaccuracies, liberties taken for the sake of the story. Every instructor has a tale or her or his own that can be used similarly.

Please share a helpful link to a pages or post on the OpenLab

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The ethical issue of biomedical engineering

The ethical issue of biomedical engineering

Chen Xu

Computer Engineering Technology

BMET1101

Activity Description: Provide a brief description of the activity

In BMET1101, Introduction to Biomedical Engineering Technology, different subareas of biomedical engineering are introduced. Discuss the new development of prosthetic arm, watch the video of mind controlled robotic arm. Ask students to research about different aspects, such as biomechanics, neural engineering, and biomedical instrumentation, medical imaging. Then move to cyborg (short for "cybernetic organism") in the novel and movies, which is a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts, such as iron man, spider man, and Darth Vader. Discuss the ethical issues, such as will the artificial devices may affect personal identity and dignity, can human still be held morally responsible for their behavior when their brain has been engineered by others to function in certain way?

Learning Goals: What do you aim to achieve with this activity?

Inspire students to explore the development of technology and critically think about the limit of technology.

Timing: At what point in the lesson or semester do you use this activity? How much classroom time do you devote to it? How much out-of-class time is expected?

At the end of semester. Maybe discuss some topics in one lecture, then let students do more research, revisit the topics again after two or three weeks.

Logistics: What preparation is needed for this activity? What instructions do you give students? Is the activity low-stakes, high-stakes, or something else?

Show some videos, and introduce the background. It’s an open-ended question, write or present as a project.

Assessment: How do you assess this activity? What assessment measures do you use? Do you use a VALUE rubric? If not, how did you develop your rubric? Is your course part of the college-wide general education assessment initiative?

Breadth of knowledge, lifelong learning, inquiry and analysis, integrate learning, ethics and value.

Reflection: How well did this activity work in your classroom? Would you repeat it? Why or why not? What challenges did you encounter, and how did you address them? What, if anything, would you change? What did students seem to enjoy about the activity?

Still in course design stage.

Additional Information: Please share any additional comments and further documentation of the activity – e.g. assignment instructions, rubrics, examples of student work, etc. These can be links to pages or posts on the OpenLab.

Please share a helpful link to a pages or post on the OpenLab

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Exploring cultural differences in dental care

Exploring cultural differences in dental care

Anna Matthews

Dental Hygiene / SPS

Oral Anatomy DEN 1112

Activity Description: Provide a brief description of the activity

In Fall 2016, students in three sections of DEN1112 completed a term project assignment with the focus on Intercultural Knowledge and Skills assessment.
This assignment consisted of several parts.
Individually, students watched a Frontline PBS documentary “Dollars and Dentists” (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/dollars-and-dentists/ ) which explores the complexity and availability of dental care in the U.S.
Next, students read the case study “Mortality associated with odontogenic infection” (Green et al., 2001) and answer accompanying questions. Students were asked to discuss the documentaries they watched in small groups. Students were provided questions for discussion prompting them to discuss their opinions regarding the status of dental health care in the U.S. as presented in the documentary. Students were also asked to share their cultural beliefs and attitudes towards dental care. Given the diversity of students in our Dental Hygiene program (over 50% of students were not born in the U.S. and speak over 20 primary/first languages), a difference of experiences and resulting opinions about health care more broadly and dental care in particular emerged in their discussions.

Individually, students wrote an essay reflecting on the Frontline documentary and the case study. Among the questions they were to address in their essay, they were asked to describe their interactions with peers in their groups and to evaluate how their own attitudes/opinions were or were not different from those of their classmates, what have they learned about other cultural beliefs/attitudes from the dialog with other students, how their own opinions have or have not changed as a result of the whole experience (watching the documentary and learning about the subject and their subsequent discussion of it in small groups).

Learning Goals: What do you aim to achieve with this activity?

1. introduce students to the complexity of dental care and its availability in the U.S.
2. connect the topics of spread of dental infection, as introduced in their Head & Neck portion of DEN1112 course, to the real-life situations leading to serious and life-threatening outcomes discussed in the scientific article (case study) and Frontline investigation.
3. work in teams to discuss the different cultural influences on how people perceive the necessity of dental care and its various aspects.
4. reflect on the whole experience by connecting all parts of this assignment in the written essay.

Timing: At what point in the lesson or semester do you use this activity? How much classroom time do you devote to it? How much out-of-class time is expected?

This assignment begins during week 13 of the Fall semester. The students discussed in small groups during class sessions twice for about 20 min. Depending on how long it takes students to write their 1200-1500 word essays, the activity would take at least 10 hours to complete outside of class.

Logistics: What preparation is needed for this activity? What instructions do you give students? Is the activity low-stakes, high-stakes, or something else?

This term project is worth 10% of their final grade for DEN1112. The students were given detailed instructions for each part of the assignment and provided with the PDF of the article and a link to Frontine documentary.

Assessment: How do you assess this activity? What assessment measures do you use? Do you use a VALUE rubric? If not, how did you develop your rubric? Is your course part of the college-wide general education assessment initiative?

In 2016, my course was part of college-wide assessment of Intercultural Knowledge and Skills. An appropriate AAC&U VALUE rubric was used for this evaluation, however, it was not used for grading. Students’ essays were evaluated based on the clarity and organization of the information, providing accurate and appropriate sources and citations (they were asked to substantiate their writing with at least two sources analyzing the topic of the video, other than the documentary itself), sentence structure, grammar and spelling.

Reflection: How well did this activity work in your classroom? Would you repeat it? Why or why not? What challenges did you encounter, and how did you address them? What, if anything, would you change? What did students seem to enjoy about the activity?

This activity worked very well and I intend to repeat it in Fall 2017. I don’t plan to introduce any changes at this time. The students seemed to enjoy the small group discussions and according to their reflections in the essays, they learned a lot from each other as well as the case study and Frontline documentary. One student’s essay was selected for publication in the 2017 issue of City Tech Writer.

Additional Information: Please share any additional comments and further documentation of the activity – e.g. assignment instructions, rubrics, examples of student work, etc. These can be links to pages or posts on the OpenLab.

Please share a helpful link to a pages or post on the OpenLab

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Teamwork assignment

Teamwork assignment

Anna Matthews

Dental Hygiene/SPS

DEN2315

Activity Description: Provide a brief description of the activity

This assignment focused on fostering students’ ability to work in teams, in class and online. Students in my Summer session’s class were randomly assigned to one of four groups (each had 5 members) and they were asked to create a PowerPoint presentation of 15-20 slides on a randomly assigned topic (one of four possible topics), which included a group of drugs that were not covered in class (anti-fungal medications, AIDS/HIV and drugs used in management, topical and systemic corticosteroids, and anti-allergy medications). Groups worked in class to create their own OpenLab project sites and I was a member of each group together with the five students. After the sites were created, students exchanged information and resources online and communicated among each other and with me. They had 2 weeks to work on their presentations and I evaluated their progress continuously. The final presentations were uploaded by one of the students from each group to our course OpenLab site. All students reviewed the presentations from each group.

Learning Goals: What do you aim to achieve with this activity?

I have done similar activity before and the main goal of it is to provide opportunity for students to work in teams and foster collaboration. While the final products by teams were always successful in the previous sessions of DEN2315, some students complained that it was not a true team effort and some students did not participate equally and did not contribute to the team’s outcome. By observing individual students’ participation online and evaluating their contributions to the process and the final group product, I was able to grade their efforts in a much more fair way and there was no more concerns from students about the unequal share of group’s work if some had done more or less than others.

Timing: At what point in the lesson or semester do you use this activity? How much classroom time do you devote to it? How much out-of-class time is expected?

Summer session 2-S is a 5-week course, we meet twice weekly in class. This assignment was due after the 4th week of the session and a progress evaluation was done at the end of week 3. We spent about 30 min in class to discuss the activity, organize students in groups and create their OpenLab project sites. The rest of work was done entirely online.

Logistics: What preparation is needed for this activity? What instructions do you give students? Is the activity low-stakes, high-stakes, or something else?

Students needed to learn how to create and manage their OpenLab sites and how to post/comment/add media and links there.
The activity is one of the 3 online assignments and it is 10% of their final course grade.

Assessment: How do you assess this activity? What assessment measures do you use? Do you use a VALUE rubric? If not, how did you develop your rubric? Is your course part of the college-wide general education assessment initiative?

I assessed students’ work by the following:
1. their participation in class in creating the site
2. the number of posts/comments they contributed during the group’s work online
3. quality of the resources they found and shared
4. clarity and organization of their own powerpoint slides in the group’s presentation
5. appropriateness of references/citations
I did use the VALUE rubric for the assessment of Teamwork as my guide to evaluate students’ interactions. My session was part of college-wide Spring 2016 assessment (although it was conducted in the Summer 2016 session) but the rubrics were used for guidance and assessment only, not for grading individual student work.

Reflection: How well did this activity work in your classroom? Would you repeat it? Why or why not? What challenges did you encounter, and how did you address them? What, if anything, would you change? What did students seem to enjoy about the activity?

The activity worked very well. It was a marked improvement compared to the previous times I used this assignment and allowed students to select their own groups and topics as well as divide their work by themselves. Previously, for some groups it resulted in unequal work distribution and by overseeing each group of students I was able to evaluate each student’s work individually. I especially liked that this time all students worked together very well, even though they were randomly assigned to groups. Students’ comments about their experience were positive as well.

Additional Information: Please share any additional comments and further documentation of the activity – e.g. assignment instructions, rubrics, examples of student work, etc. These can be links to pages or posts on the OpenLab.

For students’ privacy, their OpenLab project sites were for members only. Assignment description is here: group-study-assignment-2016-teamwork
Teamwork VALUE rubric is on the CityTech AIR website.

Please share a helpful link to a pages or post on the OpenLab

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App Review

App Review

Tanya Goetz

Communication Design

COMD 4900 Internship

Activity Description: Provide a brief description of the activity

Students are assigned the task of reviewing 2 iPad or iPhone apps for the Creative Professional as one of their internship journal entries in this class. As preparation for this assignment, during our class meeting, I present several apps currently in use in the industry such as Paper, Evernote, Flipboard, MyPrice, Pocket, and Neenah Cabinet. I also provide them with time during class on the department’s iPads to work with these apps after we discuss them. I also given them a verbal review of the app Flipboard, an app I use regularly. During class, I also have them read this short review for the Paper app from MacWorld at http://www.macworld.com/article/2107944/paper-review-fiftythrees-sketching-app-gets-ios-7-update-dots-and-brush-sizes.html
In order to help them find pertinent apps to review, I provide them with the following article from the Guardian ” The top 50 apps for Creative Minds” http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/22/the-top-50-apps-for-creative-minds. I also allow them to review one of the apps we’ve discussed in class. I give them three weeks to complete this journal entry on their internship blog. I also provide them with samples of a past student’s review of an app such as this one: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/rbayron-eportfolio/academics/internships/week-5-6-apps/

I also the students to present their app reviews orally to the class once the reviews are completed.

Learning Goals: What do you aim to achieve with this activity?

Lifelong Learning
Writing for Professional Purposes
Thinking Critically
Oral Communication

I want students to realize through this assignment that the tools are ever changing in our field and that, as part of their professional lives, they will be required to use new skills, update their skill sets and find new methods to become more efficient at doing their work. Reading professional journals and technology sections of general interest magazines and newspapers that cover our field are key resources for identifying tools they should be exploring. Along with identifying these new tools, they will often be required to communicate how they are using these tools to supervisors and to colleagues. Writing a review of an apps key features helps students develop their abilities in this area as it necessitates thinking critically about an app’s features and then requires them to articulate their thoughts first in writing and then orally to the class. I want the students to share their experience with their classmates, perhaps inspiring a peer to use an app they hadn’t yet tried out.

Timing: At what point in the lesson or semester do you use this activity? How much classroom time do you devote to it? How much out-of-class time is expected?

I assign this lesson sometime between week 5 and week 7 in the semester because at that point most of the students are at this point established in their internship. I devote 45 minutes of one class to covering different apps currently in use and then allow the students 45 minutes to explore working on the department iPads experimenting with the apps I’ve just shown.

Logistics: What preparation is needed for this activity? What instructions do you give students? Is the activity low-stakes, high-stakes, or something else?

For this lesson, one needs to have available a projector/screen and at least one’s own iPad or iPhone (or Android) and have previously worked with the apps you are demonstrating so that you model for the students how to go about evaluating different features, providing a rationale to them for why this app is useful, etc. In the COMD department, we have iPads to use in the classroom and so in advance of the class, I ensure that all the iPads have the apps I will be discussing during lecture and I also make sure I have reserved the iPads/cart for that particular class with the CLTs in advance of class.

This activity is not graded on its own. Instead, the written journal assignment becomes part of their whole internship blog, which is 30% of their grade for the course. So, in that sense it is part of a high-stakes assignment but just a small piece of an overall package. The oral presentation they do on the app review in not graded at all and so is low-stakes but I hope that this time in front of the class helps prepare them for the oral presentation of their complete blog, which is 10% of their grade for the class.

Assessment: How do you assess this activity? What assessment measures do you use? Do you use a VALUE rubric? If not, how did you develop your rubric? Is your course part of the college-wide general education assessment initiative?

There is a rubric for the overall internship journal. I use a rubric that is based on the original ePortfolio rubric that was part of that Title V grant at the college and I have tweaked it for this class.

Reflection: How well did this activity work in your classroom? Would you repeat it? Why or why not? What challenges did you encounter, and how did you address them? What, if anything, would you change? What did students seem to enjoy about the activity?

This activity has worked extremely well in the classroom. The students really enjoy evaluating and experimenting with apps on their iPhone or iPad and many of them write detailed reviews and are enthusiastic in sharing these apps with their classmates.

The only challenge one faces in the classroom is when the iPads for the department need updating or one has an app that only runs on IOS and not on Android, etc.

Additional Information: Please share any additional comments and further documentation of the activity – e.g. assignment instructions, rubrics, examples of student work, etc. These can be links to pages or posts on the OpenLab.

Samples of student App reviews:

https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/rbayron-eportfolio/academics/internships/week-5
https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/sharad/internship-2/app-review/trello-app-review/
https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/sharad/internship-2/app-review/vscocam-app-review/
https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/a-blog/from-the-field-2/app-reviews/

Please share a helpful link to a pages or post on the OpenLab

http://www.macworld.com/article/2107944/paper-review-fiftythrees-sketching-app-gets-ios-7-update-dots-and-brush-sizes.html

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