Change One Thing Challenge
Inspired by Dalhousie University, the Change One Thing Challenge at the University of Auckland offers grants to support your professional learning for teaching.
“And that is how change happens. One gesture.
One person. One moment at a time.”
— Libba Bray
About the challenge
The Change One Thing Challenge is an open invitation to the University teaching community to submit an effective learning experience [design/activity] or assessment design from their current teaching practice developed within the last 24 months that positively impact student learning.
For example:
- Collaborative assignments and projects
- Model of peer feedback
- Undergraduate research experiences
- Service learning
- Community-based learning; work-based learning or place-based learning
- Capstone projects
- Experiential or inquiry model of learning
- Using technology to enhance student engagement, feedback or assessment experience
Benefits for the recipients
A review panel will award recipients a grant for up to $1000 to support attendance at a teaching and learning conference, and or teaching and learning professional learning activity.
Your idea may be captured as case studies in TeachWell for others to learn from.
Criteria for selection
- Rationalisation for the activity within your teaching context
- Clear connections in the design between student engagement and learning experience/assessment
- Evidence of impact
2023 grant recipients
We are pleased to announce the recipients for the Change One Thing Challenge for 2023.
Dr Alys Longley
Associate Professor
Dance Studies Programme, Faculty of Creative Arts and Industries
A study in creativity
The Study in Creativity Assignment was developed to allow students to work with the unique affordances and constraints of their home environments in imaginative, multi-modal and creative ways during COVID and has remained popular with students. It allows great student choice while having a clear constraint and focus. This activity, in Dance 101/G, is about making creative work in a low-stakes way to allow students to take creative risks and engage in learning that is new to them.
View Alys’ profile page
Dr Igor' Kontorovich
Senior Lecturer
Mathematics, Faculty of Science
Discourse-eliciting activities
A comprehensive set of discourse-eliciting activities was developed for a large-scale first-year course in mathematics. The activities provided all students with opportunities to talk and act mathematically, including group work, creating imaginary dialogues, and analysing almost-correct solutions of fictitious peers.
View Igor’s profile page
Jayden Houghton
Lecturer
Faculty of Law
Student generated quizzes for non-STEM subjects
The assessment encouraged students to engage deeply with a relevant reading and enabled the lecturer to find out if this teaching method was useful for a law course. The assessment supported future law students as the lecturer was able to use the quizzes as supplementary teaching material.
Dr Jesin James
Lecturer
Department of Electrical, Computer and Software Engineering, Faculty of Engineering
To introduce the indigenous perspective on data sovereignty
The ELECTENG 101 course teaches the engineering perspective on how data is collected and processed, and hence is the perfect point to introduce the indigenous perspective on data sovereignty. Student feedback received supports the success of this one change in education content. This also prepares our future workforce to be competent to incorporate indigenous world view in engineering decisions.
View Jesin’s profile page
Dr Sonia Fonua
Professional Teaching Fellow
School of Environment, Faculty of Science
The Teina Project: Increase the number of confident Māori tutors and Moana Pacific tutors in the School of Environment
The Teina Project aims to increase the number of confident Māori tutors and Moana Pacific tutors in the School of Environment. Engaging with values such as manaakitanga and whakawhanaungatanga drives the imperative to provide opportunities to support these students to be offered opportunities, to see themselves as wanted in the roles, and to feel supported and cared for throughout their mentoring period.
View Sonia’s profile page
Dr Lynne Park
Research Fellow
School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts
Perusall for active engagement
Utilising social annotation tools such as Perusall can incentivise students to read and interact with the text on a deeper level. This type of active engagement leads to a better understanding of the material and more productive classroom discussions. By incorporating Perusall as a pre-lecture activity, students can come to class more prepared and ready to engage in deeper discussion and analysis of the assigned readings.
View Lynne’s profile page
Mareike Schmidt
Professional Teaching Fellow
School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts
Recording a podcast in a language acquisition course
The activity supported collaborative work and connected students general interest in new technologies. It created an opportunity for them to work autonomously in a team environment.
Dr Paramvir Singh
Professional Teaching Fellow
School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science
Music to motivate
To keep an ENGGEN 131 S2 2021 class of 1000+ students motivated and engaged in online learning, a set of two computer programming-related original songs were written, composed and recorded. These songs were released in the form of music videos featuring the teacher singing the songs for the students.
Dr Pedram Hekmati
Senior Lecturer
Mathematics, Faculty of Science
Connecting calculus to real-world applications
Pedram used minimal surfaces and modern tools such as 3D graphs and 3D models to support calculus students in developing their conceptual understanding of multivariable functions.
Dr Rajshri Roy
Senior Lecturer
Nutrition and Dietetics, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences
Redesigning a traditional and static assignment to dynamic learning
Students are required to work in teams, follow a fad diet, develop a nutritional recipe and share digital content using technology and social media.
Waruna Weerasekera
Professional Teaching Fellow
Exercise Sciences, Faculty of Science
Enhancing student engagement in synchronous teaching sessions
Waruna aimed to elicit engagement from students who are not normally inclined to engage in a live audience. Students are presented the opportunity to anonymously ask questions or make comments through an online polling tool while the in-person lecture is being delivered. Waruna used Vevox though there are several other polling tools available.
Assoc Prof Lokesh Padhye
Associate Professor
Civil and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Engineering
Identifying and overcoming troublesome knowledge
The environmental engineering concepts can be troublesome because they are abstract and because students find it difficult to relate them to their lives. Once the troublesome knowledge was identified, feedback videos was used as an intervention strategy.
Dr Yantao Song
Technical Services Manager, Teaching
Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences
Asynchronous e-learning course for pre-requisite learning
Yantao developed an asynchronous e-learning course in Canvas for pre-requisite learning. This enabled over 2000 students from the Faculty of Medical and Health Science, Faculty of Sciences, Faculty of Education and Social work, and AUT students to learn how to apply their clinical personal protective equipment correctly and get their N95 respirator tested within a time and resource-pressing situation.
Dr Elizabeth Peterson
Associate Professor
School of Psychology, Faculty of Science
Build tutor confidence in creating more inclusive classrooms
Elizabeth used survey data to identify the gaps and concerns new tutors had about their role, especially around engaging, and supporting diverse students. This information was used to help tailor the content of a tutor training workshop and he design of scenarios that were worked through. Tutors reported feeling better prepared to facilitate student engagement and better prepared to managing potential challenges.
Page updated 13/06/2023 (minor edit)