Meriem Chida arrived in the CTLT offices a week after Fall’08 semester had begun, a new hire with an idea to bring her problem-based teaching methods to Pullman. Chida had connections with experts in her industry, Fashion Forecasting, and had used a design project with expert feedback in her previous teaching.

Pullman was remote from her experts, so she was forced to pilot her methods online, and have students create “posters” that could be shared with one another and experts in portfolios (blogs). While the technologies have changed, the outlines of these ideas go back a decade.

With CTLT, Chida piloted the Harvesting Gradebook , a technique to gather structures and open-ended feedback from her three audiences: industry, faculty in the department and student peers. In addition to gathering feedback about the student projects, Chida’s “gradebook” gathered feedback on the assessment tools (rubrics) she used. This allowed the community to answer — is this way of assessing how students talk about data useful? And her work helped explore the different character of feedback provided by industry, faculty and student peers. Chida is receiving one of the Faculty Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Innovation Awards for her Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. She is exploring the development of community-based learning, where the community has a role in the discussion about what is important to learn and how it might be best assessed.