As ethical issues involving computer technologies and social media become more common, there is increasing interest in what role ethics should play in Computer Science education. As a result, Computer Science departments worldwide have increased efforts to examine relevant ethical issues in undergraduate Computer Science education to prepare emerging professionals to face relevant issues when they enter the computing workforce. As part of these efforts, a public R-1 Hispanic Serving Institution located on the US-Mexico border piloted a leadership course based on the Relational Leadership Model (Komives et al., 2013). This leadership model provides a broad idea of leadership that focuses on developing and exercising leaders' ethical awareness by engaging in discussions of ethical issues. The pilot course was organized around the implementation of a cooperative pedagogical tool known as structured academic controversy (Johnson et al., 1996). We describe in detail the strategy for implementing this approach, discuss key elements of students' final reflections about their participation in the academic controversy and present the quantitative results examining students' understanding of leadership and satisfaction with the pilot course.

Active learning provides students with meaningful and introspective roles in education. However, it’s difficult to achieve in online class settings, particularly for biology laboratories initially designed to offer direct interactions with live organisms. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a transition towards online learning was required in higher education institutions, creating challenges and opportunities to reform and rethink teaching practices. Here, we report our success in designing and implementing an at-home lab for an undergraduate invertebrate biology course. The objective was for students to learn about cnidarian photosymbiosis in a three-week-long experiment using live anemones. Additionally, we tested if learning outcomes are improved when adding a learning-by-teaching experience. We divided the 19 participating students into two groups where half created videos to teach their experiment to a hypothetical high-school audience, and half made video reports for their instructors. We observed that the teaching group showed better topic comprehension than the reporting group. Overall, students responded positively to this online learning experience and expressed an increased understanding of cnidarian photosymbiosis. We provide recommendations for implementing this lab with greater success and at larger scales. We argue that adding teaching scenarios in remote learning can benefit students’ overall knowledge comprehension.

Active learning is the new standard for teaching in higher education. As more faculty seek to expand their teaching practices by including active learning activities that promote higher levels of learning, many are doing so in small doses by temporarily postponing traditional lectures in favor of group activities. While there is evidence demonstrating that active learning practices can facilitate higher performance and information retention, our previous work showed that social personality differences can affect an individual’s performance in group-oriented active learning exercises. The results from this work indicated a possible dose-dependent effect driving the correlations observed between performance and social personality compared to passive lectures. This study builds on our previous work by analyzing if hosting comparatively few active learning classes is leading to a dose-dependent effect on student performance by personality type in the active learning setting. Our findings from this research demonstrate that social personality-based differences in performance on topics taught using active learning diminish with increased exposure to active learning. We also found that students of all personality types perform better on memorization-based questions than on higher-order questions in general, but that their performance on higher-order thinking questions improved after participating in active learning.

A common course activity used by emergency management faculty is the screening of Hollywood disaster films to provide students an opportunity to apply key disaster concepts learned in lecture. When college courses were abruptly moved online in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began in the United States, emergency management faculty had to quickly modify this assignment to meet the needs of the online format. This paper reports the experience of several faculty in modifying this pedagogical technique, as well as identifies unintended benefits including the opportunity for professional networking, science communication, and public engagement.