Lauren Storz is an Academic Experience Analyst on the Academic Technology Design Team, and a PhD student in cultural anthropology at CU Boulder.  Namita Mehta is a Learning Experience Designer with the Office of Information Technology at CU Boulder.  She has over 15 years of experience in education and holds an Ed.D in Leadership for Educational Equity.     Wicked problems are those that have interdependent factors to consider. To solve these complex problems in technology-mediated teaching and learning, we emphasize the importance of understanding context and the systems at play to respond to human needs in the first blog post. Developing a clear and focused problem statement is essential to guide a research project, and mixed research methods can be used to understand and continually refine problem statements throughout the research process.  In this post, we want to expand on how we use mixed research methods to achieve a human-centered approach– in other wo...

How To Be A Better Ally To First Generation And/Or Low-Income Students (1G/LI) Sloan Talbot and Molly Goldwasser Ed.D., Duke University Money matters. Low income students need money as a pre-requisite to maximize success in tertiary education, but money alone doesn’t lead to college success. Focusing solely on financial aid as an intervention, especially for low income and/or first-generation students, fails to account for psychological and social determents of personal and academic success in higher education. To be an ally is to take the role of a professor one step further, creating a congenial atmosphere in the classroom where every student can feel included, encouraged, and supported to learn. While financial intervention is important, building inclusive communities and courses are critical of the role of faculty in the classroom. These suggestions below are largely contextual to learning during more normal times. However, in the midst of a global pandemic, students will face simi...

Namita Mehta is a Learning Experience Designer with the Office of Information Technology at CU Boulder.  She has over 15 years of experience in education and holds an Ed.D in Leadership for Educational Equity. Lauren Storz is an Academic Experience Analyst on the Academic Technology Design Team, and a PhD student in cultural anthropology at CU Boulder.   Traditionally, teaching and learning in higher education has implemented “the banking model of education” as coined by Paulo Freire. Freire (2018) describes this model as one in which “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing” (p. 72).  This model reinforces that instructors should hold the power of what goes on in the classroom while students remain passive learners of their education. Through the years, there has been a greater emphasis on student-centered approaches (e.g. connected learning) that entail empowering students to be ac...

Nick Havey Looking (for research participants)? Consider “the Apps”  If you’re familiar with the HBO series Looking, which explores very white queer life in San Francisco, or have used a dating app in the last 10 years, you might know “looking” as a one-word interrogative that says a lot. It mostly is meant as a lazy (or efficient) way of asking another user if they’re interested in casual sex, but you might be “looking” for research participants! Having a baseline understanding of how dating apps work is prerequisite for using them for research purposes, as understanding terms like “looking” and app-based norms can help researchers navigate confusing virtual spaces and build trust and rapport with potential participants.  I have used proximity-based dating apps as recruitment sites for two different research projects. One considers the state of queer sexual education and how queer collegians are responding to sex educations that were not inclusive of their experiences or desi...

Brianna R. Ramirez, PhD Student University of California, San Diego Through this blog post, I begin to engage the following question that as an emergent Chicana higher education scholar I constantly reflect on and will continue doing so throughout my research journey- In what ways can higher education scholarship center the knowledge of Students of Color [i] ? So much scholarship has been conducted on or about , less with and alongside of the students and communities that many of us hope our scholarship will serve. In addressing this question, I draw from Chicana feminist theories, that as a Chicana scholar has become my epistemological and methodological home as I sought a research grounding that not only validated the ways of knowing and lived experiences of my students and their families, but also my own cultural intuition and contribution to scholarship and academia as the oldest daughter of Mexican immigrants. Chicana feminist and critical race scholar, Delgado Bernal (2002) rem...