A few weeks ago, faculty and staff were asked to provide examples of High Impact Practices (HIPs) they use with their students. Here are some of the activities happening at NYIT:

• Students in selected sections of Foundations of Scientific Process and Foundations of Inquiry are engaged in service learning projects. In some cases, the students go to NYC STEM magnet public schools, where they either: 1) work directly with elementary school students, teaching them basic principles of a STEM field; or 2) improve the technology of the school, whether it be classroom computers or the school’s intranet; or 3) create a video documentary of the 5-7 week project.
• The senior design capstone in the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences encourages students to work collaboratively on an iterative project with real-world applications. Recent examples include plant-watering robots, a transit app, a conference management app, a crib mobile that monitors the infant, a system for preventing pedestrian accidents, and a fiber optic funnel/LED system that can be used for street lights with minimal light pollution.
• School of Management students in Nanjing participate in a Learning Community: freshmen Finance majors take Research Writing and Foundations of Inquiry as a cohort. The two courses are linked thematically, and the faculty members collaborate to explore issues in globalization. The Research Writing course focuses on globalization and culture, and the Foundations of Inquiry course focuses on globalization and its relationships to technology, the environment, and education. The Finance courses include issues connected to globalization and the economy. The learning community not only allowed the students to engage with a single topic more deeply across the curriculum, but also fostered exceptionally successful collaborative term projects. Knowledge gained in one course served as a foundation for deeper, more contextualized engagement with the topic in the other classes. For example, the foundational research and composition skills the students learned in Research Writing allowed them to create stronger, better-informed written arguments in Foundations of Inquiry and to evaluate the credibility of their sources appropriately. Conversely, learning about the components of successful arguments and adequate, logical support in Foundations of Inquiry helped the students to write better-organized argumentative research papers in Research Writing. Both courses, in turn, provided a much richer, interdisciplinary context for the students’ current and future engagement with Global Finance issues (connected to their major) and improved their ability to dissect and comprehend articles in the leading academic journals of their field.
• Nursing students develop a professional portfolio, beginning in their initial Nursing course, and culminating as a required part of the capstone course. The portfolio enables students to reflect on various aspects of their education, relating their clinical experiences to other aspects of the program, such as political advocacy for selected legislation in Albany that impacts the Nursing profession.
• In Nanjing, design students do projects that benefit the institution. Monique Taylor reports that they are hosting a competition to create a logo for NYIT-NUPT campus commons events. Monique reports that “this real-life scenario will prove particularly beneficial to future experts in business and marketing,” as well as strengthening ties between NYIT and NUPT.

If you’d like to learn more, please join your colleagues at a panel discussion about teaching disciplinary contact with HIPs. The session will be Tuesday, May 2, 12:30-1:50 pm, in DL-4 / EGGC 708. RSVP at http://bit.ly/2oydRhK