Maker Literacies Program Update

I thought I’d post some general info updates about our Maker Literacies pilot program. First, we finally have an official project description on our department Projects page. For your convenience I’ve pasted it in its entirety:

In cooperation with UTA Library’s FabLab and faculty representing a wide range of academic units at UTA, we are piloting a program that ties maker-based competencies to the learning objectives of undergraduate courses. We believe that the competencies gained from hands-on, project based learning in the FabLab (for example, working in teams, time management and technical communication) will be vital skills for all UTA graduates. We seek to include courses from all programs of study, including the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, as well as traditional STEM fields.

Faculty who wish to include their courses in this program should assign a project that involves some aspect of maker literacies. This may require creating a new project, or revising an existing one. Representatives from the Maker Literacies Task Force can assist faculty in identifying or creating potential assignments that fit our program and suit their own curricular needs. Faculty would choose one or more competencies from our draft list of maker-based competencies and adapt them as needed to correspond to the learning objectives for their assignments.

Measuring student learning of these competencies is an important part of this program. The Maker Literacies Task Force has several members from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction who excel at student assessment. Our Task Force will work with faculty to develop a strategy for measuring student learning for their chosen competencies. 

Second, I wrote a blog post about three pilot courses we are testing out this fall. We had an additional course added to the program after I posted that, so we have four in total. The fourth is Dr. Cedrick May’s Afrofuturism course (from the English department). We are in the process of assessing the outcomes of these four projects.

We have two confirmed courses to work with in spring, and I need to follow up with a few other faculty to confirm their courses. We anticipate having four or five in spring.

In the coming months/years we want to continue developing the list of competencies and create a repository of case-studies/examples. Each case study will include the course name and description, the assignment/project completed in the FabLab, the competencies that we measured, the assessment technique used, and the outcomes. This will hopefully serve as guidelines for other institutions that want to build out a Maker Literacies programs of their own, without having to start from scratch. In fact, we are in the process of applying for an IMLS grant to fund this initiative. We submitted a preliminary proposal back in August, and just this past Friday we were notified by IMLS that our proposal was accepted. We now have to submit a full proposal by January 13th. If that proposal is chosen for funding, we’ll begin looking for partner institutions to collaborate with.

I believe the fundamental aspects of the program are to equip undergraduate students from all disciplines with transferrable cross-disciplinary skills (for example, the ability to work in teams, project management, technical communication, etc.), as well as get them familiarized with technology that will become ever more ubiquitous in all sectors/industries/disciplines.