PTF Impacts

On April 30, 2025, Guyot hosted a public poster session showcasing student projects focusing on datasets from the City of Austin Open Data Portal, held at the University of Texas at Austin. Projects ranged widely in focus, from environmental data to transportation and public safety, demonstrating the breadth of student inquiry and analysis.

"Musings in Greek Literature" is a podcast co-produced by Prof. Deborah Beck and advanced UT undergraduate students of ancient Greek. Episodes are available directly from UT's Liberal Arts Information Technology Services and also from Apple and Spotify.

PTF Layla Guyot presented a session at Open Data Day in March 2024, hosted by the Austin Public Library. This event was part of International Open Data Day, which celebrates open government data with events hosted around the globe. Guyot presented about promoting the use of a local open data portal for data science projects with her collaborator, former student/current UGCA Dustyn Ransom.

Alongside Dr. Berkin Dortdivanlioglu, PTF Krishna Kumar received a grant from the Cockrell School of Engineering to use AI for personalized tutors in their introduction to programming course. They have since built a personalized tutor for this course, which is available for students privately. They are now in the process of making the tutor public through the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

PTF Layla Guyot gave an invited presentation at the weekly statistics seminar at Texas State University, to an audience of primarily faculty. In her talk Guyot discussed promoting the use of a local open data portal for data science projects.

On April 11, 2024, three Provost's Teaching Fellows presented at the final session of the "Teaching as Wellbeing" mini-conference series, hosted by the UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers in collaboration with UT System faculty developers. The series served as a monthly think tank about the relationship between teaching, learning, and wellbeing for educators and educational developers across UT system.

PTF alum Deborah Beck authored this invited paper as part of a group of six articles on "rupture and repair" in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was published in Transactions of the American Philological Association, the journal of the professional organization for American Classicists. In the article, she explores the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic's social isolation and "New Normal" on faculty peer mentorship and how the landscape of academic mentorship has changed since the onset of the pandemic. 

PTF Krishna Kumar presented this paper at the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Gulf-Southwest Section Annual Conference in March 2023. This paper discusses usage and results of the Murder Mystery-style assignments Kumar has developed as part of his PTF Initiative.

Read the complete paper <here,> or find the abstract below.

PTF Jen Ebbeler was interviewed for this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about how professors can help their students connect and build relationships in both in-person and virtual classrooms, and explore the impact of student interactions on their learning.

Read the entire article here.

This profile of PTF Deborah Beck's PTF Initiative, "Musings in Greek Literature," appeared in the Spring 2023 edition of Life and Letters, the magazine of the UT College of Liberal Arts.

Nine students from PTF Layla Guyot's Elements of Data Science course were selected to virtually present the insights gained during their coursework to the Data, Impact, Visuals, and Exploration (DIVE) meetup organized by the City of Austin.

PTF Wenhong Chen presented a paper at the International Communication Association 2023 Conference in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in June 2023.

Dr. Beck made a guest appearance on the Classics media podcast "Movies We Dig" due to her work with "Musings in Greek Literature." On this podcast, hosted by several young Classicists including two graduates of the UT Classics Ph.D. program, Beck discussed the made-for-TV version of Homer's Odyssey starring Armand Assante and Isabelle Rosselini (1997).  

PTF Deborah Beck and her PTF Initiative were featured as a guest post of Sententiae Antiquae, a scholarly Classics blog with over 27,000 readers.

In the post Beck describes some of the reasons for and benefits of using podcasting as a tool for learning in Classics courses:

PTF Leaders Cynthia LaBrake and Mary Neuburger presented both a poster and a talk at the 2018 Reinvention Collaborative meeting (now the Association of Undergraduate Education at Research Universities, UERU) on November 8-10, 2018 in Arlington, Virginia. The 2018 Biennial National Conference featured more Undergraduate Vice Presidents/Provosts and more participants overall than any previous Reinvention Collaborative meeting.

The 2017 Provost's Teaching Fellows Steering Committee prepared this poster as part of the Symposium Changing Education: Redesigning the Undergraduate Experience, hosted by Project 2021 and the Faculty Innovation Center at UT Austin on March 30, 2017. The format included keynote presentations punctuated by short talks and plenty of time for discussions in breakout sessions.

In 2016 Cythia LaBrake presented about her PTF Initiative in a poster session of the National Chemistry Education Meeting. Her presentation was titled "Active Learning at Scale: Lessons from General Chemistry."

View the poster in larger format here.

As part of his PTF Initiative, Luis Martins founded the Entrepreneurship Minor within the McCombs School's Rosenthal Department of Management. The Entrepreneurship Minor is available to all undergraduate students at UT Austin, and develops entrepreneurial mindsets and skillsets that equip students to have impact on organizations and society as startup founders or as employees in established organizations.

More than a dozen of the country’s leading education experts met at Rice University October 13-14, 2014 for the biennial De Lange Conference, “Teaching in the University of Tomorrow.” This conference was presented in collaboration with Scientia, an institute for the history of science and culture, and the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University.