IMSE associate professor John Jackman helped lead a faculty effort to see if Iowa State’s Information Technology Services could develop something for more universal use across multiple disciplines, which helped to start ThinkSpace.
Jay Newell, an associate professor in Iowa State University’s Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, calls ThinkSpace “the greatest thing since sliced bread” in terms of getting into the heads of his students.
Holly Bender, a professor of clinical pathology in Iowa State’s College of Veterinary Medicine, knows that ThinkSpace better trains her students to be able to read an ailing animal’s symptoms and lab results in order to make a more accurate diagnosis.
And Dale Niederhauser, an associate professor in the Iowa State School of Education, says ThinkSpace better prepares his students for the problems they may encounter in their future classrooms.
They’re three of more than 50 ISU faculty members across a number of disciplines who are now teaching classes with ThinkSpace, an interactive online teaching resource developed at Iowa State that encourages students to think critically about the solutions to complex, real-world problems. And because of its initial success at Iowa State, ThinkSpace is now being exported for use to colleges and universities around the world.