Faculty and IT staff in higher education are struggling to understand what happens when computers and networks dissolve
the boundaries of what used to be called the classroom.
The confusion, challenges and excitement of being on that new frontier were clear in session after session this week at the
annual North East Regional Computing Program, a three-day conference for IT professionals in higher education.
"We're still just starting to figure this out," says Annesa Hartman, instructional designer, Landmark College, Putney, Vt.
As part of the college's Institute for Research and Training, she creates guidelines and recommendations for, and helps teachers
with, online instruction. Her NERCOMP presentation focused on applying universal design principles to make online course materials
and tools simpler to use and accessible for more students.
"A lot of teachers are [still] just happy to get something online," Hartman says. "The issue is how to make that useable and
readable to the students."
Hartman's job is the fruit of an explosion of interest in online learning, where students can access a fast-growing abundance
of multimedia resources and use them in online-mediate interactions with classmates and teachers, sometimes even in different
institutions, through chat, bulletin boards, video conferences, wikis and many more tools.
The trend potentially pits IT and network staff against faculty because it calls for a radically new sharing of expertise,
a willingness for two distinct disciplines to learn how to talk to each other, understand each other and work together.
Simmons College, in Boston, last year launched an intense effort to clarify what faculty, administrators and IT managers meant
by "academic technology," the term typically used to sum up these learning-focused technologies.
The urgency was created when the college's regular strategic IT planning process revealed a chasm of understanding between
these groups. Deans and faculty members acknowledged they often had only the vaguest idea of the technologies or their capabilities.
And IT staff discovered they often had equally vague ideas idea about what the others meant, expected or needed in academic
technology.
"What we needed was a process of mutual education," says Braddlee, Simmons' director of academic computing. The goal was to
create a common language for the different groups, to talk intelligibly and constructively about academic technology and to
make informed decisions about technology priorities, their tradeoffs, costs and consequences.
Using briefing documents, presentations, demonstrations and a set of preliminary potential priorities, the IT staff began
meeting last fall with faculty and deans, both in college-wide meetings and individual schools. It was an effort to create
a focused dialog about the strategic use of academic technology, resulting in specific decisions about the technology priorities
for implementation. As one faculty member said in a video clip, "The word 'wiki' is no longer a foreign word to me."
"Part of this was our giving up control over [deciding on our own] the three-year direction of academic technology at Simmons,"
says Gail Matthews-DeNatale, associate director of academic computing at the college. The IT group presented to faculty details
on the IT funding priorities and allocations, what could and could not be shifted, the financial and human resources needed
for technology options, and the various tradeoffs that each option would entail.
The college is now organizing for each of the technology priorities a cross-discipline working group and a companion faculty
interest group, as well as setting up a summer institute for faculty to increase their fluency with specific technologies,
and re-organizing budget priorities and schedules.
Making it possible for faculty to realize their learning goals for students through emerging technologiesais a prime focus
of instructional technology.
"I present [faculty with] options. I ask 'what if?'" says Gary Pandolfi, instructional technologist at Quinnipiac University,
inaHamden, Conn. Pandolfi is a former English teacher who started writing online materials for academic publishers, until
taking his current post at the university.
One technique is to ask a teacher what he or she enjoys doing most. One teacher's reply was "talking with students," followed
by a complaint that he has no time in class to do so. Pandolfi's suggestion was to tape the classroom lecture, post it with
a Powerpoint presentation and other notes online, require students to view or read the material before coming to class, and
then use the classroom time to talkaabout it.
One unexpected feature of online learning resources, says Landmark's Hartman, is that it requires faculty to be much more
organized and systematic than ever before. "Online content has to be highly planned," she says. "This is a revolutionary idea
for instructors. They now have to have a concrete plan for the entire course. It's not like walking into a class with a few
notes and winging it."
This was underscored by another Simmons College project: digital stories, or online narratives typically using pictures, text,
audio and video, using Apple's video-editing software, iMovie. Simmons staff found both students and faculty underestimated
how time-consuming the production process was. Now, the projects are structured so that about half the total time is spent
by the student on planning, researching and collecting digital content; one-quarter of the time in iMovie training; and one-quarter
on the actual digital story production.
Landmark's Institute makes extensive, almost exhaustive use of online usability testing tools, including software programs
that track a student's eyes movements and mouse clicks, to design, review and revise online content that's clear, simple to
navigate and achieves the teacher's learning goals for the student.
But even as all this is being invented on the fly, tools for measuring the results of online learning alsoahave to be invented.
The University of Massachusetts at Lowell wanted to evaluate "learning outcomes" for students using Web-enhanced course across
degree programs, not just outcomes for a given course. It proved unexpectedly difficult. Initially, the project team thought
it could easily access dataaoutcomes collected by the learning management system used by the entire public university system,
WebCT Vista, which is now part of Blackboard, another LMS vendor.
"We thought it would be easy to access a Web-based system that was storing results in a database," says Luvai Motiwalla, professor
of MIS, at the university's department of management. But the data was stored in a proprietary format not easily deciphered,
the documentation was poor and there were bureaucratic obstacles that had to be overcome.
The project team was able to extract data, which had to be processed in spreadsheets, stored in a separate MySQL database
and managed with a set of custom scripts, and mapped to specific course activities in specific courses for each school.
"There are so many new [online] interactions out there, how can you know which ones are being successful?" asks Steve Tello,
assistant professors at University of Massachusetts Lowell Department of Management. "The [commercial] learning management
systems only give you data on how many students logged in to a lecture, or how often: they track usage. But they don't track
'what did they learn from all this?'"Source Citation: "Higher education struggles to recast classrooms with technology; Online learning techniques, strategies change face of education." Network World (March 21, 2007): NA. InfoTrac OneFile. Thomson Gale. Florida Gulf Coast University. 28 Mar. 2007
Thomson Gale Document Number: A161003645
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My Say:
It is hard to believe that some students are still not getting the online education in schools. It is very important for students to grasp on technology in school, how else will they succeed in the real world without it. "Almost exhaustive use of online usability testing tools, including software programs that track a student's eyes movements and mouse clicks, to design, review and revise online content that's clear, simple to navigate and achieves the teacher's learning goals for the student. " Getting students the proper technology and software is needed in schools, because of the strategies it can teach your kids from grades k-12.
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