A growing number of faculty at Adelphi are incorporating Web applications and technology devices to
enhance their traditional classroom courses. Those instructors feel it provides a new channel for students to learn course material, gain quick feedback, and collaborate on projects.
"Technology is an adaptor between the personality of the professor and the expectations of the students," says David Parkin, Professor of Chemistry. "It opens a dialogue; freshmen especially tend to be more reserved."
The available tools are a means for stimulating interactions not only between students and faculty, but also among students, facilitating teamwork and collaboration. While not every tool will be appropriate for every subject or every instructor's style, faculty are encouraged to consider how technology might help students better absorb or appreciate course material. If there is a technology being used at Adelphi that you would like to try—or as emerging software, Web tools, and devices become available—please contact the
FCPE about your interest
From biology to English, professors can make use of this resource in their traditional courses. Podcasting technology allows recorded audio or video files to be published to the Internet for students to download and listen to on their own schedules to reaffirm their lessons.
In the School of Nursing, Associate Professor Sue Greenfield says she read about academic podcasting in the New York Times a few years ago and helped pilot the program at Adelphi for the Faculty Center for Professional Excellence (FCPE). "My courses tend to be very content heavy," says Greenfield. "I’d come to lecture and there would be 25 student tape recorders at the front of the room, and I’d have to worry about where I was standing and moving around. With podcasting, the microphone is right on me so I can move freely about the room."
Faculty can borrow digital sound and video recorders from the FCPE to tape class-related activities. The FCPE later publishes the podcasts via Blackboard or other online subscription, depending on the professor’s needs. Greenfield doesn't edit the content of her lectures, but she does divide each session's audio file into named sections, like book chapters, so students can easily jump to different areas.
Lawrence Hobbie, Professor and Chair of the Biology department, began recording his class lectures in spring 2007. By the end of the semester, at least half of his students had downloaded at least one podcast, and some downloaded them regularly. But why record the lectures if students should be paying attention during class? “Hearing me once isn’t always enough to learn the material,” says Hobbie. “Some students learn better through hearing and some through reading. This gives an option for different learning styles."
While Greenfield and Hobbie are content with audio podcasting, Judith Baumel, Associate Professor and Director of the English department, feels that video is the next step in her courses. She has been using audio podcasts to record guest lecturers in career-oriented practicum courses. "I am looking to start recording video podcasts this semester." Certain areas may benefit more from video, such as a lively guest speaker in Baumel's course, or a demonstration of a science experiment.
Students can access the files from a computer or, depending on the file type, they can be downloaded to portable MP3 players as well, giving them freedom to listen to lectures when and where they want.
"You think the students get the material while you’re talking in class," says Greenfield. "Then on the test you find out they didn’t get it."
To solve this issue, some, like Greenfield, use a classroom tool to asses whether their lectures or discussions are being absorbed well before test time. These audience response systems, affectionately known as clickers, refer to an integrated hardware and software system that allows instructors to pose questions, and students submit their answers via their clickers, which are small devices similar to TV remote controls. The receiver on the instructor's computer gathers the data and displays anonymous summaries of students' responses.
Carol Diakow, Professor of Biology, began to implement a clicker system in the spring semester of 2005 after reading an article that highlighted its benefit in academia. "It creates points of discussion," she says. "We can go over why certain answers were chosen by students. I find that they get engaged in answering."
She also compares performance on clicker quizzes administered both at the beginning and end of lab to assess student learning in the laboratory. Class performance is higher at the end of the lab session than at the beginning, demonstrating the contribution of the lab experience to student learning.
Diakow finds the method most useful in the lab setting because of the discussion aspect among a smaller number of students, but it has its merits when used with a large class. In her Neurobiology class, for example, she begins a lecture with a clicker quiz based on the previous lecture, thus gauging her students' understanding of the material.
Diakow says it is not difficult to create the question slides, enhanced with illustrations and graphics. If it is your first semester working with a clicker system, of course, it might take you longer to prepare classroom materials. However, once you have created them, you should be able to use most of them again in the future. "Students love them," she says. "I wouldn’t want to go back to teaching without them."
Chemistry Professor David Parkin uses the clickers during most of his class sessions. If the response to a question shows that a significant amount of students did not choose the right answer, he gives them more time to discuss the question in groups, and then respond again to the question. When the percentage of correct answers is high enough, he presents the correct answer for all to see.
Before Parkin began using the clicker method, students felt uncomfortable by the question and answer method. Students told him, “You don’t understand the rules of engagement; we don’t like you putting us on the spot,” says Parkin. "It wasn’t always that they were afraid of getting the answer wrong. Many of them were afraid of standing out from getting the answers right." Instead they like the team aspect the clicker system and his group discussions create. In surveys Parkin posts on Blackboard, his students now say they feel 100% respected by the professor. "They understand that the questions are there to help them, not to trap them."
Web applications can help enhance any subject, as Associate Professor Ganesh Pandit has found in the three accounting courses he teaches. He posts extra course materials such as PowerPoint slides from the textbook publisher, updated notes from class discussions, online quizzes, grades, and more.
During class he uses Sympodium to display his lecture notes, and types in additional content as discussion dictates. At the end of class, he saves the updated notes and posts them to Blackboard for students to access later. He still finds that many students write notes by hand during the class, but the reason he posts the notes is so that students can participate in discussion and think about the material during class, rather than feel they need to write down every word he says.
It's not only helpful for the students but for himself. "It keeps my notes organized, and the next time I teach the course, I have an updated record to work from."
He posts online quizzes Friday night and they are due Monday night. They are timed from when the person launches the quiz, with one hour allotted for completion. On multiple choice quizzes, students can get their grade at the end. "Sometimes I might use a few open-ended questions that require a written response that needs review before giving a grade." He uses quizzes from the textbook publishers and modifies them as he wants before exporting them to Blackboard. Sometimes Pandit gives an in-class test followed by an online quiz, "because the test would take too long and I don’t want to use up two class sessions for it."
The gradebook feature on Blackboard is something Pandit feels is useful in keeping students informed about their progress. "Each student can view only his/her grade from each assignment, review the correct solution to each online quiz by clicking on their quiz scores, and know his/her standing in the class when compared to the class average."
All of the online posting and multimedia preparation "does take some extra work, but students expect it," he says. "Every semester I’m skeptical of the reaction but they enjoy it."
Pandit teaches two traditional accounting classes and one in blended format, which meets every other week on campus—the alternate weeks have online-based assignments and discussions. "During the online week, I start with an opening question on Monday morning and post several questions throughout the week as the discussion progresses. Students must give meaningful and thought-out comments at least four times on at least two different days during each online week to be eligible for full credit for the week." He also posts suggested reading from sources such as the Wall Street Journal.
One of Pandit's colleagues in the School of Business, MaryAnne Hyland, Associate Professor of Management, Marketing, and Decision Sciences, also uses Blackboard for a variety of purposes including "signing up for current events and class projects on a discussion board," she says. "I also use podcasts and PowerPoint slides occasionally instead of face-to-face meetings."
Judith Baumel prefers online course management because "it's time saving to not have to make copies of the handouts," she says, adding the exception that she sometimes needs to scan in certain handouts. "It’s a user-friendly application and keeps the class organized and efficient. It’s helpful for the students to be able to find course materials in one place day or night."
For her Creative Writing courses, she's found the Web to be a great medium for students to give each other immediate feedback on their writing. If they're up at 2 a.m. and are eager to post a poem they've written, they can get constructive comments from a fellow student who's also awake, without having to wait until class time. She cautions that if you want to implement online discussions as part of a course, you have to build it into the syllabus. "If they have to comment they will, but you must make the expectations concrete."
Lawrence Hobbie started using Blackboard when he was teaching master's level courses "to students who were not on campus often, so I thought it would be useful to post resources online." Now he uses it to post lecture notes, old exams, answers, and grades. He gives warm-up questions before class on the reading material that will be discussed in the class. "I think it’s a positive tradeoff, maybe there's a little more time involved depending on how much you utilize it. Students used to come to my office if they missed class to get the notes and I’d have to find them and make a copy, or they'd come to get their grades, so it saves time that way."
Emilia Patricia T. Zarco, Associate Professor of Health Studies, Physical Education and Human Performance Science, is another instructor who feels her students benefit from her engagement in Blackboard and other resources available at Adelphi. "The use of these technology tools is enhancing student learning. Specifically, the discussion board is promoting student participation and bringing out more in-depth discussion which I can't get in the regular classroom setting," Zarco says. "I started to tape my lectures for podcasting but I am still working to improve the integration of this technology to my courses."
In the Derner Institute of Psychological Studies, Coleman Paul has developed interactive tutorials to stimulate his students' learning of Statistics and Behavior Analysis. "These tutorials explain concepts, give students practice quizzes, and contain hot links to Web sites which have educational simulations," he says. Prof. Paul, who is chair of the Senate Committee on Academic Information and Technology, also employs different methods via computerized testing. "The computerized quizzes are taken in class. I distribute to each student a floppy disk with the exam, and then collect the disks. The testing program (Harris Quiz) scores the test and makes a spreadsheet with the data."
Adelphi has recently acquired Moodle course management software, which offers improved functionality over Blackboard. If you are interested in trying Moodle or just want more information, please contact Adelphi's FCPE.
In the School of Education, Leigh Benin has engaged his students in participating in a wiki—a Web site that allows for collaborative content by any authorized users.
Benin's project involves collaboration between Adelphi University and Westbury High School involving the faculty, students, and staff of both institutions. They are undertaking an oral history of the Westbury/New Cassel Community that will lead to a documentary film, a written history, and teaching materials to enrich the African/Latino Experience in America course offered by Westbury High School. "The Westbury/New Cassel Experience: Building Bridges from the Past to the Future", which is still a work in progress, can be viewed at westbury.wikispaces.com.
Astrid Palm, Director of the FCPE introduced the wiki concept "as a technical solution to my project," says Benin. "I had twenty students working on it and they needed a way to collaborate and to begin sharing their research with Westbury students."
Wikis can be run for free, depending on your requirements. "It was very easy to implement," says Benin, who estimates that 30 minutes is all he needed to set it up. "It was not difficult to train the students. One session in the computer lab was sufficient for most of them."
"I have become a wiki fan, but it is not the right medium for every project," Benin notes. "Astrid and I are exploring Google Groups for another effort I have in mind."
Graduate students taking Robert Bradley's History of Mathematics course this semester are also involved in creating a wiki as part of their course assignment. "Every student in MTP 656 will produce a biography of a famous mathematician of the past as part of this wiki space," announces Bradley on http://aumtp656f07.wikispaces.com. The students bid on which mathematician they wanted to profile, and once assigned their subject, they were able to begin posting material on the site. The students also had to give an oral presentation after mid-terms, but the wiki page is graded after the final class of the semester.
Another solution for student collaboration is a blog, which is usually presented in chronological format and indicates individual user's posts. Judith Baumel has taken workshops about blogs and is hoping to implement one about the graduate program with "the goal of it being a multimedia literary magazine."
Nursing Professor Sue Greenfield uses technology that she believes her students will need in the field. "I decided to start using PDAs as part of instruction because I’ve had one in my clinical pocket for years," she says. "In the medical field, the information you’re accessing needs to be the most updated and current. Now all nursing students have PDAs beginning in their junior year."
The database company the school is contracted with updates their information every few weeks on drugs and medical conditions. "Hospitals have databases available at the nursing stations, but nurses are more apt to use the information if it’s in their pocket at the patient’s bedside. For efficiency and to reduce errors, they don’t have to leave the patient to go look up the information." She says the PDAs are easy to navigate after she gets the students oriented.
Professors Lawrence Hobbie and David Parkin make use of a wireless laptop cart for their science classes. Instructors in any department can use the cart, which includes 24 laptops for student use, but it must be used in a classroom within the Science building. Reservation guidelines can be found at http://infotech.adelphi.edu/services/classroom.php.
Hobbie, who teaches a genetics lab, has students use the laptops to perform data analysis and database searches. "There’s a variation in student level of familiarity with Excel," he says. "Some need more help in formatting their research." But as the semester progresses, so does their comfort level with the laptops. Fluency in real-world applications can be just as important as learning the subject matter.
Classrooms that have 3M digital whiteboards can be used, in conjunction with the appropriate software, to display lecture slides from a laptop as the instructor writes additional discussion notes over those slides.
Carol Diakow is introducing Computer Guided Instruction for her Histology course. This software provides an interactive virtual microscope to assist students in learning to recognize tissue components and functions. As a student observes actual histological specimens with a microscope, the software guides them in recognizing tissue components and characteristics. She feels that replacing a lab textbook with computer images is the way to go, especially for pre-med and pre-dental students, because they will be working with digital images in the professional world.
Computers in the physiology lab also enable students to do simulations that would be otherwise difficult or impossible. For instance, students can simulate the effect of different chemicals on urine production, which is something they used to use animals for. "There are also programs that simulate dissections of animals and humans," she says.
Prof. Diakow also finds the document camera to be an invaluable tool for projecting anatomical models and dissections to a screen. "I can position it from wherever I want," she says. "Rather than have the students crowding around the object trying to get a better look, all can see the specimen well."
Many more interactive resources and methods will be featured in upcoming editions of Technology@Adelphi. In the meantime, please contact the OITR or FCPE about your classroom technology needs and creative ideas.
