LEARNING TRANSFORMED
If you haven’t been in a classroom lately, you may not recognize the place. Digital technology is rapidly changing the way teachers deliver knowledge—and the way learners receive it. By SARAH MAGILL.
Students in a biology class watch a video demonstration of an energy-producing cycle in cellular metabolism—as performed by the Ohio State Marching Band.
English students learn to analyze rhetoric by taping and editing their own television commercials.
In dorm rooms and apartments across campus and beyond, students review their professors’ notes, take quizzes, and file assignments, all from the comfort of their laptops. Maybe they even review that Marching Band biology video on YouTube, the Internet sharing service.
Learning at Ohio State has a new, distinctly digital look. Advances in technology are reaching into every corner of campus and changing the educational process along the way.
Vicky Getis, interim director of the university’s whiz-bang Digital Union, sees technology as a bridge. “[It] allows us to reach, engage, and help students who didn’t learn in more traditional settings,” she said. “It’s a communication tool.”
“Technology has the potential to enhance the time that people have together, to be more interactive,” said Rebecca André, e-learning manager and adjunct faculty member in the Office of Technology Enhanced Learning and Research.
For example, some professors are making their lectures available as podcasts to be downloaded onto computer desktops and iPods. Faculty also post their lecture notes and other media resources to Carmen, the university’s course management system. Students can review the notes before class and come in better informed and ready to have a richer discussion.
“We know more about teaching and learning than we did before,” André said. “People are grabbing [the technology] and using it in ways unimagined.”
THE MARCHING BAND PERFORMS SCRIPT KREBS CYCLE
Susan Fisher, chair of biological sciences, was desperate to find new ways to teach her class of 700 non-biology majors about an important energy-producing cycle. “This group hates biochemistry,” she said. The challenge was to present the material in a format that would resonate with them, and then “slip in a little biochemistry when they’re not paying attention.”
It was a football game, of all things, that inspired Fisher. “As I was watching Script Ohio, I had an epiphany: the ‘O’ in Script Ohio is the Krebs cycle!”
Fisher arranged to borrow some band members and reserved the Woody Hayes athletics facility for a couple of videotaping sessions. She even included in the choreography some baseball players who happened to be on hand.
The next step was to contract with Ohio State’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design to animate a textbook diagram of the Krebs cycle. Then she put it all together on a DVD for her students and posted it on YouTube.
Another of Fisher’s YouTube offerings features football coach Jim Tressel and team members demonstrating photosynthesis. (Go to YouTube.com and type in keywords to see the videos.)
“Interactivity—that’s what everybody’s after. And it’s really, really tough,” Fisher said.
TREASURE TROVE OF TECHNOLOGY
The Digital Union is one place making the quest for interactive learning easier. Tucked on the third floor of the Science and Engineering Library, it’s a treasure trove for experts and neophytes alike. There’s hardware: video cameras, editing stations, touch-screen PCs, video conferencing equipment, plasma televisions. There’s software for manipulating photos, making movies, scoring music, creating podcasts, and building Web sites. There are tools such as screen readers to help make this abundance more accessible to users with special needs. There are real live humans to provide one-on-one assistance.
“Our priority here is to service people who are working on academic projects,” said coordinator Liv Gjestvang. The center exists to support education, she said, “to use technology in meaningful ways and make sure we’re not getting caught up in the bells and whistles.”
Gjestvang recalled showing students in an “American Experiences with Literacies” course how to produce a multimedia project. “This can be a safe space for students and professors to learn together. I think it’s great when professors don’t limit their class by the limits of their knowledge of technology,” she said.
English professor Harvey Graff, who taught the course, agreed: “It’s necessary for me to keep up with what’s going on. My concern is that they get some good practice in different forms of communication.”
His students reacted enthusiastically to the assignment, he added. “Ten years ago, they would have run for the hills.”
The Digital Union, which is co-sponsored by the Office of the Chief Information Officer and University Libraries, opened two years ago and is set to more than double in size by next year. Getis said she wants it to be “an exciting place for all students and faculty.”
NEW WAYS TO COMMUNICATE
Over in Denney Hall, the English department’s Digital Media Project is another resource for innovation. It serves “to provide ideas of how to bring technology into the classrooms,” said Cormac Slevin, a graduate student who works with the project.
“We cannot ignore that so much of communication that goes on outside of academia involves more than one form of media,” Slevin said. Critics complain that technology takes the focus away from “good old basic writing,” he said, but “the same ideas are still there when communicating in other ways. Taking advantage of the media skills [the students are] already walking into the classroom with, . . . I think they’re more excited about writing, about composition.”
Slevin said students’ writings have been posted on Web sites, made into films that have been uploaded onto YouTube, and submitted as audio essays to National Public Radio.
A BLACK HOLE?
Although students can gain greater independence through technology, there’s a downside, said Graff, the English professor. “Often students are encouraged to jump in without prior instruction.” He said the Internet, for example, can become a black hole into which unwary students disappear. Technology is “not the quick fix it’s thought to be.”
A report issued in November by the Education Testing Service showed that many students simply don’t have the skills necessary to use technology to solve information problems. The report identified three main challenges: recognizing trustworthy and useful information; managing overabundant information; and communicating information effectively.
Of the 6,300 high school and college students tested (Ohio State was not involved), significant numbers failed at tasks such as narrowing the results of a Web search and identifying relevant results; organizing material efficiently; and accurately adapting material for a new audience. More than half had difficulty judging the objectivity, authority, and timeliness of various Web sites.
At Ohio State, administrators are looking at changes to the undergraduate core requirements that would address such shortcomings, said Susan Metros, professor and deputy chief information officer in the Office of the Chief Information Officer.
THE POWER OF CARMEN
While professors use technology to retool their classes, Carmen is performing nothing short of a total makeover of Ohio State’s educational environment. Carmen is the university’s online course management system.
In 2005, when Carmen was launched, just over 600 students clicked on the 25 courses posted there. Within a year, traffic had exploded to more than 49,500 students, with many having more than one course on the system. And the course offerings they could manage numbered nearly 2,400.
The most common use of the password-protected site is the posting of syllabi that link to course content and media-rich resources. In addition, professors can administer quizzes, collect assignments, conduct discussions, and post grades.
“Carmen is used to support the face-to-face classroom setting,” said André, whose office administers Carmen and helps professors with its use.
Susan Fisher, for one, said Carmen is the only place to find her biology syllabi; she doesn’t distribute hard copies. Her posting on Carmen also includes all the PowerPoint presentations for her lectures, any DVDs she prepares, mass e-mails to her students, and grades. She answers about a dozen e-mails a day through Carmen.
Some students believe Carmen strengthens the professor-student bond. “I think it makes it easier to get hold of [professors] to ask questions or schedule an appointment to meet with them in person,” said junior Casey Rife, a science major.
Jessica Lee, a junior studying exercise science, said one of her professors has an America Online screen name and invites students to send instant messages during office hours.
Lee said Carmen keeps her up-to-date in case she misses a class, and she uses the system to turn in assignments.
Freshman Kyle Casper, a computer science major, said he checks Carmen “pretty much every night. I make sure I get all my Assignments done.”
André is among those who are convinced Carmen can foster closer professor-student relationships. When a discussion is conducted online, everyone in the class has a better opportunity to earn participation points, she said. Shy students may feel more comfortable asking questions.
But Dan Johnson, a freshman biomedical engineering student, said that while Carmen helps students access course material more easily, “it does take away from your relationship with your professors.”
Eric Gerhardstein, a senior majoring in history, called Carmen downright user-unfriendly.
André noted that some of the more frequent complaints deal with the way grades are posted. Several updates have improved the system, she said, and changes continue to be made.
Another concern is Carmen’s inaccessibility to people with disabilities. University officials are working with Desire2Learn, the company that provides the application powering Carmen, to revamp it so visually impaired faculty and students can use it more easily.
UNDERSTANDING AND ACCOUNTABILITY
Some teachers are experimenting with a device smaller and lighter than a cell phone, one that students can buy in the campus bookstore for about $40. Audio response systems, also known as clickers, are radio frequency keypads that allow even those professors in large lecture halls to gauge whether students are understanding the lesson.
The professor asks multiple-choice questions as part of a PowerPoint presentation. The students punch their answers into their clickers, and in seconds the professor knows the percentage of those who answered correctly. Gjestvang likened the process to that used on the television show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
The clickers get the students more involved, she said, because everyone in the class has to answer, not just the few who raise their hands and are called on.
For the most part, university officials, professors, and students agree: technological advances are not necessarily changing the nature of learning. Instead, they’re enhancing it.
“All the learning is still done in the classroom,” said Casper. “The technology just makes it easier.”
*This article appeared in the January/February 2007 issue of Ohio State Alumni Magazine. The magazine is a benefit of membership in the Alumni Association. Learn more about the benefits of membership and how you can make Ohio State stronger at membership services, or call 1-800-762-JOIN.
