NITLE survey on Instructional Use of Technology
Responses to Midwest NITLE group questions
What are the major areas of opportunity you see in the next year for your campus and the instructional use of technology?
- Marketing instructional technology. As Kevin Miles advised me, “sell the ‘sizzle’ not the bacon”; that is, find ways of presenting facets of instructional technology that have an appeal to faculty and grab their attention and interest. An example could be use of discussion forum or blogs as Just In Time coverage of subjects causing problems for students. Create a short attention grabbing voice/image shorts in Flash or Quicktime which convey a simple message. Use student & faculty recorded quotes as sound bites. Then provide follow-up material such as workshops.
- Blogging — either within or outside of Moodle. Getting more interest from faculty in pedagogic advantages of the weblog medium.
- Podcasting — a number of different faculty are interested in the potential of podcasting — both faculty podcasts (Geology / Chemistry) and student authored
- Innovative uses of Moodle - wikis for group work, student peer assessment
Are there specific areas of technology or pedagogy the campus is hoping to develop?
Following from my professional development proposal entitled podcasting and pedagogy I am planning some new developments:
- create a ‘guide to podcasting in higher education’ site (incorporating perhaps a podcasting news site) as a reference for faculty to find out what podcasting is and is not, and how it might be useful in their courses.
- work with a working group of faculty to establish easy to use procedures for creating and disseminating podcasts to students
- procedures for creating enhanced podcasts (incorporating still graphics) with Garage Band (a component of the Mac iLife package) and areas of pedagogical use.
- podcasting collaboration with Janet Russell from Wooster :
- blog / podcast commenting between two science courses sharing a common goal to produce a NPR like podcast on a science subject. Meg Streepey is interested in doing this.
- share remedial math for chemistry students enhanced podcasts on iTunesU. (Both of these projects have potential for funding from external granting bodies)
- explore the use of podcasting / VoiP technologies (i.e. Skype) and Moodle quiz with languages faculty (I am presently consulting with Aletha Stahl)
- with the Instructional Technology faculty working group test new Moodle modules and finding areas of teaching where they might be relevant.
To enable podcasting by faculty to take off we really need a studio facility. Fortunately ITAM already has a suitable room which will only require a small amount of equipment (and a computer) to make into a podcasting studio and we have taken steps to install network connections. For student produced podcasting to function the plan for upgrading the Media Arts Lab to 10 Macs would need to be carried out.
Are there plans for new initiatives?
Apart from the podcasting/blogging collaboration with Wooster I would like to start a conversation about a strategic collaboration between NITLE colleges to develop the Moodle Learning Environment to better reflect the pedagogical priorities of Liberal Arts Colleges. I outline the rationale for this in A Vision for Online Learning (which I have also posted to the NITLE-IT discussion list). I believe that there’s a window of opportunity in the next year or so for major grant funding for collaborative development of Moodle by colleges in the NITLE organization.
Steps already taken (or about to take):
- Initiate move to add Moodle development to ECS list of Academic computing programming work
- Emailed to Bill Doemel Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts regarding Moodle development initiative
- Have emailed thoughts to NITLE discussion list
- I have talked with Bryan Alexander about a NITLE sponsored Course Management Summit conference which could form the springboard for a Moodle Development Initiative
What do they see as the major opportunities and challenges in relation to the instructional uses of technology?
Opportunities:
- Languages. The current system of introductory language instruction is incredibly labour intensive. Some or all of the rote practice and grading could be done online in the Moodle quiz activity. There is considerable scope for Instructional Technology in this field of introductory language instruction. We need to review what other colleges are doing to establish some ‘best practices’ and see whether they could be implemented at Earlham.
- The blogging / podcasting concepts seem to be catching on in the sciences and I have hopes to write some grant applications for specific project ideas.
Challenges (mainly technical):
- Our current blogging system (Movable Type) was set up several years ago to test the concept. It’s an obsolete version (v2.6) of Movable Type which has been superseded by a version (v3.2) which is not open source (we’d need to purchase a one time licence for $1,000). The time is ripe for a new system or an upgrade to the current system so that faculty and student can have a blogging and podcasting platform which is easy to operate and customize. I have compared blogging software systems from the perspective of podcasting and I need to install WordPress and Drupal on my OS testing system for review by the IT working group. Fortunately ECS have already implemented the database server and there is a commitment to providing server capacity for a blogging system.
- Moodle v1.6 is in the works and should be available for the Fall semester. We are moving the database back end to MySQL which should provide a much smoother user experience with fewer glitches. I need a faculty working group to help with decisions about whether to move all the current courses into new system or start the new system from scratch importing courses where needed. In addition, there are a host of modules and plugins which could be valuable for faculty but which I need help with assessing usefulness and applicability.
Posted by markp at March 29, 2006 01:02 PM