Photo by Thomas Del Brase
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Online Tools: Making Classrooms Smarter
The old adage “Work smarter, not harder” is taking on new meaning in today’s tech-savvy classroom
By marion harmon
Last fall, psychology and child development instructor Gail Walton was new to California, to Chico, and to Chico State. She has taught at the university level for 15 years, most recently at Illinois Wesleyan University. With five classes to teach her first semester at Chico, she took on the added challenge of teaching a fully online course for the first time. “Being new to campus, everything was new to me, so it might as well have been technology that was new to me as well,” says Walton (see photo at right).
Using a Web-based set of teaching tools called Blackboard Vista, Walton held class discussions and gave tests online. She employed new voice technologies that allow students to give oral presentations online with a special microphone. Learning and implementing all these technologies while teaching five classes at a new university could have been a recipe for disaster. But, with support from staff at CSU, Chico’s Technology and Learning Program (TLP) and a knowledgeable student assistant, Walton sailed through the semester with little problem.
“My learning curve was not steep with Vista,” says Walton. “It is very easy to use, extremely user-friendly. The icons they use in the program you would see on your VCR. You don’t have to guess what buttons to push, although when you pause your cursor over an icon, the program will tell you what it is.”
As with anything new, the technology presented Walton with some challenges. It took Walton more time to design the course for a fully online environment than for a traditional classroom. She had to be very explicit with her instructions to students, and she had to think about ways to minimize cheating on tests.
“They are probably going to be sitting there with their notes in front of the computer, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, so instead of trying to work against that, you work with it,” she says. “One of the things I learned at TLP is that you make the exam timed in a way that they have to study for the exam, they can’t just turn the pages in their notes.”
While the preparation took Walton extra time, during the semester her life was made easier by the many automated features of Vista. “When students take a test online, Vista grades it for me and posts their grades, and that takes a couple of hours load off me. With teaching five classes, that was so important. I was afraid I would drown in all the grading I was going to have to do.”
Walton, who also used Vista’s Web-based tools in her other four, more traditional classes last semester, says she is proud that she’s become a lot greener. “I don’t use as much paper; I don’t go to the copy machine like I used to. I bet I’ve saved thousands of pages of paper,” she notes. “I’d really like to get to the point where I have all my students in my courses taking their exams online, whether they’re in an online class or not.”
At the forefront
CSU, Chico’s learning management system, then called WebCT, was introduced in 1998. “At that time, only the faculty who were into that were the ‘leading edgers,’ ” says Kathy Fernandes, director of Academic Technologies. “Now, 10 years later, it’s definitely changed.”
CSU, Chico entered the electronic age with its distance classes in 1975 and has been recognized nationally and internationally as a pioneer in distance education. It was the first university in the world to deliver a graduate degree program via satellite and one of the first to demonstrate video streaming as an educational delivery system.
In the summer of 2002, 14 faculty and staff at CSU, Chico discussed issues related to how students learn, particularly in an online environment. These meetings resulted in the creation of a Rubric for Online Instruction, which promotes an ongoing discussion about the nature of student learning.
“Faculty are asking ‘What’s good online instruction? What does it look like? How does it work? What does it do?’ ” says Fernandes. “There are all these questions because they did not learn that way, so the rubric helps them.”
The support doesn’t end there, though. TLP staff are on call for faculty—answering questions, troubleshooting problems, and teaching new techniques. Walton says the support she received from the information technology staff was invaluable.
“Being new, I didn’t really know much at all about online teaching even when I started the class, but they provide so much assistance for you at TLP,” she says. “The people down there are absolutely wonderful. You can call them any time during the day and get your question answered or your problem fixed.”
While there is a perception that the youngest college students are technology buffs, Walton finds that this isn’t always the case when it comes to classroom technology. “Even though this generation of students is assumed to be very interested in all new technology, I have some students who are young that don’t want to get on Vista; they just aren’t interested in it.”
Walton tries to help the students who are reluctant to use technology to get in there and at least try it. “Technology is constantly changing, and I feel like you really need to keep up with it,” she says. “You never know, at some point in time those students may use a skill like that that they’ve learned here on campus.” A lot of Walton’s students, for example, end up working in child care facilities or classrooms, where it has become common for teachers to create Web pages that parents can access to track their child’s progress.
With the help of TLP staff, Walton continues to try out new Web-based tools. “I want to know what the other tools are so that I can find those that engage the students the most,” she adds.
Deeper online learning
Integrating technology in the classroom gives students fast and easy access to information and encourages more independent work. It also allows faculty more flexibility, including teaching from off-campus locations. CSU, Chico management information systems instructor Ron Pike teaches from Pullman, Washington, to a Smart Classroom in Glenn Hall equipped with two cameras and a projection system.
“Students can see me, and I can run PowerPoint slides from my computer just as I would if I were in the room,” notes Pike. “I also use technologies such as Blackboard Vista to store digital content for students, including a copy of my lectures.”
Blackboard Vista is being used by more faculty each semester, and more of its tools are being used. “Because the tools have gotten broader in what they can do, we’re finding that more faculty are using them across the breadth of a course,” says Laura Sederberg, manager of the Technology and Learning Program. “Before, an instructor might have used Vista for one or two classes and perhaps just to post class assignments and grades. Now, that instructor might use Vista for all classes, but not necessarily all in the same way. In one class he or she is going a lot deeper, and in another class it’s still just the syllabus and posting grades.”
TLP staff work with faculty to implement the latest technological tools that make the most sense for their teaching needs. Another set of tools, commonly used for distance learning but that can be used in any Vista class, is called Wimba. Its Web-based voice tools include a podcaster, which students and faculty can use to create a voice recording. Other class members can then listen to this file on the Web or download it to their PC or Mac, or to a portable digital music player such as an iPod. Instructors use the Wimba Voice Presentation Tool to create online presentations that utilize both voice and active live Web surfing. Voice commentaries can be recorded to online PowerPoint presentations or other online resources that otherwise would have to be viewed without guidance.
The Internet and e-mail have made distance education easier for both faculty and students. In the 2002 Pew survey “The Internet Goes to College: How Students Are Living in the Future with Today’s Technology,” 79 percent of college students reported that Internet use has had a positive impact on their college academic experience. Nearly half reported that e-mail enables them to express ideas to a professor that they would not have expressed in class. In fact, many online students are finding technology helps them bridge the distance physically separating them from their professors and classmates.
Graduate Cassie Hammond, who finished her liberal studies degree in 2005 through CSU, Chico by taking online classes, found that connecting with her teachers and other students was easy. “I think that, just like in the classroom, the connection is as close as you want to make it,” says Hammond. “It is very possible to sit in the virtual back of the classroom, to just skate through the classes and never really get to know anybody. However, I have found that most people do not do this online.”
Moreover, Hammond found that taking away the face-to-face component often made people more open in their responses. “People say things that they would not normally have the strength to say aloud in class,” she says. “Also, online you can speak with your classmates far more than you can in the classroom. It is great for getting to know people and for understanding the content.”
Professors like Terry Miller-Herringer in psychology have added to their online courses what she calls “avenues of building community.” Before the semester even begins, Miller-Herringer sends a greeting message to all her online students. “This sets the tone for a community of learners,” she says. “Not only do I as the instructor have information to share; they have expertise of their own that they can share with their classmates.”
Miller-Herringer sends “getting to know you” questions right before the semester begins, asking students to post their answers in the form of a brief biography with (optional) photos of themselves, and then prompting a discussion among classmates with reply postings. She usually gets quite a few responses before classes begin.
During the semester, Miller-Herringer makes it a point to greet online students regularly (as a group and by name), and answer e-mails promptly and with a personal touch. When one of her students was in a serious bicycle accident midway through a semester, she e-mailed the class and mentioned that it would be nice for their classmate to receive a few get-well wishes. Forty of her classmates e-mailed get-well wishes to the student, who said she was cheered immensely by them.
The Wimba Voice Board tool, which Walton used last semester, enables users to create “threaded” voice discussions. Using a microphone, the instructor and students can respond to one another directly.
For example, a student responds directly to a comment made about the main topic, and another student responds to the response, and so a thread is formed. With Voice Board, instructors and students can also post accompanying text with the audio message.
“With this new technology, instructors now can add another layer of communication tools,” says Sederberg. “I think in the next year or so we’re going to see video being a part of that as well—so many students now have quick-cams on their home computers to do video chatting with each other.”
Just a click away
One of the newer technological devices being used on campus is the clicker. The small handheld device, much like a TV remote, is increasingly being found in classrooms, and it was on the list of required materials for 525 students taking Intro to University Life last fall.
The clicker’s alphanumeric buttons enable students to answer questions the instructor asks them in class, and the class totals are then displayed on the big screen at the front of the class. Jan Costenbader, who manages Classroom Technology Services, also teaches Math 101 in the fall and statistics in the spring. He uses the clicker every class session. He says the best aspect of the clicker is his students’ improved participation.
“Hands down, the best part is that it’s getting responses and feedback from all the students in the classroom,” says Costenbader, who in the fall semester led a pilot study of clicker technology on campus. “I have a tendency to ask a lot of open-ended questions in class, and more often than not, I’ll have three students in the front answer—their hands are always going up. But I have no idea what the students in the back row are thinking; I don’t even know if they’ve got the lecture. Now, with the clickers, I get immediate feedback from the entire class as to whether they got the concept or not.”
Through using the clicker, Costenbader’s students are not only participating more but also increasing their conceptual understanding, he notes. “I did one class on modular numbers, and I thought it was the best lecture in the world,” he says. “I thought I nailed it. But I asked a follow-up question with the clickers, and only about 60 percent of them got it right—that means I missed 40 percent of the class.”
When that happens, Costenbader takes more time to go over the concept until he feels the students understand it. Conversely, when virtually all the students answer a question correctly, he knows he doesn’t need to spend much time on that concept.
While the clickers are particularly well suited to large lecture classes, helping to ensure that all students are engaged in the discussions, faculty are also using them in smaller classes. Along with being a handy attention-getter, each clicker is registered to the particular student with a unique code, so teachers use them to keep attendance and for homework review.
The clickers have had their share of technical problems, which have been partly remedied by switching to one standard brand. But there are still bugs to be worked out. “With this particular clicker, we had a hardware failure this semester,” says Costenbader. “They have a rubber coating on them, and if they were carried around in nylon backpacks, static electricity was shutting the transmitter off. So we had to have Turning Point, the company that makes the clickers, come out to fix that problem.”
Classroom technology, while still rather new and sometimes problematic, has no doubt made life easier for many faculty and students. Fears of automated and impersonal instruction seem to have been alleviated, and with advanced voice and video technology, the Smart Classroom of the future should only get better.
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