Learning Unplugged: Educators Sound Off About Teaching With Tech

A year-and-a-half ago, Duke University gave free iPods to every member of its freshmen class, an effort that was considerably scaled back this year. More recently, Stanford University announced an agreement with Apple Computer in October 2005 to make hundreds of podcasts of lectures, music by students and even play-by-plays of school football games available via Apple’s iTunes Music Store. And Princeton University just began offering lectures from several universities, via streaming video or audio podcasts, that are accessible to the public, high school students and university communities.

It’s obvious that higher education is seeking to address a cultural phenomenon – technology related to digital audio and video files, iPods, other MP3 players – that has changed the way we entertain ourselves; listen to music (or books); conduct visual, aural and written communications and even learn

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 22 million American adults now own iPods or MP3 players, and 29 percent of them have downloaded podcasts using the devices. Even God seems to be getting in on the act. The Nov. 5 issue of an influential Catholic magazine, La Civilta Cattolica, claims the Catholic Church should not pass up the opportunity to make liturgies, sermons and prayers available via podcasting.

At this moment, it’s difficult to distinguish the static from the buzz.
 
Proponents of technology in higher education say that teaching with technology – in the form of podcasting, vodcasting, blogs and more – is a boon to self-paced learning, language learning, music learning, aiding students with learning or other disabilities, and even helps with the mundane scheduling of that prestigious guest speaker. If you as a teacher have been seeking to get a Detroit auto designer on campus to speak one-to-one with a studio full of student designers, a podcast is now an option that benefits everyone.

And teachers themselves can use their own podcasts for self-critiques and improvements in style. In addition, use of technology can ease learner worries that they missed key information while taking notes, serve as a tool in pre-test studies or enable non-native speakers the opportunity for valuable review. In short, it’s adding learning to what was, previously, “dead” time – time spent riding the bus, working out, walking. And time spent in the classroom is no longer limited to the hour and fifteen minutes spent inside the doorways of a particular room.

Below are comments from students and faculty from across the nation – the very people who are experimenting and using technology in new ways as they seek to boost learning for themselves and others.

• Just the beginning
• Teaching is a high-wired act
• A system that works for working students
• Podcasting makes for a richer learning community
• Wanted: self-motivated students
• Speed of learning is paramount for students
• Students will teach their schools
• Teachers come to think like journalists
• Meet the first iPod professor: iRob
• Student makes med school a laboratory for learning
• Making a case for posting law-school lectures
• Building an iPod following in architecture
• A downside for students: Counting code

Just the beginning
The University of Cincinnati’s winter-quarter experiment with podcasting is just the beginning, according to Michael Liberman, dean of instructional and research computing. He said, “We’ll survey students during and after the course…talk with the faculty involved. There will be no ambiguity of results. We’ll know what works best for our students, go from there and continuously monitor future efforts for effectivness.”

Teaching is a high-wired act
Warren Huff, UC professor of geology, likely represents the typical university faculty member. He’s jumping in with both feet to the university’s winter-quarter podcasting efforts, but truth to tell, he’s not sure what he’s getting into. “I know what an iPod is,” he reported, “But that’s about the extent of my knowledge of podcasting. So, though I haven’t the foggiest notion of what it’s all about, I’m intrigued and want to learn.”

Huff added, “To quote my friend Bill Fant in UC’s College of Pharmacy, ‘Teaching is a hire-wire act.’ We have to decide whether to take risks or not. A lot of faculty are reluctant to use technology. They want to use the same old methods, but until we try new things, we don’t know if they’re good ideas for serving students and teaching or not.”

A system that works for working students
Nancy Jennings, UC assistant professor of communications, is eager to make her lectures available by podcast: “Today’s student is certainly more diverse in terms of age and in terms of responsibility than students were in previous generations. I frequently have students who work either part or full time while carrying a full load of classes. I want to do anything I can to promote a different delivery method and keep them enrolled and moving toward their goals.”

Technology makes for a richer learning community
UC’s Charles Sidman, professor of molecular genetics, teaches the Honors Seminar for Freshmen. The 500-plus student course met every Wednesday evening of fall quarter in a large campus auditorium.

All the course lectures were captured and placed on a log-in protected Web site as video and audio files. Student could either watch “live” during class or at any point afterward. Said Sidman, “It’s such a large class that students can actually see and hear better via the video capture. If they choose not to come to class, they then have to write a one-page summary of the lecture and e-mail it to me.”

Missing class means missing out on participation in discussing hot-button issues surrounding ethics and business. Sidman said the technology forces both faculty and students to emphasize and live out the positive aspects of community engagement: “The technology actually makes for a better class. The content has to be rich, compelling and participatory – something students will regret missing if they don’t come.”

Wanted: Self-motivated students
Eli Vestich, assistant professor of industrial and engineering technologies, Shawnee State University, Portsmouth, Oh., has both a student’s and a teacher’s perspective on the use of technology in education. He’s earning a Ph.D. in technology management from Indiana State University thanks to higher education’s use of technology applications. At the same time, he’s planning his first online course for undergraduates – to be offered in winter 2006.

“I guess I’m both old school and new school when it comes to teaching with technology. I wonder about using it on the undergraduate level, but it was the only alternative for me to get a Ph.D. You can’t live and work in Portsmouth, Oh., and still earn an advanced degree,” he stated.

Vestich added that he thinks technology in education works especially well for students seeking advanced degrees because such students are “self-motivated and self-directed.” He wonders about going entirely online to teach his upcoming “Facilities Planning and Materials Handling” course to undergraduates. “I wonder how that’s going to go. Will there be students who don’t participate in the online chat room, who are just going to look at it as a way to float through a course? I also wonder about student retention,” he said.

Speed of learning is paramount
Richard T. Sweeney, university librarian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and a frequent lecturer on the use of technology in education, explained that millennial students (those born between 1979 and 1994) value educational tools that help them to speed learning and/or increase their motivation to learn. Educational technology is not necessarily valued for its own sake.

Thus, schools need to experiment and scientifically prove that use of technology does speed learning and/or motivation amongst a target population. If technology adds time to the learning process, it will be rejected. This leads to such questions as: Should digitally recorded lectures then be broken into labeled segments and indexed so students can quickly review parts they are struggling with rather than search an entire lecture? Should students be able to read a lecture transcript while listening to an audio recording? Technology alternatives need to be carefully designed and studied.

Students will teach their schools
Marc Prensky, education and learning futurist and author of “Digital Game-Based Learning,” said the only possible downside to university use of technology for teaching is that schools might use the tools so poorly that they “turn kids off. The students know themselves and their needs. The only downside universities face is using these tools without consulting with their own students.”

He also terms today’s college students as “digital natives” and stated that colleges and universities would be silly not to employ technology as part of the educational process. “There’s no great secret to doing this,” said Prensky, “Find out what the students are already using – cell phones, blogs, whatever, and ask how you can add value to education with these tools. Right now, the value is in time shifting. Giving the students the power to obtain an education according to their own schedule – when is it best for each individual to hear a podcast lecture?... Right now, open-book tests exist. What about open-cell phone, open-iPod or open-laptop testing? Should we care where and when they get the information so long as they do?”

Teachers come to think like journalists
Peter Henning, law professor at Wayne State University Law School (Detroit) and an expert in white-collar crime, thinks more like a journalist than he did before partnering with Ellen Podgor of Stetson University College of Law (Gulfport, Fla.) to begin a white-collar crime blog on Nov. 1, 2004. “I’m probably a better teacher for the blog, which draws about 1,000 hits daily from current and prospective law students and others. Before we started the blog, I wouldn’t have followed as many white-collar crime cases so closely when I wasn’t teaching an applicable class. Now, I constantly follow cases very closely. I’ve got that daily deadline pressure: What am I going to talk about today?”

Meet the first iPod professor: iRob
Robert Viau, professor of English, Georgia College & State University, is – as far as anyone can ascertain – the first college professor who integrated iPods into teaching, back in 2002. He’s used iPods that the college lends to students for honors courses he teaches on Gothic literature and art. He stated, “I use the technology to enhance critical-thinking skills. For instance, in one exercise, I have them listen to a Rachmaninoff composition titled ‘Isle of the Dead.’ While listening to the music, they also have to analyze a painting of the same title that inspired Rachmaninoff. Then, they have to write about how the elements in the painting and the music correspond. They have to apply their skills to the visual arts, music, literary works and even architecture in a variety of assignments.” Most recently, Viau asked groups of students to create utopias/dystopias, research and analyze how these societies would work and create Web sites about their societies as well as iMovies and music.

Student makes med school a laboratory for learning
Tommy Sweets, a first-year medical student at UC, digitally records the lectures for all his courses, and as a service to fellow students, uploads and stores the lectures from his biochemistry and micro-anatomy courses as MP3 files online: “I started taping the lectures, in part, because there are about ten billion things to do in medical school. I knew  med school would be hard, but I also want to do things like exercise and work out. So, I take the head phones while I ride my bike for two hours. I can listen to an hour lecture, pause it and repeat where necessary. I need to do that because my biochem professor doesn’t baby med students. He goes straight through a lecture, no stopping. This way, I can stop and absorb things.”

Sweets said the 160 students in his biochemistry classes obviously appreciate the lectures he posts online. “If I mess up…like once I forgot to upload a lecture, I get a ton of e-mails: ‘Where’s lecture number two!!?’” he explained.

Making a case for posting law-school lectures
Neil Wehneman, UC first-year law student, began a project in August 2005 in which he posts audio files of his class lectures – Wehneman himself reads the lecture notes rather than taping his professors. He also provides an RSS feed to those interested in his materials – which can run as high as 2,000 downloads a day via iTunes or his own Web site, lifeofalawstudent.com.

“About 90 percent of the downloads are via iTunes, which tells me that people are downloading to their iPods, and based on the feedback, most of the users aren’t my fellow students. They’re people considering or applying to law school. When I get to the upper-level courses, I figure that younger students will use these materials to prepare for  what’s coming next quarter.” Wehneman is also hoping to recruit other students to participate in his project so that additional lecture materials could be made available.

Building a iPod following in architecture
Katherine Willard, third-year student in UC’s top-ranked architecture program, is still listening to the 30 lectures she downloaded to her iPod this past summer. They represent the first time she’s used her iPod for anything but music downloads.

Prior to summer 2005, her professor – Jerry Larson, UC professor of architecture – had made his lectures available on CD in the library. “But who wants to make a special trip to the library?” asked Willard. “I never did,” she continues.

However, when Larson made his lectures available on a college portal, Willard downloaded them to her iPod. “I’d listen to the lecture again while I was in studio working on a project. If he’d been going a little fast in class, I could listen again. Some people listened to the lectures while working out. Some listened before going to sleep. They said the lectures helped them sleep,” she laughed.

Now that her summer courses are over, Willard still listens to the lectures, even when on a required cooperative-education quarter working for a Charleston, S.C., architecture firm:  She said, “I have my iPod on shuffle. So, I might be working on a project in the office when, suddenly, a lecture by Jerry comes up. I just keep listening. He’s such a funny, animated presenter that it’s like I’m the classroom all over again. It’s great to feel you’re back at school when you’re having a hard day at work!”

A downside for students: Counting code
Matt Rolfert, a senior in UC’s number-one ranked interior design program, saw both an upside and a downside to the architecture lectures – by Jerry Larson, UC professor of architecture – that he obtained on CD in the library (before they were easily available for iPod downloading from the Web.) “The best part,” according to Rolfert, “Is that you didn’t have to clarify with other students if there was later confusion about something that was said in class. You could basically refer to the source material, so you and a bunch of other students weren’t just sharing your collective ignorance.”

And the down side? “These lectures were two hours long. If you were looking for a specific segment, you learned you’d better keep track of the code count as to where the segment you needed was located. You could waste a lot of time looking for something specific.”