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Faculty Showcase
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Jenne McCabe received a 2005 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for $158,593 to fund the research and development of computer games that will teach health information literacy and general information literacy. The project will be developed in partnership with the Libraries, the Center for Instructional Technology (CIT), and the Center for Assessment and Research Studies (CARS) (Leiding, Press Release, 2005).
When asked why she decided to use games as a means of addressing health
literacy educational objectives, Ms. McCabe recounted the
old Reese’s cup commercial, where the chocolate runs
into the peanut butter and a new product is created. In this
case, Ms. McCabe had been asked to create health informatics
tutorials at the same time the library staff was noticing
an increase in the number of students using library computers
to play games. Consequently, the Dean of Libraries and Educational
Technologies, Ralph Alberico, did some research on games,
which supported findings that learning objectives can be met
in a gaming environment. They decided to combine the two contexts,
health informatics and games, to create gaming technology
to teach health literacy to meet the needs of a wide variety
of courses. This project is in its beginning stages.
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Jenne McCabe
Gaming for Health Informatics |
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Thad Herron teaches GCOM 121, 122, 123 which require students to give class presentations and speeches. Mr. Herron feels that one of the best learning tools for these presentations is for the students to be able to review their performance via a recording. Currently, he uses a mix of VHS and DVD recordings that are distributed to the students upon request. Logistically, it is difficult to keep up with the tapes, to get them back in a timely manner, and not all students choose to view them.
However, since he teaches in the new Harrison building, Mr. Herron’s tech classroom is equipped with a high quality digital camera. On presentation days, Mr. Herron plans to turn the camera on at the beginning of class and turn it off at the end. He will bring the digitized media to the CIT where it will be copied to a computer. After the media is on a computer, Mr. Herron will be taught how to edit and compile various clips into streaming files. Next, the movie will be put up on the streaming server. The CIT staff will show Mr. Herron how to access the streaming website and insert the movie into his Blackboard class.
Once the recorded presentations are uploaded into Blackboard, his students will be required to view and critique their sessions. They will be able to access these recordings as long as they can log in to Blackboard. At this point, Mr. Herron can have group critiques, peer reviews, or any combination thereof. Mr. Herron hopes that this application of technology will allow his students to better evaluate their performance and improve their presentations. In addition, as a capstone project, he will ask students to compare their first presentation with their last in order to see the improvement they’ve made over the semester.
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Thaddeus Herron
Recording and Digitizing Student Presentations for Playback in Blackboard |
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Dr. Pavel Zemliansky teaches two GWRIT 103 courses partially online and face-to-face, i.e. in a hybrid manner. The students meet with the professor in a traditional classroom once every few weeks; the rest of the class is conducted online using Blackboard. They meet face-to-face, either as a whole class or in small groups. They are also encouraged to come to visit Dr. Zemliansky on a one-to-one basis, which they were not doing as much as he would like. Unlike when he teaches online during the summer where the students are off-campus, on-campus freshman did not tend to see the course as a “real” course but something “dumbed down.” However, after receiving the grades on their first papers, most of the students are starting to take the hybrid course more seriously.
Dr. Zemliansky works hard to have his students see the Blackboard environment as a community, not just a website where students “drop work and go.” He also spends much time trying to make the discussion board element of the course as lively and valuable as possible, rather than a place to post a few comments then log off. Again, he wants to build a community.
The professor feels that online courses are useful for teaching for writing because that is what participants do online, write. He pointed out that in a traditional class, there are usually one or two students who do all of the talking, a few more who talk a little, and the rest who don’t say anything. Online, everyone has to contribute, and they contribute through writing, and, as we all know, if you want to learn to write, then you write.
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Dr. Pavel Zemliansky
Teaching a Hybrid Writing Course |
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Dr. Shelley Aley is also teaching a hybrid
GWRIT 103. Like Dr. Zemliansky, Dr. Aley is having a little
difficulty getting the students scheduled for face-to-face
class meetings. This scheduling difficulty highlights one
of the primary reasons that students enrolled in the hybrid
course, time conflicts in being able to attend a regular face-to-face
course and the need for flexibility. Dr. Aley feels that hybrid
and online courses are beneficial to JMU since students, who
would normally take a course at a community college or other
university, can take it at JMU since an online course is time
and space independent. Another benefit to hybrid and online
courses is that more GWRIT 103 courses are needed but there
is not enough classroom space to accommodate the need. Therefore,
the online and hybrid options seem useful.
Dr. Aley likes teaching writing online since all communication and assignments are done through writing. She also enjoys the non-traditional students who tend to sign up for hybrid and online courses. These students bring a fresh perspective and evaluate the course more openly than some traditional students might. Like Dr. Zemliansky, Dr. Aley finds that the quieter students have a chance to discuss; in fact, all students have to participate. When students write in a discussion board, they are writing for their entire class, not just for the teacher; therefore, the audience changes from that of a face-to-face course. Dr. Aley discovered that peer evaluation is easier online than in a traditional classroom. In a traditional face-to-face small group peer review, the student writer can verbally explain a section of a writing assignment that might need clarification. At that point, the student reviewer can say, “Oh, I see,” it is likely, then, that the revision is never made. Online, however, the author is not present; he or she gets the peer reviews in text at different times. The author cannot verbally elucidate any unclear passages the reviewer points out; therefore, the paper has to receive written revision.
Dr. Aley uses technology in a variety of ways. In one class, the students view an MPG3 video that argues a plane did not fly into the Pentagon on September 11. The creators of the video set up a classic argument, but if the students look beyond the music and glitz of the video, they can easily rebut each of the video’s points. She also has the students use the library’s online research databases to conduct their research on current issues. She finds that the students often do not know the difference between a source gathered from the Internet and one taken from a research database. Teaching them the difference and also how to evaluate electronic resources is a valuable skill covered in GWRIT 103 that she feels she is able to do better in an online course than in the face-to-face classroom where technology is not present.
Hybrid courses may become more and more popular as the demand for certain classes grows and classroom space diminishes. Drs. Zemliansky and Aley plan to teach both online and hybrid courses in the future.
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Dr. Shelley Aley
Teaching a Hybrid Writing Course |
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Dr. Cynthia Cadieux felt it would be beneficial for her NUTR 460 Computer Systems in Foods and Nutrition students to learn how to use and evaluate this technology because of the prevalent use of PDA’s in the health care field,. For one month in Spring 2004-2005, these students were given a PDA and asked to meet several competencies, from downloading software to using it to analyze the nutritional status of adults and children. Dr. Cadieux’s educational objectives were for the students to use self directed learning, perseverance, critical thinking, and computer skills to learn how to use the PDA’s and to evaluate them from both a personal and professional point-of-view. She wanted students to be able to make informed decisions about whether this particular technology was a good fit for them.
Using a PDA holds several benefits, including increasing productivity so that the clinician can spend more time with a patient rather than flipping through charts and reference books, decreasing math error by calculating complicated nutritional formulas, providing a place to keep reference and patient notes should a physician request information, and, if the PDA has wireless capabilities, storing downloaded information.
Unfortunately, there were drawbacks to using the PDA’s. If the battery became disconnected or drained of power the PDA lost all of the information stored in it. Students would have to synchronize their information with a desktop computer on a daily basis (or more) to insure that their information was not lost. A number of students lost all of their information on several occasions because of battery issues. Some students had trouble mastering the technology of the PDA, for example downloading and synchronizing. Others excelled in its use.
In evaluating the PDA, the students were insightful when they mentioned that they were afraid that they may become too reliant on the technology and not their clinical knowledge. Others felt that it would distance them from their patients if they spent too much time typing data into and using the PDA. Like many of us, the students were also overwhelmed by the amount of information they could access online and download onto their PDA’s and feared that trying to keep up with all of the information could become counterproductive. A few students also mentioned having difficulty typing in data due to the small size of the input menu or unfamiliarity with using a stylus.
Overall, Dr. Cadieux felt the exercise was a useful one, but she isn’t sure if she’s going to work with PDA’s again this spring. top of page
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| Dr. Cynthia Cadieux
PDAs in Dietetics |
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Dr. Dorothy Della Noce made the discussion board feature of Blackboard the heart of her online course, SCOM 231, Introduction to Alternative Dispute Resolution. The final grade for the course was largely dependent upon the quality of the students’ discussion board entries. Dr. Della Noce provided a clear rubric so the students knew in advance the standards by which they would be evaluated.
She used the discussion board to create collaboration between the students and engage them with the ideas of the course. Her philosophy is to get the students to think, explore, and apply what they’ve learned. She feels that students benefit from not only thinking about concepts but also talking about them with each other. In this case “talking” occurred through the discussion board.
Dr. Della Noce used the discussion board in two ways. First, she regularly posted for the entire class discussion questions relating concepts in the assigned readings to current events. She used this discussion board to assure that the students were grasping the concepts she intended. Secondly, she divided the class into small groups . Each group went to the former Warner Brothers Celebrity Justice website and chose a case about a celebrity. They worked with this case for the rest of the semester. Each group was responsible for providing a summary and links about the case to the rest of the class so that all of the students were conversant in all of the cases.
Once each group had a case, they were required to open weekly discussion threads for the entire class by applying concepts from their readings to the situation. For example, if the week’s topic was “forms of mediation,” the group would open a discussion with the class about what kind of mediation might be used in their case. They often included links to support their ideas. In turn, members of the class would comment and sometimes contribute additional links to support their arguments.
Dr. Della Noce was pleased to discover that the students began to provide supplementary links to relevant current events that weren’t related to their cases. For example, a student provided a link about a case and asked why a certain type of litigation was involved. Other students replied, and a discussion began. Clearly, the students were learning the material and making transfer outside of their particular cases. Dr. Della Noce was also pleased with the quality of the students’ posts, their interaction with classmates, and their engagement with the ideas presented. She was especially gratified when she could read and sense their excitement about a topic and how it applied to the world they knew.
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Dr. Dorothy Della Noce
Discussion Boards and Case Studies in an Online Course |
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