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Newsletter: Spring 2006

Contemporizing Curricula for Success

by: Shane Colter

Faculty members’ dedication to teaching often leads them to continuously revise their curricula to incorporate contemporary technologies and relevant teaching methods. Some seek to prepare their students for professional success by emulating their future work environments in terms of the nature of assignments, equipment utilized, and even the overall class structure. Here are two examples of faculty making such efforts to enhance their students’ learning experience.

Leveraging technology for collaboration


Dr. Matt Gray is an assistant professor of wetland ecology in the department of Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries. As a participant in the ITC Wireless Instructional Initiatives project, he worked with ITC staff members this past summer to restructure his upper-division Wildlife Habitat Evaluation and Management course, in which students work in groups to develop management plans for a tract of land.

Dr. Gray’s goals for his students, likely shared by most faculty, include reducing procrastination, enhancing writing skills, equalizing individual contributions to group projects, and improving individual comprehension of group plans. He also hoped technology could be used to facilitate learning, information transfer, and grading.

Dr. Gray decided to make the process for drafting group plans more ostensible, and hence reviewable, by providing a detailed schedule of deliverables and incorporating electronic journaling to record progress. He used Online@UT’s collaboration features, such as Journal LX and discussion boards, to allow students to share documents, conduct peer reviews of group plans, and post questions.

Online@UT also provided the infra-structure to organize individual and group deliverables, and to ensure students were making steady progress on their final team projects. His students were even able to use combination GPS / PDA units to share project data among team members and with the instructor while still in the field.

According to Dr. Gray, this combination of collaborative instructional design and relevant technology incorporation led to an observable increase in student interest and productivity over last year’s course. “Our students are receiving exposure to cutting-edge technology and science, and will be the top graduates in our state, if not the Southeast!”

Journalism in the digital age


In spring 2004, the department of Journalism and Electronic Media began offering Sports Writing Across the Media. The ITC worked with the instructors and their students to utilize a cart of iBook laptops, digital camcorders, and UT’s wireless network to submit print, radio, and TV assignments from sporting events across campus. The students also created Web pages, using their UT VolSpace accounts, to display their work.

This past fall, Associate Professor Dan Foley decided to further modernize this course by incorporating digital audio, still photography, video slideshows, and podcasting into his students’ projects. Last semester his students did voice-overs and editing at WUTK; this year he wanted them to record and edit audio files of interviews directly on the laptops.

The ITC worked with him to identify and explore relevant resources and technologies, including The Studio (a multimedia center in Hodges Library), iMovie, and the new Online@UT add-on tool Teams LX, which provides a collaborative Web space within a course. His students are now working to create captioned digital slide-shows from their still photographs, and next time he hopes to have them convert their audio files into podcasts, too.