Faculty Spotlight
September - October 2008: Dr. Bob Augé
Early BeginningsDr. Augé was an early adopter of educational technologies. Beginning in the late 1990’s, he discovered the instructional utility of course web pages. He first developed course websites for several of his courses. The early iterations of the course websites provided his students with “sort of a fun and more useful extended course syllabus.” Over the years the websites have evolved, and provide students with nearly all of their course materials. “Blackboard came along, which is a wonderful suite of teaching and learning tools; the gradebook alone is worth exploring the use of Blackboard.” While Dr. Augé has adopted Blackboard for several of his courses, he still finds that his course websites outside of Blackboard still have value and add to the student learning experience. Take a look at the PLSC 532 course website-
PLSC 532: Environmental Plant Ecophysiology
Technology and Communicating Through Writing
Several years ago, Dr. Augé developed a new course (PLSC 448- Horticultural Internet Communication) that satisfied the university’s general education requirements for designation as “writing-intensive.” Based on the premise that students must be able to communicate using the rapidly developing electronic technologies, he developed a course rich in the use of web authoring tools. Students are provided with a basic problem, and are assigned a specific clientele. Their task is to “hone their skills in a particular area of expertise with a focus on developing an information resource delivered via the web.” Students must identify areas for inquiry, locate relevant information, evaluate its quality, and incorporate the information into final product. In the process, students learn valuable web development skills. Dr. Bob Augé employs the use of multiple teaching and learning technologies in his PLSC 448: Horticultural Internet Technology course. He uses Online@UT to manage most of his student assignments. Students submit their assignments in digital format. He is then able to view, download, grade, and provide feedback to students all within Online@UT. Dr. Augé also uses Camtasia to record and post lecture material and demonstrations, so students have 24/7 access to the learning materials. To learn more about how Dr. Augé uses technology in PLSC 448, see his presentation on Virtual Classroom Strategies at http://itc.utk.edu/about/archives/video/