As the Ohio State switch from quarters to semesters draws closer, many faculty members are planning their revamped courses, and taking the opportunity to bring more technology into the classroom.
“That’s an advantage of semesters, especially if you’re doing research projects or if you have to make or create something,” said David Staley, director of the Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching. “Fifteen weeks is very advantageous to that.”
With an extra five weeks in each term, many instructors say they plan on assigning more multimedia projects, requiring students to create, edit and publish their own videos.
“We’ve had faculty [using] digital narratives as assignments, and that’s something we’re looking to expand,” Staley said. “That’s students taking video and image and sound and mixing them as new digital narratives. We’ll be doing this next quarter … and we’ll have more of that as the transition comes. Semesters give the opportunity to launch these sorts of initiatives.”
Doug Dangler, associate director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing also anticipates a push toward video and visual technology in the future.
“You’ve been seeing the rise of video for a while. You can’t go to MSNBC and not see a video embedded in their page,” Dangler said. “All of these places are having this move towards telling a story in different ways. I don’t think that has a lot to do with the semesters, but it gives you the time to explore it in more depth.”
Dangler said some “new media” outlets such as Facebook have only recently become widely accepted media, but it has yet to be determined how they can effectively be used in a university setting.
“A lot of this stuff is still up in the air: what we will do and how we will respond,” Dangler said. “In our area, we are always interested in taking media, taking students, teaching them the different kinds of media, and helping them become acclimated to the demands they will face in the marketplace and at their jobs.”
At OSU, 93 percent of all undergraduate students have at least one course registered in Carmen. Because of the Registrar’s Classroom Readiness Committee, nearly all classrooms on campus were equipped with multimedia technology last summer, including computers with the ability to host video conferences.
But technology in the classroom is nothing new, said Victoria Getis, director of the Digital Union, citing an engineering lab used to develop iPhone applications, along with the university-supported “wiki space” called Carmen wiki, where students can write and collaborate on entries for specific courses.
Getis said more instructors have been using interactive white boards, known as smartboards, to get students involved in the classroom. Instructors write directly on the high-tech board with a pen tipped with an infrared light. The notes can be saved and uploaded on Carmen as an electronic document. Getis said the technology also lets students play back the notes as they were written, to help them see how the instructor worked out the problem on the board.
Getis also said that when Apple releases its recently announced iPad, the university will be sure to be one of the first to get it.
