Propelling Education into the 21st Century

Written by Kelly Fodel

MAE 2011 Volume: 6 Issue: 6 (July/August)

Technology and social media have changed the way we communicate and keep in touch with friends, clients and colleagues. From smartphones to Facebook, e-readers to tablet computers, the landscape of learning and socializing is changing. Therefore, it stands to figure that emerging methods of technology would be adapted to and adopted by colleges and universities.

Today’s students are used to learning on the go, thus requiring their schools to keep up with the latest technology. College campuses and educators that stay up-to-date with emerging technology and pilot new programs are appealing and take advantage of the students’ natural adaptability to new technology.

Mobile computing with devices like smartphones, netbooks, tablet computers (such as the iPad) and other devices has become more commonplace on campuses. Most schools offer access to the Internet through mobile hotspots and broadband cards. Now many schools are taking advantage of the ever-popular text message as a way to communicate with students. Some schools have even adapted the text message into a learning tool.

Texting in Class

Dr. David McDonald is the director of emerging technologies at Georgia State University. Eighteen months ago he piloted the Text Question System (TQS) at GSU, which is a simple technology that allows students to ask questions anonymously. “Two years ago, I attended a professional hockey game and noticed that between periods, the arena audience could text messages to one another and have it shown on the scoreboard,” said McDonald. “This was the inspiration for TQS. I thought that this would be a wonderful way to co-op students’ use of technology in the classroom.

“The system was designed for the student who is too shy or reticent to raise his or her hand in the classroom,” said McDonald. “All texting is anonymous [however, the originating cell phone number is captured as a safeguard]. Students may ask questions that they might think are ‘dumb.’ Moreover, many times students think they understand a concept in the classroom during the lecture only to discover that when they do homework assignments or study for exams they really did not understand. The social networking feature [students answering other students’ questions] is a strong component of this system.”

A faculty member merely has to go to a server (cloud) application and set up a class section using the class’s unique computer number. Many courses have multiple sections, so it is important to let TQS know to which section one should send text messages. A small app, suitable for a thumb drive or placed on the university network, produces the scrolling banner that appears at the bottom of the projection screen. All questions that students send are autofiltered for obscenity and then allowed by the server to appear in the classroom via the aforementioned app.

However, this scrolling banner is not really needed; if the faculty member finds it distracting in the classroom, the questions are still captured and sent via an RSS feed to any RSS feed reader. Feed readers are readily available free on the Internet. Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Macs all come with feed readers. At GSU, the feed reader is built into the course site so that students automatically see the list of captured questions.

Interestingly, it is not the faculty who answer these questions; students answer other students’ questions for extra class credit. The system easily monitors which students have answered the questions or expanded upon an answer. From the students’ perspective, they need to know only two relevant numbers: the phone number they need to text and the computer number of the section in which they are sitting. Then, to send a text question they merely prefix the question with the section computer number. For example, a student enrolled in a marketing class with a computer number of “12345” would write: “12345 How does viral marketing work?” and click send. That’s it. McDonald does have plans to commercialize this technology and is developing a full suite of applications dubbed “txtQuest.” TQS will be only one component of the txtQuest suite of applications.

Additionally, faculty receive a listing of questions asked by students from semester to semester, which gives them a good idea what students understand in the lecture and what they do not. Using Web 2.0 “alert,” faculty receive emails when a student posts an answer. It is very simple for faculty to monitor these answers for accuracy.

While students seem to like the program and McDonald has noted what he calls “amazing results,” he has seen one particular issue. “The primary challenge is the ‘old guard’ of faculty that find PowerPoint slides leading-edge technology. These faculty are reticent to change the way they’ve been teaching for 20-plus years.”

Rise of e-Readers

Electronic books and resources have become very popular with students, especially when you consider the high price of textbooks. While electronic readers like the Kindle have been a best-selling product for the past few years, some schools are now testing out larger format versions of the e-reader, such as the Kindle DX or the Sony Reader. These larger format versions are designed for academic texts, newspapers and journals.

The American Public University System has created an extensive online library to serve its 80,000 distance learning students. “We boast of a joint online library that already provides access to over 120,000 e-books and multi-year runs of some 35,000 scholarly journals to students in 120 countries,” said Fred Stielow, vice president/dean of libraries & electronic course materials. In order to establish pilot programs, Stielow said they rely on several methods. A Facebook group of faculty, staff and librarians facilitates new idea sharing. That is joined by a budding Future Classroom project where faculty test and roll out trial ideas. “In addition, the nation’s leading corps of online subject librarians constantly monitors for suitable applications and knowledge centers in support of the curriculum,” said Stielow. “Finally, our Center for Teaching and Learning helps capture and provide background training in conjunction with fine-tuning from the Instructional Development Team.”

Stielow said the challenges of piloting new programs are immense, but that is to be expected. “Pedagogy has lagged behind technological advances since the early days of the university and revolutionary arrival of paper in the 13th century. Universities have barely dealt with the revolutionary aspects of such extant technologies as touch screens. We do work with voice-recognition applications—but only narrowly for languages. We look longingly at the as yet unrealized, but transitional potential of 3-D projections for math and science. Faculty can lead in such adoptions, yet some may be set in their ways; we must deal with the transition to a now arriving born-Web generation.”

APUS runs annual satisfaction surveys on course materials and Stielow noted that students only grudgingly accept electronic textbooks (or print for that matter). “They are more accepting of the switch toward electronic library and open Web materials,” he said. “They are most appreciative of the new media.”

Cloud-Based Courses and More

At Thomas Edison State College, there are several pilots and projects currently running, according to Matthew Cooper, director of instructional technology and instructional design & development.

“First, we have just finished adopting a cloud-based content system that will allow us to leverage our course content in a variety of delivery models and devices,” said Cooper. “In other words, instead of just developing a biology course for our online BlackBoard course environment, we can use that same course content for mobile phone delivery—without having to make a separate mobile-friendly version of the same course. Additionally, the cloud environment allows us to develop new courses more efficiently and with increased transparency by enabling many different parties (mentors, deans, instructional designers and subject matter experts) to collaborate within a shared development environment.”

Another major project is the continuation of their FlashTrack mobile learning initiative. FlashTrack is designed for mobile students (commuters, travelers, etc.) who may have a laptop with them on the go but may not have Internet access. FlashTrack is hosted on a USB drive, and it contains almost everything the student needs to complete the online course. The entire online course is replicated on the USB drive, and it also contains a suite of programs (a productivity suite of software, presentation programs, etc.) that will provide the tools students need to complete the course.

Thomas Edison State College is also preparing to pilot a course delivery methodology called “inTouch Courses.” These courses will be designed to take advantage of the benefits offered by tablet devices, such as iPads and Android tablets. Rather than use the typical website design of an online course, inTouch courses will be optimized for gesture-based interaction with course content and will utilize the multimedia capabilities of tablet devices. Cooper said, “With the nearly endless possibilities afforded by both the Android marketplace and the iTunes App Store, we anticipate being able to create a very unique learning experience for our students. We will begin piloting these courses around late summer of this year.

“Given the quickly evolving landscape in online learning, it is absolutely essential that we try to keep up with emerging consumer technologies,” he continued. “We constantly strive toward incorporating devices and tools that adults are using in their personal and professional lives— using technologies that students are already familiar with greatly increases student accessibility and comfort. In tandem with this, we also try to leverage a wide range of technologies so that we can reach as many adult learners as possible. Not everyone has an iPhone, which is why we try to develop course delivery mechanisms that are cross-platform in nature.”

Historically one of the biggest obstacles, Cooper noted, was trying to recreate the same course content for different delivery models. Having adopted the cloud-based content system, the new system is incredibly scalable, which will allow the college to quickly experiment and test new devices and technologies for students. The biggest obstacle now will be just trying to keep up with emerging technologies.

Cooper said most of the feedback they receive is rather constructive. “We rarely, if ever, have an idea that is universally accepted by all. There is always a learning curve involved when it comes to adopting new technology, and that learning curve varies greatly based on the individual. I can say that both students and staff alike recognize the importance of evolving distance education.”

Generally, these programs are assessed the same way regular online courses are assessed. They consider factors such as learning outcomes, testing metrics and general feedback through instruments like course evaluations and surveys. Cooper said they recognize the importance of scalability, so they try to embrace the open source community as best they can. This allows them to keep costs low, yet take advantage of the latest developments in technology. “We try to avoid projects that will limit our student impact because of the cost being too prohibitive,” he said.

An Exciting Future

What can future college students expect? The rapid pace of emerging technology makes it difficult to tell what the college campus will look like in the future, but students can certainly look forward to some exciting things. Anything from simple augmented reality, which could allow someone to point a smartphone at an object and find out information about it, to gesture-based computing (think the Nintendo Wii), which could allow student to control devices with their body parts. All of these developments will require money, training of faculty and staff and a change in the culture of the college campus. However, the payoff of adopting such technologies may well be worth it. Dr. McDonald noted, “The 21st century student expects much more in the classroom than prior students. Technology is an everyday part of their lives. To force them to turn off all technology is ludicrous. We, as faculty, need to continue to develop ways to incorporate their technology habits into the lesson plan. ♦

Back to Top