Although as a college administrator, I have been involved in planning
for educational technology use for a number of years, as a faculty member
I was uncertain about the feasibility and desirability of using computers
in my own teaching. Finally, in Fall 1996, driven by a sense of guilt at
the inconsistency between my planning committee and classroom behavior,
I took the plunge and developed and offered a psychology course which used
computers in a number of different ways. Additional incentives were the
remarkable ease-of-use of some curriculum development software and the sense
I got from conversations with students that they too were ready to move
beyond word processing in their own computer skills. What I found throughout
the Fall 1996 semester was that both in-class activities and out-of-class
interactions with students were changed and enriched.
The course I taught, an introduction to research methods in psychology,
introduced students to several different uses of computers. Although descriptions
below relate to that course, most, if not all of the computer applications
would be useful in teaching in a wide variety of disciplines.
E-mail: With assistance from the College, each student was
assigned an e-mail address at the beginning of the semester and spent a
part of one class period learning how to send and receive messages electronically.
For the rest of the semester, students were able to use e-mail to communicate
with me on days when we did not have class and with each other. Since students
did some of their assignments in collaborative teams, this second feature
was a major advantage. Although I gave students the option of submitting
written assignments by e-mail, most opted for more traditional methods.
Course Web Site: Serving as my own content specialist, programmer,
and graphic artist, and aided by two very user-friendly software packages,
I designed a World Wide Web site for the course which provided both information
about course requirements and assignments and an on-line version of my lecture
and other notes for each unit in the course. No textbook was assigned. Because
many students wanted to have the unit information in print as well, I ended
up providing "hard" copies of pages for those who requested them.
In future semesters, I will probably make the unit material available in
spiral-bound print form and use the Web site and/or a CD-ROM for assignments,
enrichment and primary source materials.
Internet Use: The Internet/World Wide Web makes an astonishing
array of visual and text materials easily accessible. Very few students
had used the Internet before, but after 15-20 minutes of training, they
became competent users. Although the course Web site already contained active
links to a number of other psychology-related Internet sites, once students
learned to conduct searches, they discovered many other interesting sites
on their own. Several weekly assignments required them to analyze or otherwise
use information at assigned sites or find new sites related to a given topic.
Because they worked on most of these assignments with their research teams
(2-5 students), they helped each other use the Internet. These class sessions
had an especially busy and happy sound to them.
Statistical and Graphical Software: A major component of research
assignments in the course was the collection, analysis, and representation
of data. Again, the availability of easy-to-learn software - in this case,
a program called Statview - allowed students to use descriptive
statistics in their work and to move from worksheets to graphs and back
at the press of a button. The ease with which students could move between
data and their graphic representation also allowed us to explore the question
of more and less effective graphs as communication tools in a concrete way.
How did all of this change the teaching and learning processes in my course?
First, students spent a much higher percentage of their classroom time being
actively engaged in their learning tasks. Although I inserted a few mini-lectures
when questions arose, for the most part students were doing more - talking
to me and to their research teammates, going to the computer to get needed
information, comparing data and so on. Second, my role changed significantly.
Since students were no longer dependent on me to be the primary source of
information, I spent much of my time circulating among the research groups,
asking and answering individual questions, helping groups that were stuck
move forward, applauding interesting ideas and outcomes - engaged in what
seemed to me the most rewarding parts of teaching. Third, students were
given much more power to chart their own course through assignments and
to build their own understandings of concepts. This flexibility made the
course more responsive to the array of interests and learning styles represented
in the class group. Finally, the collaborative work structure along with
the informality made possible by computer use created a climate in which
students formed strong, positive relationships with others in the class.
Long after the end of the semester, I saw groups of students who had met
in the class sitting in the cafeteria or walking across campus together
- an important outcome, particularly at a commuter campus like ours.
The new Center for Teaching and Learning, to be opened early in 1998, will
provide a place for faculty with a budding interest in using computers to
join others in a collaborative learning process directed toward exploring
these exciting teaching/learning tools.
Dr. Ellen Smiley, Assistant Provost
The Center for Teaching and Learning
NAC Building, Room R5/302
(212) 650-8245
E-mail: smiley@scisun.sci.ccny.cuny.edu
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