Education Technology Services » ETS Initiatives

ETS and Engineering’s eLearning Initiative

Cole Camplese — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:11:05 +0000

The College of Engineering’s eLearning Initiative is a shared project with ETS and the Leonhard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education. The initiative aims to expose undergraduate students within the College of Engineering to issues of globalization, ethics, and societal contexts in engineering practice. In addition the initiative will require that students demonstrate an ability to work with and lead collaborative projects, including virtual/distributed work teams.

Courses under development include topics such as technology ethics, globalization, leadership, and entrepreneurship. The initiative will also assess the long-term viability of cross-campus courses, affording students first-hand experience with working in a distributed team environment. Finally, the initiative’s goals include an exploration of student portfolio tools, specifically how best students can capture evidence of learning in the areas of ethics, global awareness, and leadership.

Turnitin

Cole Camplese — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:31:47 +0000

Turnitin is a plagiarism detection and prevention system owned by Turnitin.com, which has licensed the system to Penn State for use in the University community. Faculty can submit students’ papers to the system to perform originality checks. Turnitin can also be used as a teaching tool to raise awareness of paraphrasing and quoting skills among students to avoid plagiarism. TLT staff provide information and support for Penn State use of Turnitin athttp://tlt.its.psu.edu/turnitin/, as well as additional academic integrity resources.

Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

Cole Camplese — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:31:08 +0000

The annual Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology brings together faculty and teaching support staff to share innovative ideas and best practices for using technology to enhance courses. The next symposium is scheduled for March 29, 2008. As a complement to the event, the Web site at http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/ provides a calendar of events, podcasts, and a blog to which faculty are invited to contribute throughout the year. An RSS feed of new blog posts is available.

Podcasts at Penn State

Cole Camplese — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:30:08 +0000

The Podcasts at Penn State program offers a variety of services designed to offer faculty an easy way to produce educational podcasts and distribute them to their students. These services include hands-on training, information on locating equipment to borrow or purchase for producing podcasts, recommendations of the best practices for creating pedagogical podcasts, free software downloads necessary to create podcasts, free accounts to begin posting podcasts, online tutorials, and more. In addition, the Penn State on iTunes U project gives faculty a secure way to publish course podcasts. For more information on how to participate in the program and to begin podcasting to students, visit http://podcasts.psu.edu/ or e-mail podcasts@psu.edu.

Digital Commons at Penn State

Cole Camplese — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:27:47 +0000

The Digital Commons is a University-wide initiative to help enrich studentsâ€™ educations by creating digital content for their coursework. The Digital Commons will provide all campuses within Penn State with a common set of computing tools, a common set of support materials, and a common set of opportunities to create digital media of all kinds. The Digital Commons will also help educate faculty, staff, and students on the appropriate uses of digital media. TLT has committed to installing up to fifteen Digital Commons studios during the 2007-2008 fiscal year, with the remainder of campuses being completed during the 2008-2009 fiscal year.

While video production has been at the core of our efforts, an increasingly popular activity within the Digital Commons is the production of audio. Each Digital Commons facility is stocked with some of the best audio recording equipment available to support podcasting. Additionally, each studio has professional lighting, digital video equipment, green screens and more.

ETS Community Hubs

Cole Camplese — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:27:04 +0000

Since 2006, TLT has been implementing and supporting community blog sites, or the ETS Community Hubs, for its services and initiatives that encourage members of the Penn State community to not only find information but to share it. Users can subscribe to an RSS feed of new posts from each individual community, or from the TLT Community Aggregator site. The Community Hub aggregates content from the Adobe Connect, ANGEL, Blogs at Penn State, Digital Commons at Penn State, Education Technology Services, Educational Gaming Commons, iPhone, Penn State Learning Design, Podcasts at Penn State, SCOLA, and the Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology.

These sites are designed to be open resources that are always available to anyone — either inside or outside of Penn State. We believe that the formation of a community of users is critical for the long-term success of our primary initiatives. The Community Hubs for a community of practice for the people engaged in the use of the technologies they support. We invite you to participate in the creation of knowledge at any of the Community Hubs.

The Blogs at Penn State

Cole Camplese — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:24:13 +0000

The Blogs at Penn State is a project exploring the use of blogs (Weblogs) in higher education. Once you have established your blog, you are free to use it as you see fit. Blogs are published in your personal Web space, so they belong to you. To learn more about the Blogs at Penn State or to get started go to the Blogs at Penn State Community Hub and explore. The site includes a forum where Penn State bloggers can gather to share information on how to get the best use of the Penn State blogs.

The Blogs at Penn State are powered by Six Apart’s enterprise blogging platform, MovableType 4. This open source software has been adapted to work within the Penn State environment. We are constantly working to envision new uses for the blog platform — as a matter of fact we see the blog platform as a personal content management system. This perspective allows us to think about blogs as the basis for all sorts of opportunities — from faculty web sites to student eportfolios. If there are things you’d like to explore about the Blogs at Penn State, please don’t hesitate contacting us so so we can get together and talk.

Blended Learning Initiative

Cole Camplese — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:20:01 +0000

The goal of the Blended Learning Initiative is o increase student success in high-enrollment classesâ€”in terms of course access, academic achievement, and a sense of feeling engagedâ€”several courses per year are being redesigned to make greater use of online delivery using ANGEL. This format is intended to make it possible to offer more sections of high-demand courses, permit more feedback from instructors, increase interaction among students, and help ensure that students master key concepts. The Blended Learning Initiative is a joint effort of the respective academic departments, the World Campus, the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, and TLT. In development during 2007 are ASTRO 001, MATH 021 (York and UP), NUTR 251, ECON 002, EGEE 102, PHIL 012, BiSci 002, and SPAN 002.

ANGEL for Teaching and Learning

Cole Camplese — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:18:11 +0000

ETS staff spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to better utilzie ANGEL for teaching and learning. We have staff dedicated to working with faculty and students to understand the overall needs assocaited with this University-wide resource. Our staff, along with those of other Information Technology Services units, regularly examine faculty requests for enhancements to ANGEL. Some enhancements are designed and programmed in-house; some are submitted to ANGEL Learning, Inc. to be incorporated into future versions of ANGEL. During spring 2007, TLT staff developed a more easily searchable documentation database, allowing users to locate specific help topics more quickly. This system will continue to be refined.

Learn more about ANGEL by visiting the ANGEL Community Hub. If you’d like to sit down and talk to us about how you are currently using ANGEL or would like to discuss some new ideas you have, please feel free to contact us.

Adobe Connect Pro

Cole Camplese — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:14:39 +0000

ETS staff continue to help support Adobe Connect Pro desktop videoconferencing software as a way to provide training and hold meetings at a distance. Adobe Presenter, part of the Adobe Connect package, allows faculty to synchronize audio with PowerPoint slide presentations and create Flash-based learning objects that can be posted to the Web, including an ANGEL course, for asynchronous use. TLT staff are also providing training opportunities, and compiling Adobe Connect models, case studies, and resources for faculty and staff at Adobe Connect Community Hub.

We are constantly looking at how to improve to the toolset and are exploring new and interesting ways it can be used to support teaching and learning. If you’d like to try out Adobe Connect or work with ETS to think of ways to integrate it into your classroom, please feel free to contact us.