Archive for the ‘Faculty’ Category

Faculty Success Story: Patrice Clemson

Pat CelmsonPatrice Clemson at Penn State Beaver uses Adobe Connect, a Web-based videoconferencing application, to reach students at a distance and facilitate team collaboration. Over the last two years, she has gradually incorporated more of the tool’s versatile features into her information sciences and technology courses to aid communication with and among students.

In fall 2006, Clemson used Connect to hold online office hours with a student located at Penn State Shenango who was taking an individualized programming course. Because the application allows users to share their computer desktop with others, she said, “He could show me problems he was having with program code, we could work through it together, he could hand me control of the desktop, and I could help him fix his program. It worked out really well.”

In her “Usability Engineering” course, Clemson was assisted by Lu Xiao, a doctoral candidate at University Park. Xiao was developing a software application and the students were to evaluate its usability as a course project. She used Connect to teach the class her application. The students also used Connect to hold team meetings. Clemson said, “I found that when students had control over their own meeting rooms, they were doing better quality work, simply because they were accountable to each other.”

In summer 2007, Clemson used Connect to deliver a completely online course. Within the application, the meeting host can promote users to presenter status, allowing them to manipulate screen elements. Clemson decided to promote all eight students to presenters. At first, she recalled, the result was chaotic. She said, “Give IST students free access to a software tool, and they’re going to start pressing buttons to see how it works.” Rather than intervening, she decided to observe what would happen. Over the next few weeks, she found their use of the software toned down and said eventually, they developed an etiquette on their own.

During 2007-08, the Beaver campus is piloting a program to offer courses required for a four-year IST degree to students who have completed two years at the Shenango campus. Several Shenango students participated in Clemson’s “Organization and Design of Information Systems” course via Connect. She assigned students to groups, each with their own Connect room. Weekly, the groups discussed a question based on the readings, then presented their findings. Clemson said, “This allowed them to synthesize the readings and come up with their own take on the material. They came up with at least one golden idea every class. When they collaborated, the product they came up with was greater than the sum of the parts. I was happy that Connect helped them learn that important lesson.”

To allow students to devote more in-class time to group work, Clemson recorded her lectures using Connect, allowing students to review material outside class.

As a final project, the groups were asked to design the ideal collaborative machine, then create a presentation the class could view in Connect. Clemson said that after seeing the presentations, “I practically flew home. These were folks who were complaining about having to use a software tool to talk to people who were sitting next to them. Then they realized that what they could do with it was bring all of their thoughts together, to put the ’straw man’ up and manipulate it, and come up with an outstanding final project. They amazed each other and me.”

Faculty Success Story: Laura Guertin

Laura GuertinLaura Guertin at Penn State Brandywine uses podcasting and Google Earth in her earth and geoscience courses to help students grasp science principles. She has discovered that when students use these technologies, the quality of their science improves, they care more deeply about the subject matter, and they are eager to share their learning with a wider audience.

In 2005, Guertin began to record her classroom lectures in MP3 format. She makes them available to students via iTunes U , allowing them to engage in course content outside class.

Additionally, she recorded review sessions consisting of questions to help students prepare for exams. She asked them to listen to each question, pause, and try to answer it. Guertin explained, “These were fundamental questions to make sure they understood the basics, then during the test, I asked synthesis-type questions.” She said these recorded reviews are beneficial because Brandywine is a commuter campus and it is difficult to get the class together for face-to-face review. “This way,” Guertin said, “all the students had access to it.”

Now that Brandywine has a Digital Commons studio, Guertin assigns projects that ask the students to be the creators of podcasts and other digital media.

As one project in her Environment Earth course, students created an audio tour of tree species marked on a trail at Ridley Creek State Park. Each student recorded a podcast about a species, then added photos to it. Guertin said her students worked hard to create high-quality work. She observed, “They were not happy turning in something that wasn’t to their satisfaction. I think it’s because the projects they did are being viewed by an outside audience. I saw a sense of pride and professionalism in a way that I wouldn’t have gotten if I just had them write a paper. Their voice had this inflection to it because they were excited to talk about the tree. I don’t think I would have gotten as good a result in terms of the quality of the science, either.”

In October, her students visited the Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C., a competition for energy-efficient home design. Carrying cameras and iPods with microphones, the students viewed the model homes, recorded observations, and interviewed attendees. From this, they created a virtual tour of the event, which was tied into Google Earth, an application that allows users to view a satellite image of a location. “What we’ve created can be shared throughout the Penn State community,” she said.

Guertin’s students entered the SCA/Mazda Conservation in Action Multimedia Contest, which asks young people to pick an environmental issue, describe it, and come up with a solution. The entry could be in the form of a podcast, movie, or song. She said her students chose a range of topics and technologies and that she was thrilled with the creativity of their work.

She said she was struck when a student commented, “I didn’t realize I cared about this subject. Now I realize I can do something about it.” Guertin explained, “That ‘do something’ means the technology is there for them to help communicate what they’ve learned. They cared about the science and what got them into the science was learning not just that you need technology to take measurements in the field, but also that it can help communicate the science.”

Faculty Success Story: Carla Zembal-Saul and Scott McDonald

Carla and ScottCarla Zembal-Saul and Scott McDonald in the College of Education teach courses on methods of science teaching. As one activity, students record videos of themselves teaching lessons to their classmates or in school settings. They are then asked to analyze the videos to reflect on their teaching practice. Now these future science teachers are able to reflect in a deeper, more meaningful way, using a video tagging and analysis application called Studiocode.

In the past, said McDonald, students would watch a video, then use iMovie to compile a clip of highlights with commentary. McDonald would then watch the clip and provide feedback. “But it was just a one-on-one interaction between the instructor and the student,” he said. Studiocode has opened up that interaction to allow dialogue with the entire class, say the two faculty.

Studiocode lets you create “codes,” or labels, to mark events of interest within a video. For example, McDonald asks students to code points in a recorded lesson when they believe inquiry science has occurred. Studiocode then marks a portion of the video from two minutes before that point until two minutes after. Once the video has been coded, they can then instantly create a short movie consisting of all the “inquiry science” portions.

While a student teaches a lesson during class, McDonald codes video as it is being recorded. During the same class, he can then show a clip of the coded portions and generate discussion around it. Zembal-Saul noted that this is “a very different, more spontaneous approach to being able to call up examples for students who are asking questions versus saying, ‘OK, for next week, I’ll pull that together and bring it to class.’”

She said, “A gain you’ll see with Studiocode is the dialogue that can happen around the video through the coding process across time. That’s very powerful. It moves the entire community forward.” McDonald reiterated, “It’s moved from this individual artifact to a community artifact.”

Studiocode can be used in many fields. Medical school faculty who teach eye surgery can call up video examples of procedures. Anesthesiology students are recorded intubating patients, then instructors code and comment on the video. It has been used for meteorology, animal behavior, and sports. McDonald said, “A faculty member in engineering is using it for analyzing how groups interact around projects. It can be used for anything you can videotape, literally.”

He added, “It doesn’t even have to be videotape; it just has to be rendered in video form. For example, science uses a lot of very sophisticated visualization tools. Anything you can render into video you can bring in Studiocode and code it. When you consider broadly the applications, anything that’s a moving image you can analyze. The possibilities are really endless.”

Faculty Success Story: Kathleen Taylor Brown

Kathy BrownKathleen Taylor Brown at Penn State Greater Allegheny helps communications students gain a competitive edge in the industry by both grounding them in theoretical foundations and having them plan and produce podcasts and videos.

Today’s journalism, she says, is often “backpack journalism.” Communications professionals who were once supported by production crews now often carry their own cameras and microphones and record, edit, and produce their own pieces. “You may be both in front of the camera and behind it,” explained Brown. “It’s not just writing the copy anymore; it’s writing, producing, and putting that end product out there,” she said.

In her “Newspaper Writing and Reporting” course, Brown asked students to interview a person who works for Penn State, be it a professor or cafeteria server, then produce an audio podcast. Brown said, “It brought the whole campus together because everybody was listening to it. We got a whole buzz going.”

In Brown’s “Public Relations and Advertising” course, she designed assignments around the Rachel Carson Institute in Springdale and Carson’s influence on the environmental movement. Brown said, “What I’ve learned since I started teaching is that students have to be passionate about something and they have to be able to be activists. One of the things they’re very interested in is the environment.”

As one assignment, students attended the Rachel Carson Legacy Conference at Carnegie Mellon University. Using iPods equipped with microphones, they captured the talks as well as walked around and interviewed attendees.

Student teams each created a video promoting environmental awareness featuring series of three words, such as “green your routine,” “don’t be silent,” and “erase your footprint.” They first had to develop storyboards. Brown said, “It gave them a concept they never had before on how you put together a movie. You don’t just go out and shoot. They had to have a plan, they had to have a process, and then they had to promote it.” Students edited the videos using iMovie software in the Digital Commons studio.

Other assignments encouraged students to capture the power of oral stories. In one instance, they interviewed individuals from three different generations on “why we fight.” In another, they captured the stories of women of the Mon Valley and learned what the area was like in the ’40s and ’50s. In return for their help, these “senior research associates” will each receive a computer in their home. Brown’s students will visit their homes and teach them to use the computer, through the “Follow Me Home” initiative.

Brown explained that having students spend time creating podcasts and videos does not mean they miss out on theory. “My colleagues may think if you’re putting all this technology in, you must be losing the theory. We’re not. We’re just enhancing the theory,” said Brown, “and the student gets more excited and passionate about it as a result.”

Faculty Success Story: Greg Pierce

Greg PierceGreg Pierce in the Smeal College of Business reinforces concepts in his Finance 100 course by augmenting class meetings and textbook readings with podcasts and vodcasts (video podcasts). This allows students to review course material on an MP3 player or computer at any time or place.

Pierce said he decided to create podcasts of his lectures out of a “a sense that students are always on the go and could use supplemental material to enhance their learning.” In summer 2006, he signed up for the Podcasts at Penn State and easily learned to use ProfCast software, allowing him to record narration and synch it with his class PowerPoint slides to create “enhanced” podcasts. He posted his podcasts at Penn State on iTunes U.

Pierce said, “These lecture podcasts are designed to enhance and embellish what’s in the book, and if students have to miss a class for an employment interview, for example, they have the lectures at their fingertips. It gives them great flexibility.”

This past summer, Pierce said, he had just returned from watching his son’s baseball game when he had a fresh inspiration for providing finance problem solutions to his active students. “I had the hat on, the jacket on, the whistle, and I just went up to the whiteboard in my office and started writing out the givens, the equations, and the solutions for assigned problems,” he said. As he did so, he videotaped himself. Thus the “Finance Coach” series was born. He created videos showing how to solve the problems from each textbook chapter.

As fall approached, Pierce said, he ran out of time to edit the videos into a useable format. He asked his Schreyer Honors College students whether any of them who knew iMovie software would like to earn honors credit by assisting with the editing. As a result, he obtained the help of sophomore Kylie Nellis, who spent about one hour editing each video in iMovie.

In each Finance Coach installment, Pierce works the same problem assigned to the students, who must then submit the solution in the form of an Excel spreadsheet. He said that way, “they can see how to do the math behind the problem and not worry about it so much. Someone might argue that we’re just giving them everything. My response is that I’m teaching them the mathematics on the board, then they have to take it up one level and figure out how to solve the problem by entering it into Excel.”

Nellis said, “If you’re not familiar with math or financial concepts, it’s not really daunting to sit down with your book and the Finance Coach. You know if there’s a problem, you have a resource right away.” She added, “I feel better if someone explains something to me as opposed to reading it in a textbook. I respond a lot better to that type of audiovisual interaction.”

“Coaching,” that’s really what it’s all about,” said Pierce. “Some students I encounter had a bad experience with mathematics in the past, so they just avoid math at all costs. The Finance Coach vodcasts makes it a little easier to at least approach the problem and say ‘This isn’t so bad after all. If you can do it on the board I can at least try to solve it in Excel.’”

Next Page →