OID: Scholarship in a New Media Environment -- 1998-99 Academic Year

UCLA faculty and staff are pioneers in the development and use of cutting-edge applications which both enhance the work of the instructor and enrich student learning. In this SIANME forum, four distinguished programs with broad instructional applications will be demonstrated and discussed. The applications and presenters are:

Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) is a program, for networked computers, that enables frequent writing assignments without any increase in instructor work. Developed by the National Science Center with an NSF grant, it will be presented by Michael Fiore, Programmer Analyst on the Molecular Science Project and Project head of the CPR Development Team, and Dana Thadani, Evaluation Coordinator for the Molecular Science and graduate student researcher with the Third International Mathematics & Science Study (TIMMS).

Virtual Simulation Courseware: Hazardous Waste Site Investigation and Remediation, for Civil and Engineering 164. This software tool permits students to examine polluted sites within a virtual environment and then devise and run tests. Presented by Thomas Harmon, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and William Jepson, Director of Computing at the department of Architecture and Urban Design, School of the Arts and Architecture.

Iced-Tea (Interdisciplinary Collaborative Environment for the Development of Training and Educational Applications): an interactive web-based system that enables students and teachers, whether distributed across a large campus or across the country, to work together to develop course materials. Presented by James Strommer, Senior Medical Illustrator for the Crump Institute for Biological Imaging.

The Milken Educator Virtual Workspace: a web-based collaborative project management tool originally created for the 1,300 winners of the Milken Educator Awards to engage in online professional development activities. It will soon be made available to the educational public at large for no cost to develop collaborative projects online. Presented by John Schacter, Research, Technology and Professional Development Specialist, Milken Family Foundation Education Research and Programs department.

Panelists

The Web is now an accepted feature of the educational landscape.

But will it work?

Does it promote collaborative learning, or inhibit it? Does it dehumanize the classroom, or bring students closer? Does it complicate the instructor's task, or alleviate it? Is it a threat to education, or its panacea?

There is no single answer to any of these questions. But a few faculty have had the opportunity to both use the web in their instruction and to evaluate it. Professor Richard Walters, our guest speaker, is interested in both the quality of the instruction offered over the web and the technology that delivers it.

At UC Davis, where he teaches, in the papers he has authored, and in the seminars he regularly presents to faculty in other institutions, Professor Walters regularly shares his thoughts on the quality of the several courses he has adapted and on the advantages and pitfalls of the technology he has employed.

Professor Walters' experience with both language and science instruction makes him particularly unique, but his approach to using technology has ramifications for all who are trying to understand how technology and learning can coexist.

Increasingly, instructors at UCLA are designing courses that focus the responsibility for learning much more fully on the student. Assignments, both inside and outside the classroom, ask students to do more original research, to tutor each other and to complete group projects. Studies suggest that students retain concepts much more fully, and attain greater depth of understanding, when learner-centered methods are used, but how easy are they to adopt, and when are they appropriate?

The use of technology in instruction appears to facilitate student-centered learning in several ways. Students have access to more information than previously possible. In addition, students are creating and contributing information in new ways, using new media to create new data as part of their studies or their research. This means instructors can design assignments to use primary resources to make learning much more easily relevant to students. Innovative techniques at the undergraduate level, such as electronic peer review, can also be employed.

However, the move to student-centered learning has profound implications for the educational process at UCLA. It may change the power relation between instructor and student, and the interactions between students. It may mean that how we spend time in and out of the classroom will be very different. It may also change the way that campus support staff needs to function.

The question has to be asked, are we ready for this? Are instructors comfortable with the idea that they may not be able to predict what students create in their courses, and are students prepared to use the wealth of information available to them without being overwhelmed? Finally, how can technology help or hinder in the process?

To discuss this subject we have assembled a panel of faculty, TA's, and students, who have a variety of perspectives on learner-centered instruction.

Two years ago, creating "sound and picture" slideshows to put on the web was strictly for the technologically advanced. Those that were produced took forever to download and were barely audible to anyone listening to them from a computer at home.

All that has changed. New and very easy-to-use tools are available to the comparative novice for little or no cost. With them, one can produce multimedia narrated slideshows that "stream" -- that is, start playing as soon as the beginning of the file reaches the host computer and continue to play until they are done. These sophisticated multimedia slideshows can be made by anyone. You don't need to know HTML, and you can use hardware most consumers already own.

One of these tools is called RealProducer. It is free software from RealNetworks. In this SIANME forum four instructors will demonstrate how they used it to "talk" to their students via the web to convey information, depict processes, or demonstrate language pronunciation.