Faculty Use of Educational Technologies
As information technologies increasingly appear in homes and personal-use devices, faculty and staff utilization of similar technologies for educational purposes also increases. Many Rice educators are incorporating electronic grade books, online resources, multimedia teaching tools, and other applications in their courses. IT’s Educational Technologies group assists faculty with their technology needs in the areas of teaching and learning.
I speak Spanish, por favor, responda en Inglés
Viqui Arbizu-Sabater tried an experiment at the end of one of her courses in Spanish: a video conference between a Rice classroom of students speaking Spanish and a classroom in Mexico where the students responded in English. For both sets of students, participating in a dual-language conversation in a language that was not their native tongue was so beneficial the teachers on both sides of the border decided to find additional opportunities to pursue this kind of video conferencing. Although the high-end technologies required for videoconferencing are not always available in Mexico, IT’s Educational Technologies team member David del Pino worked with Arbizu-Sabater to keep the dual-language dialogs going with creative solutions such as opening two communication channels simultaneously,one with audio and one with video.
Can I have a Mac with that PC?
Although Apple’s Intel chips have created Macs that can work like PCs, most PC users don’t want their computers to act like a Mac. However,Scott Cutler’s graduate-level ECE class was programming iPhone applications,and his course was assigned a classroom that did not include a Macintosh.Graduate student and IT employee Bryan Grandy assisted Cutler and IT networking staff members to set up a remote-controlled Mac so that their classroom PC could work like a Mac. Additional details on the mobile device programming class and the technologies they utilized can be found at: http://webcast.rice.edu/.
Wii Fit Yet?
While Wii (pronounced “we”) fitness games were popular during the fall semester, Assistant Director for Fitness AJ Moore had anticipated the trend and harnessed the electronic game-like technology with a Brown Innovative Teaching grant to study lifetime fitness. The Wii interface and accompanying balance board were used for teaching physical fitness in the gym in her LPAP 196 course: Fitness and Technology. Moore also used OWL-Space and TV's from IT’s Educational Technologies team to teach her course. Additional details on her use of the Wii in the classroom can be found at: http://webcast.rice.edu/.
Sharing a Desktop
A new technology that is seeing increased demand at Rice is shared desktops. For some courses, hands-on instruction or correction is the best teaching device. Instructors can demonstrate many techniques if they can control or share a desktop with a student, regardless of that student’s location. Instead of walking around to a student’s desktop, the instructor would share the student’s desktop from across the classroom, across the campus,or across the globe. Similarly, students on global teams can share project information that is difficult to capture in other knowledge collaboration tools if they can share each other's desktops and show each other their work. IT secured 100 desktop sharing licenses through a collaborative grant from Yugmato to evaluate how many instructors and students need this type of technology, how often they would use it, and how they would use the technology.
Clicking Across State Lines
Both shared desktops and audience response systems are utilized by Carolyn Nichol and John Hutchinson, who are training high schoolteachers to teach nanotechnology in their local schools. Hutchinson is on sabbatical from Rice and is working out of University of Colorado at Boulder.Nichols, here at Rice, discovered an innovation for the audience response system that allows the Rice students participating in the project to enter their survey responses with the physical clickers in a classroom in Houston,while the Colorado teachers enter their survey responses through a website. All survey responses, regardless of the technology used to enter the response, are displayed in the Houston classroom, which are then viewed in Colorado via streaming video. Hutchinson is an innovative educator, specializing in Socratic, interactive learning. His goal is to get students to know instead of memorizing information, and he is sharing his teaching style with the Colorado teachers, thanks to the partnership with Rice and IT.
International Project Management
Innovate is a global collaborative project supported by multiple U.S. universities. Rice’s Engineering 205 course, taught by Cheryl Matherly and Patrick Frantz, has partnered with the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Tulsa to provide insight into working with culturalchallenges when a project spans the globe. Often, the leading nations of outsourced work will be the focus of the course. Each of the three universities provides guest speakers from these countries as well as neighboring countries togive undergraduate students a feel for working conditions, expectations, and language and cultural strengths, weaknesses, and barriers. A two-week trip around spring break takes the students into corporate offices in these countries, thanks to corporate partners such as Intel and Panasonic. Students utilize video conferencing and streaming technologies before and after the spring break trip to participate in discussions with the guest speakers. They also utilize information sharing applications such as OWL-Space for discussion groups. In 2009, Engineering 205 students will be visiting Vietnam and Taiwan.By the end of their course, these students will have utilized every educational technology available at Rice, including wikis, blogs, course sites, streaming video, video conferences, and OWL-Space.
International Capstone Projects
Another global collaboration involves capstone projects forsenior engineering students. Fathi H. Ghorbel’s MEMS 520 course is more international than most. Rice partners with universities in Paris, Abu Dhabi,and Tokyo so that senior students can work in teams on their selected capstone project. Multiple instructors at each of the four universities lecture on their areas of expertise in robotics, and the student teams work on real products for Schlumberger. Often the end result is an item that will be marketed commercially, such as a robotic window washer. Not only do the students have to resolve timezone differences to work on their project, the end result is aphysical solution, so they must determine how to actually build a product without the advantages of being in the same classroom or even city.Schlumberger underwrites the video conferencing and supplies for the projects.The students select from a limited number of project options and are then assigned to inter-institutional teams. Typically a team includes students fromonly two of the four cities, so that the time-zone difference and cultural challenges are limited to two countries. For the shared lectures and presentations, all students participate so they will learn about these countries and cultures from their peers. IT’s Educational Technologies provides streaming video for the shared lectures and presentations, and the teams utilize OWL-Space for project collaborations.
Rice - TMC Student Collaborations for Capstone Projects
Maria Oden works on a collaboration similar to that of Ghorbel, although her students’ capstone projects are in the field of Bioengineering with partners in the Texas Medical Center. The most important technology that IT supports for Oden’s course is computer imaging applications in the lab. IT’s Media Services Group records capstone presentations as well.
ME, Space, and Tennessee
Andrew Mead is collaborating with the University of Tennessee on two Mechanical Engineering graduate level classes on aeronautical engineering. The first class introduces students to aeronautical systems, and the second class works on computations on stresses unique to aeronautical engineering projects. Mead utilizes OWL-Space and video conferencing and is considering video capturing as a possible technology for future classes.