Faculty Use of Educational Technologies
As information technologies increasingly appear in homes andpersonal-use devices, faculty and staff utilization of similar technologies foreducational purposes also increases. Many Rice educatorsare incorporating electronic grade books, online resources, multimedia teachingtools, and other applications in their courses. IT’s Educational Technologiesgroup assists faculty with their technology needs in the areas of teaching andlearning.
I speak Spanish, por favor, responda en Inglés
Viqui Arbizu-Sabater tried an experiment at the end of oneof her courses in Spanish: a video conference between a Rice classroom ofstudents speaking Spanish and a classroom in Mexico where the studentsresponded in English. For both sets of students, participating in adual-language conversation in a language that was not their native tongue wasso beneficial the teachers on both sides of the border decided to findadditional opportunities to pursue this kind of video conferencing. Althoughthe high-end technologies required for videoconferencing are not alwaysavailable in Mexico, IT’s Educational Technologies team member David del Pinoworked with Arbizu-Sabater to keep the dual-language dialogs going withcreative 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 worklike 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 networkingstaff members to set up a remote-controlled Mac so that their classroom PCcould work like a Mac. Additional details on the mobile device programmingclass and the technologies they utilized can be found at: http://webcast.rice.edu/.
Wii Fit Yet?
While Wii (pronounced “we”) fitness games were popularduring the fall semester, Assistant Director for Fitness AJ Moore hadanticipated the trend and harnessed the electronic game-like technology with aBrown Innovative Teaching grant to study lifetime fitness. The Wii interfaceand accompanying balance board were used for teaching physical fitness in thegym in her LPAP 196 course: Fitness and Technology. Moore also used OWL-Spaceand TVs from IT’s Educational Technologies team to teach her course. Additionaldetails 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 isshared desktops. For some courses, hands-on instruction or correction is thebest teaching device. Instructors can demonstrate many techniques if they cancontrol or share a desktop with a student, regardless of that student’slocation. Instead of walking around to a student’s desktop, the instructorwould share the student’s desktop from across the classroom, across the campus,or across the globe. Similarly, students on global teams can share projectinformation that is difficult to capture in other knowledge collaboration toolsif they can share each other’s desktops and show each other their work. ITsecured 100 desktop sharing licenses through a collaborative grant from Yugmato evaluate how many instructors and students need this type of technology, howoften they would use it, and how they would use the technology.
Clicking Across State Lines
Both shared desktops and audience response systems areutilized by Carolyn Nichol and John Hutchinson, who are training high schoolteachers to teach nanotechnology in their local schools. Hutchinson is onsabbatical from Rice and is working out of University of Colorado at Boulder.Nichols, here at Rice, discovered an innovation for the audience responsesystem that allows the Rice students participating in the project to entertheir survey responses with the physical clickers in a classroom in Houston,while the Colorado teachers enter their survey responses through a website. Allsurvey responses, regardless of the technology used to enter the response, aredisplayed in the Houston classroom, which are then viewed in Colorado viastreaming video. Hutchinson is an innovative educator, specializing inSocratic, interactive learning. His goal is to get students to know instead ofmemorizing information, and he is sharing his teaching style with the Coloradoteachers, thanks to the partnership with Rice and IT.
International Project Management
Innovate is a global collaborative project supported bymultiple U.S. universities. Rice’s Engineering 205 course, taught by CherylMatherly and Patrick Frantz, has partnered with the University of Pittsburghand the University of Tulsa to provide insight into working with culturalchallenges when a project spans the globe. Often, the leading nations ofoutsourced work will be the focus of the course. Each of the three universitiesprovide guest speakers from these countries as well as neighboring countries togive undergraduate students a feel for working conditions, expectations, andlanguage and cultural strengths, weaknesses, and barriers. A two-week triparound spring break takes the students into corporate offices in thesecountries, thanks to corporate partners such as Intel and Panasonic. Studentsutilize video conferencing and streaming technologies before and after thespring break trip to participate in discussions with the guest speakers. Theyalso utilize information sharing applications such as OWL-Space for discussiongroups. In 2009, Engineering 205 students will be visiting Vietnam and Taiwan.By the end of their course, these students will have utilized every educationaltechnology available at Rice, including wikis, blogs, course sites, streamingvideo, 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 moreinternational than most. Rice partners with universities in Paris, Abu Dhabi,and Tokyo so that senior students can work in teams on their selected capstoneproject. Multiple instructors at each of the four universities lecture on theirareas of expertise in robotics, and the student teams work on real products forSchlumberger. Often the end result is an item that will be marketedcommercially, such as a robotic window washer. Not only do the students have toresolve timezone differences to work on their project, the end result is aphysical solution, so they must determine how to actually build a productwithout 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 thenassigned to inter-institutional teams. Typically a team includes students fromonly two of the four cities, so that the time-zone difference and culturalchallenges are limited to two countries. For the shared lectures andpresentations, all students participate so they will learn about thesecountries and cultures from their peers. IT’s Educational Technologies providesstreaming video for the shared lectures and presentations, and the teamsutilize OWL-Space for project collaborations.
Rice - TMC Student Collaborations for Capstone Projects
Maria Oden works on a collaboration similar to that ofGhorbel, although her students’ capstone projects are in the field ofBioengineering with partners in the Texas Medical Center. The most importanttechnology that IT supports for Oden’s course is computer imaging applicationsin the lab. IT’s Media Services Group records capstone presentations as well.
ME, Space, and Tennessee
Andrew Mead is collaborating with the University ofTennessee on two Mechanical Engineering graduate level classes on aeronauticalengineering. The first class introduces students to aeronautical systems, andthe second class works on computations on stresses unique to aeronauticalengineering projects. Mead utilizes OWL-Space and video conferencing and isconsidering video capturing as a possible technology for future classes.
