Drexel technology connects students, professors

By: Nathan Fried

Posted: 4/24/09

Drexel is taking advantage of technology in the classroom - from a palm, to the blackboard, to streaming information live across the country.

"Advancing academic effectiveness through incorporation of appropriate technologies is a core aspect of the Drexel mission," Michael Scheuermann, associate vice president for Instructional Technology Support, said.

Drexel has recently seen a large increase in the utilization of these new technologies within the classroom, connecting student and teacher in ways never before anticipated.

"The students are the real benefactors of all of this activity, and with IRT as a partner, [the] faculty [is] expanding the choices and their effectiveness on an ongoing basis," Scheuermann said.

Smart boards, Web casting, iTunesU, Camtasia and Impatica are all new program applications that have been integrated into the classroom. Drexel has also implemented new video conferencing between Sacramento and University City campuses.

Janice Biros, vice provost for Budget, Planning and Administration, said "IRT has set up a beautiful, state-of-the-art high-definition video conferencing room in Korman and it's schedulable by anybody. I think that faculty are seeing the advantages of video conferencing for not just teaching in Sacramento, but also having joint courses with any place in the world."

IRT hosted a workshop April 14 featuring the experiences of Drexel professors Anna Cianci and Frank Lennehan using video conferencing to teach students in Sacramento. As part of their presentation, they stepped faculty through the process of setting up a single classroom on both sides of the country and connecting the two via live streaming audio and video.

Each classroom has two cameras, screens in the front and back and also a portable unit so the class in Sacramento can see the instructor in Philadelphia and vice versa. The instructor from one side can zoom in on certain areas of the classroom to speak to individuals or to observe how a group is working.

This enables a faculty member to teach to a classroom full of students in University City while students in a "parallel" classroom located in Sacramento can not only listen in, but also actively participate by asking questions or discussing topics with the entire class. This technology is not limited to just teachers, but can also be accessed and utilized by students and student organizations.

"If a student organization here wanted to have a video conference with a group of students in England, they could," Biros said.

Although technology in the classroom may seem like a recent initiative, Biros points out advances made by the faculty here at Drexel in the mid-'80s under the Micro Computing Program which was the first in the world to instate a mandatory policy that all students own a micro computer.

"We had a Pew grant to do that. And [faculty] developed courseware like Molecular Editor which was a molecular modeling program that Alan Smith developed for chemistry students and Pascal's Pointers that was a tool that Jeff Popyack in computer science developed for teaching the concept of Pascal pointers in programming," Biros said.

Drexel has continued to be a "front runner" in the field of e-learning, specifically with DragonDrop. It allows students, faculty and staff to upload any form of rich media, convert it to different formats and disperse it to others via the Internet.

"We just added a front-end capture system to [DragonDrop] known as Camtasia Relay. This lets professors or presenters capture their lecture or talk, and, in a seamless manner, get it into the encoding system for streaming, publication and syndication. Learners can then revisit these events on demand," Scheuermann said.

The science of learning and the field of e-learning has become a hot topic throughout the entire country, drawing support from many advocates such as the National Science Foundation.

Baba Kofi Weusijana, a new member of the Math Forum at Drexel, spoke April 20 on his experiences with one of the first Science of Learning Centers to receive NSF funding, the Learning in Informal and Formal
Environments (L.I.F.E.) center.

"We're trying to figure how you can more consistently help people learn more than you could without [Second Life]. That means leveraging what's unique about it and different from a typical classroom experience," Weusijana said.

Weusijana's talk focused primarily on research he conducted that examined the implementation of Second Life in teaching and learning. Second Life is a 3D virtual world created by Linden Research Labs which has been explored by universities such as Drexel as a way to bring teaching out of the classroom and into a more interactive environment. Advocates, such as chemistry professor Jean-Claude Bradley, have searched for ways to integrate this into the classroom.

"With the growing popularity of gaming, we anticipate that more students and faculty will use virtual platforms like Second Life to extend the education experience," Bradley said in a press release.

From the inception of Drexel's 1983 mandatory micro computer policy to today's DragonDrop and video conferencing, Drexel continues to integrate new technology into the classroom. With such a focus on this, however, questions rise if these new forms of e-learning are taking away from the fundamentals of teaching.

"Can learning take place with no technology involved at all? Absolutely. Can some form of technology enhance the learning in almost any class? The answer to that question is the same. Absolutely," Scheuermann said.