PennEduTech

This summer I’ve been involved in planning for how we’ll continue teaching in the event of a large outbreak of H1N1 – the dreaded Swine Flu.  I’ve been asked to document how teachers can use technology as a substitute for some of the activities that would otherwise be carried out in the classroom.

It’s no surprise that most of the technologies (and the pedagogies behind them) that we’re recommending  are the very same things we already advocate as effective ways to enhance teaching.  You can see a summary of these recommendations on the SAS Computing web site at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/teaching_resources/flu

Hopefully, we won’t face a true emergency situation this fall.  But I am hoping that the threat of a flu outbreak will motivate more instructors to take advantage of services that are already available, and get them interested in new ways to engage with their students.

Many of the technologies we recommend are very basic, such as using Blackboard to make announcements, distribute documents or collect assignments.  Others involve more creativity, such as using discussion boards, wikis or collaboration tools.  Blackboard is the obvious first place to turn since it’s already tied into Penn’s registration systems and we’ve got good support systems in place.

But I’ll take this opportunity to put in a plug for one of my  favorite technologies which is rarely used but could be enormously useful – even when everyone is healthy.  That is, creating “screencast” movies to record basic lecture materials or technical demonstrations.

By moving some lectures outside of the classroom instructorss can free up more time for discussion and problem solving.  Those using special software such as Matlab or SPSS in their classes can record tutorials on how to perform important functions.  Screencast movies can  demonstrate how to use Library resources for research.  Basically, if you can do it on a computer, you can make it into a movie.  Details are explained at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/teaching_resources/record_lecture

Editor’s note: This blog entry was written by Lisa Minetti, Curriculum Design and Assessment Specialist at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies.

Tech blogs were buzzing last week with the news that CourseSmart had just released “eTextbooks for the iPhone“, an iPhone app which allows student and instructor subscribers to access their CourseSmart eTextbook. Seems fewer students want to carry around backpacks full of textbooks. Go figure.

Founded in 2007 and supported by six higher education publishers, CourseSmart provides higher ed markets with digital versions of over 7000 titles from some of the leading textbook publishers today (including McGraw Hill Higher Education, John Wiley & Sons , Sage Publication, Pearson and 10 others). According to its website, students from nearly 6000 universitites have subscribed to CourseSmart eTextbooks, saving an average of $62 per purchase.

Saving up to 50% off the publisher list price, students subscribe to eTextbooks for 180 days, in either fully online or downloadable versions. eTextbooks have the same content, page numbers, and layout as print versions of the text, as well as a suite of interactive tools which allow students to search for keywords, add notes, highlight key points, copy and paste quotes, print pages and even email excerpts to their classmates. What’s not to love?

If you read technology news, or even the Chronicle of Higher Education, you may have heard of Wolfram Alpha, a free online tool that is somewhere between a search engine, a database, and a computer algebra system.  The launch of Wolfram Alpha in mid-May of this year was met with much fanfare in certain circles, and much consternation in others.  Some educators fear that this tool will allow students to skip the learning process of working out problems by hand, since they can get the results online.  (Whether or not this would constitute cheating is a topic for a different post.)

I decided to wait before posting about this tool until it had a few months to mature, and until I had time to really kick the tires.  Now that I’ve done that, I agree that it can be a powerful tool and that faculty in certain fields should be aware that it exists, but I don’t think that it’s going to make homework obsolete.

Since Wolfram Alpha is based on the computation engine of Mathematica, that’s where it does best.  If you enter “integrate x sin^2 x dx”, you get

But a link also appears to “show steps”, which explains each of the steps in the solution, essentially doing the students’ homework for them.  This isn’t really new, since sites like http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ have offered step-by-step solutions for some time, so people who teach courses that assign these types of problems are probably already aware of these resources and take them into account in their teaching.  But so far, mathematical problems are the only type of input that results in a solution with steps, so instructors in other fields need not worry.

On the other hand, Wolfram Alpha employs a wide variety of data sets, so if an instructor thinks that an assignment will send students to the library or to a particular electronic resource where they’ll have to hunt for information and interpret it, they may be surprised.  For example, how did the Consumer Price Index change between June 2008 and June 2009?  Just enter “consumer price index june 2009 / consumer price index june 2008″ and you get the result:  98.57%, or a drop of 1.43%.  And if you have a large data set, Wolfram Alpha will curate it for you – see http://www.wolframalpha.com/participate/structureddata.html

There are a million other things that Wolfram Alpha can do, too, like:

• balancing a chemical equation:  enter “C3H8 + O2 —> H2O + CO2″ and you’ll get You’ll get the result, but you won’t get the steps required to get there, so students can check their results but it won’t do the work for them if the assignment requires that you “show your work”.
• calculating the nutritional value of my favorite smoothie recipe (which makes 2 servings):  enter “calories in 1 banana + 3.5 cups strawberries + 0.5 cup milk + 0.5 cup orange juice + 3 teaspoons sugar + 1 teaspoon lemon juice” and you get the full nutrition information in a format that looks very similar to the panel on all packaged food products.  You also get a place to choose what type of milk you want to use and to make other ingredient choices.

I’ve used Wolfram’s Mathematica software for more than 10 years now, and I’m very interested in the ways in which it might make a positive contribution to engaging students with course material.  If you’d like to talk about ways that you might use it in your course, please contact me!