New Poll on Students and Technology Use

From today’s Campus Technology News Update:

The report, “2009 21st-Century Campus Report: Defining the Vision,” released by CDW Government, polled about 1,000 students, instructors, and IT department staff members in order to gauge their attitudes about technology used in education and their expectations for the future

According to new research  only 38 percent of students indicated that their instructors “understand technology and fully integrate it into their classes.”  Students also rated that lack of understanding as “the biggest obstacle to classroom technology integration.”

Despite this, 74 percent of higher education instructors polled indicated that they “incorporate technology into every class or nearly every class,” and 67 percent said they were “satisfied with their technology professional development.” 52 percent of students said they use social networking tools for education, only 14 percent of faculty members said they use social networking for teaching purposes. (Thirty-six percent of faculty members use social networking tools for non-academic purposes.)

The report also found that students are using technology regularly in preparation for class: 81 percent of them this year said they use technology every day before class to prepare compared with 63 percent last year. Researchers also asked students which technologies they thought their institutions should offer. The top results included:

Wireless access (76 percent in 2009 versus 50 percent in 2008);

Computer labs (66 percent in 2009 versus 55 percent in 208); and

Course management systems (53 percent in 2009 versus 31 percent in 2008).

Results of Kenneth Green’s “Campus Computing Project”

An online seminar entitled  Managing Online Education Programs was held on Oct 28, 2009.  The handouts and archived webcast are now available – Here are some of the key points:

• Institutional efforts to expand online education impeded by: faculty resistance- 68%, lack of key resources -58%
• Limit class size on online courses: 77% limit the class size for online courses, the enrollment cap averages 37 students/class or section.
• Tuition – 70% charge higher tuition for online
• Instructional Media used – traditional textbooks, online text, asynchronous text discussions
• Tech training for faculty -53% mandatory
• Quality online vs on campus – tech prep & tech use by faculty better online, most others same for both
• LMS (learning management system) strategy – 88% use the same LMS for online as for on campus courses, Blackboard is the most popular 59%
• Resources receiving high ratings – tech support for faculty & students, lowest – assessment

Albany Law School’s First Online Course

 

Government Ethics taught by Dean Salkin this spring will be Albany Law School first totally online course.  (Judge Stein has previously taught several HYBRID courses where 1/2 of the class interaction was online).

Students who participate in this course will be guided through interactive class lessons over the Internet, working closely with Professor Salkin and exchanging ideas with fellow classmates online. Required interactivity will be asynchronous, meaning that students do not need to access their online course at any particular time during the day. The only class meeting will be an orientation held at Albany Law School to discuss course requirements.  This course will utilize Westlaw’s TWEN, a course management system that law students are already familiar with. At the course site, students will find reading assignments, links to materials pertinent to the course, a syllabus, a statement of the course goals, a number of hypothetical problems, lecture notes, video clips of lectures, audio clips, PowerPoint slides, slides with narration, a threaded discussion board, live chats, and assessments. Each week, within periods of time designated by Professor Salkin, students will be responsible for covering the material assigned, accessing materials as instructed, viewing lecture clips and participating in online discussions. The discussions will take place on the class’s threaded discussion board. They also may take place in live “chat” sessions, during which the professor may meet with students, or a group of students may arrange to meet, online. Participation in “live” chat will be optional, to preserve student flexibility in time and place. Professor Salkin will be able to track student participation and progress through the TWEN site.  

Study input will be sollicited periodically to make sure students needs are met.  This important feedback will also be used  in designing other online courses that  may be offered at Albany Law School.

What’s On Their Minds? 2009 Voice of the Student Report

This new report was published by IntelliResponse and parts of it are enlightening.  It deals with the top online questions posed by students in colleges & universities, their impact on various depratments at higher ed institutions, such as IT, and recommendations for improvements.

Here are some highlights:

• Close to 75% of all online questions asked deal with administrative, informational issues of one sort or another. This presents an ideal opportunity for institutions to standardize (across multiple communication channels such as contact centers, web site, social media and mobile) information delivery to provide students with the answers they need, while reducing costs and staff workload in key student-facingdepartments.
• 33% of all online questions asked in an IT Help Desk environment deal with simply gaining access to programs via passwords and login information.(Top questions - How do I change my password? Why can’t I login?What do I do if I forgot my password?) Clearly, there exists a tremendous opportunity for many overworked, overtaxed IT and contact center departments to deliver simple, self-serve information concerning this area – which is likely a real source of frustration for both students and staff alike. The prevalence of questions regarding remote/ wireless access to student networks, as well as management of online student portals and courseware programs like Blackboard also represent a significant portion of all queries related toinformation technology.

 

Implications - Schools must understand and provide effective technologies that accurately answer the unique questions posed by both current and prospective students in a self-serve format.

How does this apply to us? 

Yes, much of the information that students request  is probably written somewhere on the website or the intranet or WebAdivisor.  IT helpdesk responds to students’ questions in a timely manner and always points them to where the answers to many of their questions are located such as, www.albanylaw.edu/its/faq  

Windows 7 is out…

Though I haven’t seen it yet…here’s what they say is  new:

•  New Windows Task bar – It looks and feels a lot more like Mac OS X’s dock. These programs can be reordered by dragging them. You can also drag and drop the most frequently used applications on this task bar. When you move your mouse over these programs a thumbnail will pop up displaying a thumbnail of what is inside of each open application.

• Fewer Annoying Pop-ups -  the User Account Control in Windows Vista that kept asking yes/no to approve system status updates and whether you wanted to allow a program to run or not. Winodws 7 scaled back the pop-ups for all of the users making this feature less annoying.
• Device Stage – Windows 7’s device manager will give you a single window for interacting with various gadgets. Clicking on a device will provide some details such as battery charge, available storage space, and even the time and date of your last sync. From this same window you can manage photos, music, or ring tones that are stored on it.
• Other minor improvements:
  • connecting to a Wi-Fi network with a couple of mouse clicks rather than dealing with an entirely new window.
  • If you have multiple locations for music stored on your hard drive, a Music library folder can provide a single point of access to all of that music.
  • Internet Spades, Internet Backgammon and Internet Checkers, which were removed from Windows Vista, were restored.
  • Windows 7 includes Internet Explorer 8 and Windows Media Player 12.
  • Users also are able to disable many more Windows components than was possible in Windows Vista including Internet Explorer

New cool Windows 7 features:

PEEK

SNAP

SHAKE

***Windows 7 videos – Watch them to learn more!

***Windows 7 vs Vista vs  XP – click HERE.

If you can’t beat em, join em

 You have to communicate with students the way they like to communicate or they will not pay attention.  In fact, when I searched,  there were about 50  or so Albany Law Facebook pages.

Albany Law’s FB pages:

• Albany Law School – facebook.com/albanylaw
• Albany Law School Registrar
• Albany Law School Center for Law & Innovation
• Albany Law School Center for Government
• Albany Law School Alumni
• Albany Law Clinic & Justic Center

Student-Created FB pages:

• Albany Law Sci & Tech Journal
• The Issue
• Albany Black Law Students Society
• Albany Law Interns
• Albany Law Phi Alpha Delta
• Albany Law Extracurricular Activites
• Albany Law Softball
• Albany Law Racquetball
• Albany Law Tennis Club
• Albany Law Republicans
• Albany Law Class of 2012
• Albany Law Democrats
• Albany Law Outdoor Club
• Albany Law SBA
• Albany Law Class of 2010
• Albany Law Class of 2011
• Albany Law Cardozo Society
• Albany Law Rugby Alumni
• Albany Law Federal Society

and more…

Educationally, what is the value? 

LexisNexis’ Blackboard course managment system can sync to a student’s Facebook page.  I brought that up to our Westlaw rep.  Will TWEN be able to do the same?

More on Online Learning

Today’s Inside Higher Ed had an interesting article. I’ve extracted some key statements from the article:

… many colleges still know precious little about how best to organize online programs, whether those programs are profitable, and how they compare to face-to-face instruction in terms of quality. …And while a strong majority of the administrators surveyed said they believed the quality of online education was comparable to classroom learning, about half said that at their colleges the professors are in charge of assessing whether that is true.

The growth of online programs, especially at public institutions, continues to be based largely on the anticipation that such programs are the wave of the future in terms of broadening access and increasing enrollment.

A study released earlier this year by the Sloan commission and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities found that many in higher education — particularly professors — still had doubts about whether Web-based learning measured up to the kind that happens in the classroom.

Bourne said that despite the reservations of some faculty members (most of whom, he suggested, have little experience with online teaching or learning), the question of whether online teaching produces similar learning outcomes to traditional methods has been settled by 15 years’ worth of research saying it does.

But Green contended that institutions’ complacency with respect to scrutinizing online learning outcomes is misguided. “I don’t think the campus conversation about quality is over by any means,” he said. The reason, he said, is that broad-lens studies cannot offer insight on the effectiveness of a specific online program at a specific institution. “The burden still falls on the campus” to find out whether the online equivalents of its degree programs measure up to their face-to-face forbears, Green said. “If you’re teaching the same course and not using common assessment, then you just don’t know. And for too many of these things, we just don’t know.”

Here at Albany Law School, we are in the process of offering our first completely online course.  This course has been offered several ways in the past:

• entirely at Albany Law
• at Albany Law with some students participating at George Washington Law via videoconferencing
• at Albany Law with some students participating in their DC apts via Adobe Connect

More details to come…

 

60 or so Must Visit Sites

The ABA TechShow does a presentation each year called 60 Sites in Sixty Minutes.

The Social Media Law Student Blog did a better job on this list: http://socialmedialawstudent.com/twitter/60-epic-sites

Here’s a link to the CALI presentation on 55 Gadgets in 55 Minutes: http://w.cali.org/conference/sites/default/files/Cool%20Gadgets.pdf

Harvard Law Class is Online and on TV

Michael J. Sandel’s “Justice,” long one of the most popular classes at Harvard, will now be available for free online and on public television. Complete NYTimes artticle - Morals Class Is Starting; Please Pass the Popcorn

Interesting excerpts from the article:

• when it comes to the Web, Harvard lags behind Duke and Stanford, whose lectures are already available on iTunes U, and M.I.T., which developed its own software years ago to make classes available.
• We looked at what other universities had done and realized that they didn’t have the full classroom experience…Watching a video that looks as if it were made with a convenience store security camera, as most Internet courses do, without the slides, syllabus and other materials available to actual students, dilutes the experience
• Harvard had been searching for a while to find a way to deliver academic content, but finding dynamic yet cost-effective ways to share the classroom experience beyond the university’s walls has been trickier than one might think…Mr. Sandel’s proposal can serve as a working model for the dissemination of many courses.
• Discussion is an essential part of the course, Mr. Sandel said, which is why the Web site, justiceharvard.org, offers beginner and advanced discussion guides.

Use of Video For Student Assessment

The article : VIRTUAL REALITY TESTING: THE USE OF VIDEO FOR EVALUATION IN LEGAL EDUCATION (from the recent Assessment conference) and reinforces the educational  importance of the student video recordings that one professor is dong this semester. 

Each week, students sign up with a partner to practice and improve their legal counseling skills. Each student keeps a copy of the video to self-assess their performance while in class, the professor shows several video clips to point out key elements of legal counseling.

Only one series of recordings have been done so far, but the professor points out that the students have a lot to learn and this seems to be an effective way for their to learn this real-life skill.