As we plan for the return to on-campus, in-person learning in the Fall, Technology continues to explore “HyFlex” options for the classroom if the necessity arises to deliver courses in-person and online contemporaneously. Expanding our Zoom Rooms capability to designated classrooms and providing similar functionality to others via mobile equipment deployments will ready us for pandemic related contingencies. Stay tuned for more information.
Tag Archives: Classroom
Faculty Record and Share Their Classes with Tegrity
Since September, Simmons Technology has been working with a small group of faculty members to test a new product called Tegrity for capturing and sharing lectures, presentations, and other in-class activities. We want to provide an update on how faculty have been using Tegrity and some of the opportunities it might create in the future.
School of Management professor Jill Avery was able to leverage Tegrity to help a number of students who missed one of her classes in order to attend a conference. Professor Avery reached out to Technology for a way to record the content of her course and make it available to students online. Technology was able to work with her to add Tegrity to her course, record course content, upload it to Moodle, and make it available to students within Moodle.
Michael Jordan, professor in the department of Chemistry & Physics, has also been recording all of his lectures in PHYS 103 and making the videos available in Moodle for his students as an optional way to review content. In addition, Professor Jordan is giving students the opportunity to record their own videos and upload them to Moodle. He has also edited course content using external tools on his computer and uploaded them back into Tegrity for student access.
These are just a couple of examples of how faculty are using Tegrity in their classes. If you are a faculty member who’s interested in using Tegrity during the Spring semester, please email [email protected] for more information.
Reclaiming the Classroom: Flipped Learning at Simmons
Every day at Simmons, students and faculty are working together to shape the future of learning. That might sound like a bold statement, but it’s absolutely true. New methods for sharing information are being developed, tested, and refined every time many of you enter the classroom.
This fall, we’ll be kicking off a pilot test of a new content capture platform called Tegrity. Content capture is a catchall term for using technology to record and share information among faculty and students. You can find out more about the pilot in this article from the April edition of TechNews. Today, we’re going to focus on ways in which our faculty are already generating and sharing content and using technology to reclaim class time for more than just lecturing.
For many years, college faculty have sought out ways to improve upon the traditional model for disseminating information. A 1993 article by Alison King put forth a theory behind the shift that is now taking place. She envisioned a metamorphosis of faculty from being a “sage on the stage” to a “guide on the side,” meaning someone who is there to provide expertise as needed during problem solving and high-level discussions rather than someone who speaks to a mostly passive audience.
Recently, the technology to truly make this possible has become widely available. With the advent of high-speed internet and affordable recording equipment, along with the proliferation of websites where we can share video, the idea of “flipped learning” came into being. Flipped learning refers to recording lectures and providing that content to students so they can view it when it’s most convenient, thereby saving time in the physical classroom for group work and one-to-one tutoring.
In June, an article in the New York Times provided a great overview of flipped learning and gave some examples of how faculty are using content capture to share their lectures and how they’re using in-class time with students. Here at Simmons, we have quite a few faculty members who are taking a similar approach in their courses. One of them is Professor Richard Gurney, Chemistry & Physics Department Chair. We spoke with Professor Gurney to find out more about how he’s flipping his classroom and what that means to his students.
In the 2011-2012 academic year, Professor Gurney took a new approach to teaching both CHEM 114 and CHEM 225 (Organic Chemistry I & II, respectively) and has seen overwhelmingly positive results.
“We enable students to explore our courses and laboratories in such a way to feed their passions so that they can test out the careers and work they would be engaged in before they graduate,” he said. This approach in the laboratories relies heavily on mentoring students individually and working with them to explore options. Professor Gurney sought to translate this method of instruction to the lecture portion of classes and, potentially, eliminate the need for a traditional lecture that would take up most or all of the allotted class time.
In Fall 2011, he began transitioning his CHEM 225 lectures by having students spend in-class time solving problems and embedding homework directly into lecture notes. Student evaluations at the end of the semester indicated that these steps had made a rigorous and demanding course more manageable. This positive feedback helped Professor Gurney take the next step.
In Spring 2012, Professor Gurney completely flipped the lectures in CHEM 114. All lectures were recorded and posted online and students were responsible for viewing the lectures and working through basic problems before coming to class. In-class time was used for higher level problem solving in small groups. He found that using his time with students to work through problems and answer questions rather than lecturing to be “overwhelmingly successful.” He also noted that student feedback revealed that students preferred the online lectures by a margin of more than 3 to 1.
Professor Gurney is not alone among his colleagues and he indicated that other members of his department had preceded him in putting some of these methods to use in their courses. We spoke to Professor Michael Berger, who has been blending flipped teaching methods into his courses for several years. Using screen capture software, Professor Berger has recorded lectures, homework problem sets, and even additional lecture material that didn’t fit into the time allotted for a standard class period. With assistance from production specialist Jamie Traynor, Professor Berger also set up document cameras to record problem sets as he worked through them so students could replay step-by-step solutions in preparation for classes and exams. When we spoke to Professor Berger, he stressed the importance of reaching different types of learners and using technology that suits the students and their needs rather than simply employing it because it is available or trendy.
Professor Berger talked about the qualitative gains that technology and non-traditional lecture formats can provide. The success of these techniques cannot always be measured by test scores but is often reflected in student engagement and participation. Recording lectures and problem sets allowed Professor Berger to, “slow down in the delivery of content and engage students more,” he said. Additionally, he found that students used class time as a launching pad for discussions and presentations that would have been out of the question in a more traditional format.
Other Chemistry & Physics department faculty, including Professor Michael Jordan and Professor Nancy Lee, are also on board with flipping the classroom. Professor Jordan started providing video lectures last year for his PHYS 112 (Fundamentals of Physics) course and intends to continue moving more lecture content online so he can spend in-class time working with students on the most difficult material. He thinks that “the best possible learning experience is when the teacher and a small number of students sit down together in the same room” and that the availability of content capture technology can help professors better manage schedules and get back to the most basic and important tenets of learning.
These are just a few examples of how Simmons professors are changing the way we think about how students learn and how to make the most of their time in class. We know that there are other professors out there engaged in flipping the classroom and we are working to provide additional tools and support for these efforts.
Throughout the Fall 2012 semester, faculty members will be testing a content capture system called Tegrity. With their feedback, we hope to decide if this platform is appropriate and to then make it available to all faculty starting in Spring 2013. As always, we will continue to provide updates on what promises to be an exciting development for our students and faculty.
Flipping the classroom: Content capture at Simmons
It should come as no surprise to faculty and staff that technology changes quickly and making the right choices when selecting and implementing new products is vital to the success of twenty-first century institutions.
One such technology that is currently undergoing a dramatic shift is content capture. Formerly referred to as “lecture capture,” this is a catch-all for the ways in which we record and share content in our courses. In the past, this was mostly accomplished by equipping classrooms with audio and video equipment and then recording lectures, which could be shared online. While this is a very useful method for reaching distance learners and capturing lectures for later viewing, it’s not especially good at incorporating the many ways students and professors interact. It’s also financially disadvantageous because it requires video and audio recording equipment to be installed in every classroom and it can only capture what happens during a class session.
Outside of this basic technology, there has been significant growth in the ability and feasibility of capturing and sharing other aspects of the learning experience. We now use web content, slides, document cameras, conferencing tools, and other non-lecture paths for connecting students and instructors. What’s more, learning itself is becoming an anytime, anywhere activity and more students are learning in blended classrooms or completely online. Because of this, we need a solution that goes far beyond the simple recording of lectures.
Starting this summer, as part of Simmons Moodle (our new learning management system), we will be simultaneously pilot testing two software-based content capture systems for possible long-term use. We have selected two products: Tegrity and Panopto. Both are software-based solutions that take advantage of existing infrastructure at Simmons (screen capture, webcams, document cameras, etc.) and provide simple organization and editing of content. Additionally, it puts the professor in control of their own content. Instructors can decide what content is captured, where and when it appears, and how many times it has been viewed. We want content capture to be respectful of students’ and faculty members’ time and intellectual property. This solution will minimize the time spent organizing and maximize control of the content you have created.
Perhaps the biggest advantage to these content capture systems is the ability to directly integrate what you’ve captured into Simmons Moodle. There will be no need to upload videos or other content to a personal or external site. You will be able to use one interface to upload, edit, organize, and share what you’ve created.
Our goal is to begin testing Tegrity and Panopto during the second summer session. Once the pilot sessions are up and running, we will update everyone on our progress and seek your input so we can make the best choice for faculty and students. Please keep an eye on future issues of TechNews for information on how you can get involved with this exciting initiative.