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Features
High Tech on a Human Scale
7/30/2001
The LTC and the campus commitment to technology have supported several new teaching projects. For instance, Professor Don Polzella is working on an ambitious redesign of the first-year psychology survey course, taking it from a standard lecture course to a fully online course with built-in collaborative activities.
As a good psychologist, Polzella is not taking this huge step without doing the appropriate scientific research. This year, with funding from a Pew Grant for course redesign, he has worked with others in the Psychology Department and university to design an experiment: students taking Intro to Psych this year are randomly assigned to either the standard lecture course (which he teaches) or an online equivalent. The results of the experiment will shape the development of the new course design, scheduled to become fully operational in the next academic year. Polzella credits the university's commitment to educational technology for giving him the pedagogical and technological support he needs to build the new course.
Larry Ulrich has also developed online versions of his courses, offering both Bi'ethics and Business Ethics in an online form to summer students. This year, with the help of LTC staff, he'll transform the course into Lotus Learning Space, which he feels will give him and his students more features and make accessing the course site easier.
Many other faculty members are experimenting with new approaches to teaching with educational technology with the help of the LTC. The Studio, the university's experimental teaching space, is fully booked. "We could have used several of those," says Skill. "We could use more classrooms just like it."
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