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Education Technology Consortium: Academic and Technocrat Collaboration
8/12/2002
“Functionality suggested by professors and students, technology innovations offered by WHYY, and skills in human interface design offered by WebStudy’s designers and programmers have been combined to create a tool that is intuitive and powerful—allowing quick course creation and ease of course delivery.”
Temple University Professor Donald Heller, who teaches an online course on “Communication in Organizations,” said the platform “offers a range of services that enhance the online experience for the students, including the live chat and forum sections. From a faculty member point of view, it is rewarding to be able to enrich student learning and participation with the course online tools offered by WebStudy.”
Gisela Gil, a teaching assistant at Temple’s School of Communications and Theater, has helped faculty members and students work with course management tools adopted by the university.
Says Gil: “In general, students seem to find WebStudy more versatile and ‘warmer’ than other platforms they have used. With WebStudy’s latest version, students are better able to figure out its functions by themselves.”
She added that WebStudy’s “voice mail” was a promising feature: “The possibility of recording 10 minute messages provides a great opportunity for rescuing the instructor’s role as a storyteller in online learning environments.”
The struggles inherent in the collaboration have challenged not only the academics, but the commerical partners. Gisele Larose, president of WebStudy, said the experience of collaborative development conveys “what it is like to live in an academic world. The corporate world can appear like another planet sometimes.... It takes a willingness to get in the customers’ world to succeed at building relationships and serving your customer.”
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Education Technology Consortium Members Camden County College |
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