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About
INNOVATOR 2005: Coppin State
7/28/2005
| INNOVATION: | INNOVATOR: |
|---|---|
| Dramatically Improving Student Note-taking and Class Retention | Coppin State University / Tegrity Campus |
Challenge
An historically black institution in Baltimore, MD, Coppin State is dedicated to helping its 4,000 students succeed in the face of obstacles.With limited financial support,many students must maintain jobs during the course of their studies, and their obligations at home sometimes precede their course responsibilities. Coppin State needed to offer its students a flexible, effective and inexpensive way to improve learning, studying, and information retention. In addition, the university was looking for a way to expand class time beyond the four walls of the classroom— all of which would give students a better opportunity to succeed.Technology Choice/Project Design
Coppin State chose the Tegrity Campus solution from Tegrity (www.tegrity.com). According to the university’s VP/IT and CIO Ahmed El- Haggan, “What struck us about Tegrity was that it was a technology that impacted and improved fundamental learning behaviors— listening to lectures, taking notes, studying— with minimal change in classroom behavior for both the instructor and the student. While the underlying technology is complex, it’s simple for our students and faculty to use, and can benefit all students, traditional and non-traditional. In terms of scalability and extensibility, the technology could easily be implemented across the entire campus in a short period of time; we employed a pilot program prior to implementation to ensure that it would be appropriate, beneficial, and worth the investment. Other technologies included in the deployment: Blackboard’s course management system (www.blackboard.com), already in place; Tablet PCs to capture written communication by professors; and audio and visual recordings, projectors, document cameras, and wireless microphones and cameras, many of which were already installed in our 40 ‘smart’ classrooms.”
Coppin State instructors continue to teach as they always have, and the students maintain their normal classroom behaviors, both within the institution’s existing technology infrastructure. The software simply provides anytime access to the recorded classroom experience. The addition of the Tegrity digital pen allows students (who do not wish to use or don’t have access to laptops and tablet PCs) to take handwritten notes during class. The technology then records the class or lecture (and lectures across campus), automatically populating the archived lectures in the university’s course management system. Later, students can view their notes online, exactly as written in their notebooks, and double- click on any notation to hear and see the professor explain a particular concept again. Or, they can replay the entire class online.
