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Watch These Pilots
9/20/2005
Forging change via comfortable transitions, these two campus pilot projects are ideal eLearning models.
ONE OF MY FAVORITE innovation adages is, “Projects lead the infrastructure.” The reasoning behind this adage is simple: Pilot projects are a means of introducing change that is less threatening, yet still challenging. Most of us are comforted and distracted by being assured that “This is only a test,” yet pilots are harbingers of mainstream changes—changes that we generally want to anticipate and plan for.Pilot to Watch: Duquesne University
Having said that much about the general value of pilot projects, in particular, some that have caught my eye of late focus on ever-smaller mobile and wireless personal appliances—PDAs, iPods, and cell phones that fit into our pockets and pocketbooks.
Download and learn. One of these projects is Learning-on-the-Go from the School of Leadership and Professional Advancement at Duquesne University (PA). The purpose of the project—developed as a result of student suggestions—is to reach out to working professionals and help them make better use of their commuting and exercise time. The first implementation of Learning- on-the-Go provided students with course audio content that they could download from course Web sites to PDAs and MP3 players, or simply to computers, to burn CDs. As this project has continued to evolve, it supports downloading and synchronization of content from Blackboard (www.blackboard.com) course Web sites onto PDAs for students, including troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Infrastructure requirements. Building and supporting this capability challenged the infrastructure, but is resulting in increased flexibility and convenience for all students. According to Boris Vilic, director of Technology for the School of Leadership and Professional Advancement, one of the project needs was to build faculty awareness; faculty needed to learn ways of ensuring that their course content planned as audio downloads actually worked well in that mode. Students often adjusted to multimedia content by listening to the audio and then supplementing it with a look at the visual content, while connected online. Media-rich offerings such as streaming are still part of course content, but the audio content has definitely been a hit with students.
Another infrastructure requirement for the Learning-on-the- Go project relates to designing for troops in remote, technology- unfriendly areas. Vilic noted that the number of hours that access to the Internet can be assumed for the student troops is just one hour a week; yet, this works. Being able to download and synchronize with course content means that students can participate in discussion boards and other interactive projects, retaining the power of feeling connected to the class, no matter where they are…almost.
Providing the “download and synchronize” capability for course Web sites required creating a new building block for Blackboard.
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