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SPECIAL DOUBLE FEATURE! Academic MP3s >> Is It iTime Yet?

2/28/2006

By Mikael Blaisdell

iPod Project: iDental (or iFast)

“We’re different from almost all of the other schools introducing iPod-based programs in that we didn’t start out to do podcasting at all,” reports Johnson at the University of Michigan’s School of Dentistry. “Our students wanted us to videotape the lectures and then make them available for review. We looked into what it would cost, and it was a pretty significant investment.”

But Johnson understood the students’ need for the review capability. “Those lectures are really information-dense,” she says. “You just can’t get it all in one sitting. The key to what they have to learn is: review, review, and more review. So we had the ‘nail’—the problem—and we went looking for the best hammer to use on it.”

The first step was a study, involving the videotaping of the lectures, linking in the instructor’s slides. The result was made available to the students. “We looked to the access logs, and ran a series of focus groups to determine what best fit the students’ needs,” Johnson recalls. “Two-thirds of the students preferred the audio over either the video or the presentation slides. They already had the slides; the students themselves had asked their teachers to release them. That’s an important point, for in the early days, there had been some faculty resistance to making the slides available. But when the students asked, they were given.”

After determining that the audio of the lecture was the key issue, the next step was how to effectively capture and distribute it. “We put a computer in the back of the lecture halls,” Johnson explains. “A student starts a script at the beginning of the class, and the lecture is automatically recorded through the PA system and fed to the mixer. At the end of the lecture, the student enters the metadata—the name of the class and instructor—and the file is immediately uploaded to the school’s area, on iTunes. Four minutes after the class is over, the file is ready for downloading to the students’ iPods or laptops.”

The decision to use an area of iTunes came after an interim period of using several different Web sites, dividing the files according to subject or class group. “The students wanted a subscription approach with the content all in one place,” recalls Johnson. “We moved to RSS feeds in January of 2005, and then shifted to Apple and iTunes later on.”

“All the way through, we were talking to the students and to the faculty,” Johnson emphasizes. “And the ownership of the project was on the students; they were responsible for getting permission from the faculty, and they were the ones doing the work of recording. It succeeded because it was helpful to everybody. I still marvel that, in the end, this was such a simple project.”

iPod Project: iVillage

“One of the problems Georgia College & State University shares with almost all other higher education institutions, is student retention,” CIO Jim Wolfgang acknowledges. “We have some entering freshmen with 3.9 grade-point averages coming out of high school who just fall apart in their first year of college because they haven’t built a community here; they don’t have a sense of unity and association. We have the traditional dormitory communities, which can help, but those all inevitably disperse at the end of the year.” In addition to the standard dormitories, GC&SU already had several special living/learning communities. Wolfgang and other GC&SU administrators and faculty talked about a different approach, of building a “virtual” community that was not based on a common living space or on any particular major. The “glue” that would keep the members together would be technology.

Authorized by President Dorothy Leland as one of a small number of carefully monitored experiments in using the iPod and related technology, the “iVillage” began with a group of entering freshmen in the Fall semester of 2005. The results of the first year were carefully monitored and compared to the benefits of GC&SU’s more traditional living/learning communities.

“Originally,” recalls Wolfgang, “we hoped to start the iVillage with our incoming freshmen even before they arrived on campus. We thought we’d try to get the students an iPod in March of their senior year in high school, to get them started on building their community early. Then, when they came to regular orientation, they’d already know each other.” The timing did not work out as hoped (although the 2006 incoming freshman iVillagers may get their iPods early). Admission into the iVillage was via an online application, with students responding to questions about why they wanted to be in the program, what it could mean to them, their technological know-how, and what they could bring to the iVillage. “We made it almost like a scholarship,” says Wolfgang. “We didn’t want educational challenges getting in the way, so we started at the top and worked down to fill the openings. Their replies were really interesting.”

Early on, the iVillage was built around the concept of the frontier. “We set out to use the analogy of the Wild West,” says Wolfgang. “You are the pioneers,” he told the iVillagers. “How is your community going to be governed? What will it be named? What roles will be needed?” The burden would be on the students to make the iVillage succeed. The new participants accepted the challenge.

While the iPod was a key element, the students used iChat on their computers, and the iSight cameras for video chatting, as well. These technologies have allowed the boundaries of the community to be expanded considerably. “One of our iVillagers is going to go away to study business at another campus for awhile,” says GC&SU freshman Jill Albano, “and she’ll be using iSight so that she can still chat with us and stay involved even though she’s away.”

What d'es the future hold for the school’s iVillage? According to Wolfgang, “The current iVillagers will be welcoming in the next group, who will do the same for those who come after. This first group has already told me they’re going to be the Senior iVillage.” Says Albano: “There are so many possibilities.”

Mikael Blaisdell is principal of mikael blaisdell & associates (www.mblaisdell.com), an IT support consultancy.

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