My normal courses usually enroll approximately 85-100 students per class. Consequently, these courses tend to take a lecture-type format where I present, illustrate, and discuss course materials. All of my lectures are now presented using PowerPoint slides. Within these slides, I incorporate outlines of the course materials, graphs and charts that illustrate concepts under discussion, and graphics and images that may help illuminate various points. PowerPoint slides have made these visual materials more organized, easier to read, more visually appealing and interesting, and easier to access at later times should students want to reexamine some issue discussed at an earlier point in the class.
This semester I also set up a listserv for the course. I used it to post students' grades, to provide students with practice exercises or questions, to initiate or continue discussions of concepts covered in lecture, and to post study guides for upcoming exams. The students use the listserv to ask me (or one another) question about the course materials, to discuss concepts being covered in class and to organize out-of-class study groups.
One-to-one e-mail is used primarily among the students to ask me questions and arrange meetings that may not be of interest to the entire class. I have also used one-to-one e-mail this semester as a way to collect a class assignment. The students in the course had administered a questionnaire to fellow students at Tech, and my students submitted the data from the questionnaire to me via e-mail. This was particularly valuable because their data could be easily blocked and copied into a format that could be used in a statistical package.
To initiate the use of e-mail access, I included one graded assignment at the beginning of the semester where students were required to "drop me a note." That assignment ensured that all students were able to receive messages from me individually and from the listserv. Finally, I have made some efforts to include WWW resources into the course content. Specifically, I showed the students how to use Netscape, how to access Virginia Tech's home page, and how to access FirstSearch from the library home page. Many students made use of FirstSearch in a subsequent assignment that required them to locate scholarly research articles.
For the most part, I feel that my uses of new technologies in teaching have been very favorably received by students. Today at the end of class, I asked my students to anonymously jot down their impressions. Amost all of these impressions were very positive, although there were a few negative responses.
Communication Major, Sophomore, Female:
The PowerPoint lectures are far more illustrative, interesting, and visually pleasing than the normal scribbles on the overhead. And being more or less forced to use the Internet (like a lot of students, I was intimidated at first) has helped me in other classes where I've had to do research papers. It was recently asked by one of the Assistant Deans of Arts and Sciences what I would change about Tech if I had all the money and resources I needed, and my response was that I would encourage more profs to use the technology available at Tech. It has helped me out with a class which I consider very challenging. And a lot of students don't even realize what's available here, much less how lucky we are to have it.
Communication Major, Freshman, Female:
I feel that I can get help 24 hours a day in Comm Research. I'm never discouraged by office hours and how they collide with my course load. I love the fact that you can get grades from a Friday test on Sunday in my room. As far as academic advantages go, the night before a test I can connect to the listserv and ask an important question that otherwise would have gone unanswered till the next day when I could reach someone in my class or the teacher. The extra questions we receive after a confusing lecture help in the self-evaluation process of what we understand or don't understand of that material. I can connect with my teachers whenever I have the chance and have them respond when it's good for them without my roommate losing the message. It makes a large class seem smaller and the teacher more accessible.
For additional information on this innovation, contact:
olivermb@vt.edu