Video Development Has Broader Impact
One of the goals of the Faculty Innovation in Teaching program is to research and develop new technologies for teaching and learning. Over the years, the innovation team has implemented and adapted many technologies in new ways. There is a wider benefit to other campus projects, in that many of the technologies that were developed in the program have been adapted for broader user.
A recent example includes the development of a video player using Flash technology. Mike Tolomeo, a member of the innovation team in CIT, developed the Flash code for the “Videos to Enhance Surgery Training” project with Prof. Susan Fubini in the College of Veterinary Medicine. The experience in developing an interactive way to play video on the web was then applied to other projects.
The recently updated site, http://www.CyberTower.cornell.edu, uses a Flash video player created from the custom Flash player that was originally developed in the innovation project. The Flash player has been programmed to include captions, and shows the video in a full screen, without loss of video quality.
The CyberTower site, originally launched 10 years ago by Cornell’s Adult University (CAU), uses video to share faculty expertise on the web. The site has recently undergone a transformation in site design and use of technology. Read the “New CyberTower brings the faculty into sharper focus” article in the Cornell Chronicle for more information. The Faculty Support Services team in CIT produces and develops the site in partnership with CAU.
So the experience of creating and adapting technologies to create engaging academic projects is extended to other campus projects.
Project Cycles Beginning & Ending
Another cycle of Innovation in Teaching projects have been completed, and the new project cycle has begun development.
A faculty comment about the program…
“The whole experience was great and the impact long lived. We can expose students to material they would get no other way in lecture.”
In the past year, projects focused on using collaborative tools, such as blogs & wiki’s, webcasting and more complex collaborative systems. Several projects used blogs in new ways for teaching, and the development team implemented several expansions to our current blog service. One outcome of the FIT program is that it informs, and in this case enhances our services — which then is of benefit to the entire campus.
A new area of exploration for projects in the past year is the use of mapping & virtual technology to enable students to explore spaces in different ways. In addition, these projects engage the students through interactive assignments where students contribute to the content and development of the sites.
The complete cycle projects developed new digital teaching materials or implemented new technologies such as:
- Online tutorials
- Document repositories
- Virtual Worlds
- Interactive Video’s
- Collaborative document creation and writing
- Writing simulations
- Implementation of a complex Video & Webcasting system
- Student generated content
When asked about project outcomes and program impact faculty participants in the FIT program reported that…
“I’m very grateful for the FIT project because it enabled me to now teach my course in a way that is not only more interesting and motivational for the students; but it is also much more rewarding for me since the considerable time I spend on lecture preparation is rewarded by having happy, interested students.”
The program also implements a project evaluation process that informs the program about the “success” of the project as it is being used in a course, as well as looking at how the technology may impact learning.
Future blog postings will report on project outcomes and findings.
April 2 Proposal Deadline
The 8th Call for Proposals for the Faculty Innovation in Teaching program is now closed.
Project selections will be announced at the end of April 2009.
Questions? Send an email to innovprojects@cornell.edu
FIT Program Supports Avon Global Center for Women and Justice Web Site
Faculty Innovation in Teaching projects often overlap or partner with other programs on campus. An example of this is the web site that was developed and supported for the Avon Global Center for Women and Justice, as part of a current project.
Recently, this program has been featured in the news — since the Avon Global Center for Women and Justice recently received a grant to establish the center. See recent law school news article.
Sital Kalantry (FIT awardee, 2008) is the director of the new Avon Global Center for Women and Justice at Cornell Law School. The mission of the organization is “to work with judges, legal professionals, governmental and non-governmental organizations to improve access to justice in an effort to eliminate violence against women and girls.” The new center was announced at the Global Forum for Women and Justice in Washington, DC.
According to the news article, linked to today’s Cornell home page,
… The new Avon Global Center for Women and Justice at Cornell Law School will undertake four major initiatives in an effort to improve access to justice and eliminate violence against women, including:
- engaging in intensive legal clinical projects;
- providing legal research for judges;
- hosting conferences and events;
- maintaining an extensive, online library of relevant laws, articles, and reports.
Visit the center’s website http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/womenandjustice/ for more information.
Announcing the 8th Call for Proposals
Announcing the 8th Call for Proposals for the Faculty Innovation in Teaching program.
Proposal information and the on-line application form is on the web at: http://innovation.cornell.edu/apply.html
The deadline for proposals is Thursday April 2, 2009
Program information sessions will be held on:
Wednesday March 4 at 3 pm and Thursday March 12 at 3 pm in room G27 Stimson Hall
The Faculty Innovation in Teaching (FIT) program is designed to assist faculty in developing innovative instructional technology projects that have the potential to improve teaching and learning. The program provides faculty with the technical staff and other resources necessary to plan and implement their projects, thus allowing faculty to focus on their course objectives.
Enhancing Introductory Physics Digitally
The Fundamentals of Physics course Phys207 introduces non-physics students to the often unfamiliar world of physics. In a class with 300 students, effectively presenting new material – while maintaining interactivity with learners – is especially challenging. Professor Matthias Liepe addressed these difficulties by enhancing the learning experience through the use of technology. This included in-class elements, such as tablet PCs, and online aspects, such as physics demonstration videos and other digital materials
Initially, the project implemented Tablet-PCs, improved projection, and digital whiteboards to enable flexible integration of digital media during class, and while preserving the interconnectivity, spontaneity and slow pace of hand-written delivered lectures. In the second phase of the project, an online database of physics demonstration videos and other digital materials was developed.
This open database can be used during lectures by instructors, by students for review of concepts demonstrated, and to share video demonstrations with colleagues. The database serves a central host for collections of commonly performed physics demonstrations such as those that involve kinematics, oscillation and forces. Users can review multiple versions of a demonstration to find the one that best suits their learning and teaching needs. Particular video clips of demonstrations clips have become favorites, such as the wooden suspension bridge which undulates wildly when one side is jumped on by a group of people.
In an evaluation of the project outcomes, students reported that “…the benefit of the database’s 24/7 accessibility, particularly when students wish to review concepts either in preparation for an exam or for clarification.” In addition, 67% of the students surveyed reported that “The video clips being accessible online is helpful to my learning”. Undergraduates also find the demonstrations informative, and helpful to learning physics concepts. Students acknowledge that the database also helps to promote work not just by Cornell but also by participating institutions, and that the database serves the larger science community.
Faculty Presentation
To hear Prof. Liepe discuss his project and its impact on teaching, you can view the archived presentation about the project (Feb 23, 2009) on the FIT speaker archive page.
Comparing Words Between Documents – Wordle
Another identified technology in a faculty project that has interesting uses for teaching is wordle.
A “wordle” is a word cloud or a word collage that you make on the web site http://www.wordle.net/ The more often a word is used in a given block of text, the larger it appears in the cloud of words. You can paste in text and make you word clouds from any source. Wordle can also provide a list of words used in the text pasted and show how often that word is used.
The example above shows the words from the Faculty Support Services web site.
What may seem like a visual toy can be used to quickly evaluate documents in a new way. Comparing the words used in different documents and the words used most often can illuminate themes and foster discussion, all while being interactive and fun to use.
Virtual Field Trips – New Article
In a recently published journal article in Computers & Equation about a 2004 Faculty Innovation in Teaching (FIT) project, the benefit of developing virtual fields trips is discussed.
“In deciding what kind of learning to target in a VFT, one has to be realistic. Clearly VFTs cannot provide the physical perception that one has in the field, such as touching soil, walking along rice paddy fields, visiting the Taj Mahal, or climbing the stairs of a Mayan pyramid. A well-designed VFT, involving maps, images and video clips in a variety of formats, could however help students imagine what a real field trip to the site would be like. In addition, a VFT could give a sense of time travel or depict geotemporal changes that could not be seen in a real field trip.”
Source: Jacobson, A. R., Militello, R., and Baveye, P. C. (2009) Development of computer-assisted virtual field trips to support multidisciplinary learning. Computers & Education. 52, 3 (Apr. 2009), 571-580.
There are many examples of virtual fields trips that have been developed by the FIT program for different types of courses and student learning. The VFT’s have been designed to combine multi-media resources for students to explore the content and utilize in course assignments and papers.
Other examples from FIT projects include…..
Vicos: A Virtual Tour (B.J. Isbell, 2005/2007)
This web site was developed initially for anthropology and developmental sociology courses. The site contains a rich repository of images, video, maps and interactive animations to bring the remote location into the classroom for Cornell students.
Virtual Visits to Women’s Health Facilities
(Andrea Parrott, 2004)
In the Contemporary Issues in Women’s Health course, students attend 8 out of 12 weekly field trips. There are many sites that students should visit but are difficult or impossible to visit during a semester. This project also created “Virtual Visits” so students could visit inaccessible sites. The tours area of the site were developed both as independent multimedia visits, and to be accompanied with video- or audio-conferencing during class time, or with a paired onsite visit to a similar type of women’s health facility.
Though each of these examples represent content for a range of courses, they all provide an interactive experience for students to explore the content in new ways. The virtual field trip helps to facilitate new learning by providing remote access to theses sites, as well as designing the interactions for student learning.
Digital Video for Studying 2-D Mechanics
This Innovation in Teaching project (2007) was developed by Philip Krasicky and Erich Mueller to address the challenge of how to illustrate two-dimensional motion of objects. This project developed a computer-based digital video capture and analysis system for a series of laboratory experiments in which students recorded and analyzed the two-dimensional motion of objects. The Faculty Innovation in Teaching (FIT) team worked with them to create a hands-on, interactive lab with computers, air tables, and video cameras.
In the lab, students can produce stroboscopic motion diagrams (”strobe diagrams”) that illustrate the two-dimensional motions of a selected object or collections of objects. A strobe diagram is a picture that shows the location and/or orientation of an object at successive intervals of time, much like a multi-exposure photograph. This offers a valuable opportunity for students to gain both an intuitive and quantitative understanding of challenging yet universal concepts in physics. This project was implemented in Physics 112 which is a mechanics course with 250-400 students each semester.
Project Evaluation
Throughout the fall course, baseline data was gathered in Physics 112 prior to the launch of a 2-D digital video capture and analysis system. Beginning in January, 2008, mechanics undergraduates utilized the innovation and conducted live experiments involving real objects such as pendulums and projectiles. Pre-innovation data indicated that respondents’ experience with then “current” methods were lack luster and “Neutral”. Post innovation data (spring of 2008) included classroom (lab) observations and video clips that observed students at 90-100% engaged. Students exiting the labs reported a positive experience and recommended the technology’s use in other physics labs.
Similar positive findings were reflected in survey instruments (pre/post) which included five “physics knowledge base” items provided by the faculty. The percentage of correct answers increased between 8 and 41% on four out of five item. In addition, 61.9% of post-innovation respondents agreed that digital video helped them to understand course concepts compared to 36.8% pre-innovation. Teaching staff concur that stroboscopic diagrams created by the technology clearly helped learners gain both intuitive and quantitative understanding of some of the most challenging concepts in physics.
Faculty Presentation
To hear the faculty discuss their project and its impact on teaching, you can view their archived presentation about the project (December 3, 2008) at: http://blogs.cornell.edu/innovation/fit-speaker-archives/
Adobe PDF Packages
One aspect of the Faculty Innovation in Teaching program is the technology research that is conducted as part of faculty projects. Often the technology research and identified solutions are applicable for many instructional uses.
An example of this is “Adobe PDF Packages” which use the Adobe PDF software in a new way. PDF packages make it possible to search across numerous documents to locate certain keywords or concepts, to see relationships, and to make claims.
One faculty member, David S. Patel (as part of the “Helping Students Evaluate Islamist Moderation” project) , uses PDF packages in his courses on Middle Eastern Politics and Islamic Studies. He provides his students with PDF packages of political documents, organized by categories such as country or political party, and has the students search across those documents for keywords and phrases such as women and education or moderation.
The results of those searches allow students to see, in context, how those words are used in the various documents. The resulting lists have served as the basis for student papers, and Professor Patel feels the technique helps his students conduct research across a large amount of content and provides them with a very easy way expand upon their research.
To find out more about how you can used PDF packages to promote research analysis, contact innovprojects@cornell.edu
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