Case Study in Instructional Technology

The Spring 2007 Instructional Technology Fellowship

By Ethan Ehrenberg & Chaoyan Dong

What is the Fellowship?

Given the number of new technologies to choose from, a faculty member at an institution such as NYU who is preparing to teach his or her course may ask, "Which technologies can help students learn in my class, and how can I use these technologies effectively to achieve this goal?" Since the answer to this question is often as unique as the course being taught and the faculty member who is teaching it, the ITS Instructional Technology Fellowship was created to help find it on a course-by-course, faculty-by-faculty basis.

The ITS Instructional Technology Fellowship was initiated by the Faculty Technology Services (FTS) group of ITS in the spring of 2006. The Fellowship gives faculty members the opportunity to work one-on-one with a team of technology experts from FTS to focus on how technology can be used to improve student learning in a particular course. The outcome of each fellowship is a well-formulated, technology-integrated course that can be used in multiple semesters and generate a demonstrable improvement in student learning. Since no prior technological skills are required, faculty members with an interest in new technologies, and a willingness to integrate them into their teaching, can gain significant experience with the effective use of technology in their courses.

Although FTS staff strive to customize each fellowship to meet individual professors' needs, all fellowships are structured according to a few simple guidelines, as described below. A fellowship lasts two semesters. During the semester prior to when the course is to be taught, we focus on reviewing the course goals and requirements, developing targeted solutions using available technology services, and then preparing the faculty member with the necessary training to manage all technologies self-sufficiently while the course is in session. During the semester when the course is offered, the Fellowship team remains available for ongoing support and refinement to the active technologies.

Faculty apply to the Instructional Technology Fellowship program by completing an online form (see www.nyu.edu/its/faculty/fellowship/) that asks applicants to describe the challenges encountered in the course and their reasons for applying to the fellowship. FTS staff then review the applications and make selections based on the best fit between the applicants' goals and our available expertise.

The following case describes our work with Professor Esther Katz, whom we selected from approximately 15 applicants last fall. We began working with Professor Katz in October 2006 and will complete her fellowship at the end of the spring 2007 semester. The FTS team working on this fellowship consisted of ITS Instructional Technology Specialist Ethan Ehrenberg and Chaoyan Dong, a PhD candidate in the Educational Communication and Technology Program at NYU's Steinhardt School of Education and an Instructional Technology Associate at the NYU Digital Studio.

The Case

Background

Professor Katz is a part-time faculty member at NYU's College of Arts & Science who specializes in U.S. History and has been teaching at NYU for some 25 years. She has prior experience in combining technology and scholarship from her work as the Director of the Margaret Sanger Papers Project. The course she identified in her application for the Fellowship is entitled Modern American History. About 80 undergraduate students take the course each semester, including majors from the Department of History and those seeking to fulfill the Liberal Arts requirement. Students attend lectures twice a week for 75 minutes each, as well as one recitation session per week, with approximately 20 students in each recitation group. There are two teaching assistants, Bekah Friedman and Atiba Pertilla, who each cover two recitation sections.

Purpose

Professor Katz applied to the Fellowship program seeking to integrate technology more effectively into the course through the use of different conceptual models. She wanted to find new methods to engage students with the course material, both in the lectures and in the recitations, and had a particular interest in incorporating multimedia elements to enrich the historical texts and lectures. Her past attempts to incorporate technologies had not yielded satisfying results.

Goals & Ground Rules

First, we established the project duration. We met with Professor Katz in October 2006 and agreed that according to the structure of the Fellowship, we would use the time prior to the start of the spring 2007 semester for planning and implementing course solutions, and the time during the spring semester for ongoing training, support, and minor refinements.

Next, we decided to meet every week for one hour until those meetings became unnecessary. Since we wanted a holistic view of the course and how technology could be integrated into it, we agreed that we would accomplish more by meeting, considering a problem for a brief time, brainstorming some possible solutions, and then taking some time to "sleep on it," instead of sitting down and trying to figure everything out at one time.

With the structure established, we turned our attention to the course goals. In several informal conversations, we discussed Professor Katz's past experiences with the course, analyzed the syllabus, and talked about hopes and expectations. The main goal for the Fellowship team was to understand what was most important to the Professor and what were some of her major concerns. Our experience has taught us that although this process can take time, it is critically important when working on a group project that everyone involved agree on a common set of clearly articulated goals. In due time, we established the following set of goals for the course:

1. Students will learn to talk intelligently about American history, using the language of the discipline.
2. Students will know the dates of important events and demonstrate knowledge of the chronological order for most other events.
3. Students will be able to think critically and evaluate the quality of source materials.
4. Students will demonstrate a basic level understanding of historiography.
5. Students will gain in-class note taking, organization, and presentation skills.
6. Students will be able to formulate, present, and defend a historical argument based on analysis of evidence.

Solutions

In response to the course goals, and after a close analysis of the course content through the syllabus, we came up with two main solution areas: delivering course content online and designing engaging assignments. To begin designing and implementing solutions, we broke each area into three elements: challenge, solution, and implementation.

Delivering Content

Challenge

Students were not engaged by the readings and other course material to the extent that was wished. Students would often arrive at lectures and recitations unprepared to participate in a class discussion and without questions in mind. Students had a hard time fitting the work into their busy schedules.

Solution

We wanted to make sure that we reduced all barriers to accessing the content to a minimum. We reasoned that the easier it is to access the material, the more opportunities students would have to read it. We decided to optimize the NYU Blackboard course site that Professor Katz had used in previous semesters. As an online course management system, NYU Blackboard provides a convenient way to gather a large amount of content in a location that is only available to students registered for the class and that can be accessed easily with any web browser and Internet connection.

Since the Blackboard site already had an abundance of content, we concentrated on organizing and presenting the content in a way that would be more intuitive for the students and would better reflect course goals. As the syllabus already divided the course into approximately 16 topic units, roughly one per week, we imagined folders in Blackboard under a "Course Units" button that would reflect those units. We thought each unit folder should include three elements: "Themes," "Required Readings and Relevant Resources," and "Questions/Issues to Think About." We believed this structure would allow Professor Katz to direct student engagement with the material while still giving students the independence and convenience of accessing the course content online.

Implementation

Implementing the structure described above into the Blackboard course site was a fairly straightforward process. First, we presented the concept to Professor Katz. Once we reached an agreement on the vision, the Fellowship team implemented a mock-up example of the design, ensuring that the site was not yet visible to students. We then presented the mock-up to Professor Katz, listened to her feedback and suggestions, and went back to make modifications. Once there was agreement on the mock-up, we implemented the design throughout the course site. We showed Professor Katz and the TAs what we had implemented, and demonstrated how they could make further modifications, as needed. All course site modifications were complete before the start of classes.

Engaging Assignments: Discussion Board

Challenge

Professor Katz was of the opinion that even with the optimized structure of the course content in the NYU Blackboard site, the students would still need more direction to adequately engage with the material. She wanted to make sure that students read and thought through the course material before the lectures and recitations, but, with 80 students, it was not feasible to check up on each one individually.

Solution

We suggested using the Blackboard Discussion Board for a series of ongoing writing assignments. As part of an assignment, students would post original comments based on that week's readings and responsive replies based on the postings of their peers. In order to balance the workload, Professor Katz wanted the students to post four original responses and four replies over the semester, choosing from any of the course units, so long as they did not post an original comment and reply in the same week, and they completed original posts before that week's lecture. The students were expected to take the postings seriously, so we suggested that she inform students that the postings would be graded at the end of the semester, and that both she and the TAs would participate in the online discussion and occasionally give feedback on posts.

Implementation

We used the group feature in Blackboard to establish a group for each of the recitation sections. For each group, we enabled the group discussion board, which is only accessible by the members of the group, plus the instructor and TAs. Within the group discussion board, we established 16 different forums to correspond to the readings for the 16 course units. To facilitate access to the group discussion board, we added a new navigation button called "Recitation Sections" that would take students directly to a page where they could choose their section and enter the discussion board. We provided training for Professor Katz and the TAs, to ensure they were able to manage the discussion board on their own. The discussion board was fully implemented before the start of classes.

Engaging Assignments: Class Wiki

Challenge

In addition to the assignments based on the weekly readings, Professor Katz also wanted the students to complete one original research paper. In order to build their evaluation, organization, and presentation skills, she decided that the students should research and write about a focused topic related to one of the course units. From past experience, she found that a traditional approach to term papers sometimes yielded bland papers that lacked the kind of critical engagement that she sought. She believed that a bit more consistent feedback and guidance would have improved the quality of the papers, but the large number of students made it difficult to provide that kind of feedback on an individual basis.

Solution

The Fellowship team suggested the development of a class wiki as a replacement for the traditional term paper. Wikis use a technology that allows multiple people to collaborate in publishing an online web resource.¹ The authoring options in wikis are fairly simple and tend to emphasize text, images, and hyperlinks. The use of a wiki is most effective when consistent participation by a number of people is used to build and share knowledge on a particular topic. Our goal was to combine independent work (like that done on a term paper) with a collaborative element, enabling students to help refine each other's work and see how their contribution might fit into a larger scholarly context.

Wikis by their nature are unstructured, so to help organize the class wiki project, we suggested first creating four thematic divisions that would span the time period of the course, then assigning one theme to each of the recitation sections. The themes Professor Katz suggested were "Religion and Reform," "Industrial and Post-Industrial Nation, "Power and Cultural Hegemony," and "Imperialism." Each student would then be asked to pick one focused topic within the given theme and to produce one wiki "page"² representing their research on that topic—including references, images, and other elements they would typically include in a traditional term paper. After completing their pages, each recitation section would be asked to complete a collaborative overview page that would introduce the major theme for the recitation session and include links to the individual pages of the students. We recommended that the overview page include a timeline, a table of contents, and other elements that could help bring the various focus pages together and lend context. The students would also be encouraged to link to each other's pages and references to further enrich the resource.

The combination of both independent and collaborative elements is intended to give students a sense of participation as scholars in this discipline. One of the great pedagogical advantages of using a wiki, beyond its collaborative feature, is that it is a publicly accessible resource that can be developed over multiple semesters. We hope that the idea that students are not just completing an assignment, but are instead participating in the development of an online resource on modern American history, provides an added sense of ownership and an additional incentive to engage in the material.

Implementation

Currently, the wiki service at NYU is in an experimental, pilot phase. To implement the desired solution for Professor Katz's class, the Fellowship team coordinated with the wiki support team in ITS eServices to create a pilot wiki, designating Professor Katz, the two TAs, and all the students as editors.

Editing and managing a wiki involves using both a WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") editor as well as a specialized "wiki mark-up" language, which is a simplified version of HTML. We provided the necessary training to ensure that Professor Katz and the TAs felt comfortable using and managing the wiki on their own. The TAs then began editing the wiki and setting up sections, to facilitate students' work when they began to use the wiki.

Next, we worked with Professor Katz and the TAs to develop a strategy for presenting the assignment to the students and introducing the wiki technology. We decided on an incremental approach. After being informed that the wiki would replace the typical term paper, the students were instructed to first pick topics and begin gathering resources, thus postponing their actual encounter with the technology until after they had completed the more familiar part of the assignment. Prior to the deadline for the first draft, we organized a 60 minute in-class demonstration/tutorial on how to use the wiki, focusing only on the elements they would need to complete the project, namely: creating a page, changing the page title, inserting images, creating external and internal links, and footnoting. At the end of the demonstration, students were told that they should complete their first draft using the wiki, and that they would probably find the experience similar to using a regular word processing program. We also established a separate forum in the class' Blackboard discussion board, as a venue for conversation and questions on the wiki project. During the recitation session, the TAs also fielded questions and provided guidance on the wiki project. Once the individual wiki pages were more or less completed, the TAs orchestrated the collaborative part of the project in recitation, building the overview page(s) that helped unify the different page elements within a theme.

Outcomes & Evaluation

Thus far, feedback on the Fellowship process and the results of the technology integration has been positive. Professor Katz and the TAs reported that they enjoyed the process and that students seem to be responding well to the changes. The Fellowship team plans to conduct end-of-semester surveys with Professor Katz, the TAs, and the students that will focus on their satisfaction with the process, difficulties that may have been encountered, and the impact on learning outcomes. We also plan to compare the current semester to previous semesters, using the measure of average grade for this course, to see if our efforts made an impact.

In addition, we plan to conduct a series of "exit interviews" with Professor Katz and the TAs to gather descriptive data about the Fellowship process, overall differences between this semester's course and previous semesters', the effectiveness of the technology integration for achieving course goals, and the quantity and quality of student involvement. These evaluations will enable us to make further recommendations to both Professor Katz and other faculty members interested in implementing similar teaching and learning projects in their courses.

For more information about the Instructional Technology Fellowship, or to apply for a future semester, visit www.nyu.edu/its/faculty/fellowship/.

Footnotes

1. Possibly the best known wiki is the online collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/).
2. Even though the output would undoubtedly be the equivalent of several typed pages, we use the term wiki page to suggest each student's topic space in the wiki.

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Author Biographies

Ethan Ehrenberg is an ITS Faculty Technology Specialist at the NYU Digital Studio. Chaoyan Dong, a PhD candidate at NYU Steinhardt's Educational Communication & Technology program, is also an Instructional Technology Associate at the NYU Digital Studio.

Page last reviewed: April 19, 2007. All content © New York University.
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