UD GRANTS SUPPORT TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED COURSE REDESIGN

Long-term improvement and enhancement in teaching through technology is the goal of UD's Technology-Enhanced Course Redesign grants. Here is how a team of faculty members and an individual faculty member plan to use their grants to strengthen and enrich the courses they teach.

A team from biological sciences, led by Patricia Walsh, assistant professor, is using the grants to redesign "Principles in Biology," a lecture and lab course for nonscience majors that enrolls more than 600 students annually.

At the other end of the spectrum, Carol A. Krawczyk, assistant professor of landscape design, is redesigning her course in "Landscape Construction Details," a more specialized course, which will also serve as a pilot project for other faculty in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Principles in Biology is a lecture and lab course where the lectures are given by several faculty members, and the lab sessions are taught by graduate students, directed by the laboratory director Bob Ketcham.

"Although we felt that the number and variety of faculty lecturers and lab instructors were a plus for the course, our team was concerned about bridging the gaps that might exist in the material covered and between the lectures and lab sessions," Walsh said.

To help connect the lectures and lab sessions and make them more meaningful, faculty in the department will film videos, using University Media Services, linking the lab sessions to biological principles and "real world" experience, Walsh said. For example, one video being prepared by Jane Noble-Harvey, associate professor of biological sciences, deals with bacteria and disease, which may have been just touched on in a lecture. The video would explain the relevance of the topic to the lab project and also discuss current issues on bacteria and disease in the news, she said.

The videos can be shown to students before lab sessions and also will be available on CDs. "Our goal is to get students more actively involved and engaged in the course and lab work. Bob Ketcham, the lab director, has been invaluable in leading us in this effort," Walsh said.

In addition to the lectures, a combination video and interactive animation on how to use the compound microscope is being prepared under Ketcham's direction. The tutorial will show students how to set up the compound microscope for successful viewing, and in the future, it is planned that students will be able to use laptop computers to access the tutorial at the same time they are using the microscope. "Making individual instruction available to students, who can then go at their own pace, will free the instructor for other things and make the lab more efficient," Walsh said.

"This is an exciting year for the biological sciences department," Walsh said. "Thanks to University grants, departmental grants and Howard Hughes Medical Institute funds, we have been able to revise the biology labs with new equipment, including laptops for students."

Landscape Construction Details, A Mobile Design Studio will provide AutoCAD on notebook computers for students so that they research properties of materials and can draw details and designs of materials and structure in class and in the field, according to Krawczyk, who teaches the course.

During the course, students study the materials, products and processes of landscape construction, including paving, wood construction basics, arbor and wood structures, wall construction, dry laid stone walls, metal materials and fabrication.

"This will be quite a departure from the past when I taught using a blackboard and students did all their sketches by hand," she said. "Not only will the new equipment facilitate teaching and learning, students will become familiar with the technology they will use in the future in their careers."

Students attend lectures one day a week, visit projects on fieldtrips on another day where they can use AutoCAD and finalize their projects on the third day. As she wrote in her proposal, the "goal is to provide computers that can be used not only in the indoor classroom/design studio but in the field where students can better synthesize the design process by gathering data and performing the analysis and design on site."

Krawczyk also is organizing her slide collection on CDs to be used in PowerPoint lectures and is working with PRESENT to create a Web CT site.

"This new technology can be applied to other fields and this class can serve as a model for other departments in the college," Krawczyk said.

SUE MONCURE


Patricia Walsh (left) and students	Carol Krawczyk