Emerging Leader
UD Library's Carver chosen as NMC Emerging Leader award winner
12:54 p.m., July 9, 2013--The University of Delaware Library has announced that Nico Carver, assistant librarian and coordinator, Student Multimedia Design Center Services, was chosen as the winner of the New Media Consortium (NMC) Emerging Leaders award during the New Media Consortium Conference held June 4-7 in Hilton Head, S.C.
NMC is an international community of experts in educational technology. UD is a member of the NMC with the joint support of the University of Delaware Library and Information Technologies.
Honors Stories
National Medal of Science
Warren Award
To be considered for the Emerging Leaders cohort, which was chosen prior to the conference, Carver proposed developing a method that takes mouse movements from each participant in a hands-on computer instruction session and overlays them for assessment purposes.
This method will provide feedback to the instructor as to when, during the instruction session, and where, on the screen, participants get confused.
Carver calls his method MACAW, for Mouse Analytics for Computer-Assisted Workshops.
NMC Emerging Leaders were supported with both conference registration and a travel stipend to attend the 2013 NMC Summer Conference.
Carver’s proposal focused on his belief that traditional assessment methods fall short when trying to measure experiential learning. According to Carver, the emerging field of “learning analytics” is making great headway in assessing experiential learning, but methods currently available are not practical when teaching a brief, two-hour workshop on multimedia software.
Librarians at the Student Multimedia Design Center in the University of Delaware Library have begun developing a method for analyzing workshop participants' mouse movements. Tracking mouse movements can reveal us a great deal about how a participant is interacting with a particular piece of software.
By aggregating all participants' mouse movements, and tying that visual data to an audio recording of the instruction, teaching can be greatly improved, with instructors better able to tell when participants are distracted or lost, or when they are falling behind.
This method allows educators to quickly assess computer-based experiential learning without distracting their students from the task at hand.
Carver and the seven other NMC Emerging Leaders each gave a 10-minute presentation at the conference followed by five minutes of questions and feedback from the audience.
The audience then voted to select Carver’s presentation as their favorite to receive the NMC Emerging Leaders award, including $2,500.
Carver is also invited as a guest to the NMC Future of Education Summit to be held in January 2014 with support of registration and travel.