A faculty review team has evaluated the proposals on the Initiative on Technology-Enhanced Learning (ITEL). Twenty-eight ITEL and MOOC grants were awarded, involving about 100 faculty members in 43 different departments or programs on the multiple campuses of Georgetown. Take a look at itel.georgetown.edu. Jointly with edX, we’ll announce the first GeorgetownX MOOCs in the coming days.
When we launched ITEL, we had the aspiration of involving 100 faculty and 100 courses over the first three years. We’re in great shape to meet that target.
The inventiveness of the proposals was heartwarming.
They include an online shared platform for student supplied images and data in a study-abroad class. Another proposal is a formal experiment to compare online-assisted writing instruction to traditional face-to-face-only writing instruction. This is a learning experience that can affect all undergraduates at Georgetown and thus have important impact on the effectiveness of education here.
There will be a development of a new approach to teach National Security Law, using automated problem sets, which will give the student more chances at expression of his/her learning. The problems will mimic the real-life limitations on information available to make judgments.
We will see how students who have completed a course in languages can direct the redesign of what they’ve learned, using new technology tools to do so.
There are several examples of “flipping” the classroom, the move of traditional lecture material into interactive web-based software, and then the use of the limited face-to-face time for more intensive focus on problematic concepts. One will formalize assessment of whether this is effective by having formal pre-and post-tests of student knowledge. These kinds of formal comparisons will permit wise application of new methods in other courses.
Gamification of learning is a popular development in learning strategies. This idea attempts to use some of the motivating features of games that capture attention and focus on principles underlying the rules of the game. If the rules of the game could be defined by the learning objectives of the course, the logic goes, then students will learn the material by playing the game. One proposal attempts to apply this logic in a course on the rules of legal evidence.
Other proposals will create video material of prominent practitioners in a field and make these available for multiple courses in a program. Another will create user-friendly web-based simulations to illustrate scientific principles. These and others are examples of what many speculate is the future of academic courses, making available tools and modules of courses that will offer an instructor a menu of optional ways of teaching the material in his/her course. Mixing and matching these modules to fit the individual course needs will be part of future course-building exercises.
I want to thank all those faculty members who submitted proposals to the ITEL program. I’m hopeful that revision and resubmissions of some of them will be funded in the next round of ITEL solicitations. I also hope that the prospect of reforming their courses may spur such revisions by them even without ITEL funding.
Georgetown is on its way to evaluating how best to blend face-to-face teaching with online assistance and interactive web-based tools. If we succeed, both faculty and students will benefit.
As an alumnus who has followed the development of MOOCs (and GU’s involvement) closely, I am very excited about this latest development. I can’t wait to see the initial GeorgetownX course offerings! Kudos to all involved!