Dr Leo Schouest is Manager of Academic Computing /Faculty and Student Technical Services. Dr. Schouest has been with the UC Riverside campus for over 26 years and has in the last seven years successfully implemented many IT principles on the campus especially within the Science departments. Lately his focus has been on implementing a large scale H-ITT deployment.
Visit UC Riverside's clicker site.
|
The development of better audience response systems (ARS) over the past few years has coincided with the increased interest in active learning and constructive learning principles on many college campuses. These systems which instructors and students affectionately refer to as clickers have become one of several increasingly common ways by which instructors can engage their students in the active learning process. The student feedback received by the instructor via clickers when combined with other active learning principles has re-established the tutorial model as an effective teaching paradigm especially in the larger classes where that model had become almost extinct.
"Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner. Put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he learns and the way he understands it." --Kierkegard A not so trivial aspect for teaching and learning professionals and support centers is the implementation of clickers in a classroom environment and how to motivate faculty ownership of the possibilities inherent in incorporating this new instructional technology in their teaching. To facilitate adoption, the University of California at Riverside campus realized that it was important to make the technology as transparent as possible to the user. The UC Riverside campus as part of a larger classroom technology upgrade initiative committed itself to implementing audience response systems in all its general assignment classrooms. Standardizing on and incorporating a single system campus-wide into the classroom infrastructure increases the adoption rate by faculty. Instructors no longer have to think about setup, connections, software loading, etc. as the ARS system is seamlessly integrated with all other technologies in the classroom. Now an instructor can go into any classroom and easily use a unified system. To further support faculty use of clickers, UCR created several websites to provide faculty the information they would require to incorporate clickers into their teaching and how to have students register their clickers. One site (http://clickers.ucr.edu) deals with the registration of clickers by students, roster creation and roster downloads by instructors as well as administrative uses such as lost and found and special account creation. Rosters are created automatically via the student registration process since students' accounts are tied directly to our student information system. Students register at the beginning of every quarter (the database is archived at terms end) which allows the student to sell their clicker to another student or the bookstore subsequently to be registered by another student. The archive feature creates a record of owners over time for each clicker allowing us to track a clickers' history. A second web site (http://cnc.ucr.edu/clickers) provides faculty with an introduction to clickers, background history, best practices, FAQs, and faculty testimonials in the use of clickers on the UCR campus as well as the details of what clickers are and how to get started. Both sites are linked to each other. Links to these sites are created in the campus learning management system for all classes using an audience response system The UC Riverside campus has been using audience response since the Winter of 2004 with adoption increasing every quarter since. Clickers have been used in classes as small as 30 and as large as 575. Workshops for new faculty users and faculty panel discussions of previous faculty users are provided to the campus every quarter and are well attended. Instructional Technology changes quickly and sometimes when you wait to make a decision a particular technology may pass a campus by. With new technologies waiting in the wings, it is less important as to which technology you choose, especially if the implementations are similar.. The more important issue is faculty awareness and exposure to the technology, so that they can start to deal with the issues of how to use that technology to address pedagogical issues. Faculty need to move beyond the initial slope of the learning curve to effect substantive change in their teaching. The UC Riverside campus made a decision to move forward to empower its faculty to fully engage their students now rather than later. Dr Leo Schouest is Manager of Academic Computing /Faculty and Student Technical Services. Dr. Schouest has been with the UC Riverside campus for over 26 years and has in the last seven years successfully implemented many IT principles on the campus especially within the Science departments. With a total of over 35 years experience in higher education at both private and public research and teaching institutions, he provides a balanced and academic-centered perspective to Instructional Technology implementations. Stressing active-learning principles and student-centered approaches has always been his emphasis to effect change in teaching. He conducts workshops for faculty and TA development on all aspects of instructional technology and curricular redevelopment. This is not an endorsement of H-ITT by the University of California Riverside. |