A Video Email from My Dean

SteveFoerster — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:42:00 GMT

“When we speak of 'the higher education community,' it's not just an expression... We really are a community of learners, and we take care of each other.” — John Peters

A.T. Still University is split up into a number of schools, including two osteopathic medical schools, a dental school, a school of allied health, and my school, which is the School of Health Management. Today I received an email from the interim dean of SHM, Kimberly O'Reilly. It wasn't send just to me personally, it was a note to all of us in the school. Interestingly, the email directed us to Dean O'Reilly's message as a video on the SHM web site, an interesting use of multimedia, and a very welcome development considering that I've remarked in the past on how ATSU doesn't take good enough advantage of online audio and video.

Even more interesting, she called on students and alumni to make our own videos and send them in, to help ATSU recruit students. She explained that she made a video for us in part so we could put a face to the name, and hoped some of us could respond in kind. That's an exciting challenge, and I'm looking forward to taking her up on it. I already have a videocamera (one of those cheap ones from Flip, but it ought to be good enough for this), and I figure this should be a good excuse to get familiar with some of the multimedia studio tools that come with Linux.

Another interesting fact about my dean is that she was one of the first graduates of the program that I'm in now. I realize that if a school has too many faculty members that are its own alumni that this considered a problem, because it means there's not enough diversity of training among the faculty. But that's not the case here, and it's good to know that the person who's running things there really knows what I'm going through.

Next up, I get interviewed by the Sacramento Bee newspaper about my recent critical comments about UC Berkeley's call for a federal bailout of top tier state universities.

Image courtesy of g_kat26

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Multimedia and the Future of Education

SteveFoerster — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:26:00 GMT

“This is a test of the emergency Stevecast system....”

Click here for audio!

(transcript follows)

You may be thinking, "Hey, this is your blog, Steve! Aren't I supposed to read it, not listen to it?" And ordinarily that'd be true. But today I thought I'd add some audio technology, just to make a point.

See, recently I was in an online discussion about distance learning, arguing against someone who thinks that it needs to struggle to prove that it's as good as a traditional classroom experience. I argued that distance learning is not only just as good, but can actually be better. An example of why is that distance learners can make use of technology to achieve things that traditional learners can't.

There are a number of examples, but my favorite is multimedia. Sure, you can wheel a CD player or a TV and DVD player into a classroom, but you can add that same audio or video file to an online course that's available not just during classtime, but anytime a student wants to check in and review it. And as you can see, or rather hear, it's very easy to create this sort of content. I'm recording this on a headset I bought for twenty dollars using software that I downloaded for free. Inexpensive video cameras can be had for less than two hundred dollars now, and webcams are even cheaper. And if I can afford it, so can your university.

Now I'll be the first to admit that not all schools make good use of multimedia. I've been a little surprised how A.T. Still University is still getting the ball rolling when it comes to videos and podcasts in my program. All courses I've taken so far rely heavily on textbooks and text-based discussion boards, and given their growing pains, I expect that it will take them some time before they can offer a richer set of resources. But they will adjust, and they're not alone.

Many distance learning programs are enhancing their courses by adding content through the use of multimedia files that they either create themselves or find elsewhere. For example, Stanford University has a set of freely available videos that are easy to integrate into distance learning courses... not to mention the wild and wacky world of YouTube.

As I remarked recently, there's even evidence that students get better grades when professors make lectures available for them to view on their own time rather than having students sit through them on a particular schedule.

So I say hooray for multimedia. It's a great idea that helps demonstrate that eLearning is not just as good as what we've had in the past, but it's at the leading edge of how we'll all learn in the future.

Next up, I get back into the swing of thing.

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My A.T. Still University Experience : multimedia

A Video Email from My Dean

Multimedia and the Future of Education