Articles

Speaking of Schools: Virtual Worlds for Teaching and Learning through SimHub

The Front Line of Online & Virtual Education for the Real World

Check out the latest feature on UCG's  SimHub™ immersive technology center in the February edition of Greenville Business Magazine. Click image for article. 

UCG President Named 50 Most Influential

Dr. Fred Baus, UCG President & CEO, was named by Greenville Business Magazine as one of the 50 Most Influential of 2010. Click image to view article.

The End of the Textbook as We Know it

To Save Students Money, Colleges May Force a Switch to E-Textbooks

By Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education

October 24, 2010

You've heard it before: Digital technologies blew up the music industry's moneymaking model, and the textbook business is next.

For years observers have predicted a coming wave of e-textbooks. But so far it just hasn't happened. One explanation for the delay is that while music fans were eager to try a new, more portable form of entertainment, students tend to be more conservative when choosing required materials for their studies. For a real disruption in the textbook market, students may have to be forced to change.

That's exactly what some companies and college leaders are now proposing. They're saying that e-textbooks should be required reading and that colleges should be the ones charging for them. It is the best way to control skyrocketing costs and may actually save the textbook industry from digital piracy, they claim. Major players like the McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson, and John Wiley & Sons are getting involved.

To understand what a radical shift that would be, think about the current textbook model. Every professor expects students to have ready access to required texts, but technically, purchasing them is optional. So over the years students have improvised a range of ways to dodge buying a new copy—picking up a used textbook, borrowing a copy from the library, sharing with a roommate, renting one, downloading an illegal version, or simply going without. Publishers collect a fee only when students buy new books, giving the companies a financial impetus to crank out updated editions whether the content needs refreshing or not.

Here's the new plan: Colleges require students to pay a course-materials fee, which would be used to buy e-books for all of them (whatever text the professor recommends, just as in the old model).

Why electronic copies? Well, they're far cheaper to produce than printed texts, making a bulk purchase more feasible. By ordering books by the hundreds or thousands, colleges can negotiate a much better rate than students were able to get on their own, even for used books. And publishers could eliminate the used-book market and reduce incentives for students to illegally download copies as well.

Read the full article here: The Chronicle on Higher Education

Games Theory (Video; The New York Times)

21st Century Education - Video

Reach for the Sky: GSATC founder helping tech companies to 'dream big enough'

By Tim Ronaldson

Upstate Business Trends

September 2010

Sometime in the near future, the Greenville Spartanburg Anderson Technology Council might have to change its name.

The organization is no longer an “Upstate phenomenon,” as founder Phil Yanov called it. It is now a mainstay in the Midlands, Charleston and, in September, it will expand to Charlotte. Through its weekly luncheons and Tech After Five events, the GSATC is seeking to connect technology professionals in a way they’re not often connected – offline.

“We are relentless advocates for technology and entrepreneurship,” Yanov said.

Much like technology itself, the GSATC is expanding at a rapid pace. In September, the organization will celebrate its eighth birthday and venture into its fourth city.

“Our success baffles me,” Yanov said. “It’s a very simple idea. We’re very careful how we frame the conversation. We’re really trying to help (our members) get something done.”

The GSATC accomplishes this by taking the extra step for its networking attendees. In advance of the event, the group asks attendees what they’re looking to get out of the event, and they publish that on each person’s name badge. They also print a brochure with who’s attending to let others know who they can expect to see at the meeting. Following events, Yanov and his team follow up with attendees to share their stories about their experiences, and opportunities both capitalized on and missed.

The core members of the GSATC are tech professionals who are working inside another “non-tech” business. A company such a BI-LO, for example, needs a sophisticated IT network in the background that happens on the end-point to move its groceries, so while it wouldn’t be considered a tech company, it is sinks or swims based on the functionality of its technology.

“The fact is that tech is a lever for many businesses,” Yanov said. “Sometimes, it’s simply the price of doing business, but very clever companies are using it to leapfrog others.”

In the Upstate, this can be seen first-hand with the University Center of Greenville. Last fall, the UCG was inducted into the Virtual World Consortium to expand access for faculty and students into virtual world platforms. This spring, the University connected through Clemson University to Internet2, a private high-speed fiber network. And this month, the UCG plans to launch SimHub, an immersive technology center, to serve as a connection site to support and experience simulated environments, augmented reality applications with smart phones, gaming applications and expand virtual world use.

Above is a screen shot inside the virtual world platform in which the University Center of Greenville's member institutions have classes or projects. The various outlets can simulate more traditional settings like a board meeting room, as well as more abstract or imaginative settings, such as a 3D shape outlining a complicated process.

“Combining the resources of Internet2 with the VWC will exponentially increase the quantity and quality of teaching and research possibilities at the University Center,” said UCB President & CEO Fred Baus. “This partnership allows UCG to remain at the forefront of technologies for teaching and learning, as well as advance new models for immersive learning in virtual environments.”

Projects such as SimHub are helping to build the information technology industry’s leaders of tomorrow – people who could one day follow the path of Yanov.

Yanov has been a techie for as long as he can remember. He built his own information technology company that he eventually sold to Kyrus Corp. – a firm that sold computers, cash registers and networks for large grocery store chains – and became that company’s e-business executive and CIO.

While he was working professionally at his regular job in 1983, he started the first IBM PC users group in the Upstate. While it was simply a hobby group at first, his interest in “getting tech people together” grew, which lead to him founding the GSATC, his current full-time job, in September 2002.

The GSATC’s “strongest reach” is with information technology professionals. While the organization has reached out to other areas of technology, such as GE wind experts, the IT professional is its core demographic because Yanov believes it is a great platform to build business and build wealth. A smart person with good people and the right skills can build a great technology business, he said.

“IT is the world’s longest-running IQ test,” he said. “It continues to get more sophisticated.”

The ever-advancing nature of the technology business is both a blessing and a curse to industry professionals. While it allows for continual advancement, it also forces people to re-train quite often.

Plumbers do their work quite similarly to the way they did it 20 or 30 years ago, Yanov said, but computer programmers are constantly forced to learn new computer languages that may only have a 10-year lifespan.

“The problem I see in what we’ve done is you have to re-learn your toolset regularly,” he said.

What Yanov would love to see technology professionals do is stop thinking too small, and that is one goal of the GSATC. He tells a story of a member of the IBM PC users group who used to bring his kid to meetings as a way to bond. Today, the two have built an international tech company because they were able to think big and take chances.

“I think we don’t dream big enough. Our concept of money and success in this community is sometimes kind of limiting,” Yanov said.

“We’ve had some beautiful, great big wins. We need more of them. We need more people to see them.”

Reaching the Last Technology Holdouts at the Front of the Classroom

By Jeffrey R. Young

The Chronicle on Higher Education

July 24, 2010

Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard U., helped write the Department of Education's new National Educational Technology Plan, which challenges educators to leverage modern technology to create engaging learning experiences for students.

Every semester a lot of professors' lectures are essentially reruns because many instructors are too busy to upgrade their classroom methods.

That frustrates Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard University, who argues that clinging to outdated teaching practices amounts to educational malpractice.

"If you were going to see a doctor and the doctor said, 'I've been really busy since I got out of medical school, and so I'm going to treat you with the techniques I learned back then,' you'd be rightly incensed," he told me recently. "Yet there are a lot of faculty who say with a straight face, 'I don't need to change my teaching,' as if nothing has been learned about teaching since they had been prepared to do it—if they've ever been prepared to."

And poor teaching can have serious consequences, he says, when students fall behind or drop out because of sleep-inducing lectures. Colleges have tried several approaches over the years to spur teaching innovation. But among instructors across the nation, holdouts clearly remain.

Mr. Dede's arguments (in more bureaucratic language) form the basis of a new National Educational Technology Plan, issued in draft form in March by the U.S. Department of Education. "The challenge for our education system is to leverage the learning sciences and modern technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all learners that mirror students' daily lives and the reality of their futures," says the plan, which he helped write. The title of the report, "Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology," suggests that the country's teaching methods need a reboot.

It is tough to measure how many professors teach with technology or try other techniques the report recommends, such as group activities and hands-on exercises. (Technology isn't the only way to improve teaching, of course, and some argue that it can hinder it.) Though most colleges can point to several cutting-edge teaching experiments on their campuses, a recent national assessment called the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement suggests that old-school instruction remains the norm.

Only 13 percent of the professors surveyed said they used blogs in teaching; 12 percent had tried videoconferencing; and 13 percent gave interactive quizzes using "clickers," or TV-remotelike devices that let students respond and get feedback instantaneously. The one technology that most teachers use regularly—course-management systems—focuses mostly on housekeeping tasks like handing out assignments or keeping track of student grades. The survey, answered by 4,600 professors nationwide, did not ask about PowerPoint, which anecdotal evidence suggests is ubiquitous as a replacement for overhead and slide projectors.

Should colleges do more to push new technology? Should professors throw out those yellowed lecture notes and start fresh (or at least update their jokes)?

Here are three suggestions for next steps based on interviews with experts.

Focus on the Non-Techies

The least-wired faculty members make the best advocates for high-tech teaching. That's according to a session at last week's Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium, held in San Jose, by the Sloan Consortium.

The session's title promises a world where every professor works to teach better: "Faculty Motivation and Technology Integration: How to Bring 100% of Non-Techie Faculty On Board."

The key is to enlist longtime professors with no particular interest in technology and get them to try the latest online forums, videoconferencing, or clickers, said the two presenters, from Florida Hospital College of Health Sciences. Then encourage the professors to give a lunch talk for their colleagues.

And their peers' eyes will light up as they imagine their own experiments, said one of the presenters, Dan Lim, assistant vice president for educational technology and distance learning. "Their minds will start working, thinking, 'I know I can do this,'" he said.

One of Mr. Lim's non-techie converts is Lenore S. Brantley, a professor of psychology, who taught an online course with audioconferencing tools last year. "It's always a little frightening because people from my generation did not grow up with technology," says the professor, who has been teaching for more than 40 years. "I was willing to try it because I like to try new things."

Things didn't always work perfectly—she had to trek to campus to teach the online classes because she couldn't get the software to run on her home computer. But the technology came in handy when she wanted to leave town for a church conference: She could still teach from the road.

At her lunch talk to colleagues in February, she gave a PowerPoint presentation titled, "My Journey in Teaching: From Then 'Til Now." She kicked it off with pictures of the tools that were standard back in the day: typewriters, adding machines, film projectors, and a paper grade book. She doesn't miss them.

"I'm very surprised how well I like it and how well you get to know your students," she says of her experience in an online classroom.

Administrators said at least one other "non-techie" professor showed up for a college-sponsored tech-training workshop soon after Ms. Brantley's talk.

Watch Your Language

Summer is prime time for professors to go back to school themselves, to attend short workshops on how to teach with the latest technology tools.

Typically, colleges give seminars with titles like "5 Ways to Use a Wiki in Your Class" or "Getting Started With Blackboard."

Too often those stress the technology more than its goals, though, says Mr. Dede, of Harvard.

"Those technology sessions are useful, but often they're marketed the wrong way," he told me. "What you want to do is deal with issues that keep faculty up at night. The titles should be, How do you keep students coming to your class rather than just copying the notes off the Web? or, How to get students to respond really deeply rather than from CliffsNotes."

Donald Williams, senior vice president for academic administration at Florida Hospital College of Health Sciences, says his institution goes out of its way to hire tech-support staff who speak teaching rather than technology. "None of them are salesmen for technology—they're all educators," he says. "They're not the geeky type of tech person who can't really get down to the level of the everyday user."

Look to Disciplines

Some professors attend one workshop, try one new trick, and consider their teaching reinvigorated.

But a number of teaching experts hope to encourage professors to think of their teaching as something that needs constant care and feeding.

"I like to think about it as an ongoing process," says Pat Hutchings, senior associate with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Scholarly disciplines, rather than colleges, may become the best drivers of teaching reform, then, because scholars already turn to disciplinary organizations and journals to keep up with research.

History is one field leading the approach to reform, says Ms. Hutchings, pointing to the work of David Pace, a history professor at Indiana University at Bloomington.

In a 2004 essay in The American Historical Review, Mr. Pace, as Mr. Dede has done, compared college professors to doctors operating on patients without proper training.

"Why is the classroom a place for the uncritical perpetuation of folk traditions, when the operating room is not?" he wrote. "Most of us care passionately about teaching and believe that it is vitally important that students be exposed to the kinds of reasoning and the knowledge of the past that members of our profession have developed. But until very recently, it was believed that no formal training was necessary before historians began thinking about teaching and learning, no examination of the efforts of other scholars, no collective effort to ground knowledge as firmly as possible."

Notice there's no mention of technology there.

Indeed, the National Educational Technology Plan has long sections with little mention of technology at all, Mr. Dede says.

And there doesn't have to be, he says, because the role of technology in classroom innovation is a given. "Most of those changes are almost impossible to make without technology," he says. "Technology becomes the handmaiden of the change."