Thank you to yesterday’s presenters, Hisae Kobayashi, Joe Schroeder, Andrea Lanoux, and Jason Jones (Director of Educational Technology, Trinity College), at the Teaching with Technology event, Expand Your Classroom through Inter-Campus Collaborations. I personally left feeling very excited about the possibilities that videoconferencing technology affords our students. Here is a short summary of the event if you missed it.
- Hisae Kobayashi presented an upper level Japanese course where students regularly met with peers at Mount Holyoke. Students participated in peer reading, discussion, and delivered presentations to each other via Skype (which were also recorded using QuickTime). In addition to the course learning goal of having students learn Japanese culture and language through the Japanese language, Professor Kobayashi found that students were especially motivated to do well when speaking with students at a different college.
- Joe Schroeder and Jason Jones spoke about a course taught by Matthew Kurtz, Wesleyan University, on schizophrenia to students at Trinity, Wesleyan and Connecticut College (CTW). A more detailed description of the course can be found in an article published in Campus Technology. In addition to the weekly teleconference meetings, the course included two face to face meetings and a field trip to a local hospital providing both a common experience from which to draw throughout the course and a chance to interact in person.This collaboration allowed both Trinity and Conn to offer a course taught by an expert that they would otherwise not have been able to offer.
- Finally, Andrea Lanoux wowed us all with her course about youth culture in the United States and Russia. The course includes 18 American students and 22 Russian students in St. Petersburg and utilizes the teleconference equipment in Olin 107. The discussion based course requires students to regularly confront cultural differences, stereotypes, and carefully examine and communicate their own culture. Read more about this course an a 2013 article by Professor Lanoux from The School of Russian and Asian Studies’ newsletter. You can also read a 2012 article from Connecticut College Magazine about a past iteration of the course.
If you are interested in using Skype, Google Hangouts, FaceTime, or the videoconference equipment available at the college, feel free to contact your Instructional Technology Liaison and we can help with the technical aspects. You can also learn more about some of the technology available in our workshop handout.
Image credit: Students in the Dilley Room, Shain Library. Photo by Bob McDonnell.
Engage 