(Don Merritt) Good morning, everyone.
Alright. So, first of all, how many of you have ever heard of or are familiar with
the Office of Instructional Resources? Anyone? We got a few.
There's a few familiar faces in the audience, too, but I'll go over that
in a second. I'm Don Merritt. I'm the director of OIR,
as we're more commonly known. We are the classroom and AV folks on campus.
We are also the other half of the Division of Digital Learning,
which now consists of our office and the Center for Distributed Learning.
You heard mentioned earlier the mixed mode classes, half online, half in the
classroom. We are the other half of that equation. That's one of the reasons
that we've been brought together. One of the things we want to talk
about this morning is a little bit about who we are, what we do,
and what we can help you with, just so you've got an idea where we come from.
My first interaction with UCF, officially, was a little over sixteen years ago
as an adjunct faculty member when I was working in the private sector here in town.
So, I actually come from broadcasting and journalism. I worked at Channel 2
here in Orlando for a number of years, worked at a few other production houses
and television stations across the southeast before that. I came here
to teach media law many years ago. Actually, in the fall of 2001.
It was an interesting trip from there, and eventually, I got hired on by UCF
full time to run the ITV, the Interactive Television System, for the university.
That's where we were running the video classes from Orlando to all of the regional
campuses and sometimes back and forth. I've been here for a while. I've taught in
the digital media program. I've taught in the communications program.
I bounced around a bit. Unfortunately, my schedule doesn't allow me a lot
of time to teach anymore, but I still do some research. In fact, one of my Co-PI's
on a project we're working on right now is one of your alumni today.
Emily and I have been working on a language acquisition video game for
about a year now. I still get to mix it up a little bit, and I still get to work
with some of the faculty and some of the researchers.
Even though we stay busy with classroom and multimedia stuff,
we do try to stay as connected to the rest of the university as possible.
Our mission is really to make sure that faculty, staff, researchers,
and students have the resources they need in the classroom, in multimedia.
We really see ourselves as AV experts for the university, and that is on the
business level. When it comes to building buildings, renovating
classrooms, all of those sorts of things, we are involved in all of that.
We're helping to plan the Trevor Colbourn building. We're helping
to plan the Downtown campuses. Every summer, if you notice when
you come back in the fall semester, there are often lots of renovated classrooms.
We're involved in those too. We work very closely with the colleges to identify
which rooms need to be renovated and how to go about doing that, and then
what they look like afterwards. We do design. We do installation. We do support.
While we don't support all classrooms on campus, it seems that more and more
are added to our list every semester, so if we're not the ones who are
responding to your classroom, I would end that with a yet. We will eventually
be there, at least that seems to be the way things are going. Our focus has
always been that you are the ones who are using the equipment in the classroom,
and it's really important that it is usable for you, and that as you go
from building to building, room to room, even campus to campus, you don't have
to figure out all over again how these things work. You know you're going
to have a document camera, you know there's going to be a touch family,
you know there's going to be all of these other things in there. We consider that
transparency. The more you have to think about how to teach in a room, the less
well we've done our job. We know it's not perfect, but we worked really hard
to make it as consistent as possible. If we could go through and renovate
every single classroom all at once, we would be in a perfect system.
Unfortunately, we don't. So, as we come out with new ones, we try to iterate,
we try to improve upon previous designs, and we're always looking for feedback
from all of you on how to make those better.
We work with a lot of different people, both on campus and off.
Just a few examples, we sit, most years, on the Tech Fee Review Committee,
As the tech fee proposals are getting submitted, we have an opportunity to
look at those. We help people write them, create them, and we also help to review
them too. We work closely with a lot of national groups. I'm actually
the treasurer for the Consortium of College and University Media Centers,
which is a group of folks like us and like librarians across the country.
We've actually started partnering with folks in the UK and Australia now on
making the AV audio video experience in classrooms, media centers, and libraries
in campuses across the world as good as we can. We work closely with InfoComm,
if you're familiar with that. Most probably aren't, but it comes to
Orlando every other year. It is a big audio video circus, but essentially,
they take up the entire, or most of the Orange County Convention Center,
with all kinds of new projectors and displays, and multimedia systems,
and interaction systems, and all these other things. We're closely associated
with them too. Basically, we work with as many people as possible to make
the experience for you and your students, whether it's in the classroom or in the
research area, or even in just general meeting spaces, as good as possible.
Part of that responsibility is making sure that you feel supported and have
the support that you need in classrooms across campus, and that part of the
responsibility actually falls under Todd McMahon, our assistant director.
I'm going to turn this over to him and let him talk a little bit about
what he and his team do to help you in those spaces.
(Todd) Hi, everybody. Like Donny said, my name's Todd, and I've been working
with faculty pretty closely in their classroom and doing digital stuff
for over 25 years. So, I do bring, I hope, an appreciation for what
you do and try not to overemphasize the technology, really looking at what
can we do to help you. In the classroom, we try to make sure that all of the
classrooms that you go into are functioning properly when you
get there. Not that you get there and you go, "Oh my goodness, something's not
working." We check every classroom, every morning, to make sure it works.
If something does go wrong, we try to get there as quickly as we possibly can,
make sure that you're up and running and don't have too much down time.
Things happen with technology, a plug comes unplugged. Somebody moves
something and it gets unplugged, we need to come back and plug
it back in because somehow it fell behind the console.
We will do our best to make sure that everything is working properly in that
classroom. We have a Faculty Multimedia Center, how many of you have heard
of the Faculty Multimedia Center?
Alright, good.
If you haven't heard about it, please look it up, please come see us.
We have a classroom set up in there so that if you want to come in and
just kind of get used to the equipment that's going to be in your classroom.
You can come in at the Faculty Multimedia Center at any time, most of the time,
try it and just use it. We'll train you on anything that is in the classroom
or anything that you might want us to try. You let us know, "Hey, I'm looking at using
this technology or this idea." If there's any way we can
bring that into the Faculty Multimedia Center, we will so that we can help
you get up to speed on whatever it is you're trying to do in your classroom.
We also do event support. Sometimes, you might be bringing in some event
kind of thing for your classroom, or even an additional thing.
We do event support as well, just so that you're aware of that.
It's something as simple as we got somebody doing a presentation over
Skype in your classroom, and you need some help making sure how to do that,
we'll help you with that area as well. We go all the way up to multi-camera
live events for anything that you might be working on.
The Faculty Multimedia Center, that's the main thing I want to talk to you about.
It's in Classroom Building 1, and it's on the second floor, and that's where all
of our offices are located, and this is, of course, the Faculty Multimedia Center.
There's a website on our OIR page that's dedicated simply to the Faculty Multimedia
Center. If you just go to oir.ucf.edu and you go to the Faculty Multimedia Center
pull-down menu, you'll get to it.
In the pull-down menu, the Faculty Multimedia Center resources.
We also have a reservation calendar, so if you want to see any of the
offerings that we have in the FMC, you can click on that, it brings up
the calendar, and you can quickly and easily see if there's availability.
Most of the time, things are available. You can stop by if you're in the area.
It's a large campus, the likelihood of you just happening to be in the area might
be slim, but if you are in Classroom Building 1 and you want to swing by,
most likely, we'll have some availability.
For the Faculty Multimedia Center resources, we've got transferring
of any of the contents that you have into the digital form that you might
want to use in your classroom. We can digitize documents and images that you
might have. One of the things that's almost surprising, that somebody
is really interested in this, is a high speed scanner.
(Narrator) Hello and welcome to the Faculty Multimedia Center.
Here's another one of the tools that we offer, a Kodak high-speed
document scanner.
(Todd) So, what I want to just make a comment here on is how quickly
this will scan in documents. It does it very quickly
and turns it into a PDF file, searchable.
Two-sided.
(Narrator) This unit can not only save you space but make your material of much
more use with searchable content and the ability to reorganize in digital fashion.
When the unit is finished scanning your material, the pages are all presented
within a single Adobe PDF document.
(Todd) So, that's the high speed scanner. There's one thing that you can get in
there. We also have some PCs that are available if you're in the area
and you want to use a PC just to check your email or do something,
that's fine as well. We have what is kind of an audio booth,
I want to call it.
It has Camtasia on it. You can do a voice over for your PowerPoint if you want,
but there's more to it than that, and this is Camtasia.
One of the items that we can also show you. Anybody familiar with Camtasia?
If you want any kind of power user help, come on in, we'll sit with you
and we'll show you what you can do, but there's also very easy things that
you can do as well. And if you want to, you can come and use it in our facility,
or you can kind of learn about it and then use it on your own if you want.
The idea about the Faculty Multimedia Center is that you can come in with
your content, with your knowledge, with what you want to teach your
students, and we'll be there to assist you. We're not going to be there to do
it for you. We want to assist you, but you've got the agency of your
content. You can do what you want to do with it, you can do your voice-over,
you can do the screen capture, or you can simply do the voice-over.
So, that's the audio captioning area.
(Narrator) If you just like to keep it simple, Camtasia does that easily,
allowing you to record the desktop and export to an MP4 video perfect
for Webcourses or YouTube.
(Todd) So, if you get that file, you can put it right into your Webcourses class.
I'm assuming you've done a few things in here from that.
The thing that I'd like to point out most deliberately is our lightboard.
The new thing we've come up with. People seem to like it. One of our
stars is here, Barbara, right there.
The lightboard is a unique way of doing little lecturettes, as we call them.
You've got a piece of glass, you've got a camera pointing at it, and you've got
a neon dry erase marker. You can write right on the glass and it gets digitally
flipped. So, although you're writing, you don't have to write backwards.
You can just write normally, and it'll be digitally flipped.
Now, in this instance, what you're seeing is a PowerPoint presentation actually
being projected up onto a panel by the glass, but you can still write
behind it as well, so it's actually seen through the PowerPoint presentation.
You're not going to be coming in and doing a 30-minute lecture
with this. You've got that much space, that's it. You use that space up, you're
done. Now, how do you use this? You can see how it's kind of a unique
way of presenting it, and students, when they get something like that,
they're going to be paying attention. I know sometimes the whizzbang
is like, "Oh gee, what's that all about?" You can see that it's a pretty cool idea.
but how to use it is important to you, and it's really, really easy.
You come on in to our environment. You simply bring your little jump drive,
thumb drive, whatever you want to call that little thing, the USB memory stick,
and you just plug it in.
(Narrator) You bring it over and insert it into the slot. The entire system
comes alive. You're almost set to go. Take a microphone, put that on,
and then simply hit the button.
(Todd) You hit the button and it's going to record this video clip of you on the
other side of the glass. Now, you can either use the glass or not.
You might just want to give a brief little update for your Webcourses.
You've realized, "Oh, they didn't quite get this one concept. I want to talk
to them a little bit about it." You can just go in and do it.
You push the button, hit start, and it records it. You talk for your little five
minutes of whatever you want to say, you push the button, it writes it to that
little thumb drive, you unplug that thumb drive, everything turns off and you leave.
It's as simple as that.
Yes?
No.
I will get to that in a moment.
What happens then is if you want to use the lightboard, you plug it in,
everything turns on, push the button, you write on the lightboard, do your
presentation and you push the button. If you want to do another segment,
wipe off the lightboard, push the button again, start up, and do another one.
You can do that as many times as you want. When you're done, all those clips are on
that jump drive. You just pull it out, everything turns off, and you leave.
You can put it directly into your Canvas course. You can go to
another spot in our multimedia center and do some video editing
if you're interested in doing that. You can actually plug it into our
video editing system and edit it more if you want to. You might want to
intersperse some of your PowerPoint slides in the presentation on the lightboard.
There might be any number of things that you want to do to elaborate on
that little segment that you did there.
(Don) And that's also where you can add the captioning.
(Todd) To encourage the captioning and scripting and make sure that you are
prepared to come in. That doesn't mean you have to be prepared
because sometimes, you can do things after the fact.
The idea is we've got these resources for you to help you create what you
need to create in your Webcourses online. You might want to share it in your
classroom. However you want to do it, we're there to help you get that stuff
into the digital form, get it into your Webcourses.
(Don) I got a few things to add if you finished?
(Todd) Yeah.
(Don) Okay. Just to build a little bit on that, like Todd said, there's not a lot
of pre-planning you have to do before you come in, but the more pre-planning you do,
the better it will go. So, let me give you an example of an instance where you
may not have had a chance to do a pre-planning but you still want
to get in there. You walk out of class after having a conversation with
a student and you realize there's a concept they are just not getting,
and you know the people who were not there in class are going to need that
information too, come immediately over here, knock it out, and then
we can caption it and get it online. With the stuff that you just went
over there in class, we can get it out pretty quickly. That's what we mean
by you don't have to come prepared, but when these things hit you,
come on over, we'll knock it out, especially if you're walking right
out of a classroom in the Classroom 1 Building. Like we said, we've got all
the resources there to help you with this. When it comes to captioning,
we do strongly urge you to walk out of there with captioned material.
If you walk in with a script, as I'm sure you've heard, it's a lot easier to do that.
And to be perfectly honest, we are seeing the folks on TV with the news and all
of that. The captioning is their script because it's incredibly expensive
to caption freeform conversations, like incredibly expensive. There's satellites
involved and everything else, that's how they do it on live TV.
That's why they're very, very strict on keeping to your scripts.
It's been like that for as long as I've worked on television.
In fact, when I was just out of college and working at my first TV station
I'll give you a little example but I'm not giving any names because you wouldn't
know them anyway, but there was a point where, this was more than 20 years ago,
there was a point where people were still trying to figure out how the captioning
was going to work, especially when it came to ADA and everything else, and as
TV stations were trying to sort this out, there were lots of people watching,
whether they needed to or not. The station I worked for had
a gentleman in the viewing area who believed that the captioning
was meant to cause him mental distress, that was the entire point
of the captioning. And sometimes, TV people can get a little cynical
and joke around with each other, and when you're writing those
scripts, at least back then, the ones that we used, if you didn't put the
right tag in front of whatever was coming up in the script, it would
go out as captioning. And unfortunately, someone made a joke about the guy
who was suing the TV station and it came back as captioning. So, my point
being the scripts are all important. We've been using them forever,
that's how we've always done captioning. It's incredibly important. It doesn't mean
you can't caption if you don't, but just remember that people are paying attention
to whether you've captioned or not. It's really important that what you
have in the captioning is what you're actually saying on the video.
When it comes to accessibility, something else I'll mention too, especially
in classrooms, there's this idea and we're trying to design around this
where possible, but there's the idea when it comes to microphones,
"Oh, I don't need one, everyone can hear me."
That isn't true. And it's really, really important that you remember that.
One of the things that we try to remind ourselves of is that students nowadays
are coming to us with more and more hearing damage than they have
in years past. The Sony walkman was bad for our ears? The earbuds they've
got now are horrible for our students' ears. Some estimates I've seen,
fifteen to twenty percent of our students come into school, come into the classroom,
with some level of hearing loss that's undiagnosed, and it's getting worse.
Right? And they don't always realize that they've got some hearing loss.
It's going to manifest itself in a number of different ways, one of which is
they think you're mumbling. You're not, they just can't hear you very well,
and if they can't hear you very well, they're not paying any attention to you.
They think it's you when it's really them. So, when you've got the opportunity to use
the microphone, I strongly urge you to use a microphone. When it comes
to accessibility, so that you know, all of our classrooms now, as we do
renovations, as we do upgrades, they are all being reviewed for accessibility
issues. So, we're moving furniture around, we're changing the shape of some of the
rooms, we're doing lots of different things in the classroom to make sure
all of our students have access to the educational materials we're trying to
make available to them, whether online or in the physical space where they are.
That said, there's always things we miss. We know there are things we miss.
We try to at least make sure we're hitting what the law tells us to do, but we really
believe that creating a barrier free environment is the right way to do it.
If you have ideas on how to make our classrooms or our learning spaces
more accessible, please do share with us because we iterate our designs every year
and every improvement we can make helps everyone in the long run.
Now, I know we've got about ten minutes or so left for some questions,
maybe a little bit less than that because we started a little early. What questions
can we answer for any of you folks here in the room?
Yes, sir? If you'll wait just a second so we can capture the question
for the recording.
Oh, sorry. (laughter)
I think several went up at the same time.
(Audience Member) So, when we bring in our transcripts to the lightboard
room, do we bring it on a document, like a Word document, or print it out
ready for you? Or, how does that work?
(Don) If you're going to do the captioning later, you'll want to
have an electronic format for that. In the actual lightboard room,
bring a script in with you, print it out. That way you've got something.
Comes in handy.
(Audience Member) That makes sense. Thank you.
(Don) Yep.
(Audience Member) I take it you have only one lightboard room?
(Don) For now, yes.
(Audience Member) How is it? Do you have to schedule it? You visit, say you finished
your class, then you start as soon as you walk in?
(Don) We've only had it for a few months so it isn't that busy yet.
(Audience Member) Because it's not known.
(Don) Exactly. But if you're familiar with UCF, when you can show there's
a demand for something, then sometimes resources will become available to make
more of them. This was built with a tech fee, and we got the tech fee funding
to build one, and we're already looking at spaces where we can add more to it
because of the demand.
We've got a star over here who's driving a lot of stuff to it, so the more we see it,
the more we know we're going to have to build more.
(Audience Member) One last question.
How much can I put on that board?
(Don) You mean?
(Audience Member) Two minutes, five minutes, one minute?
You said if you fill it, you have to erase it.
(Don) Correct.
(Audience Member) That you stop it then erase it.
(Don) Correct.
(Todd) Like I mentioned, you're not going to come in and do a 30-minute presentation,
probably don't want to do that for a video clip on a website anyway.
It just kind of automatically chunks your lecture so that you're not just talking
and talking, and talking, giving a little break in between each of your ideas.
So, depending on how much you write, you can see you might draw images,
you might write more, you might be doing a PowerPoint presentation.
You can erase it a little bit, but the more you erase it, the more stuff
stays on that glass because it is this kind of greasy neon stuff.
You can erase a little bit and maybe make a correction, or even if you
change your PowerPoint slide, you can erase some of the little
marks you made, bring up the next slide and do a couple more little
marks, but eventually, it needs to be cleaned really good. We do that,
you don't need to do that. Once you're done, you pull your thing
out, you leave. Then later, one of us will go in there and clean it up real well.
So, exactly how long? You're right, could be two minutes, could be
five minutes, but it's probably not going to be much more than five minutes
because you do have a limited amount of space on the glass.
(Don) You're going to work a problem, you're not going to go up there
and work a series of problems, in all likelihood, so just plan for that.
There's something quick, something concrete, something discrete that
you want to cover, that's really the idea here, and one of the things about the
visual that we've tried too in some of the classrooms, if you'll notice, some
of the monitors are on articulating arms, that's to get ready for when everything
goes touch. A lot of those arms or monitors are actually all-in-one
touch computers, so you can start annotating, like drawing over your
PowerPoint or whatever it is you're working for. And this is an old TV trick,
never turn your back to the students. We're trying to get you to always
be facing the students because they're very used to trusting people who never
turned their back to them. Think about it, how often do people turn their back
to you on TV? Even the weather guy, or girl, they do this, and then they
step aside and they do this.
They are trained to never turn their back on the camera because,
it's psychological and it's been around for a long time, you never want to lose
eye contact with the people you're trying to get to trust you. The more
eye contact you make with them, it's subliminal, the more they will
trust and value what it is that you're saying. So, we're trying to design
some of that into the classroom. There are other advantages
we have to the articulating arms, but we're really trying to make sure
you stay engaged with the people that are in front of you, and this
is perfect because you're looking at them the entire time you're writing.
It's kind of like both the benefits of a whiteboard and never having to turn
your back on the students at the same time.
(Audience Member) Alright. There are a few of us here from a satellite campus.
We're the Rosen College all the way across town. So, two part question is
if we need to get some help from you over there, for example, the in-class
video recording of a guest speaker to either stream it or to use it for later,
and then secondarily, for Camtasia, is there any way to do that,
get a license for that where we are, or do we have to drive? So, those
two pieces that could help us out as far as like, do you come to us or could we
make it easier for us to do things where we are?
(Don) We can probably do both. One of the challenges we have
is finding a space to do this well. I think in the case of Rosen in
particular, we can probably work with your library folks to figure something out.
When it comes to the classrooms down there, we'll eventually move
the designs we're doing here down there as well as we do more of the renovations.
One of the advantages we have in the newer computers, the monitors,
the all-in-one, is that there's also a camera and microphone in there.
So, you can actually do Skype from the classroom in most of these cases.
You just swing the monitor around to face it at the students, project the
person up, and you're doing a web conference. You may have to repeat
a question or something like that, but you got that capability now.
We're trying to design the hardware so as the software moves forward,
we can do those sorts of things. You can even record with those
things. We've done that in a number of places too. Is it as high quality
as the cost associated with putting someone with a camera and
a microphone, and all this other stuff in there? Maybe not, but if it's just
to capture the content for reinforcement later, do you really need all of that?
Those are the sorts of conversations that we would want to have.
So, my answer to you would be both. There are times when we can
come out to you and there are, I think, opportunities to build some of these
resources closer to you, and that's a conversation we should continue to have.
I will just say again, when I first got here, I worked with the ITD
system and most of the faculty I worked with were regional
campus faculty. I'm very sensitive to not call Rosen a regional campus because
I've had my hand slapped for that a couple of times, but some of the
challenges you face are the same ones that the regional campus
faculty face. I just want to say that we're sensitive to that, and we're
always looking for ways to help with that.
(Todd) Your question about Camtasia. I would want to address that for you
to get assistance and real help from us in OIR, it'd be much more
complicated trying to get you to do it as where got all of this technology in
this one space and getting you to come in and get up to speed on it, and then,
your department or college wants to purchase and own Camtasia
in that area, and you'd be able to transfer that, that you learned
in the FMC to that space. That's also not to say we couldn't do a Skype
training, so to speak. There's all kinds of options. We're hoping
that whatever we can do to support owning that particular item.
We own it in the FMC. If you want to have it on your own laptop,
then you might have to buy it.
(Audience Member) Thank you. I was curious about something you said,
Todd, early on in your presentation. Did you say that you exist to make
the classroom less technology dependent, to make the instructor or professor more
able to work without technology? Did I understand that correctly?
(Todd) It's not that I want you to work with less technology, I don't want the
technology to drive you. I want the technology to be what you want
to do with that technology in the classroom.
So, if you don't want to use the dock camera, then, do you have to? No.
You might have another idea, a better way of presenting your content to your
students and if it's a technology that you think might benefit others, let me know
in the FMC and we might be able to integrate that into our classroom that
we have there, and it might be something we can scale to all the classes.
We want to get your feedback, what's working, what's not working?
If you never use a dock camera, why would we want to put
a dock camera in the front.
Lots of people use them, so it's pretty fair for us to put them in there,
but there might be a time where that's a technology you don't want
to use, we're not going to push it.
(Don) Our challenge, and there's a much longer conversation to have
here, is that anyone can get scheduled in any classroom at UCF.
So, all classrooms have to be designed for the most demanding situation,
within reason, and our problem is sometimes cost. There are, as someone
who came from digital media, where image quality, color, and contrast,
all these things, get really important. It's very expensive to put those kinds
of projectors and environments in every single classroom, so there
are places. Our challenge is finding out when there's a very specialized request,
a very specialized need from a program, how can we identify the right spaces
to get scheduled by that program to use that equipment in the way that they
need to without spending an extra sixty-thousand dollars on a projector in
every single classroom. Right? So, our challenge is making sure everyone has at
least the base need, and then identifying those spaces where there are additional
needs and adding that stuff to it. The BAB132 is actually designed
to meet both a lecture need and a very specific film need.
That's just one example. We've got some places over in HPA to work
with the variety of the health programs over there. So, we do that, but like Todd
was saying, we don't put it in the room and expect you to have to use
everything we put in the room, but if we put it in the room, chances are someone
is going to end up using it at some time during the day, and that's why it's there.
(Wendy) We're almost out of time. I did see two hands go up so I think
we can squeeze in two last quick questions.
(Audience Member) Camtasia.
I ended up preparing 29 five minutes or so videos this semester. I had to buy
my own. Is there any chance that you guys with some of the fees that you mentioned
can buy a university site license? There's about ten or fifteen that's due.
(Don) We don't get that money. The tech fee money is distributed
by a proposal.
(Audience Member) Okay, the issue is not the money, the issue is the site license
for UCF. That's a software that should be available for teaching.
(Don) That is a complicated question. The answer I can give you now is that
that's one of the reasons why we have these things in our space, it's because
that's what I have the resources to provide right now. When it comes to site licenses,
it gets a little more complicated and that's kind of a longer conversation.
Because UCF is big, let's just say that makes site license conversations and
costs associated with that with some of these vendors really difficult to have,
to the point where is it worth spending six hundred, thousand dollars on a license
that only a few people on campus are going to use if you have to get a site license.
I'm not making that number up, that's an example of some of the
conversations we've had. They see sixty-six thousand students, and they
immediately start adding zeroes to whatever conversation it is that we're
having. So, where possible, where we know a lot of people are going to use it,
that's why we bring those things into the FMC, and the more it gets used
there, then the more data we have to share with the folks who make
some of these decisions on where we should be concentrating our
resources for site licenses for more folks.
Yep?
Not now. (laughter) Sorry.
(Audience Member) Hello, Don and Todd. You said something earlier that kind of
struck me. That when, as an instructor, you turn your back on the student.
Many of us do that and one, has there been any kind of research done
on a sort of campus level to see whether that effect exists?
That's one. The other one is if, for instance, there is evidence out there,
in particular, evidence that that's actually the case, is the office willing
to sort of push that technology to the classroom, or could you perhaps create
some classrooms with that kind of technology so that lecturers that
want to improve on their teaching and engagement with the students can
kind of use those classrooms? Thank you.
(Don) No problem. We are actually, if you've not heard yet, the university
is moving towards an active learning initiative in all of our classrooms here
on campus, and in fact, we've already got one that we're experimenting
with over in the College of Business. We have the plans done and will
be moving forward on another active learning classroom in the classroom
building in conjunction with the faculty center. It's actually going
to be their room and we're just helping to manage it. The idea behind that room
and some of the designs we're taking in other places is to get rid of the
instructor console entirely, and instead, we'll be moving to a much more wireless
infrastructure with a laptop or whatever so that you won't have to connect to
a device. There will still be connections. We know we're going to need those
for a while. But the idea is you can put your laptop or whatever on a movable
podium or stand in the room and go where ever you want to, in the middle
of the room, in the front of the room, you decide what the front of the
room is, move it where ever you want to, move it throughout the class,
to get rid of this idea that there is a front of the room and that there's
privileging the idea of lecture in the first place. I know there are still
going to be instances when you have to lecture, when it's appropriate for
the content that you're trying to deliver, but our next generation of classrooms
will remove that assumption built into the room first and foremost.
So, to answer that part of your question, yes.
The second is more a question of engagement. Again, my background
comes from broadcasting, from video journalism, those sorts of things.
There have been some things done in the classroom, but we've not done
anything specific here at UCF, at least not that I'm aware of.
But our sandbox classroom, which is what we're calling the room we're
putting over in the classroom building, is meant to be a research room, both for
teaching and learning practices, and frankly, for some of these questions
of technology that we have to support. We want a place where we can put
technology in the room, test it out, and see, number one, can we make
it work in our environment because not everything works in a classroom.
We have literally melted equipment in rooms when we put them through
the paces of what UCF classrooms do. We've literally seen the plastic start
to melt on these things. So, it's important to us to make sure that
it won't when we put it in the classroom. But two, we actually
want to see if you're going to use it because one of the things we get
is that I've got to have this, I've got to have this.
We put it in a classroom, it gets used two times. So, I need some
actual numbers on which devices do get used, which don't, and that way,
we can make better decisions on what goes into the classroom and can use less of our
money on these things, and more on things that are more important to more people.