Experiments with Technology in Teaching

Robert M. Thornton, Senior Lecturer in Biology (Emeritus) at UCD

October 27, 2002

I began teaching introductory biology at UCD in 1968, and was successful enough with traditional lectures, labs, and discussions to earn a teaching award in 1974 and another in 1986. From 1968 until I retired in 2001, my professional goal was to find ways to teach that would improve student thinking and problem-solving skills.

I began to experiment with computer media in the early 1980s, when Apple Computer gave UCD enough Mac computers to set up a learning center. Few students had home computers, so my early efforts were limited to the learning center, where I made and offered animated simulations of biological processes, and quizzes with wrong-answer feedback for self-testing.

In 1995, I attended a workshop on instructional technology at UCD’s Teaching Resources Center (TRC). There, I saw that UCD had installed computer projectors in some classrooms, making it possible at last to bring animated simulations to every student during lectures. At once, I began to explore the impact of computers in the lecture hall. For my next offering of introductory plant biology, I used Macromedia Director to replace the customary four lectures per week with computer presentations that included animated simulations. The results were much like PowerPoint presentations, but Director is a more powerful tool for building animations. From then until I retired in 2001, with every offering of the course I refined my computer media and combined it in various ways with traditional chalkboard work. Every summer I helped with the TRC workshop, showing other instructors how to do similar work and sharing my ongoing experiments.

The first offering in 1995 brought a hint of trouble when my son, who had taken my traditional course, attended one of the computer-based classes. He thought the students might lose something of value by not seeing me at the chalkboard. Indeed, while students were impressed with the media, they seemed a little less capable on class tests; and they rated both me and the course significantly lower than in prior traditional offerings.

In six subsequent offerings of the course with varied media/chalkboard mixes, a clear pattern emerged: When media took up no more than 25% of the lecture time, student ratings were as high as (but not higher than) the ratings for offerings with no media at all—and on the two course offerings where media completely replaced chalkboard lectures, the ratings dropped sharply.

Since students clearly valued the media outside the lecture hall, I refined them for easy use at home, and put them on a website and in lab computers for download. By that time (1997) most students had their own computers, and most of them used the media. In 1998, I tried once more to replace all my chalkboard lectures with media presentations, and received the lowest ratings ever. A sampling of student comments about the media helped to see where the problem might lie. Some were simply positive, such as:

Excellent! It made studying enjoyable and interesting. I felt like I was learning something, instead of just memorizing facts.

Media helped because I am a visual learner and it made the material stick better.

But others presented a variety of problems:

Very helpful when used out of class or when used to demonstrate something after it has been worked out on the chalkboard.

I really liked the media. However, I didn’t like it during lecture. Why would I want to waste class time when I can look at it at home?

Excellent as a study tool, but not as a lecture tool. If you write on the board, you go at the same rate as the students who are taking notes.

The message is that media is valuable outside of class, but if the instructor is adept at lecturing and chalkboard work, students may get more from traditional methods than from media sessions in which the instructor is merely the narrator for polished but canned presentations. As my son suggested, students may gain valuable mentoring when they see the instructor at work on the fly—putting thoughts together, making and correcting mistakes, being human. Perhaps the shared humanity encourages students to believe that they could do similar work, and gives them a model of how to put thoughts together. By contrast, a canned presentation shows only the final product with all human flaws removed, and may seem as if it came from genius beyond the student’s grasp. In short, replacement of “live” performances with media may crowd out humanity and thereby decrease mentoring and encourage passive learning.

With that experience in mind, at the workshops I urged instructors to keep media below 25% of the lecture time, interspersed with chalkboard work and student interaction. I urged them to use media only for what it does best: showing images that can’t be drawn on the board because they entail color or motion. Keep text to a minimum in classroom media; it distracts from the images. For text, rely on the printed word. And make all media available to students for home use.

While exploring the use of lecture media, I also expanded the use of computer-based self-testing. Students love it, and in learning centers they will often join in groups to wrestle with difficult problems. In the 1996 TRC workshop, a young chemistry instructor asked me for a Director template that could be used to build self-quizzes with feedback. An undergraduate saw the product and asked if he could help to build a set of self-quizzes for all the topics in the introductory course on cell and molecular biology. Today, the quizzes are available on UCD web sites for use by students in every offering of the course. Based on old midterm exams from many instructors, they provide feedback on wrong answers, and allow students to take repeated tests on the same subject area, drawing random sets of questions from a pool. This is one of the most effective uses of instructional technology. Our present quizzes offer only one level of feedback (one response for each answer choice), but the potential exists for a branching tutorial system linked to quiz questions—a personalized system of instruction.

I also found that email can be a great aid to instruction, greatly expanding interaction between students and instructors. Most students never visit office hours. But nearly all students have computers, and UCD gives each student an email account that is included in the registrar’s class lists. Coupled with UCD’s automated email lists, this makes it easy for the instructor to reach every student with study advice and opportunities for extra learning experiences. As one example, I used email to offer students extra credit for library research projects. Together, the student and I would work out a suitable project by email, and would exchange memos as the project unfolded. Such interaction lessens the isolation that plagues students in big classes, and provides a personalized creative environment for learning that is enjoyable for student and instructor alike.

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