Teaching with Learning Technology in a Small Campus Honors Course: What if Anything Does it Mean for Campus Ed Tech?
Lanny Arvan (Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies and Associate Professor of Economics)
Teaching a small course on campus provides a good opportunity for instructors to test out different ways of using technology in order to enhance the learning experience of their students. According to Lanny Arvan, Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies and Associate Professor of Economics, teaching a small course in Economics 101 for the Campus Honors Program has afforded him the opportunity to align different uses of educational technology with his teaching philosophy. Although constantly evolving, Arvan's teaching philosophy is to create a more unified match between his expectations as a teacher, and the outcomes produced by his students. For Arvan, this entails using real-world examples from economics to tap into students' intrinsic motivation. By using real-world examples, Arvan hopes to make learning more enjoyable for his students, create the basic foundation needed to introduce economic theory to his students, and inculcate in students the desire to continue to learn about economics once the course has ended.
Presentation Summary
Arvan began his presentation by providing an overview of the undergraduate, general education course he is currently teaching, Economics 101. Arvan's course consists of mostly engineering majors, one chemistry major, and one anthropology major. In order to gauge his students' past experiences with technology and with Economics, Arvan begins the semester by distributing surveys to his students (created using Excel) that ask questions about computer use and familiarity with Economics. After compiling the surveys, Lanny posts the results to the course Blogger site, Econ 101 Sp 06 Course Blog. Although creating the surveys individually in Excel is tedious and time-consuming, (Arvan admits that he does not always choose the right technology to use in his classes) Arvan stresses that instructors must test out a wide array of technologies in their classes in order to figure out what works best.
Next, Arvan talked about his teaching philosophy, and refers to book that inspired some of this thoughts on education called Collision Course by Russel K. Durst. The book chronicles the experiences of a Freshman writing course that ultimately failed because the instructors of the course took a highly theoretical approach to the course, while the students took a highly practical approach to the course, resulting in a mismatch of teacher-student expectations. As a result, Durst suggests that both teachers and students need to make a move toward the middle, with the instructors taking the lead to move further toward implementing practical knowledge in their classrooms. Arvan takes this advise to heart in his teaching philosophy, asserting that instructors (when appropriate) should encourage students' intrinsic motivation about real-world and practical issues by engaging students in the material in a more practical, less-theoretical way. Arvan's blog post, Teaching Practical Stuff, outlines in detail his approach to teaching.
In taking a more practical approach to teaching, Arvan does not use textbooks in his course, because most Economics textbooks that he has seen have focused predominately on theory, using examples only to highlight theory. To Arvan, this approach is backwards. Instead, he believes that most students learn from examples that are of intrinsic interest to them, which capture students' attention and allow them to then progress on to learning theory. Jerry Uhl's article, Why (and how) I teach without long lectures, illustrates this approach of teaching from examples to theory.
Arvan then proceeded to discuss the goals for his course, which include giving students the tools necessary to remain life-long learners of Economics. Arvan believes that Economics can be a very powerful metaphor for thinking about society, and for gaining insight as a way to view the world. Many of his students leave his class with a different viewpoint, and in order to continue to affect change in students' thoughts and attitudes, Arvan consciously chooses readings for the course that will inspire students to continue reading after the course is over. He hopes that his class, along with other general education courses, has the impact of life-long reading and learning down the road.
Finally, Arvan concluded by discussing some of the pros and cons of using Excel, Netfiles, and Blogger as the primary means for distributing information to students. He readily admits that compiling surveys in Excel is a great deal of work, and does not recommend that other instructors design their course content in Excel. Moreover, because Arvan used Netfiles and Blogger for both submission and publication of student work, issues of security arise because neither tool uses password protection which means that anyone can see student work. It is through these problems that Arvan realized the benefit of course managements systems like Illinois Compass. For the most part, Compass is a place where most students know where to go to get course materials, most student know how to use the different features of Compass, and all information within Compass is secure and password protected which solves many privacy and copyright issues.
About Lanny Arvan
Lanny Arvan is Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies and an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the mid to late 1990s Arvan moved quickly from teaching with technology to doing administrative work in the area. As the campus regularized its support of educational technologies it was Arvan who led the effort. He directs the CITES support of smart classrooms and their support of online components to enhance instruction. He writes a regular blog on learning technology that attracts an international audience http://guava.cites.uiuc.edu/l-arvan/blog/lannyexport.html .
Arvan's economic research has been in applied economic theory, with a concentration on industrial organization. He has taught courses in theoretical and applied microeconomics from the principles to the advanced graduate theory. While he is currently a full time administrator, he likes to teach undergraduate courses as a way to stay current with the students and to get their views on how best to teach economics and how to use technology in teaching and learning.
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