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October 10, 1996

1st instructional technology grants begin to produce some results

In April 1995, the Instructional Technology Working Group of the executive committee on academic computing (ECAC) awarded six grants for projects to advance new instructional technology efforts at the University.

Totaling about $100,000, the grants were the first in a series of similar grants. They included a video monitoring and recording system for Pitt's Human Simulation Center, a program to teach legal research skills to law students, and a multimedia technology to teach community assessment to nursing students.

"It's a slow process," said Dave Beratan, a faculty member in the chemistry department and chair of the working group, about the progress of the projects. "It takes longer than you expect to get things to work. Plus, people are doing this on top of their normal teaching and research commitments."

In hopes of speeding up development, Beratan said his group is exploring actions, such as the granting of release time and the hiring of teaching assistants, that the University might take to help faculty members who are awarded grants devote more time to their projects.

"We're just starting to explore options to get support for this kind of activity," said Beratan, "not only in the instructional technology program, but also in the specialized labs program."

Funds for the grants come from the student computer fee, according to Beratan. "It's really important that the students know what they are getting for their money," he added. "And the faculty, too. It's very easy for programs like this to get lost."

Following are the six projects funded by the Instructional Technology Working Group in 1995 and their current status:

* Kevin Ashley, a faculty member in the School of Law, and colleagues were awarded a grant for the field testing and deployment of a Case Argument Tutorial Program called CATO.

Developed by the Learning Research and Development Center, the program is designed to teach first-year law students the basic skills needed to make and respond to arguments that cite cases, and to improve their legal research skills.

"We had an experiment with 30 first-year law students in which the control group was taught by a very accomplished legal writing instructor and an experimental group was taught by the CATO program," Ashley said. "We had a pre-test and a post-test, and we were able to show that both groups improved in their argumentation skills and that there was no statistical difference in improvements between the two groups."

Ashley said he would like to see the program become a regular part of instruction in the law school and that he has applied for two external grants to support the move.

* Dirk Mahling of the School of Information Sciences, working with faculty from theatre arts, history and medicine, was awarded a grant to develop a project for active group learning that transfers problem-based learning programs used in medicine to other disciplines. The goal is to allow students to develop problem-solving skills in an area, rather than simply learning isolated facts.

Mahling said the project was successfully developed and recently attracted about $100,000 in additional funding from the Phillips Co. and A. T. Kearney, the latter one of the top management consulting firms in the world.

"The system is ready for use," Mahling said. "What we have is basically a system that supports distance learning, electronic classroom learning and video conferencing. It ties a whole lot of things together. It's not just another distance learning thing."

According to Mahling, the program allows any teacher to author courseware, what Mahling calls one the great bottlenecks in software education systems.

"Many teachers are unhappy with the courseware that's provided and would like to improve it or write their own," he noted. "This allows them to do so."

Mahling and his colleagues on the project are currently discussing with the Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education (CIDDE) ways to make the program available to the University community.

* A video monitoring and recording system for debriefing and performance appraisal is up and running at the Human Simulation Center, a joint project of Pitt and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) departments of anesthesiology and critical care medicine.

At the time the grant was awarded, UPMC had already purchased a human patient simulator based on sophisticated computer modeling of human physiology and pharmacology.

The ECAC grant was used to purchase videotaping equipment to record human patient simulation sessions with trainees. Taping enables instructors to replay portions of the teaching session for review with students.

According to John Schaefer, a member of UPMC's anesthesiology department involved in the project, a couple hundred medical students have used the systems, over 100 residents and about 50 critical care fellows. The system also has been used for violence awareness demonstrations at area high schools.

"It's worked out fantastic," said Schaefer. "We started out with full scale crisis management courses in anesthesiology for residents. That was a success and at all levels of classes now we've done a repeat course."

The center also has successfully used the system for home-based learning, critical care training, continuing education workshops, training of obstetrics and gynecology residents, and courses for the drug industry.

* Marlin Mickle and a group of colleagues were awarded a grant for a parallel computer to be used by electrical engineering, computer science and telecommunications faculty to demonstrate different, but related concepts.

The grant proposal was for hardware needed to construct a parallel digital computer with the flexibility to configure a number of different hardware architectures and demonstrate principles of hardware, software and networks.

According to Mickle, the hardware was purchased and the system designed and successfully tested. To continue development of the operating system, a proposal for a $29,500 grant has been submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF). A grant proposal for $200,000 also is being prepared for submission to the NSF.

A side benefit of the project has been a master's thesis, "Matrix Transpose Algorithm for the Pitt Parallel Computer" by Jeffrey Freiwald.

Mahling said the project also is being expanded to allow other universities to build their own parallel computers using software from Pitt.

* James Williams, of the School of Information Sciences, and a group of colleagues were awarded a grant to create a simulated town that can be used to teach nursing and public health students how to judge a community's socio-economic standing in relationship to the community's general health.

Faculty in the School of Nursing and the Graduate School of Public Health had been using a gerry-rigged multimedia program that started with a videotaped "windshield survey" or drive-through of a community in the Mon Valley.

During the taped drive-through, students were taught to look at such things as the condition of buildings, number of people hanging out on street corners and so on, then compare the demographics of the community involved to other communities in the United States. The ECAC grant was used to recruit experts from CIDDE to refine the material used in the course and incorporate it into a software package.

"It sort of brings the community into the classroom through a multimedia presentation where you look at things like demographics and some of the geographic features and the way things are distributed throughout the community," said Williams.

At the moment, Williams added, his group is waiting to integrate the outline and refine it based on reviews by CIDDE and curriculum experts.

* Jane Feuer, a faculty member in English and film studies, was awarded a grant to develop an interactive multimedia technology for film and television courses.

The major learning objective of film, television and mass communication courses is to train students to identify the ways in which audiovisual stimuli combine to shape the responses of viewers.

Feuer's project is designed to teach students how to actively manipulate the films and videos used in classes to achieve the results they want instead of simply viewing and discussing what is shown. Feuer is currently on leave out of the country and could not be reached for an update report.

Mike Sajna

Filed under: Feature,Volume 29 Issue 4

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