University Times

A plan to teach legal research skills to first-year law students and a video monitoring and recording system for Pitt's Human Simulation Center were among six computer-based instructional projects recently awarded grants by the Instructional Technology Working Group of the executive committee on academic computing (ECAC).

The grants, which total $100,000, are the first awarded by the ECAC to advance new instructional technology projects within the University. According to Lewis Jacobson, a member of the biology department and chair of the ECAC's Instructional Technology Working Group, the grants are meant to promote the development of future technologies, as opposed to implementing existing technologies.

The grants also must be used to fund specifically approved capital equipment purchases, Jacobson said. Under University rules, the ECAC can only fund capital items, such as computers, software and video equipment.

A call for pre-proposals on projects involving the use of new technology in instruction was put out by the working group last fall. About 20 pre-proposals were submitted and six projects selected out of that total for full proposal development.

"In almost all the cases, those projects represent collaborations of groups of faculty and frequently several schools and frequently departments within schools," said Jacobson.

For example, a grant was awarded for a project involving a joint proposal by theatre arts, history, and library and information science. Other grants also were given for projects involving various engineering departments, computer science and mathematics, and the law school and the Learning Research and Development Center.

The working group set two criteria for serious consideration of projects at both the pre-proposal and proposal stages, according to Jacobson.

"One, we were looking for something very innovative," he explained. "Second, we were looking for something that had the potential to have a large impact on instruction, with the understanding that that large impact might be significantly down the road in time. These are speculative developments in most cases and untried technology." Because it was the first time ECAC undertook such a project, the working group did not know whether the money would go to finance one project or to partially fund several projects. "The six final proposals were so good that we decided to give some money to all of them," Jacobson said.

One surprise revealed by the proposals was the growing interaction of computers and video technologies, a combination that does not have a traditional constituency at Pitt. According to Jacobson, there are groups on campus promoting computer technology and other groups promoting video technology, but none that provides a home for the merger of the two technologies.

"We didn't know what faculty would come up with," he said. "Our job is partly to encourage creativity rather than set a technological agenda. You can't set a technological agenda at an institution this huge." Only one project got everything it wanted in the way of financing, but it was the smallest project and asked for the least amount of money, according to Jacobson. "It was one indivisible hardware/software system that could not be cut down," he added.

Although he does not know how much money might be available in the budget for next year, Jacobson said the ECAC was so pleased with the results of this year's program that it will solicit proposals for new projects in the fall.

"When you are into times of tight budgets, that which does not exist is always the easiest thing to eliminate because it does not have a built-in constituency," he said. "I think that this is an intelligent thing for the University to do. It is investing in the future. It takes a little courage for the University to do that in tight times." The six proposals awarded grants are: * A project for the field testing and deployment of a Case Argument Tutorial Program headed by Kevin Ashley of the law school and developed with the Learning Research and Development Center. The program was designed to teach first-year law students basic skills in making and responding to arguments citing cases and to improve their legal research skills. It will provide students with various tools to analyze problems in light of cases in its database and also to construct legal arguments using information in the database.

* An interactive multimedia technology for film and television courses proposed by Jane Feuer, English and film studies.

The major learning objective of film, television and mass communications courses is to train students to identify the ways in which audio-visual stimuli combine to shape the responses of viewers. The project would allow students in film courses to actively manipulate the films and videos used in classes to achieve the results they wanted instead of simply viewing and discussing what is shown.

* A video monitoring and recording system for debriefing and performance appraisal at the Human Simulation Center. The project is a joint effort of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's (UPMC) anesthesiology and critical care medicine departments and is headed by Rene Gonzalez of anesthesiology.

UPMC recently purchased a human patient simulator based on sophisticated computer modeling of human physiology and pharmacology. Instructors at the Human Simulation Center will use video taping equipment to record human patient simulation sessions with trainees for review. Taping will enable instructors to replay portions of the teaching session for review with the student.

* An project for active group learning that transfers problem-based learning programs used in medicine to theatre arts, history and other disciplines. Dirk Mahling of the School of Library and Information Science developed the project with faculty from theatre arts, history and medicine.

The purpose of the project is to make problem-based learning programs developed in medical education available to students in other academic fields. The goal is to allow students to develop problem-solving skills in their domain, rather than simply learning isolated facts.

*A parallel computer to be used by electrical engineering, computer science and telecommunications to demonstrate different, but related concepts. The project is headed by Marlin Mickle of electrical engineering and was developed with faculty from computer science, mathematics and engineering.

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

* A community assessment simulation initiative to teach nursing students the process of community assessment through a simulation of an actual community. Students will learn the process of community assessment by assessing the simulated community, which frees faculty to spend class time helping students conceptualize the role of community in health and the value of community assessment.

The project was developed by Joyce White of nursing with other faculty from nursing and the School of Library and Information Science.

–Mike Sajna