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[no dialogue].
The university's accreditation is an example or a testimony
to its quality and excellence.
And that is a critical aspect for every student that attends
Eastern Illinois University.
Because when they come here we're able to show through our
accreditation that we meet standards of excellence as
testified by or as verified by the North Central Association.
We wanted to insure that we could have the broadest
participation in the survey so that students and faculty could
give us feedback on how Eastern is meeting the criteria.
Within about 48 hours of our request to create a web-based
survey, Danny Harvey was put in charge of the project.
And he came up with several different templates for
the survey and allowed all of us who were on the
steering committee to pilot it and participate in it so that
we could see how it was working and if it was meeting
our needs in specific ways.
As a result of CATS' work and the web-based survey,
we had the largest participation of students and faculty
in this process in our history.
And we're really delighted about that because when the
site reviewers are here we'll be able to show how many
students participated and be able to verify that
our students were aware of the accreditation and had
opportunities to participate in the process.
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I'm excited to talk about how CATS has helped the Counseling
and Student Development Department.
They've helped us specifically in three ways.
First, they've helped us with the grant, and we utilized that
grant to redesign the program and utilize technology
throughout our teaching.
And I think this was instrumental in helping the
department move forward in integrating technology
throughout the program.
Second, CATS has helped us individually by putting some of
our courses on the internet.
They not only did the kinds of things you would expect moving
content to the web, but they also surprisingly helped me
think a lot about pedagogy and learning theory and how teaching
over the internet is different.
And I thought we were able specifically in my course to
utilize the best of what the internet has to offer.
Lastly, CATS has helped us redesign our web page
utilizing flash technology.
And I was glad to see that they're willing to try something
new and not only help me with the project but stay with me
until I'm satisfied.
I think it's really important that students get access to and
see modeled for them the use of technology in the classroom.
CATS provides the training and resources for our
faculty to do just that.
And in working with accreditation bodies, I know
that they are very interested that our students are well
trained in technology and can utilize it in professional life.
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I take students over to Belgium to work on the excavation of a
castle, and at the same time they get an introduction to what
archeology is as a crossroad discipline between the
sciences and the humanities.
I have a lot of slides and photos as well as the graphics
that we create every year when we excavate.
We talked about how we could translate this into a
document we could use.
I borrowed a video camera from Media Services and took it over
the next summer.
And one of the young women here who went on the project trained
to use that, so we added live video footage to our
collection of materials.
And that, too, got incorporated into the product
that we have so far.
We saw that we could do a number of things to help recruitment
for the project and also to help people in the university
community and beyond it understand what we're doing and
the significance and so forth.
I'm certainly learning a lot from my collaboration with CATS,
and it's a work in progress.
And I look forward to the next phases of this work.
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Our project is to teach an MBA class with
students in two locations.
We have a program at Parkland, and in order to be able to
accommodate the Parkland students at the same time as
we accommodate our campus students here, we either
have to have teachers in both places or use this technology.
And so we've been trying to pilot this technology for the
last semester, and this semester we're making it work a little
better with some improvements in the network and the equipment.
The problem is with the number of students we have up there
it doesn't justify sending a faculty member up there
every semester, and it's really difficult for them
to come down here.
So with the distance learning technology that CATS was
starting to acquire, we approached CATS as to whether
they could help us possiblly solve this problem that we had
putting a teacher in two places at the same time.
And so they started to pursue that project with us, which
turned into a pilot project last spring.
This semester we are running it with two of our MBA classes
and have students at both locations and it's
working out quite well so far.
We envision that our MBA program at Parkland at some point in
time those students may be able to take all of their courses
using this technology, which would give them a much greater
selection of courses and not take them as long to finish
the program because of the currently limited number
of courses we can teach at any given time up at Parkland.
So CATS has provided the level of support that we didn't have
previously directly for faculty, wide availability of training
materials and help and other assistance that they can get.
And I feel like this is really the first step toward empowering
faculty to use whatever technologies they might feel
would benefit them the most in their classroom.
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I offered a senior seminar in 1980, the first senior seminar
on the campus, [unclear audio] course for our majors,
all our EIU majors.
And the title says "Spaceship Earth: The Present State".
And you have to cover the current state of the planet
Earth, the potential, the limitation, and the growing of
all aspects of population, polution, everything else.
So I have to bring the latest data, there's no textbook.
I have a lot of graphs, a lot of color pictures, a lot of data,
complicated charts, and students cannot take notes, how are you
going to help me.
Well, there's two ways we could help.
One, to put all those on the web.
And then we had trouble accessing the web when students
tried to access it from home.
Well, we could put all those on a CD, and you provide the CD for
the students in the class.
Now I'm able to bring very effective instructional
technology to the classroom.
The grades of the students in my senior seminar
have improved significantly.
I have an easier time, I'm not worried about it.
For every area there is someone there to help us.
It's not limited, it's not narrow in scope or narrow in
services, and sometimes if someone has to get help,
they get it, not I.
Technology is a powerful tool for instruction.
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Freshman year through graduate school, we need to
systematically check that key knowledge and skills that we
think speech pathologists should possess at the end of their
program are being acquired throughout their program.
So we have a large variety of people meeting to assess those
skills over a large period of time.
We worked on trying to develop a database ourselves.
We tried avenues such as Excel, SPSS.
And we couldn't come up with a way to have so many raters'
input and not be looking through huge data bases of where am I
going to put this number at.
There would be issues of accidently deleting data,
putting data in the wrong place, just not being able to find
where you should put it.
After a year or two of trying we decided to contact CATS.
Danny Harvey got involved and worked with us and spent a chunk
of his time developing an Access database that also
works well from the web.
He spent time developing a way for faculty members to be able
to drop down almost like they electronically enter grades
here on campus.
You can drop down to the student, choose a class or an
experience like an internship, and then the items that are
supposed to be assessed out of that class show up, the faculty
give those ratings, they say submit and it shows up in our
database but without faculty having to look through large
spreadsheets and stuff.
That's been very helpful.
Students are also getting lots of detailed feedback from that.
So again, not only do they get to be in the class but they'll
get a printout every year of how faculty members or external site
supervisors saw your skills in these areas, and these are areas
of strength for you, these are areas that might be weaker and
should be worked on.
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Courses that I had taught face-to-face for like 10 years
to convert those to online delivery.
I taught it for three years now online, and it's been really a
good experience.
I've gotten really good support from CATS, good support from the
Graduate School--there's also a graduate course--and also from
Continuing Education, which does most of the administrative work
for the courses, so I couldn't ask for better support.
Also from ITS when I had other problems.
The short history of CATS, it has shown that, I think it's
been successful in that more and more faculty are integrating
technology, more and more courses are going online.
Online-delivered courses can really expand the reach of the
university that otherwise would never happen.
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The project that I came to CATS with was basically to prepare a
palm manual for a workshop that I was going to conduct for the
National Education Computing Conference.
Upon my arrival to CATS I went to Mr. Pete Grant whom I had met
in developing my web page and shared with him that I was
interested in the Palm Project for the National Education
Computing Conference.
He then invited me to go to the Title Room where we met
Ryan Gibson, and they both shared with me how to
utilize a document camera.
And we began taking snapshots or captures of the palm step by
step, how I actually wanted to present, and from there we
developed a really nice palm manual.
Upon the completion of the manual, Ira Yarbrough assisted
in burning the CD's for my participants.
The title of the workshop, which was a three-and-a-half-hour
workshop, was "Reading and Writing to the Handbeat of the
Handheld Technology".
And my participants were teachers, administrators,
technology specialists, reading, Title I specialists who all were
interested in integrating technology in the classroom.
And having the palm manual and providing a step-by-step
approach for the participants was probably one of the best
things I could have done.
And without CATS that wouldn't have been possible.
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I teach an MBA class, it's called Quantitative Modeling,
and we always have two distinct areas we're trying to serve.
We have a Parkland MBA program and an Eastern MBA program.
We always have taught it so that the Eastern MBA's have been
taught one semester and Parkland's the next semester.
Through teleconferencing we were hoping to serve
both audiences at once.
We came to CATS because we realized that in the School of
Business we might not have the technical expertise to pull off
teaching a class effectively through teleconferencing.
Well, the way that the video conferencing equipment is
now set up, they can actually see my image at all times
and allow me to project computer presentations or
use a white board.
The interactivity of the off-site location is nearly as
great as the on-site location.
I get as many questions off-site as I get on-site.
And when I ask questions, I get as many answers off-site
as I get on-site.
So it really does allow a great degree of interactivity between
the professor and the off-site location.
Having video conferencing capabilities really expands your
ability to reach a lot of people.
I can really see this blossoming in the future and it's only
going to be possible through the use of CATS.
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We are a laboratory, we are an exemplary program, and
we must be able to show college students how to
use technology appropriately.
We want them to use technlogy but we want them to use it
in ways that are developmentally appropriate for
children and for families.
In the fall of 2000, I attended the National Association for the
Education of Young Children Annual Conference.
And they had vendor booths set up that we toured as
part of the conference.
They would use technology in a way that I didn't feel was
appropriate or conducive to good relationships with families.
They used web cams, and they had all of these systems set up in
order to basically spy on child care providers.
After talking to Dr. Murphy, we decided it would be
very exciting to put those in our lab and use it as a
parent communication tool or a family communication tool and
use it for families to log on to a site and see their
children in our facility.
And so CATS looked at what we had hardware wise.
And also we had the security issue to be addessed because
this needed to be a password-protected website that
was secure and wasn't available to the general public.
And the software for achieving that goal is something that
we needed halp with.
We needed someone to facilitate that.
We told you what we had, we told you what our needs were and what
our focus was for the families, and you took care of that.
And you did it within our budget which was very important in
finding things that were inexpensive or for free even.
If we want to isolate a particular event, for example,
if we wanted to look at snack time, the initiation of the
snack part of the day over and over and over, we could do that.
It's all there, we just have to save out the part that we want
and then we can discard the rest, but the research
opportunities are there to actually keep files,
video files, over a period of time.
As we moved through this process, again we're not
technology people, and so often as things came up CATS
anticipated what we might need or anticipated even a
pedagogical or research-oriented type of issue that was
very exciting, too.
And the students benefit, the college students benefit,
because they're seeing technology used in a
family-friendly way instead of in an adversarial way.
We literally have everything that we need now.
It's up and running, the students use it, family members
use it, extended family uses it.
We've had nothing but positive reports related to this program.
And of course that's exciting because we've been waiting
a long time to do this.
Every detail was addressed with kindness and respect.
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