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(Eric Kinser). Sorry for the lengthy
explanation there on my background, but when people see
I have a biology degree they always ask me how did I get into
teaching business and technology, so it's been a long
and winding road but technology was something I could never
really shake in my life.
So, what I want to talk about today is to just kind of give
you guys an overview of how we're doing, what we're
using TurningPoint for at the Kelley School of Business in
Indiana University, how we've implemented some of the
techniques we used and then kind of come back to just giving you
an idea of where we're kind of looking to go, and some of the
comments from the keynote speech this morning
got me kind of fired up.
I'm really excited to hear some of the things come along that
the CO was talking about.
One of the things we do at--Yes?
(female speaker). We are on channel 74.
(Eric). Oh, great.
(female speaker). We are on channel 74 here,
so if [unclear audio] program channel,
it's just go, seven, four, go.
If you have any problems, I can help you.
And there's a remote up there if you want to use it.
(Eric). You know, I tend to pace a lot
and with all the cords up here that's probably not a good idea,
so I'll just stay stationary.
I have a bad habit of bumping into things, anyway.
One of the things I'll talk about is the style of
questioning we use for our students, but we always ask
an ice breaker question so this will be my ice breaker,
being a Hoosier.
Go ahead and click in with which team you think is going
to win the basketball tournament.
If you don't know, just choose IU.
[no dialogue].
Being a Hoosier, I've got to ask a basketball question.
I can't get around it even though I've come
over to Illinois here.
There we go, I like to see that.
I don't think it's going to happen, I don't even know
if we're going to make the tournament, but anyway.
We always ask an icebreaker question, and this just gives
our students a chance to get logged into the session as we
call it to get their clickers registered just like y'all
did--listen to me from southern Indiana--just to give them a
chance to go-seven-four-go, get logged in, gives them a chance
to see that they're being tracked, gives us a chance to
see that our software is actually working, that we've
set everything up correctly.
So this is just kind of one of our more common questions.
And then I'd like to ask you a question about the individual
size of your classrooms.
If you are instructing, are you a classroom of less than 50,
50-100, 100-300, or more than 300.
At Kelley, we range in size from 50-300, depending on
the course we're teaching.
[no dialogue].
Four responses, and we are...very small classrooms,
interesting.
I have a classroom of 30, but it's only because about 30 of
them choose not to show up at 8:00 am, so we actually tend to
have rather large, we use these in very large lectures.
So the two courses I represent today are K201 and X201.
These are two parts of what we call Technology Foundations.
These are introductory level classes that are required for
admission to the School of Business at IU.
So whether you come in as a person aspiring to get into the
School of Business or you come in as a direct admit,
you've got to take these courses and perform with
a C or better grade.
K201 is our bigger freshman course that typically has
between 1500-1700 students a semester, a very large course.
They have six lectures on Fridays from 8:00 am all the way
out till like 3:30 pm and those lectures typically run somewhere
between 100-200 students each.
In K201, in the lab sections, these are divided into
lab and lectures.
They discuss mostly at the fundamental level data base and
spread sheets, so we're teaching students basic business
technical skills, we teach them about data base management and
development, spread sheet usage.
In our lectures we focus on everything from this is a
keyboard, this is a monitor, to data security.
And X201 we take them up to the next level, we have a much
smaller enrollment because not everybody makes it through K201,
so we go down to about 700 students a semester.
We also see a trailing effect.
That number is a little deceiving, K201 is not that bad,
but we do see a little bit of a trailing effect, most of our
students are sophomores, but some people wait up to a year
and a half to two years later to take X201, for whatever reason.
With K201, we get incoming freshman almost absolutely.
With X201, we see sophomores, juniors, and every once in
awhile a person who decides they're going to stay on campus
for about six or seven years.
In X201, we teach spreadsheet modeling and analysis, so we
take the skills they learned in K and we basically bump
them up to the next level.
We like to call ourselves the power users.
So we teach them really sophisticated stuff with
Excel and we teach them to analyze the data that
they get and interpret it.
In the lectures we talk about analyzing technology and how to
use it in business and how to make business decisions with the
technology they are using.
Again, we have labs during the week, lectures on Fridays, and
in the lectures that's where we're using the clickers.
And again, we can go up to 260 students per lecture
so it just really varies.
We cannot do participant lists like we are doing here today.
This is the first time I've actually seen this used because
we have such a varying number of students.
We don't have the support staff to manage participant lists,
so we use the auto setting in TurningPoint to just
collect people as they go.
I'll talk about some of the problems that we've
experienced with that.
As far as implementation goes we implemented this
system in 2005, in the fall of 2005, in K201.
K201 is kind of our model course.
They tend to, anything new they're going to do, we usually
follow after they've kind of broken their teeth on it.
So we waited a year, and X201 we started this last September in
fall 2006 thinking all the students have seen this, this is
great, and it turns out most of our students still hadn't used a
clicker before in X201 because of that lag between when they
take K and then go into X201.
And that brings up an interesting point.
I don't know how many of you I saw, we only had about
four people actually teaching, but just as a word of advice.
One of the things we're doing right now is we're talking to
some other courses in the School of Business about
implementing the system.
It's got a very positive review, my wife is actually heavily
involved in the system as well, and she was just giving some
presentations on Friday, this last Friday, and there are
several courses, one has already committed to building off of
our model and using the clicker system.
We have another very large course that typically handles
juniors and seniors, somewhere in the enrollment about on par
with X201, about several hundred per semester.
They're in discussions about using the system as well.
One of the things we've been talking to them about is when to
implement because we've already trained a good chunk of the
students in the School of Business on using clickers.
So they won't have some of the same problems we have
where people forget to bring them to class, they don't know
how to log in, just some of the user issues that you
have to train the students on.
We've already done that for them, much as when we
implemented in the fall, we had hoped it had already happened.
So one of the things that we're talking about--see, there I go,
tripping on stuff--one of the things that we're talking about
to these other courses is how long do you want to wait to
implement so that the students already know how to use the
clicker and all you have to focus on is developing your own
system and teaching and getting the instructors up to speed.
The students will already know how the system works.
So that's just a point I thought I would put out there
after I saw the large number of people wanting to implement.
Yes?
(female speaker). I hope you don't mind the
interruption, but I have a question.
(Eric). Go ahead.
(female speaker). You said you introduced it
in K201 all at once, so I'm assuming that
involves 10-15 instructors?
(Eric). Actually no, because we're only
using it, we actually have somewhere around 30 instructors
that teach the lab sections.
The lectures, because they're so large, we only have two
different instructors that teach six lectures on Fridays.
So we're only using it in the lecture component right now.
(female speaker). You only need to get buy-in
from two people actually.
(Eric). I'm sorry, could you
repeat that?
(female speaker). You only have to get buy-in
from two people.
(Eric). More or less, yes, absolutely.
(female speaker). [unclear audio].
(Eric). No, they usually teach some
component--actually one of the instructors for K201 teaches
X201 lab, so these two, as far as instructors go, these two
courses are fairly transparent.
But most of our instructors, our full-time faculty, are on-board
with this, they like it.
I've actually been talking to some of the other lab
instructors about moving the system into the lab even though
we have an encore system, a Sakai system, that can do
quizzes and polling in class.
There's interest in getting the clickers anyway because I think
the instructors see the clickers as a more active, really
getting--you know, the students sit there and stare at their PC
so much anyway it's nice to get them to sit back and look up at
what we're doing in the lab.
So we've got buy-in from, we have about 15 full-time
faculty members teaching and almost to a T they're
all invested in this system.
Yes, no, I hate to just stand up here and yammer on,
so bring on the questions.
(male speaker). [unclear audio].
(Eric). No, not right now.
We have unannounced quizzes we use from time to time, but we
don't do any kind of reporting off that to show the class.
We have that system, I actually just found out
about this last week.
We have that availability to us but because the Sakai system
is something that most of us don't like to play around in
on a regular basis, running out of a PowerPoint presentation
like this is much quicker and easier to do.
We would prefer to use the clickers actually.
I'm not trying to knock on Sakai by the way, I mean, it's a
program that does exactly what it's supposed to.
But I think as great as web technology is--and this is
coming from a kind of an alpha geek here--I don't think a lot
of us like to live on the web, so if we have to do quizzes and
tests and things, we don't want to have to do it online
if we can avoid it.