Project Description

The Hart Leadership Program, directed by Alma Blount, is exploring different methods of assessment for their program.  The goals of this exploration include the following:

•    overall student work (yielded by improved and standardized assessment methods using rubrics and assessment technologies)
•    student engagement (measured by assessment technologies and past student ratings)
•    student and program exposure via eportfolio publishing and public press

Currently, program faculty and staff have chosen to use eportfolios as a means towards creating a standardized programmatic assessment by generating standard rubrics to assess writing samples (reflective pieces and full papers), along with a completed eportfolio presentation (public webpages generated by the students’ work).  The program has decided to use Chalk&Wire’s ePortfolio2 product to meet the aforementioned goals.

Project Started: Dec 2007
Funding: $4300

For an hour the students — Katie Tiedemann, Dana Edelstein and Sarah Weber — observed committee members, a city councilman and staff from the Durham Department of Housing and Community Development stumble through the meeting. The students recorded the conversation on a couple iPod devices equipped with microphone attachments.

“That was the most inefficient meeting I’ve ever been to,” Weber said after the students stepped out of the meeting.

To turn the unfocused hour into a newspaper story, each student researched the stipulations of the development grant, reviewed the notes they took during the meeting and listened to the recordings they made.

In their articles, all three homed in on comments by the same committee member. Weber recounts the scene in her paper: “‘We don’t necessarily have a prescribed goal or mission at this point,’ said committee member Aaron Cain between bites of a grilled cheese sandwich. ‘I’ve been coming since June, and it seems to me that every meeting we have a long discussion about why we’re supposed to be here, and nobody’s really sure.’”

Students in Ken Rogerson’s “Newspaper Journalism” course use their iPods to listen to examples of radio journalism and to record interviews for their own stories. Three students covered a wandering local committee meeting. Listen to a portion of the meeting.

For this “Newspaper Journalism” course, the iPods are “glorified tape recorders,” says instructor Ken Rogerson, Ph.D. But, he says, the iPods are a step up from tape recorders because the iPods allow students to more easily retrieve quotes and store their interviews. The iPods also support another assignment he gives: listening to radio segments, such as a National Public Radio show on interviewing techniques. Rogerson gets permission to distribute the segments through his class Web site. The students can then download the segments and listen to them on their iPods.

Rogerson says about two thirds of the students use their iPods as recorders for the short newspaper stories he assigns each week. Compared with previous classes that didn’t use iPods, he says, “the number of sources and variety of sources [in students’ stories] have increased, and that’s been really nice.”

Listen to a portion of the meeting.



Listen to the Cain’s remark

Project description

Admay participated in a Faculty Fellows group focused on teaching large classes. This fellowship group discussed a number of techniques, described in McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers and Classroom Assessment Techniques.

In the Spring 2006 Fellows program, Catherine Admay introduced multimedia materials and more effective use of Blackboard into two courses, Arts and Human Rights and a Capstone Seminar for professional graduate students. Admay surveyed the students and found that the use of images, sound and video in her course very enriching and challenging and encouraged her students to upload material. Monitoring of discussion board posts displayed a deeper understanding of the subject matter. Admay also explored the use of wikis and surveys in the Blackboard course web site.

Project start date: January 1, 2006
Funding awarded: $1,000