Caroline Bruzelius and faculty colleagues Mark Olson, Rachael Brady, Raquel Salvatella de Prada, and Sheila Dillon have developed a new gateway course, “Wired!”, that will integrate new technologies into the teaching of historical disciplines to prepare advanced undergraduates and graduate students to actively engage with and create new media in their scholarly work.  Students in the course will collaborate with faculty at Duke in Computer Science, Engineering and historical disciplines, as well as staff at the Nasher Museum and partners at an archaeological site in Italy to create projects that integrate scholarly research with multimedia documentation and presentation of their work.  The course will be taught for the first time in Spring 2009, with plans to make the course a regular part of the Visual Studies curriculum.

As part of the Strategic Initiative grants program, the Center for Instructional Technology is providing funding to purchase licenses for Strata Foto 3d software for use in the course.  In addition, the CIT is loaning the instructors a professional level SLR digital camera for the class.

Project start date:  1/12/2009

Funding awarded: $1,826

Project Description

For Brenda Neece’s course on Musicology, a requirement of all incoming PhD candidates in the Music Department, Neece and her students experimented with the use of small form factor Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPCs) for field research. Neece, during her own research, used a handheld Psion in her work to take notes, dictation, keep track of sources and even make sketches as she travelled in many locations researching musical instruments. With this project, Neece introduced the students to new methods of integrating technology with field research.

The UMPC is a new form factor computer – essentially a small tablet PC – giving the students access to a full Windows Vista computer in a small package. The project allowed the CIT to gain an understanding of ways that students and faculty might use this novel new portable computer.

The CIT loaned Neece and her two students Sony UMPCs during the Fall semester. The UMPCs have a stylus and could be used much like a tablet to create quick sketches and music notation. The computer includes a built-in webcam and digital still/video camera, as well as wireless capabilities, built-in microphone and other features. The computers were pre-loaded with productivity software, such as MS Office, and Endnote for creating and using citations. The Music Department provided licenses for the music notation software Sibelius for use on the computers during the project.

Neece and her students used the UMPC’s for common tasks, such as web browsing and editing of Word documents, but focused primarily on using the devices for research.  They used library electronic resources using WiFi access, made notes using the writing input-based Windows Journal, created and edited short musical examples with the stylus in Sibelius, and used the built-in camera to take quick images of sheet music or instruments for reference.

Despite some technical problems due to the emerging nature of the UMPC platform, the reaction was positive.  “It is fantastic to have the power of a full computer in one’s pocket,” Neece said at the end of the project.  “This is exactly what I would have loved to have had when I did all of my fieldwork and library research for my doctorate instead of my little Psion.”

Project Started: 8/30/2007
Funding: $5,400

Project Description

The major goal of the project was to develop an immersive 3D virtual model to teach students chemical oxidation using a context that is relevant to students—alcohol metabolism. The model, developed for the DiVE, shows how alcohol is oxidized by 2 forms of the same liver enzyme, ADH. One form increases the risk of alcoholism, and another form decreases the risk. To carry out the project, 5 undergraduate students of different majors took Pharmacology 197/198 (Independent Study in Science Education). Working together the students developed the molecular models of alcohol and the enzymes according to their published structures, and built an interactive virtual reality experience, in the form of several games. The complete program takes about 35 minutes, and is also available in a web-based form. A separate group of students developed a tutorial for use by teachers interested in using the program in their chemistry classes.

Three different assessments were carried out during the funding period to assess content knowledge learned and student attitudes about the program. The first two provided formative data, and the third was a pilot study for a major grant. The first assessment targeted high school students, who demonstrated a significant increase in knowledge of chemical oxidation after viewing a preliminary version of the program in the DiVE. The second assessment, carried out in a Duke Pharmacology course (Pharm 150) during Fall 2008, showed that the interactive component of the program did not improve knowledge of oxidation compared to a non-interactive version. The small sample size (n=22) may have prevented detection of any significant differences. The third assessment was carried out in an accelerated intro chemistry course at Duke (Chem 23L) during the Spring 2009. ([The assessment was carried out as a senior thesis project by a Duke chemistry student (Dave McMullen)]. In this pilot study, students (n=121) were randomized into 3 groups to learn about alcohol oxidation; 1) a typical paper handout, 2) the DiVE program, and 3) a web-based version of the DiVE program (non-immersive), in the Duke LINK classrooms. Several outcomes were measured. There was no difference in the knowledge about oxidation among the 3 groups. It is possible that the immediate assessment (within 15 minutes of the intervention), or the single short exposure, did not allow the students to consolidate knowledge. However, the students in the DiVE group
expressed a greater interest in the content compared to the other groups, and they thought that they had a better understanding of oxidation (even though they did not demonstrate this). The pilot data will be used to write a major grant to carry out a more thorough assessment of the impact of the program on learning.

A summary of the program was presented at the IEEE Virtual Reality meeting in March, 2009 (abstract), and in January 2009 at the Visualization Friday Forum at Duke.   Finally, the webbased program will be made available to the public at http://www.rise.duke.edu/dive-adh (currently password-protected) and it will be submitted in September 2009 to the NSF-Science Visualization Challenge competition.

photo credit:  Les Todd

Project start date: 5/4/2007
Funding awarded: $ 6,500

Additional information:

Duke University Visualization Technology Group

RISE (Raising Interest in Science Education)

Other projects by Pharmacology 150

Duke Center for Science Education

Description of project in Duke Research Blog

Instead of assigning a final paper in his Organizations and Global Competitiveness course, Duke Professor Gary Gereffi has teams of students develop Web sites that analyze global industries. In a 2001 paper on Teaching Website Design in Business Classes, Gereffi explained the assignment’s goals: “integrate theory and empirical research … create, analyze and present information for a general audience (and) develop teamwork skills.” When he first gave the assignment in 2000, he never dreamed these projects might influence international policy. But they have.

Yerbol Orynbayev, a native of Kazakhstan, was a Public Policy graduate student at Duke in 2002 when he took Gereffi’s course and helped create the Vegetable Oil Industry Web site pictured below as part of an online report for Professor Gary Gereffi’s Organizations and Global Competitiveness course.

Orynbayev was so impressed with the course, that when he returned to Kazakhstan and became the country’s deputy minister for economy and budget planning, he asked Gereffi to travel to Kazakhstan during his sabbatical to help implement the country’s new economic strategy. Gereffi agreed and, as part of that work, taught a short course on industry analysis to Kazakh businessmen and government officials.

At the end of that course, the participants turned in PowerPoint presentations (similar to the Duke students’ Web sites) that analyzed various industries in Kazakhstan and proposed economic development plans. Below are two examples: Electric Power in the Oil and Gas Sector of Kazakhstan and Pipe Line Value Chain & Pipe Market Analysis.

“[Gereffi’s] class offers practical tools and instruments to use the value chain concept for real-life industry analysis,” says Orynbayev, now the CEO of the Center for Marketing and Analytical Research in Kazakhstan. “The Web site assignment is a salient example of such an instrument.”

Challenging students to create a Web site with up-to-date industry analysis “gets them into this research mode,” Gereffi says. “You’re not just absorbing material that the instructor is giving you, but you’re creating resources that can actually be useful to people.”

Support for Gereffi’s global industry Web site assignment came from Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) and a GE Foundation grant. For more examples of technology being used in the classroom at Duke, see CIT’s project examples.

Project Description

As part of the CIT’s Spring 2006 Fellows program designed for faculty teaching large classes, Dr. Elizabeth Hill wished to find solutions on how to keep approximately 50 students with hugely varying backgrounds engaged in a course that requires understanding and applying concepts that are often new to them and can be quite complex.

In the program, Hill and the other Fellows were introduced to a wide range of methods to enhance student learning and engagement in large courses including new approaches to lectures and effective use of student feedback and groups. She tried to encourage and monitor attendance, promote active class participation in a classroom where students have full wireless access to the internet, and encourage group work and independent learning. The particular technologies she used were:

• Students were provided the link to SmartDraw: Students are required to develop timelines for their projects, and this free download gave them the opportunity to experiment with electronic versions of timelines, charts, and graphs.

• As students are required to do several group projects, she set each group up with a discussion board in Blackboard, so they could communicate and send information back and forth via Blackboard. They were also set up to use virtual classroom.

• As their final project, students will be required to do a PowerPoint presentation of their proposed health care program.

Project start date: 1/2006
Funding awarded: $1,250

Additional Information

Dr. Hill’s poster for the CIT showcase 2007