Todd Stabley,   OIT Academic Services

With over 60 classrooms hard-wired for capture on campus, and with multiple streaming, download, and podcasting options available through DukeStream, there are many choices available for instructors and presenters at Duke who wish to capture their classes and events and make them available for later viewing. In this session we will outline a number of these options, focusing on what purposes they serve and why you might want to select one over the other. Additionally, we will look at key enhancements on the horizon for these services as well as related ad-hoc options such as Duke on YouTube that are emerging as technology evolves.

Linda Goodwin, School of Nursing

With federal initiatives pushing health information technologies (HIT) into a reluctant health care system, decision-makers in health care find themselves without research and evidence that defines best practices. A March 2008 PubMed search yielded approximately 150,000 hits; this illustrates a problem for decision makers trying to sift through evidence for HIT results. A problem exists in that it has historically taken about seventeen years for health care to implement research findings into practice. It is imperative that we find more rapid methods of evidence/knowledge development, dissemination, and adoption if we are to leverage HIT to accomplish needed improvements for safety, cost, and quality in patient care. This project involved students in evaluation of four “netbook” products and then provided online nursing informatics graduate students (n=11) with an Asus ee. The devices were supposed to help them critique, summarize, and disseminate available HIT studies and evidence reports. We utilized mobile technologies and remote (virtual) teamwork that enabled both synchronous (Skype.com) and asynchronous (Blackboard) collaboration. Some students are using their netbook, but for mobile productivity purposes rather than the project goals and most students found the device too slow for efficient web access. There are newer Asus netbooks that may be faster.

Evaluation tool

Presentation PDF

Constance Johnson, School of Nursing

We have built a Second Life® infrastructure that allows faculty and students experiential learning and promotes social interaction, in a collaborative environment in our distance education program. It furthermore supports immersion and presence, allowing real-time teaching and discussion. In the School of Nursing, the use of virtual environments for distance education has been piloted for one year. We built a virtual School of Nursing using Second Life as the infrastructure. A Summer theory course was taught using this medium as well as Blackboard and Elluminate (a webinar). A self-administered survey instrument was completed by students following each of the three instructional modalities (Blackboard, Elluminate, and Second Life). The survey instrument included perceptions of learning from a variety of components of the instructional technology, such as pace of class, quality of discussions, integration of technology, and fit between assignments and classroom environment. Significant differences occurred in both overall perceptions of the effect of the instructional modality on individual learning, as well as of the quality of instruction provided to understand the fit between instructional modality and coursework. Student rated experience of Second Life was significantly higher than that of Blackboard for both overall perceptions and quality of instruction (post-hoc Tukey; p<.10). Evaluative feedback from the students suggests that 3D learning environments have the potential to bridge barriers such as isolation, foster interactivity, clarify information, support spontaneous discussions, and facilitate learning experiences.

Presentation PDF