Technology, Innovation Are Part of Life for GSE Students
By Elena Barbre
A conference table occupies the center of the classroom, surrounded by a ring
of computers and flanked by a large screen. This is not the typical set-up for
a class of education students, but this is not a typical education class.
Students in the instructional design immersion program illustrate their strategies
on the large screen for government or corporate clients, who are either seated
at the table or videoconferencing from their work sites. At the end of the semester,
the clients walk away with a state-of-the-art design prototype and the students
walk away with professional experience and a web-based portfolio that will blow
the competition away.
The Graduate School of Education (GSE) now trains not only traditional K-12
teachers, guidance counselors, and administrators, but also professionals who
want to optimize technology in their corporations, clinics, and classrooms.
The school accomplishes this training in many ways, most visibly through its
instructional technology program, where corporate professionals translate design
ideas into technology-based learning environments, teachers apply technologies
ranging from television to telecommunications to support students' learning, and
therapists use technology to help people with disabilities.
Giving traditional instructional design an innovative twist was what Assistant
Professor Brenda Bannan-Ritland had in mind when she created the curriculum for
the instructional design immersion program. The program, the only one of its kind,
gives students experience working on corporate, military, or grant-sponsored instructional
design projects.
"Other instructional design programs rely primarily on internships to provide
students with practical experience," says Bannan-Ritland, "but they are almost
an add-on, remote from the classroom experience. Ours is a hybrid, incorporating
realistic projects and clients into a full-time academic experience. It's an intense
environment, but the students walk out as seasoned professionals. They learn the
process through the project."
Students keep painstaking records of the design process, from concept through
final presentation, and archive them on a project web site that future classes
can build on, funneling revisions into improved products. They work in teams that
mimic real-world practice, and at the end of the course they are accountable not
only to the professor, but to clients, who provide tuition support in exchange
for their services.
Finished products have included a CD-ROM-based orientation program for the
U.S. Department of Defense, a web-based performance support system for literacy
facilitators who help children with special needs for the U.S. Department of Education,
and an online learning community for the U.S. Forestry Service. Graduates now
manage their own instructional design projects for such employers as America Online,
SAIC, Oracle University, and the Academy for Educational Development.
As more businesses and government agencies take their paper resources online,
the need for the skills offered by these technology-savvy graduates grows. The
need is no less urgent in education, where teachers daily face the challenges
of increasing efficiency and improving the learning process.
Teachers who complete Associate Professor Priscilla Norton's integration of
technology in schools cohort program return to their classrooms as experts on
the use of technology in K-12 education, ready to inject fresh air into the learning
environment. In some cases, they become the technology resource teachers for their
schools. Groups of 24 teachers move through the program together, designing environments
that help students learn about technology and learn how to use it to solve problems.
"This is really a robust, systematic approach to helping teachers think about
using technology," says Norton. "It allows teachers to build bridges between learning
and applying that knowledge in the classroom."
Norton has also created an online certificate program whose new "low-tech,
high-touch" approach allows anyone with a computer to access a scaled-down version
of the cohort program. Online mentors, usually graduates of the cohort program
who are using technology innovatively in their own classrooms, guide teachers
through the certificate program in small clusters rather than as part of a large
class, creating a minicommunity that includes faculty members, veteran teachers,
and teachers new to the process.
"Most online education efforts take the traditional classroom model and move
it online," says Norton. "That's just imposing an old paradigm of learning on
new technology. We're capitalizing on the new technology, using it to create a
new system."
Assistive technology is another field in which GSE excels. The need for professionals
who can use technology to make the lives of people with disabilities easier will
only increase because the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals
with Disabilities in Education Act now require accommodations for assistive technology,
says Michael Behrmann, professor and director of the Helen A. Kellar Institute
for Human disAbilities.
Behrmann's program trains special education teachers, health professionals,
and product developers to address assistive technology issues in schools, workplaces,
communities, and homes, whether providing screen readers for the visually impaired
or adapting sports and leisure activities for those with physical disabilities.
The program is one of the most comprehensive of the handful that exist in
the country, says Behrmann, not only in the range of degrees and certifications
it offers, but also in the range of disabilities and ages it spans, allowing students
to tailor their programs to the specific disabilities they encounter in their
jobs. Technology is both the subject and the vehicle in many courses because students
model the tools they will use in person and across distances through web-enabled
learning and videoconferencing in the state-of-the-art assistive technology lab.
A growing distance education component, including a summer institute that
caters to distant enrollees, means many classes are "split 50-50" between online
learning and face-to-face classroom experience, says Behrmann, and that makes
the program's resources available across the state and beyond.
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