Innovative Uses for Educational Technology Funds?

RumGunner asks: "I work for a university, and we have a special 'technology' fee that is charged to students, intended to be used for focus on new technology of direct benefit to students either in the classroom or related educational/learning activities. Every semester there is a request for proposals on how to spend this money, and for the most part these proposals are fairly lackluster. Since I know there are a lot of .GOV and .EDU readers on Slashdot, I'm curious to see if anyone has any good ideas for large (or small) scale applications of new technology for the benefit of students?"

Comments

off the top of my head...

[feldsteins]

1. online course materials via products like Blackboard (grades, tests, syllabi, lecture notes, discussions, etc)

2. Wireless networking (encrypted and/or MAC filtered) in libraries and public places

3. Wireless laptops, either for everyone or for "borrowing" perhaps at the library or other public places.

4. Intelligent routing to prevent the gnutella users from sucking up all the bandwidth. You can do this without entirely blocking the ports, thus letting it happen but preserving the bulk of the bandwidth for other (presumably more legitimate) uses.

5. Internet stations placed in public places for general email and web.

6. IMAP mail (including a Web client) if you currently use POP.

Re:off the top of my head...

[baptiste]

A good starting point, but all but one of your items deals with stuff outside the classroom. I'm the Director of IT for a engineering school in a large university. All told our school is one of the smaller schools in the University, with about 1,000 students. The university is pushing technology, but not to the point of being bleeding edge. Sure they do trials and such, but prefer to be right behind folks on the bleeding edge.

For example, they are pushing Blackboard hard - just upgraded to the latest version which is much improved. The tricky part is getting faculty on board. Some jump on it, some don't have the time, and some just don't want to (very few) THe interesting part is that professors without course sites are being pressured by the students to get online. This is a good thing - its not that most faculty don't want to get online, they just don't necessarily see the advantage or if they do, aren't sure it's worth the effort or simply don't know whats involved.

To help with situations like this, we have a university wide division whose entire purpose is working to help join technology with education. They host seminars to help faculty and students take advantage of technology available to them, etc. Even with this valuale resource, it still can be a struggle to get the visibility needed to reach the right people. Blackboard wasn't that great in past years, but the new versions really work to integrate everything and provide the student a portal to their class info as well as developing communities for each class (discussion boards, document repositories, mailing lists, and even grades, practice exams, etc)

Wireless is a great thing. Our campus is deploying wireless quickly (our school finally got 100% coverage activated this month and a large part of the campus is covered), not just in dorms and educational spaces but in other places like the Quad, student center, etc. Now that the infrastructure is in place, the trick is using it. Many professors are wary of wireless in the classrooms (students surf the web during lectures) while other plan to embrace it. We're only now starting to work to get faculty to propose ideas for integrating wireless technology in teh classrom (say using PDAs and/or laptops to interact with the students, etc) Yes, there will be MUCH trial and error so it may seem like a waste of your money, but at least where I work, the intentions are clear - to use technology to improve the educational experience.

Email kiosks - another great idea. We're currently working to deploy clusters of kiosks in our common areas using Linux and Shuttle's tiny SV24 box. $750 including a 15" LCD screen and touchpad keyboard - and prices are dropping. We already have high powered clusters of Sun workstations, but they're in rooms that aren't always where the students congregate. Again, we'll trial it and if its successful, deploy more.

A lot of folks talk about requiring all students to get laptops - may work in some places, but I knwo we've just recently decided NOT to require them. 95% of our students already have computers, though not all are portable. ut forcing folks onto one platform would have caused too much of a backlash.

On area we are actively researching is the classrooms themselves. Is a PC in a podium with a projector enough? Probably not (though its better than projector slides - we've only got 2 lecture halls with LCD projectors though we have plans to upfit many more of our classrooms in the comin gfew years) Other ideas being tossed about? Laptop carts, interactive classrooms with desktop PCs at each seat tied into a central control console where professors can bring up student screens to some their work as an example (and yes ensure they aren't surfing porn), smartboards which capture notes in realtime and also in files for upload to the class website, etc. The trick is a) figureing out which works best (or perhaps which infrastruture works best with which class) And of course, providing the resources to the faculty so they can adapt their courses for the future. Of course the other fun part is the faculty that don't want to change. At one point whiteboards were put up in place of chalk blackboards - a number of faculty complained so much that the whiteboards are now gone and good old blackboards are back up.

So its not simple. Its going to take time. remember, educational institutions have limited budgets even when they charge special technical fees. As we all know, the HW is often cheap - the problem is hiring the people to integrate and run it.

Often the most formidable obstacle to all this is, surprise, communication. SOme folks may already have killer software and apps put together to adapt coursework to new technology, but if its not publicized in a way that others can take advantage of it, things stagnate.

Of course, this is all infrastructure. As you know, you can have a kick butt webserver, but you need CONTENT. If you spend $100K on retrofitting a classroom, it'll be useless until faculty have material that takes advantage of it and developing that material takes time. Sure, they can easily convert notes into Powerpoint slides - but thats no differnet than tossing premade transparencies onto an overhead - just more colorful. But imagine a class where the professor has interactive programs to demonstrate concepts, video clips showing phenomenon, feedback mechanisms where he/she can quiz the class on the current topic and based on their answers (push button a, b, c, or ,d), know if they are grasping it or if he/she needs to explain it further.

This sounds like pointy head boss speak - but see if your school has a committee or organization looking at technology in education. We do and it works well. Granted its not speedy, but they deal with a number of the pressing issues related to technology in education. Their minutes and discussion papers are posted monthly. But feedback is limited. So see whats already going on at your school and make suggestions - they may get acted on - you never know! I know for us, all teh feedback we get is from faculty, not students. We have a single student rep on the committee, but our site allows for student feedback - we don't get much. If you like or don't like something being done, find out who runs the program and let them know. Be professional, but explain why something is or isnt' working - its the only way they know somethings up so they can try to improve it (or drop it all together)

I know from where I sit, we're working on infrastructure. But the problem is classic chicken and egg. We don't have material already so we don't knwo what infrastrcture we need and we don't want to spend millions on the wrong type of equipment. So trial and error is the name of the game. Its slow, but hopefully we can identify the right mix and then push it out rapidly.

No, I didn't come up with lots of new ideas, but right now all we have time to worry about right now is infrastructure and limited trials. The good news is the administration is holding millions in reserve/placeholders to spend the money where we prove it will work best - so technical improvement in education will happen, but its not gonna be a Net speed!

Network drives

[James1006]

Giving every student an account on a Samba server they can reach from anywhere on campus would be good.

It would eliminate the need for floppies and such.

kinda hard..

[harakh]

.. to give any direct advice since you didnt specify how large this budget is and what kinda stuff you already have at the university but..
Personally i study at a university and things that i would like to have improved are the amounts of terminals around campus to check email from.. Maybe somekinda thin-client/server system that allows you to access the uni-servers to check mail/news (slashdot ;)).
Also i doubt that very many universities have enough of they're lecture data on the web - which is really helpful. If the budget is large enough you could hire someone or a few persons to help the lecturers that arent so computer-literate to "digitize" lecture materials and extra material aswell as make good homepages for the courses with links to relevant sites etc. We have those on some of the courses and they are great! More of those would be really neat - preferrably from all courses.

... Just a few kind suggestions - please be gentle :)

Little innovation right now + many lazy people =

[Anonymous Coward]

There's very little "new technology" coming out, scheduled every semester, that benefits students. Five years ago, just having computer labs probably would have been sufficient. These days, when the students all own computers, pagers, and cell phones, all the University can really do is provide connectivity.

There's no new technology that will allow the students to learn more, faster, and have a higher comprehension.

There is, however, scant use of existing technology. Why aren't all syllabi online? Can't past lecture notes and sample tests be posted online? How come half the universities still make students stand in line to sign up for classes? Why do you have to wander around with a slip of paper to drop or add a class? How come so few classes are taught online? I'm not meaning real-time, but a learn-at-your-own-pace? People like me, who have jobs and families and no good University nearby, want to take extra classes, and have the money, but can't find anyplace reputable to offer the courses.

There's little innovation because most people don't get what to do with it, or they aren't willing to spend the time to do it. I know of 3 dozen professors who received grants to make their classes available online, and in the end, all they had was about 20 pages of static HTML pages, which were never updated, became stale, and then were removed from being online when the web server was upgraded.

I'll end this with the worst funding request I ever read (and you're going to read it all):

"Here's a list of the things we want. (You don't need anything more than this, do you?)"

Attached was an excel spreadsheet with items and prices.

top of the line innovation:

[augros]

you can't beat this: stop charging them the tech fee. i paid it all four years and got nothing but crappy half-implemented services like "blackboard" (an assignment/notice/expensive software that only CS professors were willing to use/schedule web application). here's my advice, if you don't know what you're charging a fee for -- don't charge it!!! how would you like a government-gizmo-thingy-tax?

Re:Campus-wide wireless?

[RC514]

Wireless networking on the whole campus is nice, of course, but it isn't educational if there is no educational content or projects which make use of the network. Looking at stories about the bandwith demand at universities, I guess the networks are mostly there (although not always wireless), but the on-topic content is missing. I'd say, put the money into virtualizing lecture material and developing new forms of presenting educational material. Some things can be expressed much better in an animation or interactive 3d-model for example, ways of presentation which are usually unvailable today.

Why not give the money back?

[Bruenor]

I know that this will probably be a completely foreign idea for anyone in education or government, but why not give the money back?

If you have to ask on Slashdot on how you should spend the money then I can only imagine one of two situations. Either your technology infrastructure has everything you need out of it, or you/your staff are unable to see what it needs and you should find jobs you are more suited to.

If it is the former, then why not refund the money back to the students who paid it? As a current taxpayer and recent student I am sick and tired of the waste of my money that occurs in the system by people spending money whimsically on unneeded expenditures. I'm sure those of your students that are working hard to pay their way through school would agree with me.

I can only speak from a U.S.A. perspective, but schools and government both seem to suffer under the idea that they ought to spend our money not because they need it, but because they can. The thought that you need to look for blue sky projects to spend the money on just because you have it sickens me.

Invest in open source

[MobyDisk]

Use the money to pay students to work on open source projects. This kind of stuff would be a win-win-win: student gets paid, university gets useful software, open-source grows.

Example: My college needed an emulator to teach assembly language to students, and I SOOO wanted them to have an undergrad build one and open source it.

ask the students

[jman sr]

After all, the money does come from them. Try putting up feedback pages on your website and see what areas the students feel are lacking in your IT department.

Secondly, do research on whatever you decide to do, and then discuss it with the students in some way. My school attempted to implement a one laptop for every person policy-- until they announced it to the students. The students protested so loudly that the plan has since been put on the backburner, indefinately.

Spend it on people!

[melquiades]

It seems like almost all of these lackluster "tech in education" ideas are focused on hardware -- and totally miss the point, not only of technology in the classroom, but of how all learning works. While it is a disgrace that so many schools have such out-of-date technology, it's much more a disgrace that so much technology, so costly to schools, is essentially useless.

At colleges and universities, hardware has a clear purpose: students need to do research and write papers. There's a very high demand for that, even if technology isn't playing a direct role in education. And even there, it's often the case that hardware-focused programs waste money.

But in K-12 education, this problem is huge. It's one of the many bitter jokes behind Microsoft's school donation proposal: you can't just plop a lot of hardware in the middle of a school and expect magic.

Guess what? Computers do not magically make learning happen. Students aren't going to get anything out of computers unless either (1) they have an engaged, tech-savvy teacher who finds ways to use computers effectively as a teaching tool, or (2) they have the opportunity to experiment on their own, without having the computers locked off, crippled, or kept off limits for unstructured learning. For hardware to be useful, students need available expertise and, above all, access.

So, I'd suggest spending tech dollars on people. I'm thinking mostly of K-12 here:

• Hire non-paranoid sysadmins who know enough about security to open up computers for student use. If technology is inaccessible, due to either technological or physical controls, it's a waste. Students need to be able to experiment to learn.
  
  
• Give teachers technology training (if they want it -- don't shove it down their throats).
  
  
• Bring in full- or part-time experts in technology fields to teach technology subjects: programming, graphic design, desktop publishing, system administration. Bring them into the rest of the curriculum, so that (for example) if students are publishing a magazine, they have access to the desktop publishing person.
  
  
• Such experts are often (obviously) expensive. But there are many decent people who are willing to volunteer part-time. Hire a technology volunteer coordinator, and give them a budget they can do something with.
  
  
• And, for heaven's sake, pay teachers a decent salary.
  

Re:Spend it on people!

[Lumpy]

They cant / wont.

I applied several times to K-12 schools, large K-12 schools to be the sysadmin/netadmin/it/is guy. There are hundreds of offers out there and hundreds of jobs out there for this position, even right now they are there.. problem is that the schools want to pay about the same that McDonalds or burger King pay's for someone to say "you want fries with that?" but expect 15 years expierience (one I saw and made me die laughing said "requires 5 years expierience with windows 2000") and some even try to require BS or MS in computer science. and these positions are NEVER full time. they are 20 hrs a week part time so they can avoid giving you benifits.

the K-12 schools who have a clue hire a real fulltime person, or have an awesome CS teacher who does it, or even better, has a student run IT department...(yes dorothy it can happen and happen well) but they are very very rare.

Problem is that many teachers unions also BLOCK hiring of these tech people or impose insane restrictions.(and the salary is part of that too!)

Getting more people in the K-12 schools to manage the technology is great, it's an awesome idea. but it wont happen until you get state or federal mandates forcing the schools to put a person there. Because they would rather increase the coach's salary or spend it on new shiny sports gear instead of trying to actually educate the children.

Re:Spend it on people!

[melquiades]

problem is that the schools want to pay about the same that McDonalds or burger King pay's for someone to say "you want fries with that?" but expect 15 years expierience

K-12 schools are invariably on a completely unworkable budget. Thus the "bitter irony" of Microsoft's school donation plan, and so many other technology grants: how much good can it do to plop machines the middle of a school when the facilities are in disrepair, the administration is understaffed, the classes are large, and teachers are underpaid?

It's true, both K-12 schools and their donor often fail to understand the true costs of technology.

Problem is that many teachers unions also BLOCK hiring of these tech people or impose insane restrictions.(and the salary is part of that too!)

Thus the last item in my list -- "for heaven's sake, pay the teachers a decent salary". When the salary pool is way too small, there will be bitter battles over it, and you end up with these silly things that teachers' unions do. Have you ever heard of a programmers' union imposing a restriction like this on the salaries of sysadmins? ;)

Re:Spend it on people!

[Lumpy]

Exactly! and there is one thing I failed to mention... the 2 schools that I observed that had a working IT program were private schools. (tuition was $200.00 per month per child... pretty darn cheap) Every student was issued a laptop and Internet access at home was required (parents had to supply that) Starting at the 8th grade students could take classes in the It department at IT "employees". granted every student that left the one school that is closest to me graduates very well educated students... which is a drastically different from the public schools. The ONLY way to get the public schools up to speed would be to get the state governments and fed govt to increase funding. (add to that local funding also.) but in america, education of the children is at the bottom of the priority list below cable tv rates and programming, snack foods, and porn accessability.... Makes you love this country eh?

Re:Spend it on people!

[wagadog]

The main problem in universities is where computer support sits in their status hierarchy: At The Bottom. Definitely below the departmental secretaries, possibly above the janitors. In some departments, computer support was in fact done by certain janitors that volunteered to change the backup tapes, got root, and took over from there.

CS teaching and research is considered a cash cow, but their contribution is actually not taken seriously as part of "the life of the mind." The administration will gladly take half or more of the money they bring in, and would rather spend it on the campus landscraping than on the network infrastructure. The students and faculty demand better computers and better support, so what does the administration do? Levy another student fee to pay for it!

But where did that 50-60% in "administrative overhead" on grants and contracts that supposedly goes to pay for the infrastructure, including the, uh, network? Oh, into some pet project of some kiss-ass assistant dean of liberal somethingorother, as usual. Painting the Roses Red.

So now you have a shiny new pot of money to spend on computers. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. It will become yet another bone of contention for yet another round of stupid power games, and the person that gets stuck with making what's little left at the end of it all work--you know, the guy or gal at the bottom of their hierarchy of prestige and power--will get all the blame for all the delay caused by their power struggle and indecision, and will be caught in the middle of their stupid games.

The students, who have paid for it all, will get nothing, if anything, out of this as usual.

Except for those lovely expensive full-color glossy printed brochures put out by the the Wife Of Dean So-And-So working in the University of PR office describing, in extremely vague marketing terms, all of the benefits of the their selling out to Microsoft and accepting tons of M$ educational licenses for half price, the wonderful deal that she oh so sucksessfully negotiated -- when they could have gotten linux for free.

You can come up with all the creative ideas you want, but the above is what will actually happen.

Little Things

[that_guy]

My school (Oregon Tech) has a similar fee that we pay, but it isn't applied to innovations or research of new technologies, but rather improving the existing infastructure. Since it started we went from unwired dorms to 10Mb. Some wireless beta programs were added, and best of all we got our own T1 for student access. (previously it was just dial up in the dorms. Ten modems for 300+ people) None of these things were very impressive, (maybe even lackluster) but they helped improve campus life 100%

MP3s of all lectures.

[vkg]

Why? Not just because you might miss a class, but also for reference after the event.

Why MP3 rather than video?

Simple: cost. You could take a tiny slice of the tech budget and wire every auditorium and classroom for sound, and serving the files is no big deal (96KBMP for voice sounds like a CD).

The problem which this leaves is blackboards / whiteboards. I'd suggest two possible solutions, in keeping with this low-tech approach.

1> Webcams which take a picture of the board every five or ten seconds.
(Pros: cool, cons: more complex, sync. with audio a problem).

2> One of those funky systems which record where your pen is on the whiteboard and produce gifs from that data.

Either solution is expensive, relative to sound, however, so mebbe the right thing to do is just to skip it.

My thoughts

[macdaddy]

I too work at a university and the question has come up here before. It's already been suggested but wireless is a good way to go. Another might be to raise disk space quotas. More bandwidth is good but you also have to take care of what you buy. ie, buy a Packeteer to go with it. More lab machines. Better lab machines. Laptop checkout. NIDS to help better security. Minimal support of a local gaming server for the dorms. I know it sounds unusual and doesn't sound like it supports education, but really it does. Everyone needs to upplug from reality every so often--students included. Kids love gaming. Hell I love gaming. Netadmins hate gaming over the 'Net connection because of the bandwidth demands (I'm a netadmin). Supply some resources to have one local to campus that can only be accessed from the campus. Donate it to the SGA and let them admin it. Create a technology resource center where students can reserve time to use high tech stuff like fancy scanners, CD burners, etc...

Here's a thought. Ask the students what they think their money should be spent on. :-)

Educate the educators

[kooshvt]

While I don't agree with colleting fees from students when you have no clear goals in mind with the money, I do have one suggestion. The school I attend has a very good infrastructure and lots of software at the proffesors disposal to allow students to access grades, assignments, homework, or whatever online (such as the blackboard software). However this software seems to be rarely used due to the fact that some professors simply have no idea how to use it. Professors from nontechnical departments such as the English department simply just don't get it because they have never been properly shown how to use it. The software was probably purchased using technology fees from previous years but it is now worthless because no one uses it to it's fullest potential if they use it at all.

What is the point of constantly spending money to buy software and hardware that no one will know how to use. Take some time and set up seminars on how to better use the existing infrastructure. Educate the proffesors on how to make the best use of the technology at their disposal.

I am all for spending money to upgrade and expand the technology used on campus, but make sure people know how to use it and will use it before adding more unused resources.

Interoperable Tools and Systems

[jfrumkin]

I currently work at a research university, and one of the foremosts issues we face is not in a number of useful tools and projects which promote research and education, but how to get these tools and systems to interoperate. It would be great if a student could log in with their student ID, and access any of the tools and services that might be available to them. These might be electronic reserves, their class registration, their course's website, the campus bookstore (for ordering books), a central file storage area particular to that student, etc. I'm not aware of any university which has seemless integration of learning and research tools.

Weave's guide to spending Ed Tech monies

[weave]

When proposing how to spend Ed Tech monies, it's important to keep the institution's goals and best interests in mind. Education you may think? No, it's grand openings and tour opportunities.

There is nothing more important than providing a platform for University and politicians to come together to pat each other on the back and show off. Therefore, all proposals must meet this primary objective. If it fills a room up, all the better.

Therefore, Weave's the good and the bad list for spending ed tech money.

THE BAD

• Infrastructure: Forget bandwidth upgrades, replacing tired 10 Mbps hubs with switches, wireless, more disk for your SAN, and that fancy LTO tape robot you've had your eye on. (The robot may qualify if it is in a clear case where you can see it in operation. Something like an ADIC 100 is therefore just an ugly little black box and not worthy).
• Tech Training: "We are a learning institution. We will not send our techs out for training. We will cross-train internally." Besides, you can't touch or see training. Only possible exception is if it produces nice certifications that can hang on the wall and become a small part of a larger tour.
• End-user Training: See above. It doesn't matter if the equipment purchased is used to its fullest. Let the IT department answer any end-user questions on the new stuff.
• Tech staffing: Big no no. It doesn't matter if hundreds of computers are added all over campus, or older equipment is under massive migration to the latest, the tech support department will need to absorb the added duties. (All they do is play quake all day anyway). Besides, we don't want to look like we're using the money to grow a bureaucracy. Work smarter, not harder.

THE GOOD

• Labs: Where x is the total amount of money available in ed tech money and y is the number of computers in a typical computer lab and z is the current price of a new PC, calculate n = x/y/z and purchase n computer labs. Infrastructure? Staffing? You didn't read "THE BAD" section, did you?
• Multimedia lecture rooms: Smart boards, projectors, good. This is very likely to get approved. Board members can sit in a classroom and view a powerpoint presentation about how the money was spent. Make sure to annotate the presentation with notes scribbled on smart board and printed out so board members can take with them. Concerned about faculty training? See next bullet.
• Faculty development lab: Throw a few computers, VCRs, presentation monitor, and a cabinet (glass) full of impressive software titles up, and take a tech from the help desk area to man this new lab. However, it's important to ensure faculty have no additional release time from normal classes to learn how to integrate technology into their courses. We wouldn't want to take them away from teaching students. Also, don't train that help desk guy. He's a computer geek, they just know this stuff naturally.
• Get a cheesy portal product: Force all users to migrate off the UNIX or Microsoft mail servers they have been using for 10 years onto some new portal product like Campus Pipeline. Be sure the product, whatever it is, has two pricing options. One, some made up outrageous fee like $250,000 and the other, a free grant model where allowing them to put up advertising on your web pages and use cookies to track student browsing habits. You can then take credit for saving a quarter million dollars, despite it duplicating (or even losing) what functionality you already had.

I hope this helps. p.s. This is just a theoretical exercise. My employer is, of course, far more enlightened on these matters...