http://www.itp.berkeley.edu/ITP/itpupdate.html (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)
The Instructional Technology Program (ITP) has been helping faculty members tap the power of technology to improve teaching and learning since 1986. ITP offers a repertoire of strategies for assisting and advising faculty: Focus groups, seminars and forums, courses, and pilot projects.
ITP has two focus groups, one aimed at helping math, science, and engineering faculty utilize technology for instruction, and the other aimed at helping humanities faculty utilize technology for instruction. ITP sponsors forums and seminars to inform the campus community about recent advances in instructional uses of technology at other institutions. ITP assists Berkeley faculty in communicating about their own uses of technology by sponsoring a courseware developers and users group. ITP offers course to help faculty improve instruction. ITP works with departments, schools, and faculty to initiate pilot projects that improve instruction in particular courses.
In general, ITP projects take a partnership approach to instructional innovation. Projects typically involve a coordinator, a designer, experts in technology, experts in pedagogy, and experts in the discipline. These individuals work jointly to create innovative approaches to instruction. Projects typically involve several iterations of trial and refinement. Creative ideas are tried out in a course and carefully evaluated. Evaluation information is used to improve the innovation. Pilot projects can be extended with outside funding. ITP has established projects, completed projects, and new projects. A project database is available at the Instructional Technology Program World Wide Web site (http://www.itp.berkeley.edu/).
This report highlights current activities, leading edge and established projects for the campus, as well as summarizing current and recent events.
The Science, Mathematics, and Engineering focus group, coordinated by Fred Beshears, features a graduate student council composed of research assistants from mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and engineering, who are assisting faculty to improve undergraduate courses. For example, in mathematics, the ITP research assistant is working with Professor Mardsen to prepare an NSF proposal for reforming the first two years of introductory mathematics courses. This work builds on a proposal funded earlier to convene a conference of leading experts of technology and instruction in the area of mathematics. Another ITP research assistant from chemistry is creating visualizations to help students understand chemical reactions. This work in conjunction with the Modular Chemistry Consortium recently funded by NSF. In addition, the science, mathematics, and engineering focus group leader from physiology, is helping develop lab exercises that use microcomputer based laboratories to collect and analyze data.
The Science, Mathematics, and Engineering focus group is also continuing its support of a number of established projects. These include a project to translate activities originally developed in Mathematica to a new software platform, MAPLE, for introductory mathematics courses. Another project supports an FTP server in the physics department that provides information about introductory physics courses including the syllabus, homework assignments, handouts, and problem solutions. Another on-going project is a virtual discussion group for students in an integrative biology course.
The Humanities Focus Group (HFG) coordinated by Owen McGrath currently directs several leading edge projects. In the area of foreign language instruction, 'Decouvrir Berkeley' involves second year French students composing multimedia essays to share via the internet with electronic penpals in France. HFG staff also work with instructors of French, Spanish, and German to investigate effective uses of computer-mediated synchronous dialogue in both a local setting (using Daedalus) and on the world-wide internet (using IRC, MOO, MUD). HFG projects in support of lower division writing courses range from an internet-accessible database of teaching materials for writing instructors to workshops on the use of electronic conferencing software as a pre-writing activity in the remedial writing classroom.
In addition the Humanities focus group continues to support a number of on-going projects in which Berkeley faculty have developed customized software for their courses. These development projects include the Mandarin Tone Tutor, Introduction to Attic Greek, Fan Jian Character Tutorial, and others. These projects make full use of the computer's capacity to deliver digitized sound, images, animation, and video in a fully interactive learning environment.