Director’s Message: Supporting a New Teaching Paradigm
By Fedro Zazueta
Academic Technology
In the traditional teaching paradigm, students and their instructors share the same location and time. However, with IT becoming ubiquitous, a natural evolution has taken place where students and faculty are not required to be in the same location at the same time. Instruction today may occur in any combination of space and time (See Figure).
The teaching paradigms which result from when and where instruction takes place can lead to a substantially different learner and teacher experience. Courses occurring in the same space and time are often referred to as conventional or traditional courses. Courses that occur at a different space or time are referred to as distance education courses.
The provision of robust tools that facilitate learning across different teaching and learning paradigms is a necessity at UF. This is driven by several factors, including: IT becoming ubiquitous;increasingly higher levels of IT competence by students; the growth of distance education programs; and the desire of students to learn at their own pace in their own time. This has resulted in the deployment of a course management platform and related support services that can be used for all courses at UF, including conventional courses. The E-Learning platform (formerly known as Blackboard/WebCT) provides faculty with the ability to manage content for a course as well as many other aspects of course administration. Some of these other aspects include, but are not limited to: rosters, quizzes, testing, originality of work, grading, collaboration, etc. The system is complemented by state of the art services for collaboration, video, voice and data transmission.
Over the course of this summer, major improvements were made to core services that support teaching and learning at the University. These include the course management system upgrade, video conferencing and streaming, and a renovated space for student use. For more information on all of these items, see the articles in this newsletter.
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Tags: Academic Technology
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Posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007.
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