With what the report’s authors say is little empirical research on how iPads influence student perceptions of learning and engagement and how faculty members teaching with iPads deal with the pedagogical challenges arising with their use, iPP began with the idea that “all students need exposure to technology as a collaborative and problem-solving tool that complements (not replaces) human interaction,” notes the report.
After consultation with faculty in 2013, the founding members of iPP decided that the College would purchase iPads, invite instructors to apply to use them, and then furnish each student with an iPad for classroom use.
iPP administrators selected undergrad and grad courses as well as content and methods courses, and the first semester of the project (fall 2013) consisted of seven selected instructors representing a range of disciplines: art, history, composition, anthropology, and public administration and policy analysis. Another four faculty joined in the spring of 2014.
iPP admin also outlined guiding principles for the program. For example, the project:
- Is designed as a collaborative effort between college admin and faculty
- Has faculty learning committees to lead the iPP to avoid any temptation to define exactly how the mobile tech would be used before it was purchased
- Aims to answer the question of whether tech encourages or hinders student learning
- Must be driven by “obvious pedagogical need”
- Is based on pedagogical approaches
- Should be inexpensive for users and easy to use
- Must be “empirically proven by monitoring and evaluation studies”
Based on these principles, the project participants met regularly in person and through the online message board to collaborate and assist one another.
In order to analyze the project’s impact, a sample of four faculty members from diverse courses were asked to write case studies to highlight common pedagogical challenges and how the authors solved these challenges. A survey was also administered in the spring of 2014 to measure student perceptions of the project, and all faculty part of iPP were asked to submit in-depth comments. [More on the methodology can be found in the report.]
Pedagogical challenges
According to the four faculty members, there were seven major pedagocial challenges, such as: “How to prepare all students, not just the tech-savvy ones, to enter the digitally-enhanced workplace?” as well as “How to engage student with multiple learning style?” and “How to make the classroom more like the real world?”
For Instructor Amy Brumfield, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Philosophy at ISU, one pedagogical challenge was in solving the question “I am expert in X, not technology. What/how could I possibly teach with it?”
“Many of our disciplines are not (at least not yet) focused on the integration of electronic materials into our course content,” said Brumfield. “Particularly in the liberal arts, we may focus a great deal of our time on interpersonal communication.”
According Brumfield, most liberal arts courses also focus on largely rhetorical debates with students, aimed at checking the students’ understanding rather than expanding an instructor’s own. “Integrating technology can unsettle this expectation by encouraging and sometimes forcing us to ask open question with unknown answers.”
Understanding that the use of iPads might essentially flip instructor and student in terms of knowledge expertise, Brumfield decided to take the risk and ask her students how they might best collaborate during the writing process using the iPads and then disseminate the finished products.
“[I] took this risk because professional writing has expanded far past simple word processing,” she explained. “…my goal was to ask questions that allowed for very open pathways to find answers, in the hopes of expanding my own knowledge along with my students.”
For Professor McBeth, a major pedagogical challenge to solve was “Can mobile technology promote better classroom discussion and classroom interaction?”
Though McBeth was “leery” about introducing iPads into his upper-division and graduate-level public policy and analysis course, he explained that he overcame his fear that the technology would hinder his active exchange between student and professor designed course.
“[I] slowly introduced small experiments into each three-hour class and carefully watched to see how the dynamics of the class shifted,” he noted.
For example, according to the report, he started he started posting questions to the class blog and had students respond to the questions as the class progressed. Those blog posts intensified the discussion, brought in a much wider range of student comments, and allowed all the students, especially his quieter ones, room to expand on their thoughts so that they could be more confident in jumping “into the fray of discussion.”
Encouraged by that success, McBeth instituted the use of pre- and posttests. He created simple surveys about the class’s material, posted the link, and received the results in real time, allowing students to see their individual and collective knowledge development change based on a night’s worth of discussion.
“Altogether, [I] found that using the iPads strengthened the instructor/student dynamic, improved the students’ relationships with each other, and showed the value of attending class and participating in the discussion rather than simply trying to glean information from a textbook,” he concluded.
(Next page: What students thought of the iPads)
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