Idaho State University takes open approach to faculty and student use of iPads in the humanities.

ipad-college-liberalOffering a realistic glimpse of what it’s like to try and use mobile technology in undergraduate and graduate courses in higher education, one rural, liberal arts college says the only way to effectively implement an iPad program is if the technology has no usage hiccups and comes second to pedagogy.

Another key element of making a mobile tech program work? Start the program as an open experiment for faculty members to use as they see fit.

“By leaving the experiment open, the instructors had an unbounded creative space to do what we demand of our students: critically think our way through the existing problems to find novel solutions,” said Mark McBeth, associate dean of the College of Arts & Letters at Idaho State University (ISU), and lead author of the College’s case study report. “Theory and research informed this project, but much of the success required simple trial and error with faculty and students in classroom experiences.”

The iPad Pilot Project (iPP), which started at the College in spring 2013—thanks to the support of its dean, associate dean, and director of development—began as a response to both the national emerging interest in mobile technology in the classroom, as well as the supposed notion that liberal arts institutions and technology don’t mix.

Two years later, the College has put together a report detailing four case studies from faculty, which aims to offer an honest look into how the implementation fared in their classrooms, as well as begin to answer the question: Can mobile technology truly enhance liberal arts learning in higher education?

(Next page: How the program is designed; pedagogical challenges)

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)

According to students surveyed by the iPP:

  • 72 percent of students understood the purpose of the iPads
  • 67 believed that the tool would assist them in their future careers
  • 63 percent agreed that the iPads played an important role in critical thinking and collaboration in the classroom
  • 58 percent agreed the iPad is a tool for student learning
  • 57 percent said it enhances participation
  • 56 percent said it increases student engagement
  • 52 percent said they wanted to take another class that uses mobile tech
  • 36 percent said they felt the iPad was distracting in class

“We see this latter finding as related to the need for more training as some faculty in the project noted initial difficulties in helping students use the technology in the classroom,” muse the authors. “It should also be noted that there were a consistent 15 to 26 percent of students that self-reported that they did not benefit from the iPP. This negative finding might be explained partially by the rural and non-traditional nature of the student body at the university.”

One faculty member also emphasized during a learning community meeting that “students had some concerns about the use of technology and social media in the classroom, including ethical concerns about labor practices and concerns about social media use in general.”

The authors conclude by saying the next step will be to use controlled experiments with pre- and post-testes comparing student experiences in an iPP course with student experiences in a non-iPP course.

For more individual case studies, further explanation of pedagogical challenges, and more student perception data, read the full report, “The iPad Pilot Project: A faculty driven effort to use mobile technology in the reinvention of the liberal arts.”

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