Dr. Wende Huehn-Brown is Professor of Business at St. Petersburg College. Her earlier Guest Post describes her blended learning course.
I am constantly trying to integrate evolving technology in my entirely online classes to help students with the learning objectives. I further provide these online resources to blended students as reference materials for additional help on study plan and homework submissions they need to complete outside of class. A couple of years ago my husband gave me a smart pen for Christmas– the Echo LiveScribe pen (see http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/smartpen/echo/). At first, I found learning to use and sharing the output in my online classes a challenge. But in the past year LiveScribe seemed to resolve this issue with an Adobe format which makes it much easier (see example Problem 1.9 ).
This past fall I started adding pencast tutorials like this example to my Operations Management course using select Study Plan problems. I had viewed similar tutorials others developed for math classes and thought it might be helpful for my students in operations management. I typically find my students really struggle with the analytics in this field. At this point I have a small sample size, and I further complicated my data collection and analysis for comparison purposes by changing homework requirements (actually added further work to better align with another university for articulation). While making the homework more challenging, the overall average grade went from a C to a B since I developed 31 pencasts! Students tell me they can replay these pencasts multiple times to help the analytical concepts ‘sink in’. I also have 24 other video tutorials showing students how to use POM for Windows or Excel OM to solve similar study plan problems. Yet students tell me “the pencasts helped the most” in their feedback.
Wende can be reached at huehnbrown.wende@spcollege.edu.