A pilot program at Northwestern is giving students who spend lecture on Facebook and Sporcle a second chance to watch what they may have missed.
Students in Prof. Thomas O’Halloran’s Chemistry 103 course this quarter have access to recorded lectures posted on NU’s Course Management System, said Brian Wasserman, co-president of the Weinberg College Student Advisory Board. Last quarter, Prof. Teri Odom and Prof. Chad Mirkin’s Chemistry 102 class also had online access to lecture videos.
Associated Student Government is interested in expanding the system to include more classes, said Weinberg freshman Karly Vercauteren, a member of ASG’s Academic Committee. She said part of what they are considering is whether to keep lecture videos on Blackboard or move them to a website like the OpenCourseWare Consortium.
According to its website, the OpenCourseWare Consortium hosts course materials, such as video lectures, from more than 200 schools, including the University of California, Berkeley and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The site is open and free to anyone.
“There would be benefits for students of Northwestern as well as students at other institutions,” Vercauteren said. “It would help them to plan their course of study. They would have access to material for courses that they wouldn’t usually have access to.”
Gabby Daniels, ASG academic vice president, said the classes using the video lecture technology are part of a trial period and added that an expansion would be “feasible and very beneficial to students.”
“Other schools like MIT and (Johns Hopkins University) have this,” the Weinberg sophomore said. “Northwestern is a premiere institution, and we’re always looking to improve.”
The service being used to post lecture videos, Academic & Research Technologies, started on the Chicago Campus for classes in the Feinberg School of Medicine, Wasserman said. He added the impetus behind an expansion to the Evanston Campus was a potential pandemic.
“The reason we started doing the research for this stuff at all was the whole swine flu thing,” the Weinberg senior said. “If you can’t go to class, you could always go back and watch the lectures.”
Daniels was in Odom’s and Mirkin’s chemistry class last quarter and said the video lectures were helpful for review purposes and working through problems.
“Sometimes I just couldn’t write everything down,” she said.
A survey was distributed to students in the class, and Daniels said there was a lot of positive feedback.
Today NU will host “AcademiX 2010,” a cooperative effort between the University, MIT and MacLearning.org, according to the event’s website. Presentations, which will occur simultaneously at NU and MIT, will focus on higher education in an open access environment.
Muhammad Safdari, former ASG academic vice president, said there’s “potential for more online-type material.”
“How do we address education in the 21st century?” the Weinberg senior asked. “How do we reconcile that with the traditional university experience? Blackboard is one way of doing that, but how do we go beyond?”
One concern with the video lectures is students would simply skip class, though Daniels said she disagrees with this.
“I don’t think a video lecture would really hinder (class attendance),” she said. “The video lectures would provide a supplement to lecture and a positive resource to students.”[email protected]
