In the digital age, the tools of the trade in higher education are no longer just notebooks and textbooks. A host of technological systems are used at St. Michael’s College as a supplement to students’ education, and possibly the most widely used of those is eCollege.
eCollege past and present (and future)
eCollege was first used in undergraduate classes at St. Michael’s in the spring 2004 semester, eCollege administrator Cynthia Kelley says. This semester, 314 class sections, about 55 percent of all classes, use eCollege in some capacity, she says.
In most of these classes, eCollege acts as a supplement to the in-class material, though the school has about 20 classes that are fully online, where the instructor hands out no paper in the class, Kelley says.
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Books being accessed online (Photo illustration by Abby Robitaille) |
“Here it's a voluntary program. At some schools that I've been to, it's required of all faculty,” she says.
eCollege is probably the “most robust system on the St. Michael's campus,” Kelley says. This means that eCollege is more reliable than any other system the college uses.
The school spends $40,000 per year to use and host eCollege, which includes keeping previous semester’s eCollege sites for faculty, Kelley says.
The next generation of eCollege, called .NeXT, is scheduled to be implemented in 2009 and will be more flexible to update and include more editing capabilities for students, she says.
The new system uses more interactive “Web 2.0” features, and Kelley hopes that more professors will use these features more often, she says.
“We could have more video,” she says. “You could download lectures onto your iPod.”
Saving time and trees
Business and accounting department chair, Robert Letovsky, has been using some form of online system in graduate courses since 1998. He first used eCollege in a graduate course in summer 2000.
Because graduate courses usually include professionals who don't have as much time for class meetings, Letovsky uses eCollege to lessen the time people spend on campus, he says.
“The idea was to replace some of the in-class meetings with an online discussion,” he says.
Letovsky could post a question in a discussion thread, where students in the class would then respond within a window of time and engage in a threaded conversation. Using these discussions, Letovsky was able to cut down a class that met twice a week to once a week, he says.
In one special circumstance, Letovsky taught in El Salvador for two weeks at the end of the fall 2006 semester, but used eCollege to continue his class at St. Michael's. Letovsky and his students interacted through eCollege via the discussion groups. He gave a take-home final, and students could upload their finished exams to eCollege so that Letovsky could download and grade them while abroad, he says.
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eCollege screen (Photo illustration by Redmond Deck) |
Psychology professor Jeffrey Adams says he only gives out a “quick syllabus” in class, and reserves the full syllabus for eCollege in order to save paper.
Adams also puts up “tabs” that aren't necessarily related to course material, he says.
“I'll put tabs for different topics, such as study tips, [and] ways the tests can be constructed and how to prepare for those,” he says.
Adams also puts up text-only versions of his PowerPoint lectures so that his students can download and print the PowerPoints and bring them to class, which he says helps for taking notes.
“They don't have to sit down and act like scribes, taking down everything on the slide,” he says. “They can listen to what I'm saying.”
Spanish professor Amanda Amend uses eCollege in all her classes to put up the syllabus, homework and handouts, she says. Amend also uses eCollege to link to many outside Web sites for extra grammar practice, she says.
She also frequently links to the video-sharing site YouTube and photography sites “to bring culture into the classroom,” she says.
“The Webliography link in eCollege makes it really easy to organize,” she says.
One feature that's especially common in eCollege is the online gradebook, where students can check their grades at any time.
“There are students who are really proactive, and they log on [to the gradebook] every day,” Amend says. “I can double-check that and make sure that [the grades] are accurate.”
Adams also finds the gradebook useful, so that his students are always aware of their standing.
“You know [the grades] throughout the entire semester, so there should never be a question of how you're doing in the class,” Adams says.
The cons of eCollege
eCollege isn't for everyone, however.
“I already spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen, and my sense is that students do as well,” English professor Will Marquess says. “[With eCollege] I would start spending more time checking on activity…and I’d rather not commit more.”
Marquess, who calls himself “a fairly low-tech guy,” says he prefers to make changes to his syllabus in class, rather than updating an online syllabus, so that his students have a chance to voice questions face to face.
However, Marquess thinks eCollege is good for some courses, and sees the use of eCollege in so many other classes as a reason not to use it in his classes.
“I’m quite sure it has good uses,” Marquess says. “I could definitely see how, if I were using a lot of links to the Web, eCollege would be quite useful. But I’m not.”
Some professors who do use eCollege have found mixed response from students.
“It really depends on the student's learning style,” Amend says. “There are students who would rather have the assignment put on the board in class because it doesn't take as much effort.”
eCollege has a lot of potential, and Adams has tried many different things, but a lot depends on how much people are willing to get involved, he says.
“I can put information there, I can't make people read it,” Adams says, comparing his use of eCollege to holding office hours, which he “can't make people come to.”