Plato's Roundtable
Professor Ransom Discusses Classroom Technology
Professor Ransom
Roger Ransom came to UCR in 1968 and taught in the Economics department until 1984, when he moved to the History department. In 2003 he was awarded the UCR Distinguished Teaching Award, and he was named as the Distinquished Humanist Acheivement Lecturer for 2005-06 by the UCR Center for Ideas and Society. Professor Ransom expounds on the value of technology in the classroom. During this interview subjects covered include his use of iLearn in the classroom and how the use of clickers has changed how he interacts with his students.
When did you begin using technology in your classrooms?
Remember when "classroom technology" meant dry erase markers and overhead projectors? Professor Ransom discusses how the transition from overhead projectors to Powerpoint began simply as a way to keep himself organized.- Grades, Discussion Boards and Notes in iLearn
As an early adopter of the iLearn system, Professor Ransom explains how his earliest problems with iLearn involved limited student access to computers, which has become a virtually non-existent problem today. - Case-Based Learning with Online Discussion Boards
Professor Ransom describes an instance where an online discussion board was used to facilitate learning in a graduate level course. Students were given a series of graphs and asked to provide responses that would in turn become the topics for discussion at the next class meeting. - Using Clickers: Attendance and Beyond
Clickers, which began as a solution to increasing student attendance, grew to be a valuable tool for discussion in in professor Ransom's larger lectures. - Utilizing Clickers to gauge student performance
Using a new technology that affects student grading can be daunting to students and teachers alike. Professor Ransom discusses how he overcame technical problems and changed his grading scale in a way that evaluated students based on clicker data, but still placed heavy value on more traditional testing methods. - Student technological literacy and new problems in the digital age
In the early days of computing, the lack of reliable and available PC's gave rise to problems with accessing online material or even turning in assignments due to computer failure. Now that these problems have diminished significantly, there is a new focus to combat plagiarism and the copying of work. - Now that tools like iLearn exist to facilitate out of class communication, how do you bring this type of communication back into the class?
Online communication allows students to interact with the professor in ways that may be more impersonal, but online communication increases interaction with faculty. While there has been a decline in face to face communication, there have been huge increases in e-mails to the professor. - How is iLearn perceived by the students, is it transparent or is it obscuring the teaching process?
In closing, student response is very positive towards the idea of class notes and grading from within the iLearn system.