Gerald Feldman

Tools:

1. Blackboard
2. CAPA (Computer Assisted Personalized Approach)
3. Respondex or Rx Show (electronic response system)

Benefits for Faculty:

1. Blackboard

• Posting course materials such as homework solutions
• Announcements
• Broadcast email
• Daily quiz due about an hour before class time
• Posting of student questions to Blackboard (using the discussion boards) so that faculty answer once, and all students have access to the faculty response and student questions.
• Blackboard merged roster courses - "We now have a single Blackboard site for Physics 1, both the in-class and the distance ed. Both sections run entirely in parallel, both have the same homework, have the same weekend mini exams. So, the point is mainly that we can send announcements to everybody. Deadlines affect everybody. And also the discussion forums are not limited to only one section. We essentially doubled our numbers to have discussions."

2. CAPA

Homework system

• mostly numerical problems that students get on the computer - "Every person gets the same problem but with different numbers. So no one can copy off of anyone else except to discuss the method. And we encourage them to discuss things."
• conceptual questions—multiple choice (A or B or C or D or E), system allows multiple tries.

3. Respondex or Rx Show

• Faculty ask students questions in class - conceptual questions - and students provide an immediate answer; "... we pose a question with five multiple choice answers and we ask [students] to think about it on their own and then commit to an answer. So, the answer is recorded and we can show them the histogram of student responses and then, after this first round, we let them talk about it.…Students really are very quiet the first time around and whatever their responses are, you can see a definite shift in the responses mostly toward the right answer after they have discussed the question among themselves.

Benefits for Students:

Blackboard

• Ease of use - "Not a single [student] explained to me that they did not know or that they did not have experience of Blackboard."
• Engaging - "I think basically the discussion forum on some homework assignments had upward of 60 postings per week. When students post stuff, some other students answer. So the best thing is for us, the instructors to just watch and have the students talk back and forth and in fact, that is largely working. My impression is that students must find the discussion fora very useful for not only those who are posting and getting answers but of course others may be just watching."

Teaching Tips:

"Generally, when the semester begins, we have a Blackboard site that is just empty. We don’t have material to post. We post material as the semester goes on. So it is that kind of overall management feature that I like most about Blackboard.

If you have an immensely large course, they may have no homework because the numbers are just too large, and TAs just can’t grade 700 assignments. CAPA will deliver a homework set of your choosing to all 700."