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by Ellen Borkowski

Dr. Kaci Thompson, this year’s winner of the UM Innovation in Teaching with Technology Award, used to enrich her lectures with slides to provide students with visually accurate images of rare and unusual creatures. There was one problem with this – students did not have access to the images after the lecture. In 1996, Dr. Thompson was encouraged by Dr. Bill Higgins, Associate Professor of Biology, to apply for an Instructional Improvement Grant (IIG) from the Center for Teaching Excellence to try and digitize her slides and provide access to them for students. She received IIG funding and, not having ever put together a Web page before, had a student help her build a simple one.

After a year of using this Web page, Dr. Thompson took courses to learn about HTML and Photoshop so that she could modify Web pages herself. What was the hardest thing for her to learn? Learning to deal with the non-linear nature of Web pages when she was used to linear formats of a book. In the process of learning about Web pages, she started to rethink the design of the Web site. She has been using Web pages to support her Mammalogy course since 1997.

Her Web site started off simple. Lack of time meant she had to do just a little at a time. Dr. Thompson has found that “one of the benefits of the Web is that you can constantly tweak the Web pages.” Over the years, she has been transforming the way she teaches her course by adding additional components to her course Web site. Her current course site not only includes general course information and the image archives, but also includes lecture outlines using the seamless integration found in WebCT. She has found that students have been using the discussion tool in WebCT for more in-depth questions where they are trying to connect information they learned in class to their own experiences. She has also “taken the plunge” and gives her class lectures using a live Internet connection to all the course materials saved on her Web site rather than using duplicate files saved on her own computer.

Dr. Thompson has also seen an improvement in her course evaluations. The course evaluation consists of 13 questions about course organization and content rated using a 5-point scale and two open-ended questions about the course’s strengths and weaknesses. After her first year of using the technology in support of her course, she has seen dramatic improvement in her evaluation scores. For example, in 2002, students assigned the course a 4.7 for organization, a 4.8 for use of examples and illustrations to clarify concepts and a 4.8 for the contribution for audiovisual materials to learning, all well above the departmental course averages of 3.9-4.1.

How would Dr. Thompson characterize her experiences and the benefits she has gained from using technology in her teaching? “Technology has allowed me to create an environment that takes the benefits of classroom teaching and the benefits of digital resources and brings them together,” she said. “It allows me to keep the human touch and add the things that the Internet has to offer.”

To see Dr. Thompson’s Mammalogy course Web site, visit www.life.umd.edu/classroom/bsci338m.

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