Online developments in teaching and learning will be demonstrated at a conference to be held at The University of Queensland this week.
At UQ, lessons and experiments are being conducted in cyberspace as a result of a significant collaboration between the University and a leading US institution.
UQ is one of only seven universities worldwide and the only Australian university selected as a ‘hub’ institution for the US-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) iCampus Outreach program which aims to disseminate innovative educational technology tools that can make a significant difference to how well and quickly students learn.
The program will be demonstrated during the Pan-Australian iCampus Conference to be held at UQ from June 19 to 21.
Director of Learning Outreach with the MIT iCampus Outreach Program Dr Phillip Long said iCampus was a collection of projects sharing a common theme of active learning and a technological approach of web services.
“The advantages of iCampus can be best realised by thinking about the projects as kernels of scholarly communities worldwide with a shared interest in the goals expressed by each of the projects,” Dr Long said.
“In the spirit of scholarship, the intellectual content of a project, the software and surrounding teaching content is disseminated freely so that the focus remains on the educational goals of the project and not a licence fee to pay for the development effort that created the software in the first place.
“The staff who created iCampus projects eagerly share their work so that others may benefit. The advantages of iCampus stem from the participation and interaction among the teachers and developers who share the common goals of improving learning through technology.”
Dr Long said the conference would serve as a catalyst for exploring, using, and developing new educational technologies.
“While the initial deployment of iCampus projects has focused on higher education, the potential is equally large in K-12 and in some circumstances, the corporate training community,” he said.
“In the end, we hope the iCampus conference will serve as another and we hope important venue and on-going community of scholars interested in promoting the open sharing of educational technologies to support teaching and learning.”
UQ’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) Professor Michael Keniger said the University was excited to be taking part in this shared educational experience.
“The real goal of iCampus is to stimulate the sharing of technologies as an element of an open educational resource strategy. We are excited to be taking iCampus technologies and extending them in new ways,” Professor Keniger said.
A range of iCampus projects will be demonstrated during the conference, including the iLabs technology. The iLabs project is dedicated to the proposition that online laboratories - real laboratories accessed through the Internet - can enrich science and engineering education.
“UQ is now leading the way in building new iLabs,” Professor Keniger said.
“The iLabs vision is to share expensive equipment and educational materials associated with laboratory experiments as broadly as possible within higher education and beyond.”
iLab teams have created remote laboratories at MIT in microelectronics, chemical engineering, polymer crystallisation, structural engineering and signal processing as case studies for understanding the complex requirements of operating remote lab experiments.
UQ’s School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering staff are currently pursuing a number of experiments based around the iLabs technology.
Other iCampus projects to be discussed during the conference include the Online Assessment Tool, iMOAT; a cross media annotation system developed to enhance the use of video and image in humanities classes, xMAS; and Web-based wireless sensors for education, iDAT.
Information: details about iCampus can be found at http://icampus.uq.edu.au/ to attend the conference or for more information please email bergita@itee.uq.edu.au
Media: For more information, contact Chris Saxby at UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 2479, email c.saxby@uq.edu.au).
