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Toasting the Technophile
John Walsh of the USC Davis School of Gerontology receives the 2008 Provost’s Prize for Teaching with Technology
John Walsh, associate professor at the USC Davis School of Gerontology, believes the best way to teach students is to provide guidance before they take graded exams rather than afterwards. To do so, Walsh, along with the help of educational technologists at the school of gerontology, developed a Multimedia Learning Tool (MLT) to augment instruction of his GERO 414: Neurobiology of Aging class.
The learning tool features an assessment component that allows students to monitor their progress and informs Dr. Walsh of individual study habits, making it possible for him to counsel them if they appear to be falling behind. The tool also takes the place of textbooks; reading assignments are posted for each weekly topic via a click on a PDF library button.
For these innovations and others utilizing the multimedia tool, Walsh received the 2008 Provost’s Prize for Teaching with Technology at the 2008 Teaching with Technology Conference on Tuesday, May 6, at the Davidson Conference Center.
Themed, “Mobile Teaching, Mobile Learning,” the conference, now in its second year, emphasized innovations spanning the full continuum of e-learning, including supplemental use in the traditional classroom, blended learning and online distance education.
Using the learning tool, Walsh loads course content into a prefabricated template complete with 2-D PowerPoint images, text, narration, 2-D and 3-D animation and video clips. Walsh, who is also a member of the Neuroscience Program at USC, is currently using a prototype of the tool for a course section on Parkinson’s disease.
“For the section on Parkinson’s disease, the multimedia learning tool guides lectures, monitors student interaction and initiates discussions that go beyond the narrative modality found in a typical classroom,” Walsh said.
Commonly used teaching resources such as Power Point and overhead projector slides, according to Walsh, are linear, one-way teaching tools. The MLT, on the other hand, provides students with a multi-dimensional, learner centered environment designed to increase understanding and retention of information.
“The course, which covers the etiology, diagnosis and treatment of age-related diseases of the brain, is ideally suited for a virtual setting,” Walsh said. “Students are evaluated in “grand rounds” fashion on three criteria: their ability to decipher the causes of certain age-related diseases, their diagnosis of each disease and the treatment of each disorder.”
A member of the Center for Excellence in Teaching (CET), Walsh is a longtime advocate of technology in teaching.
“I hope that others in the biomedical fields and social sciences will use modules such as the MLT to complement the curriculum of their courses,” Walsh said.
Other members of Walsh’s technology team are Greg Misiaszek, Jerry Chih-Yuan Sun, Trevor Nelson and Maria Henke, assistant dean of the USC Davis School.
(L to R) Dr. John Walsh, Jerry Chih-Yuan Sun, and Greg Misiaszek |
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