BY WENDY SODERBURG
UCLA Today Staff

It’s hard to believe that as little as five years ago, some students were still struggling to get wired. They grew up with computers and knew how to use them, but not all of them had easy access to the technology. Today, it’s difficult to find a student who can’t get his or her hands on a computer at any time of the day — or night.

The use of technology has, understandably, crept more slowly into the personal and professional lives of faculty. But after years of teaching classes in more conventional ways, many faculty are realizing the benefits of technology in drawing students into the learning experience.

In fall 2001, Brian Copenhaver, provost of the College of Letters and Science, decided to encourage new thinking about the potential for technology in undergraduate instruction by creating the Faculty Committee on Educational Technology. Last spring, the committee created the Provost’s Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology with two goals in mind: to build a broad, interdisciplinary community of instructors who could share their technology strategies with each other, and to recognize members of that community — faculty, temporary instructors and graduate students — for their innovative work in teaching with technology.

All together, 59 instructors from 34 departments were nominated by the campus community for their use of media and software, both in and out of the classroom, and for the use of interactive tools and real data.

What impressed those nominating was not so much the whiz-bang technology itself, but the innovators’ overall focus on learning improvement and experience.

For example, one instructor was praised for reflecting “a deep understanding of how people learn and why they get excited. They are not about the technology — you barely notice it — they are about smashing tired, inefficient ways of conveying information, and bringing the world ... to life in lecture halls, dorm rooms and imaginations.”

The following four faculty members, winners of the inaugural Provost’s Award for Innovation in Teaching with Techno-logy, received their awards on May 7 at a College reception and were also honored at the College Awards Dinner on May 12. They have shown that technology can, indeed, bring course material to life. For more information on the awards, go to www.college.ucla.edu/edtech.

DAVID KAPLAN
Professor of Philosophy and Hans Reichen-bach Chair in Scientific Philosophy

Philosophy Professor David Kaplan’s Logic 2000 software has taken the pain out of problem solving.

“Symbolic logic is a mathematics-like subject in which you do problem sets,” Kaplan explained. “It’s not so much a question of getting a deeper and deeper conceptual understanding of a few fundamental topics, like ‘What is justice?’ It’s developing a skill, like learning algebra.”

Kaplan realized long ago that the old system of teaching logic — in which students would complete a set of problems, turn them in to a TA or reader and get them back after a week or so — was almost counterproductive. “By the time their papers came back to them, they had ingrained in their neurons the wrong way to do a number of things,” he said. “There was no possibility for trial-and-error learning.”

So in the early ’80s, Kaplan and his UCLA colleague, Bob Martin, decided to create a DOS-based computer program that would act as a supplement to classroom instruction. The program, widely used by students around the world, died with the advent of Windows but was revived as a JAVA program a few years ago.

Today, students can run Logic 2000 at home off the Web and work through problems on their own. If they make an error, the program beeps, and they’ll get a specially crafted message that is adapted to the particular error. If they need more help, they can work their way down, layer by layer, until they understand the problem.

“With the computer, there’s no one sitting there saying, ‘Look, you’ve made this error three times. Do I really have to tell you again?’ ” Kaplan said, laughing. “It’s always there, it moves at the student’s own pace. It has some wonderful advantages over human beings.”

JOAN WAUGH
Associate Professor of History

Students wanting to know more about the life of a Civil War soldier can find that information on History Associate Professor Joan Waugh’s Web site.

From the moment students first step into Waugh’s classes on the American Civil War or the Gilded Age, they are greeted with music from the era — soldiers’ laments, say, or railroad songs — and they know they’re in for an intellectual and emotional ride in a time machine, whisked away to the late-19th century by a lively array of slide presentations, video clips and period songs.

“My lectures are generally very fast-paced, very intense and full of information,” Waugh said. “Students will be taking notes furiously, and then they’ll stop and feel what I’ve been telling them intellectually. They’ll feel it because they understand it.”

Providing audiovisual experiences in class is not the only way Waugh uses technology to enhance her lectures. Her Civil War and Gilded Age Web sites have been called “exceptionally rich troves of primary documents, historical information, recommended books, pictures and links.” Attached to the sites are bulletin boards on which students can post questions, share information and communicate with each other.

Although she doesn’t consider herself a computer expert, Waugh wanted to make learning more accessible and interesting for her students. So six years ago, she hired graduate student Christopher Bates, who helped her tailor Web sites specifically to her courses. Her Civil War Web site, for instance, contains short summaries of legislative acts, biographies of important people and primary documents such as the Constitution. Waugh assigns readings from the sites, ensuring that her students visit them regularly.

“Anybody can play short videos or use slides, but if they’re not integrated into the lecture, students won’t get the best experience they can get,” Waugh said. “I’m far from perfecting it, but it is an amazing experience to be able to excite UCLA students about American history, and I love it. It’s worth the work.”

LIANNA JOHNSON, Academic Administrator, and JOHN MERRIAM, Professor, of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology

Lianna Johnson and John Merriam created an interactive CD-ROM for genetics students.

Monohybrids, dihybrids, auxotrophy, epistasis, transduction — such terms can trigger terrible anxiety in an undergraduate student in Life Sciences 4, an introductory genetics course.

But Johnson and Merriam have found a way to ease much of the frustration students experience while trying to solve difficult genetics problems. Together, the two have created a compact disk program called “Interactive Genetics,” which supplements the lectures and textbook used in LS 4. Use of the program is free on various PCs around campus, or students can purchase the CD and accompanying workbook.

In May of 1998, the pair started working together on the CD-ROM with the help of several undergraduate science majors. The two faculty members would present a genetics problem to the students, who would use their creativity — and sometimes humor — to make their own version of the problem and program it into the computer. Johnson and Merriam would then edit their work and eliminate any computer bugs. The resulting workbook contains problems only; to get the solutions, students have to go to the CD-ROM.

“Genetics problem-solving is something that many students almost need to be tutored through,” Johnson said. “This program is self-tutoring; they can learn it in their own way, whereas before, they had to come to office hours. They really couldn’t do it on their own. And now we found we’ve given them that independence.”

“We’re not out to replace the professor,” Merriam added. “We regard the CD-ROM as a personal tutor. It’s always available and infinitely patient.”