Innovating With Technology
Whether designing for a completely online, hybrid or face-to-face course experience, our educational technology strategy for innovating the student learning experience requires continuous research and prototyping in order to keep pace with the role technology plays in the personal, academic and professional lives of our students.
Current Innovation Pilots
The Online Curriculum & Instruction team is charged with ensuring our educational technologies are serving faculty and student needs and keeping pace with state-of-the-art best practices in the higher education community.
We encourage you to take a tour of our current pilot technologies and to explore their potential to support your courses and pedagogical priorities.
To learn about how we work with faculty, including in the exploration of new technologies, please see the Technology Design for Courses page.
Following a thorough research process, the PebblePad platform was selected as the technology best suited to prototype co-curricular innovation based on folio thinking over 2018-2020. Several design-driven pilots are exploring new opportunities for student success, by creating a bridge between academic and co-curricular learning.
Current pilot participants include the Career Design Lab (CDL), and the Strategic Communications and Negotiation and Conflict Resolution programs.
Pilot highlights to date include:
- A reimagined Career Readiness Journey for all incoming SCOM and NECR students and a companion digital workbook
- Increased engagement of pilot students with CDL coaches, resources, and programming
- Interactive activities that leverage mobile technology to enhance student engagement
- A new approach to delivering Internship courses online
- Learning Transfer activities that optimize student preparation and positioning for jobs and internships by leveraging coursework
If you would like to explore how PebblePad can support your program or course goals, please contact Domi Enders, Associate Director of Learning Resources and Academic Technologies.
Our team is keenly focused on finding new ways to apply technology to reshape and advance traditional learning models — with the ultimate goal of inspiring innovation in every classroom. One of our most promising new technologies in this regard is Panopto. A growing number of SPS faculty are using Panopto for asynchronous lecture capture to flip their classroom, freeing up valuable in-class time for hands-on teaching strategies. Some instructors are venturing into video quizzing, while others are helping students hone their presentation skills through video-based assignments.
Interested in using Panopto in your course, setting up an account, or additional training? Instructors who are interested in using Panopto in their course(s) or need more one-on-one training should contact their instructional designer or the SPS Media team at [email protected].
Troubleshooting - We encourage you to start by exploring the many tutorial videos available in our Panopto Tutorials playlist. If you are unable to find an answer to your question, please submit a help request via CUSPS Helpdesk.
Panopto: System Requirements
WalkMe is a software tool that was deployed to all CUSPS faculty and associates in January 2019, on a pilot basis. The tool helps faculty navigate Canvas features and receive the just-in-time support they need, on-demand and 24/7. You should be able to see the WalkMe player tab on the lower right of every page in your Canvas course(s). If not, please contact the CUSPS Helpdesk.
WalkMe provides clear onscreen directions to support you right when you need it the most. Open the help tab on your Canvas screen, select the walkthrough corresponding to your task, and you will instantly receive the step-by-step guidance you need to complete it. The result is a vastly-improved Canvas experience, allowing you to easily get things done without feeling frustrated or getting lost.
Teaching complex topics in computer science requires a robust platform. That's where Codio comes in.
The pilot implementation of Codio in Fall 2018 was a collaboration between the team at SPS Innovation and Academic Technology and the lead-design faculty for the Applied Analytics course, SQL and Relational Databases. The pilot’s scope was to create a software stack that can be administered and supported by the faculty and accessed by students via a browser-based integrated development environment without the need of extensive local setup on students’ personal machines.
Because Codio is a browser-based environment, student interaction with the platform was not impacted by individual computer configurations, and software installation and setup was nearly entirely eliminated. The effort faculty normally spend supporting and troubleshooting, which can amount to dozens of hours, was refocused on developing and teaching the curriculum.
The initial impressions from the students and faculty are positive, and the faculty has expressed enthusiasm for the continued use of Codio in the Applied Analytics program. Future plans include implementing assignments that can be automatically graded and passed back to the Canvas gradebook.
For more information on implementing Codio in your course, contact Justin Saunders, Education Technologist.
Interested in learning more about our pilot technologies?
Please contact the Innovation and Academic Technology team for more info and/or a demo: [email protected].
We encourage you to visit the Insights and Research page, with links to pilot findings that have been synthesized in case studies, as well as links to other resources that inform the work of the Online Curriculum & Instruction team. These resources relate to adult learning, educational technologies, instructional design, data and analytics, and more—from academic papers to white papers.