iPads for Education Pilot

Use of mobile devices & applications for teaching & learning in higher education is an area of significant & rapid growth, as are collaborative applications & cloud-based computing (Horizon Report, 2011, 2010). TTS’s Educational and Scholarly Serviced group (ESTS) is working on a set of initiatives designed to partner with the Tufts community in this fast-moving arena and this ipad pilot is an important component of that.

Fall 2013 – Course-based iPad loans to faculty & students

This Fall 2013, Educational & Scholarly Technology Services (ESTS) would like to partner with one or two instructors who are interested in integrating iPads into their classes. ESTS will work with you to gather empirical data on student outcomes and/or instructor change. We are most interested in classes where you would:

  • Implement a flipped classroom model AND/OR
  • Teach a medium- to large-sized lecture class format (40~75 students)

The systematic evaluation will likely need to include measurement or observational methods that compare student performance or instructor change data from two different classes (eg. Comparing data with a prior or concurrent class that is taught with and without the iPad).

We have a total of about 75 iPads that are available for loan.

To apply, please fill out a brief survey here.

Resources

Spring 2013 – course-based iPad loans to faculty & students

From among the Fall 2012 participants, we hope to identify 2-4 Spring 2013 classes where the professors have a keen interest in promoting active learning & student engagement via ipads, loan the students in those classes each an ipad for the semester (with the stipulation that the ipads come back to UIT to be wiped clean at the end of the semester), and work with the faculty & other colleagues to support & evaluate the project throughout the semester.

We expect to have a pool of approximately 75 iPads to support this pilot, so will likely need to focus efforts on small to medium sized classes.

Faculty participating in this part of the project will need to commit to working with ESTS staff to carefully plan their use of the ipads, define metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts, and identify lessons learned & potential best practices that can be applied to other classes.

Potentially valuable course-wide use cases include, but are not limited to:

  • in-class note taking, annotating, and other content capturing methods
  • multimedia project production
  • location-aware in-field data collection
  • touch-screen interactivity, collaboration
  • and many more

Fall 2012 – iPad loans to individual faculty

ESTS is excited to provide faculty with the opportunity to borrow an iPad to use in their courses this fall as well as to participate in a series of events on how to effectively use iPads for teaching.

We ask that faculty who are interested in borrowing an iPad for the Fall 2012 semester, or in participating in the pilot using their own iPad, do the following:

  • fill out the application by midnight on Sunday August 26,
  • agree to give us feedback on their experiences,
  • agree to release content/data collected via this program for future publication,
  • return all loaner equipment in good working order & in a timely manner at the end of the Fall 2012 semester & remove any content you want to keep from the device. Lost/damaged equipment will result in a charge for the replacement value.

The application period was open from August 7-August 26, 2012. Faculty will be notified by August 31 as to whether their application was accepted.  Please contact ipadpilot@tufts.edu if you have questions.