Creative Use of Technology Often Entails Creative Use of Small Budgets

My current teaching assignment requires me to simultaneously teach graduate university sections in Tulsa, in Stillwater, and to distance education students around the country. Realizing that my lectures, support materials, and such are ALWAYS going out to at least part of my students in some electronic form, I had concluded that our current modes of delivery resulted in certain compromises for students in each venue. I decided to capitalize on readily available technologies as a way to minimize the effects of these compromises. Dr. Martin Crossland Associate Professor Management Science and Information Systems Oklahoma State University - Tulsa Click here to see the interview. Click here to see the presentation. (Requires Real Player)

It doesn't take huge grants or massive amounts of money to effectively use technology to better serve our student-learners. According to Dr. Marty Crossland, "The collection of technologies and methods I have developed work to leverage the relatively low-cost technologies now available to all faculty and students at OSU, and to most other educators elsewhere. I believe the innovation is in the collection and integration of the various components, rather than in utilization of any one or only a few of the available solutions." These component solutions for Dr. Crossland include a high quality web site featuring, "bulk lecture" type presentations, short punchy news cast type sound and video bytes, downloadable Powerpoint handouts, all managed from within the course management system WebCT.

For this Tech Tuesday, Dr. Crossland went over and demonstrated some of the specific, cost effective, tools he uses. These include:

• Microsoft FrontPage - available at no cost to OSU faculty, for creating high-quality course web sites,
• Camtasia Studio - available for about $100, for creating active, narrated lectures,
  • can export to Macromedia Flash format,
  • produces streaming media clips in the Windows Media format (free tool from Microsoft),
  • can include content converted from analog sources (e.g. VHS tapes) by using an inexpensive capture card,
  • can also incorporate PowerPoint slides.
• Visual Communicator Pro, available for around $500, for producing newscast-type video introductions,
• Adobe Acrobat, available at a highly reduced price to OSU faculty, for creating lecture notes from PowerPoint,
• WebCT, free to OSU faculty, for creating online quizzes for weekly learning and progress assessment, and for major online unproctored exams.
  • Dr. Crossland also uses WebCT to electronically administer his course evaluations.

For more information on Tech Tuesday, including locations, times, links to recent presentations, or to access last semester's archives, click on any Tech Tuesday link or go to http://fp.okstate.edu/techtuesday.

This page was last updated on Monday, February 21, 2005 8:12 AM .

For more details or information email Steve Brown.