WARWICK -- Bongsup Cho uses three-dimensional animations to show his University of Rhode Island pharmacy students how drugs such as Prozac work -- how their molecules snap into molecules in the brain, like keys fit into locks.
Luis Malaret, an ecologist at the Community College of Rhode Island, has used videoconferencing to co-teach an environmental affairs course with professors across the country.
Richard Evans posts PowerPoint versions of his lectures on the Web, along with quizzes and homework, and he answers questions by e-mail and clarifies points he might have overlooked in class. When Rhode Island College accidentally overbooked his Web design class, he even let some students take the whole course online.
Evans, Malaret and Cho are pioneers in the use of technology in teaching in Rhode Island's public higher education system. They've mastered software and hardware that didn't exist just a few semesters ago; they've taken risks and experimented in ways that college professors aren't often known to do.
But they are no longer rarities. Yesterday, at the Office of Higher Education's second annual "Using Technology in Teaching: Ideas that Work" seminar, at CCRI's Knight Campus, more than three dozen CCRI, RIC and URI professors gave presentations on how they're using the Web, digital animations, streaming video, and other high-tech tools to teach everything from writing, to art history, to geology, to math.
Such is the demand for technology training, said Nancy Carriuolo, associate higher education commissioner for academic affairs, that her office had a waiting list for yesterday's event; about 170 professors attended, including a handful from private institutions such as Providence College and Salve Regina University.
The response to yesterday's event shows how people's fear of technology has waned, Carriuolo said.
"Now the faculty are clamoring to use technology," she said. "If anything, it's difficult to keep up with all the faculty who want to use it."
With so many eager to learn, Carriuolo said, peers are teaching peers -- at the individual schools, and at events like yesterday's, across campuses.
The eight-hour seminar covered a wide range of topics, some quite specific, and some broader -- such as how technology can serve as a "catalyst for learning and interaction."
Growing numbers of faculty at all three colleges are now using a program called WebCT to develop online components for their courses, and several workshops focused on its pros and cons: how e-mail and message boards can engage students, and online quizzes can help them review the material, but also how some students might cheat on a quiz, and how some parts of the program are clunky.
Several professors spoke about how they've used multimedia presentations to make their subjects come alive.
Natalie Coletta, who teaches art history at CCRI, has turned her lectures into dramatic visual presentations, gathering images from Web sites, online archives, and books and photos that she scans herself and turning them into PowerPoint slideshows.
URI Prof. Don Hermes talked about how he uses "virtual field trips" to national parks to teach his students to recognize geologic features and understand geologic processes.
And Norm Grant and Jim Glickman, of CCRI, showed a CD-ROM they made that juxtaposed scenes from very different productions of Hamlet, from the traditional to the super-modern.
CCRI's Malaret, for his part, teamed up with four other CCRI faculty members -- including three on the Lincoln campus -- to demonstrate the joys and difficulties of videoconferencing. Watching each other on TV screens, the two groups played Pictionary, using an electronic "Smartboard" rather than a blackboard.
Once engaged in the game, the teams seemed to forget the distance. But then the signal would get choppy, like a bad cell-phone connection. As English professor Kathleen Beauchene put it, with videoconferencing, "there are lots of things that you can do, and there are lots of things that can go wrong."
Finally, Malaret played some video of a lecture last spring, part of the videconferencing-based environmental course, a project based at Cornell University. A CCRI student gave a presentation, and then got feedback from peers at several other colleges. The ramifications, Malaret said, are "tremendous."
He is teaching the course again this spring, this time with two CCRI colleagues: a chemist, Nick Alteri, and an economist, Safiul Huda.
