US tablet programme helps faculty integrate tech into classes

California State University has introduced a voluntary tablet program in a bid to reduce the cost of college. Through 1-to-1 initiatives, the scheme hopes to encourage faculty to integrate technology into more courses and teaching. A week long summer workshop has also been put in place where faculty can explore using tablets in their own courses alongside grant schemes approved for tablets. 

Mobile Computing

Transforming Teaching at Fresno State with Tablets

This tablet program was as much about helping faculty integrate technology into their courses as it was about outfitting students with computing devices for their academics.

California State University, Fresno had all kinds of reasons to implement a mobile device program. For one thing, new students arriving from local high schools with broad 1-to-1 initiatives, including Fresno Unified School District, Clovis Unified and Central Unified, increasingly expected tech in the classroom. Also, like all public institutions, Fresno State is big on reducing the cost of college. Being able to use open educational resources widely across campus could go a long way toward that goal — achievable only if students were outfitted with a means for working with those digital resources. But perhaps the most compelling reason to launch "DISCOVERe," the university's tablet program, was to nudge its faculty into integrating technology into their courses and teaching.

Here's what Fresno State has learned.

Set Expectations Low for Faculty

Faculty participation in the tablet program at Fresno State is entirely voluntary. Once they're accepted into the program, they receive their devices and begin attending a set of two-hour sessions scheduled every couple of weeks to gain the basics of tablet usage and learn how the devices might be applied for specific purposes or particular courses. "It could be using the device as a presentation tool or for interactivity and creativity, for assessment, for collaboration and engagement or as a tool for reflection," explained Sue Yang, the university instructional designer who coordinates that faculty training.

From there, faculty attend a weeklong summer workshop where they explore how to use the tablets in their own courses, she added. "It could be a specific app or [program] they know they want to use."

Joe Ross, an assistant professor of biology, was part of the original cohort of instructors at the very beginning of DISCOVERe. He remembers spending a lot of time in those sessions with his colleagues just "learning how to use apps — playing with them, testing them." What was clear to him from early on was that teaching staff were left to choose which apps were most appropriate for the topics they were teaching. Nothing was mandated. That approach, he said, "was, of course, ideal for faculty. We generally hate to be told what to do. We are the experts and we think we know what's best to do in a classroom."

Picking the Right Course Isn't Always Easy

The class Ross chose for his inaugural tablet effort was an upper-division genetics course (required for the biology major) that he had previously taught only once before. He and his department chair both realized that choosing a required course for first-time tablet-enabled teaching was risky. What if this was the only section of genetics being taught that semester, and he failed miserably?

So they decided to split the section in half, one taught using the tablet and the other following the traditional instructional approach. The two classes showed up in the schedule back-to-back. "The first one of the day was the traditional class," Ross recalled. "Then I went one floor up in the same building to the classroom above me and I taught the tablet version."

Take Baby Steps

During that first semester, initially the only difference between the two sessions was that Ross handed out exercises on paper in the first class and distributed them as PDF files in the second class. "The transformation was not very significant," he acknowledged. "It was substitution, the lowest level of incorporating technology into a classroom. We took a paper-product process and turned it into an electronic process."