Penn State School of Nursing Grant Proposal Presentation
Tue, 05/15/2007 - 8:37am — Yvonne Clark
The School of Nursing at Penn State has submitted a proposal for a grant to incorporate emerging technologies in their courses. Two of the technologies they plan to be making good use of are Adobe Connect blended with PolyCom.
The School of Nursing currently uses PolyCom extensively to deliver their courses. Students at a distance travel to PolyCom rooms at various sites throughout the state to join the face-to-face classes. Although more convenient for students than traveling to University Park, it can still cause difficulties. By including Web-based, desktop video conferencing through Adobe Connect as an option for attending classes, students at a distance will be able to participate without having to spend time and money traveling to a PolyCom site.
As a finalist in the grant proposal process, the Penn State School of Nursing will be hosting executives representing the grant underwriters for a day of meetings and presentations. To demonstrate how they will blend the Adobe Connect and PolyCom technologies, the Nursing staff has arranged for several PolyCom sites to call in to the meeting as well having a faculty member at New Kensington join the meeting through Breeze. The faculty member, through the Adobe Connect Share and Camera and Voice pods, will be giving a PowerPoint presentation for the group.
To further demonstrate the capabilities of Adobe Connect, several students have recorded a Connect session where they discuss and critique a research article, making use of the application sharing capabilities of the Share pod as well as the collaborative note taking capabilities of the Note pod. The recording of the student session is available at https://breeze.psu.edu/p86267433/. You can move through the recording using the slider bar at the bottom of the window. The parts of the recording being used for the grant proposal presentation are minutes 0 to 2:09, 3:20 to 4:20, and 5:25 to 6:14.
If the Nursing School is awarded the grant, they will be revising several courses to include the use of Adobe Connect as well as several other emerging technologies.
Yvonne, are they considering
Yvonne, are they considering Skype at all? I have a pal at Wake Forest who just did a seminar between his students and students in Russia using Skype. I tried doing a PolyCom conference with different students from the same university a few years back but it didn't work. IUPUI's PolyCom was too new and didn't work with their much older PolyCom version. :-(
Too Early to Choose a Final Communication Tool
It's still too early in the project to settle on one specific technology for communication. I don't think actual course planning will begin until they find out if they have received the grant money.
I agree with you that Skype is definitely something that should be considered for use in the courses. There are also some IM Chat products that allow video, audio, and document sharing. Education Technology Services will be starting a project later this year to try to assemble a list of available communication technologies, what they do well and what they don't do well. We will make this information available here at our community site for people to use to evaluate their goals and objectives and make an educated choice of which technologies to use.