Title
IT @ UNSW: Clouding our education?
Abstract
Universities are offering more and more resources to students to aid their
learning. Students enrol online, choose course listings online and pay online. If
they miss an assignment due to sickness or other considerations, they can apply
for special consideration online. In the past, academics have provided websites for
students to access lecture notes and resources online. Communication via email is
regular and expected. Nowadays, universities enter into contracts with large
educational software providers to support academics’ teaching and learning. Over
the past decade, UNSW have used WebCT, Vista, Blackboard and now use Moodle.
These software link to the enrolment records so only the students enrolled have
access to a particular course. Students can submit assignments in the Moodle
environment, can take quizzes designed by academics which are automatically
assessed. There are discussion forums, links to websites and videos to aid learning.
Academics can coordinate courses from anywhere in the world. In the last few
session at UNSW, lectures have been recorded using the Echo360 product in a
podcast form with the PPT slides and a moving mouse on the recording. A video of
the lecturer will appear in the recording soon. Students can listen to the lecture
again online and academics can track how many are watching and when. MOOCs
are also a new phenomenon which are challenging universities. Many of these
resources can be accessed via the cloud on all sorts of mobile devices, meaning
that education can be performed 24/7 and not only in the classroom. So with all
this access to educational resources are our students better off?
Craig Roberts, UNSW
Craig Roberts is a Senior Lecturer majoring in Surveying/ GPS/ Geodesy in the
Surveying and Geospatial Engineering group at the School of Civil and
Environmental Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He
graduated from the South Australian Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of
Surveying in 1988. He began his career as a private surveyor in Adelaide and has
since worked as a Geodetic Engineer at UNAVCO, USA involved with GPS for
geodynamic studies in Nepal, Ethiopia, Argentina and Indonesia. He worked as a
scientific assistant at the GeoForschungsZentrum, Germany where his main focus
was orbit determination and prediction for a number of geodetic research
satellites. He completed his PhD thesis on volcano monitoring using low-cost GPS
networks in March 2002. He has lectured at RMIT University in Melbourne for two
years. His current research interests involve implications of datum modernisation
and leveraging CORS infrastructure for practical application to surveying and
geospatial information.
Bio