Calvin College - Teaching & Learning

Design an online resource for students to be able to schedule/change/cancel Rhetoric Center appointments online instead having to sign up on location. Rhetoric Center employees will also be able to enter the hours they are available to work and check their schedule.

Determine equipment recommendations and standard for creating and editing audio recordings (for podcasts).

Explore the production of audio recording “kits” with the necessary equipment to produce audio files.
• Portable – kits
• DS or campus location

Bonnie Speyers entered the Studio and started discussion about a weblog for students who were struggling with vocation questions. Speyers worked with Emily to create a fun, inviting design that would allow students to feel welcome and comfortable asking questions and dialoguing about their struggles.

Want a graphical way of advertising important items of interest on the CIT home page.

A gallery was set up for Classics 221 not only so that students could easily view images, but also so professor Ken Bratt could easily add, remove, rearrange, or change discriptions of the images within the gallery.

The "clickers" are a useful tool to facilitate discussion in the classroom. They can also be used for evaluating and assessing students, gauging comprehension, reviewing materials before an exam, and taking attendance. Teaching & Learning is exploring ways to further implement the clickers on campus. One model we're exploring involves each student purchasing a clicker from the campus store, which they register in their KV course(s), with results going directly in the the instructor's KV gradebook.

The Prelude program is looking for a solution which allows instructors to:

- Automate attendance
- Adminster quizzes and surveys
- Encourage participation
- Provide timely feedback to students
- Import grades into KnightVision gradebook

Creative Dining Services has purchased large digital displays to be used for concession pricing in the new arena. They need a solution to dynamically display and update concession item names and prices depending on the given event.

The displays are made by RedPost and use a proprietary system to manage the display of web pages on screen. They need to be able to easily and remotely (from a web browser) update the content of the web pages (item names and prices) while locking down the design.

CIT will use Expression Engine to translate desired design from Creative Dining Services into a template with editable fields for each item/price pair. This solution will allow the fields to be edited remotely, while preserving the visual design of the templates.

In response to a suggestion from John Witte, the Dean of Residence Life, Emily created the Dormulator. The Dormulator allows students to see all the furniture that will be in their dorm room and move it around, rotate it, and change its colors to see what their room could look like.

Engineering professor Matthew Heun was looking for a web-based solution to manage and deliver data collected from student designed and implemented instrumentation systems. Studio students Aaron and Emily used Calvin's pilot weblog software with Heun to create an effective content management system for his students' project web pages.

Aubrey Sykes needed web site templates to give Engineering 101 students a starting point to post their projects on. There are 3 different templates to choose from, and each is easily customized in color, fonts, borders, etc. The css and html files are extensively commented so that further customization can be made and web design learned and understood. They were made to be downloadable with a download link existing on the example site for ease of use.

English professor Karen Saupe approached the Digital Studio with the hope of improving the collection of interview transcripts that her English 101 students contributed to and used as sources for a research project. Emily created a web site for use by English 101 students that allowed them to easily browse and search the content of the interviews. An extensive back end was also produced to allow easy maintenance of the database.

The Digital Studio is working in collaboration with Lois Dye of the Hekman Library to develop a series of interactive learning modules to teach students how to use the library and conduct research.

Pat Buist needs a way to track safety certifications with new employees.

Exploring the potential of a KV organization.

French proficiency test for on-line version

Working with Johnathan Bascom, Emily created a set of highly interactive geography quizzes to give students more flexibility and feedback while taking the quizzes. Professors can choose which items are included in the question pool, as well as how many items are randomly pulled into the quiz.

As an art professor, Kasarian Dane often showed his classes examples of previous students' artwork for specific assignments. Shown with a slide projector, students who wanted to have another look at the examples were usually out of luck. Emily designed a Flash-based gallery of student artwork that uses Gallery, an open-source software program, to allow Kasarian to easily maintain the images in the gallery. In addition, the funky, modern design of the gallery and its smooth interaction give outside visitors a positive impression of Calvin's art department.

Internship training modules consisting of a flash-based promotional video, FAQ, training videos, and an HTML web form. This allows students to complete the step by step training and then apply for access to the internship database.

In collaboration with Greg Sennema of the Hekman Library, Justin created KnightCite, an exhaustive online resource that allows individuals to cite a variety of media using the citation style of their choice, either MLA, APA, or Chicago Style. After entering in the appropriate information, a citation will be generated depending upon the information given and the citation style selected.

Current configuration does not allow for the following:
• Unable to save Groupwise attachments to KV Content System
• Unable to run Access on KV Content System (problematic for dept using ePortfolio rubric databases)
• Reports generated in Access can not be saved directly to KV Content System
• Saving of files start at Root directory requiring users to drill down working directory.
• Unable to define local root directory to KV content System in Dreamweaver
Avoid insecure use of NetDrive (publicly available)

Pilot new Smart Classroom for Bus/Econ

Nursing is looking for a way to store their VHS videos in KV and make them more readily available to faculty and students

Design online training modules to assist in using the KnightVision Content System, such as how to use WebDAV to connect to KV and how to use the website building block.

Nursing Professor Karen Vander Laan needed to revise her Lab Skills Competency final exam. This final exam consisted of a book that had to be flipped through to give each student a different patient scenario. To ensure that all the students had a fair scenario, the Digital Studio created a Flash-driven Patient Scenario Generator, giving each student a randomly selected Patient History, Focused Assessment, and Intervention from which they would answer questions on their final exam.

Prof. Julie Walton came to the Studio asking for a forum for timely discussion of issues related to wellness, sport, and leisure from a distinctively Christian viewpoint. Aaron created a clean design that represented the fun yet serious discussions that would ensue.

The Digital Studio team created a website using Expression Engine which delivers clips of audio, video and text samples organizationally tied to the book Servant Speaking, by Quentin Schultze. We also created a KnightVision organization for the delivery of teaching materials and to serve as a virtual collaborative environment for faculty and instructors using the book.

Peter DeJong, a Social Work professor at Calvin College, was using an outdated VHS tape with accompanying workbook to teach students about social work interviews. Using DVD Studio Pro, Jose digitized the video footage and added subtitles, questions, and cues to guide the students through the exercises.

TBD see:

Michaellynn Hannink
Student Organization Finance Chair
Student Senate Office - Commons Annex 140
financechair@calvin.edu
(616)526-7077

Teaching & Learning is currently redesigning our project process to better meet academic technology needs on campus.

Implement a blog for Teaching & Learning to create on on-going and dynamic communication tool for faculty.

Nancy Zylstra of Calvin Information Technology was manually updating the web newsletter for faculty and staff each week, as well as archiving previous articles. Aaron and Emily used Calvin's pilot weblog software to create a weblog for the I.T. Connection. This allows Nancy to easily update the newsletter. The Studio interns also created a RSS feed to put the headlines of the current newsletter on the CIT homepage.

Computer Science Professor Joel Adams has been archiving his spam e-mail since 1998, with the hope of someday analyzing its trends over time. Justin developed a system to automatically map incoming spam to an SQL database, scripted the analysis tools in PHP, and provided an AJAX-powered interface to dynamically view the basic trends of unsolicited e-mail Professor Adams has received over the years.

Need for video conferencing over the web in smart classrooms.

Proposed solution: Standardize on a webcam, microphone, and software for either check out or installation in all Smart Classrooms.

Over the past few months, we have been undertaking the task of organizing the Calvin College Herbarium into a functional research and teaching resource. Significant progress has been made as a result of our efforts- the collections have been sorted and updated, and our specimens have been annotated with their most current taxonomic nomenclature.
Most notably, we have completed a relational database in Microsoft ACCESS to catalogue not only what specimens we have in our collections, but also who collected them, where they were collected from, and their dates of collection. This database was intentionally designed to be used by both faculty and students wishing to utilize our herbarium- a historically and scientifically indispensible and irreplaceable resource with over 5650 unique specimens collected by more than 400 individuals over the past 172 years.
We are aiming to take this project one step further by making the herbarium accessible to faculty and students (and hopefully even the public) anytime and anywhere by publishing the database online. We also wish to include photographs of representative specimens of each species in our collection, thereby creating a ‘virtual herbarium’ where users could run queries and examine specimens online.

Teaching & Learning: Projects

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