AT&T Fellows Final Reports

April 2006
Name
 Michael Morrone
Title
 Lecturer
Department
 Business Communication
Campus
 Bloomington
Project Title
 Creating Diversity in the Classroom through Use of Indiana University’s Online Collaboration Tools 
Project Goal

To create diversity in student teams that are learning about teamwork
Type of Technology Used in the Project

Oncourse CL course sites, project sites, and Adobe Connect (f/k/a Macromedia Adobe Connect Meeting)

Executive Summary of Results

The combined efforts of the IU School of Medicine and the School of Informatics, New Media program at IUPUI bring video game technology together with medical pedagogy. This has resulted in an immersive simulation/video game that allows the use of medical data and techniques yet promotes the importance of split second decision-making and sound bedside manner through the virtual experience. The XML database allows for assessment for student competency and progress that can be quickly made available to both student and instructor. The SBC grant created the alpha stage, which serves as a framework for these goals and has a database to support a limited simulation scenario.

Need for the Project

Briefly explain why you believed there was a need for your project and what teaching approach was used to address this need.

Both KSB and SSU believe in preparing future leaders (SSU Mission Statement and KSB Mission).  As leaders they will need communication skills to work successfully in the increasing diversity that is part of the American landscape.  While the number of corporations that promote diversity has dramatically risen, businesses in general have “emphasized diversity without a sufficient grasp of how individuals work as a team” (Mannix and Neal, 2006).  And recent studies suggest that surface level diversity (such as racial diversity), if mismanaged, effects workplace performance negatively (Kwak, 2003).  People need “a more nuanced” understanding of diversity for it to be helpful (Kwak, 2003).  Teams with high surface level diversity must overcome “disruptive effects of their differences… to engage in effective and creative problem solving” (Mannix and Neal, 2006).

The typical age of college students puts colleges and universities in a crucial role of preparing students to maximize the benefits of diversity while minimizing the disruptions it can cause in the workplace and in our society generally.  In one recent study, the authors concluded that “in order to foster citizenship for a diverse democracy, educators must intentionally structure opportunities for students to leave the comfort of their homogeneous peer group and build relationships across racially/ethnically diverse student communities on campus” (Gurin, Dey, Hurtado, and Gurin, 2002).   

Need for project at IU and KSB
In 2002, only 3.1% of IU Bloomington’s students were Black or African-American (http://www.iub.edu/~asd/diversity/facts.html, downloaded 1/4/2006) and as of Spring 2003, just above 2% of KSB students were Black of African-American (http://www.kelley.iu.edu/ugrad/diversity/3yrReportUpdate.pdf, downloaded on 1/6/2006).  The national percentage of Black or African-Americans was 12.3% and Indiana’s was 8.4% according to the 2000 census.  (American fact finder, US Census Bureau website, downloaded 1/6/2006).  IU sections involved included no African American or black students and 1 Asian international student out of 54 students

Need for project at SSU
Savannah State University’s mission statement discusses the racial makeup its campus: “The University serves a primarily African-American student population enriched by a diversity of traditional and non--traditional students from other countries, cultures, and races” (SSU Mission Statement, 2/15/2006).  The SSU section involved included no Caucasians or Asians out of 44 students.

Both IU and SSU strongly supported this project with its hopes to augment classroom diversity through the use of technology.

Teaching approach
This team project was designed to foster cross racial communication and teamwork in classrooms that were racially homogenous. 

Use of Technology

Briefly explain how your project used instructional technology in a new or different way.

Oncourse CL
Oncourse CL provided an excellent environment for team work.  Savannah State students received IU guest accounts and were listed as participants in the IU Oncourse CL sections involved in the project.  Each student team also had its own project site in Oncourse CL for private collaboration.  Each team had access to the following tools:

  1. A resource space for file sharing
  2. Announcements that posted in the team project site and via email
  3. Chat space.
  4. A message center for both private messages (emails) and discussions (some of which were prompted by the faculty to facilitate the diversity learning)

The course site (as opposed to the team project site) also facilitated knowledge of each other and each campus by using the web content tool to create links to facebook (facebook.com), each campus’s news pages, rockpaperscissors.biz, and other links as requested by the students.

Use of Adobe Connect Live
Adobe Connect was set up to be a virtual meeting room that team members enter to chat, to see and hear each other while meeting, and to share files and screens.   Students used webcams to meet and collaborate in their teams.  Several teams heavily relied on the chat and document sharing functions in Adobe Connect. 
At the project’s culmination, the student teams presented their work products to the faculty and the president of RPS.  Adobe Connect Live was used during the final presentations to allow all team members to be visible and heard while and to create virtually seamless presentation of the teams’ PowerPoint slides and other visual aids.

Instructional Design Plan

Describe how the use of technology used supported your teaching approach:

The students worked in racially-diverse teams to research expansion of RPS.  The research resulted in a written report and a team presentation.  In sum, the communication skills emphasized in this project were:

Moreover, it is believed that the project fostered more learning about communication than a homogenous classroom by pushing students to apply communication concepts in a new thought-provoking way.  This project also held promise for preparing students for the democratic realities of the working world including: the need to consider and analyze issues from multiple perspectives; the need to communicate with supervisors and subordinates regardless of their racial background; and, the need to respond appropriately to an audience regardless of racial background (Gurin, et. al., 2002).

     respective learning styles, and build collaboration?

The teaching plan incorporated a real world work assignment into the normal X204 curriculum.  The specific activities included two individually-completed progress memos, a team report, and a team presentation.  Feedback was provided in three ways: (1) general feedback was provided using the announcement tool in Oncourse CL and (2) during in class discussion, and (3) individual feedback was provided according to rubrics designed to reinforce key concepts emphasized in X204. 

The assignment was specifically designed to require collaboration, as it resulted in a team report and team presentation.  The team presentation required collaborative design of a Powerpoint presentation.  The presentation was “broadcast” via Adobe Connect at SSU and IU.  The instructors at both IU and SSU, as well as, the president of RPS attended these meetings.  Students from IU and SSU fielded questions from the president of RPS.

From a practical and from a teaching and learning perspective, this project was only possible, because the technology made it feasible for IU and SSU students to collaborate in racially-diverse teams.