In this Discovery Session, presenters will showcase their pilot project and emerging research around implementation of a 1-1 device model - every student brings a laptop to every class meeting - in conjunction with major curricular redesign to foster high-demand, 21st century skills that include multimodal content creation and digital collaboration.
This Discovery Sessions will be facilitated by faculty members from the College of DuPage (a large suburban community college) who were awarded an institutional "Resource for Excellence" grant that funded the purchase of a library of laptop devices (Chromebooks) which were made available to all students in classes taught by project participants in Fall 2017, Spring 2018, and Fall 2018.
Each class was specifically redesigned to use Google's GSuite content creation and collaboration tools, like docs, slides, forms, and sites. With the 1-1 model in place, every student was required to bring his or her device to every class meeting.
The session will provide the opportunity for attendees to learn what steps went into organizing and implementing both the curricular redesign and the purchase and housing of available devices, including the student-use contract we created and how we advertised through the registration system.
Additionally, attendees can experience what it might be like to work using the collaborative GSuite tools to get a sense of what activities were happening in the various classes. We will provide representative examples of assignments and of student work; in addition, we will highlight what 21st century educational and professional skills our redesign allowed us to tap into. We will address both our institutional General Education outcomes and high-demand skills identified by national organizations like the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
As part our Discovery Session we will also share out data we have collected from across the various semesters and course sections involved in the pilot. We discovered some surprising things about what students liked, what they did not like, where they would like to see the project expand, and also what prior knowledge and expectations they were coming to us with. The data collected so far is informing how we continue to grow and offer the project as we move into year two.
Finally, as we share out our experience we will also actively solicit input from attendees who might be undertaking similar efforts. We are especially interested to learn about what the 1-1 model and curricular redesign might look like across a wide diversity of academic disciplines, including transfer and career-tech programs. And we are eager to hear perspectives from a range of institutional constituents, including administrative leaders, technology and design professionals, in addition to student support and advising.
Our project grew out of our desire to offer our students curricula that would better prepare them to be digitally literate citizens and savvy professionals in the 21st century. We knew, though, that in designing around the 1-1 model we ran the risk of inadvertently disadvantaging the very students who might already be our most underserved: i.e. those without access to adequate technology. So making the hardware available to those who needed access to it was both the most practical aspect of our project, but also perhaps the most fundamental.
It is ultimately this issue of equity and access that we hope to keep foregrounded as we share out our process and findings, and as we gather further input to continue to shape our efforts.