Technology in Today's Classroom?

Hey all, Sarah here. I'm a sophomore at Purdue University in Aeronautical Engineering. Also, Bill's daughter.

As I start my second year of college, a lot of new technology is being thrown my way. Not only are there the online homework assignments and chat features available on our school's site like last year, Purdue, and many others, are stepping up in their technology to better educate us.

My Economics 251 book (Microeconomics) cost me upwards of $125. I went to class and they informed me that I can simply purchase the eBook of this text, as well as access to the online homework which comes with all new texts, online for $70. Wouldn't that be handy? So I returned my text to the bookstore, regaining my $125, and decided to buy the online version for only $70. But the online text is broken. When I came home and tried to register on CourseCompass.com, my course ID wouldn't let me buy the book and online homework access. I check my email and sure enough I have a message from my professor that the course is not letting you register without a new text. She's working on fixing it and it will be up soon. That was last Tuesday. It still isn't working. I'm excited for the prospect, but I worry about why it is so complicated. The technology is simple enough, but is it too hard to coordinate all those 400 students in my lecture? Shouldn't be, but something apparently is.

Another interesting new developement, and I think it is far more interesting than online texts, is my Introduction to Aerospace Design course. There are two sections of the class. Section one is over 100 students, taught in a lecture hall with overheads, whiteboards, or powerpoints, whatever the professor desires. Section two, my section, is about 40 students. We learn in a computer lab, in a virtual world. We play the role of interns working on a project for a large corporation called AeroQuest. We were just given our first of two projects: to design a spacecraft to orbit first the earth, then the moon carrying a few astronauts. The two professors for the course switch each day which section they teach and the courses are at the same time. With all the information they doled out on Monday, needless to say I was excited for the test run on Friday. Unfortunately, it is also a bit of a failure. Like the eText from my Econ class, it couldn't handle all the students running around in the world at the same time. In the initial test run on Friday, everyone, after some initial downloading problems, got up and running and exploring our new "office environment" when the program promptly crashed. For the professor to get in and explain how the world worked, the students all had to log out. Hopefully with the design engineer of the program (a grad student here at Purdue) working on it this weekend, it will be up and running better on Monday. I'll keep you posted.

I had such high hopes on Monday for this new technology, and I'm hoping it ends up being worth my time after the disappointments later in the week.

I'm pretty busy here, but I'll try to submit a blog when interesting stuff happens.