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KEEP Case Studies: Transforming Teaching and Learning

Transforming Teaching and Learning Through the Effective Use of Innovative Technology

Hewlett-Packard Technology for Teaching: A Worldwide Higher Education Philanthropy Initiative

HP Grant Recipient Gallery
2006 conference materials

The HP Technology for Teaching initiative grants teams of faculty from colleges or universities, 2-year or 4-year, public or private, an award to redesign a course using technology, such as Tablet PCs. Project teams include one or more faculty members acting as the principal investigators often with other team members who are experts in instructional design or technology integration.

Over the last three years, for more than 200 projects in 34 countries, the use of the technology, the changes in pedagogy, and the courses being redesigned have evolved as technology is used in new ways across academic disciplines. From engineering to geology, from business to nursing, what the projects all have in common is their intent to transform how they teach and interact with students. Together they aim to improve student-learning outcomes.

The Carnegie Foundation's KEEP Toolkit was first used by HP grant recipients in 2005, by a cohort of worldwide recipients, preparing to attend the annual HP Technology for Teaching Worldwide Higher Education Conference. By making the KEEP Toolkit available to the grant recipients, HP's goals were to:

Increase the visibility of HP Technology for Teaching grant recipient projects
Provide an easy way for grant recipients to make a public webpage
Guide the grant recipients in reflecting on the salient components of their projects, with a specific emphasis on the impact of the project on learning and teaching

Faculty were asked to prepare a public webpage, that would in turn be printed on a large format printer to serve as a poster for the conference poster session. The goal was to guide the faculty in describing their project clearly to a public audience. The KEEP Toolkit made the creation of webpages simple, and by providing a template we could guide the content of their story. By printing the webpages directly, we could prepare hard-copy posters for use in the conference without any additional work on the part of the conference participants.

Tablet PC Collaborative Software Development for Fieldwork-Based Courses Kenrick Mock, Computer Science, University of Alaska Anchorage

Mobile Tablet-PC Lab for a Biology Laboratory Course Liza V. Jimenez, Natural Sciences Department University of Puerto Rico, Aguadilla

Hospital Information System for Students & Mobile Problem Solving Maria Cinque, Universita` Campus Bio-Medeico, Roma, Italy

As a result, the KEEP Toolkit facilitated the conference and provided a lasting (and edit-able) online artifact that can describe the project to other faculty in the months and years to come.

The Process for Reaching these Goals with KEEP Toolkit

The initiative leadership team was first introduced to the Toolkit as a result of Carnegie's work with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. The team met with the Knowledge Media Lab (KML) to discuss ways to support faculty who were engaged in "course redesign" efforts related to their HP grant. As a result of our conversation, the KML extended an invitation to HP grant recipients to use the KEEP Toolkit to build public project snapshots, and thereby guide their reflections on the significance of their work.

The poster session at the 2006 conference.

The initiative leadership team spent a significant amount of time, with some guidance from the KML team, in developing a template that had meaningful reflection prompts that were specific to their grant initiative's goals. The team then invited faculty to use the KEEP Toolkit to create a project snapshot to share not only a project description, but also pedagogical and technological "know-how" as well as an analysis of how the transformation effort improved teaching and student learning with some evidence.

Project Launch Template: The HP Technology for Teaching Project Launch template is provided to new grant recipients who are starting to use the KEEP Toolkit.

To further encourage the faculty to use the Toolkit, the team offered to print the snapshot in a large poster size to be used during the poster session at our annual grant recipient conference - saving faculty from the time consuming task of generating a project poster. Most of the participants at the 2006 conference chose to use the KEEP Toolkit to generate their public webpage, and as a result, the poster session was quite informative.

The next step in enhancing the HP Technology for Teaching Higher Education Philanthropy Initiative is to increase the collaboration and visibility of projects among the community of grant recipients. To do this, the project team is experimenting with various social networking web collaboration tools, including the use of a private Wiki space.