Feedback November 2002 (Vol 43 No 4)

7. Online cases and simulations;8. Course content—lecture notes, etc.; and9. Online interactive puzzles and games relevant to course content.One powerful tool available on many campuses is the Blackboard learning environment.This tool has many advantages over earlier learning engines. Students are oftenahead of faculty when it comes to computer use and competency. This can causefaculty anxiety (Donald, 1997). This computer learning environment is designed toovercome this fear and limitation and help faculty get their course online. Blackboardhosts online groups and group websites. Blackboard is capable of measuring the level ofonline interactions (and thereby permits faculty members to assess quantity of groupinteraction as well as individual interaction, which is a powerful quantitative tool).Toward a Richer Learning EnvrionmentChickering and Gamson (1987) described seven principles of good practice for facultymembers constructing an undergraduate learning environment. Their study revealedthat these principles are consistent examplars of outstanding teaching practice:1. Encouraging student-faculty contact, a dialogue between learners that existsboth in and out of the classroom, reminding students that they are a part ofthe ongoing process of building knowledge;2. Encouraging cooperation among students as a means of producing team-workand collaborative skills that make for a richer learning environment. This ismore comparable to what will be encountered in the workplace than thesolitary work of the scholar;3. Encouraging active learning in which the student constructs meaning andinterpretations rather than serving as a passive receptacle of information;4. Providing prompt feedback so that students can closely monitor the progressthey are making;5. Encouraging time-on-task so that students develop skills related to projectmanagement and completion and are able to build substantive rather thansuperficial knowledge of the issue at hand;6. Maintaining high expectations so that students strive to do better and knowthat only their best performance will result in a high grade; and7. Respecting diverse learning styles by providing a number of different pedagogystrategies and different types of assessments and performance measures.Unfortunately, many of these sound principles are constrained by the tiny threehourweekly contact time of a conventional course and by a lack of diverse learningstrategies in the classroom. Happily, some of those time constraints can be overcome bythe Enriched Classroom (see Figure 2).BEA—Educating tomorrow’s electronic media professionals 35