First row, left to right: Chemists Beatrice Botch, Peter Lillya, Roberta Day, Stephen Hixson. Back row, left to right: CESD staff Cindy Stein, Stephen Battisti, David Hart. Not shown: William Vining (Chemistry).
In this edition of TechCast at UMass we explore OWL, an innovative, interactive, multimedia Online Web-based Learning system that helps students do their homework – and maybe even like it!
It’s a dilemma facing all teachers: how to motivate students to do homework. Getting them to enjoy it is even more of a challenge. For teachers of chemistry, especially those teaching intro courses at the undergraduate level, it might seem like mission impossible. But thousands of teachers are using the OWL homework system. OWL was created by a team of chemistry professors and computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Developed out of a unique collaboration between UMass Amherst’s Department of Chemistry and its Center for Educational Software Development (CESD), OWL encourages students to master their coursework by means of an interactive, self-paced electronic homework system. Some 20,000 students at UMass use OWL each year—many in chemistry, but also in disciplines as varied as physics and art history. OWL is reaching students far beyond the University of Massachusetts. With assistance from the office of Commercial Ventures and Intellectual Property (CVIP), OWL’s creators have teamed up with educational publisher Cengage Learning, who has licensed the OWL software from the University of Massachusetts Amherst for commercial use. Now some 100,000 chemistry students around the country are using it.
In this episode, we talk with Dave Hart, CESD’s Director and Peter Lillya, Professor of Organic Chemistry at UMass-Amherst about the creation of the OWL system and how they brought their two disciplines together to help students learn chemistry. Later in the podcast we talk with Cengage Learning’s Chemistry Acquisitions Editor, Lisa Lockwood, about how Cengage is using the OWL system in schools across the nation.
Links
OWL: http://www.cesd.umass.edu/CESD/OWL/
Demo to OWL system: http://owl.cengage.com/owl-c/demo/owldemo.cgi
UMass Amherst Center for Educational Software Development (CESD): http://www.cesd.umass.edu/CESD/
UMass Amherst Department of Chemistry: http://www.chem.umass.edu/Department/
UMass Amherst Department of Computer Science: http://www.cs.umass.edu/
TechCast at UMass #4: Online Web-based Learning Helps Students Learn Chemistry [20:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
