Blog Juice for Educational Technology

At the League for Innovation in the Community College conference, many of the sessions deal with how to capture the attention of today’s students. College students these days want games, video, audio, and other bells and whistles, presenters say: Otherwise, they’ll spend their class time staring at the screens of their video iPods.

What are missing from most of these presentations are the opinions of actual students.

Bethany Perrin and Cathy Russell are students in the master’s program in educational technology at Texas A&M University at College Station. They also work as instructional designers for Blinn College on its campus in nearby Bryan, Tex., which is how they ended up at the conference.

They attend sessions and take notes, like everyone else, although Ms. Russell writes with bright green ink and Ms. Perrin scribbles on purple notebook paper.

But when attendees bragged about how they begin their online course with a video tour of the campus, the students provided another perspective.

“That would frustrate me,” Ms. Perrin said. “It would be a waste of my time.”

Fancy videos are nice, they said, but what’s most important is to make an online course well organized and easy to navigate. Otherwise, students are likely to lose interest. “That’s the key to classwork,” Ms. Russell said. “It has to sound relevant.”

Their responses captured the attention of other session attendees, who began peppering the students with questions. At the end, one of the attendees yelled out, “You guys have been enlightening.”