Sloan ALN Summer Workshops: Learning Effectiveness and Faculty Satisfaction

Lanny Arvan
Director SCALE, Center for Educational Technology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Chamapign
email: l-arvan@uiuc.edu
URL: http://franklin.scale.uiuc.edu/scale/

Lanny Arvan is director of the Sloan Center for Asynchronous Learning Environments (SCALE) and is an associate professor in the department of Economics. In 1997-98, under Arvan's leadership, SCALE pursued a variety of experiments with ALN instruction (the Efficiencies Projects) aimed at showing that ALN can lower the cost of instruction in high-enrollment courses.
Arvan's own ALN teaching has served as a model for these projects. In his section of intermediate microeconomics he use quizzes in Mallard for students to really learn what is going on in lecture. He has problem sets done by teams of students submitted in FirstClass, with a twist borrowed from Writing Across the Curriculum, wherein the team is allowed to revise the homework submission based on graded feedback from the the TA. And he uses undergraduate TAs, former students in the class, who provide numerous online office hours during the evenings and weekends, when the students are working on their homework.

Arvan has also led SCALE to the next phase of ALN implementation. Most of the initial SCALE success was with highly motivated faculty, "early adopters," who required little support from SCALE other than a bit of initial training and access to the servers. That phase is almost done and SCALE has turned to getting "mainstream faculty" engaged in ALN teaching. This change in audience is necessitating a change in SCALE's ALN support where training is but a component and helping faculty think hard about their course re-design is more of a focus.

Arvan has recently been named the first Director of Educational Technology for the UIUC campus, in charge of a new Center for Educational Technologies. The current mission of the CET, getting mainstream faculty involved with Educational Technology, dovetails nicely with the SCALE mission. Indeed, the forming of the CET demonstrates the commitment at UIUC to institutionalize the SCALE project.