BU's top provider of educational media
Prof Barba has single-handedly become the university’s top provider of educational media via iTunes U.
With her latest course on iTunes U, a freshman Introduction to Engineering module titled “Bio-Aerial Locomotion,” Prof. Barba firmly establishes her track-record of using new media to support learning and championing the open courseware movement.
This course has been the Top Collection on BU’s iTunes page since the start of the semester, while her previous courses continue to be among the Top Downloads.
In fact, Prof. Barba’s tracks on iTunes have completely dominated the list of top downloads on BU’s site for several weeks now, making her the top provider of educational media in the university, at this time.
This has been achieved single-handedly, with no additional technical support nor funding, as her methods are simple yet effective. She presented a paper on them at the 1st BU Instructional Innovation Conference¹, describing how she uses digital inking and screencasting.
Her current collections on iTunes U are:
- Fluid Mechanics ME 303 (undergraduate)²
- Computational Fluid Mechanics ME 702 (graduate)
- PASI, Pan-american Advanced Studies Institute, “Scientific Computing in the Americas—The challenge of massive parallelism” (NSF-funded summer school)
- Bio-Aerial Locomotion EK 131/132 (undergraduate freshman)³
For this latest course, Prof. Barba has embraced other digital pedagogy techniques, e.g., the course has a blog, where students have been authoring posts about the course material, and notable guest speakers have participated in the course via Skype interviews (which can be seen in the lecture videos).
Prof. Barba not only gives her own students the opportunity to re-play lectures and reinforce their learning, but is also helping many self-learners around the world.
She often receives emails of appreciation for this contribution—the two most recent ones are from a retired 70 year-old self-learner in Arkansas, and a student writing from Tripoli, Lybia, during the country’s turbulent times.
Notes
¹ “Digital inking and lecture screencasts”, L A Barba, 1st Annual Instructional Innovation Conference, Boston University, March 27, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.94015
² ME 303 was listed among the “Top 30 iTunes U Engineering Courses” by the Degree Central on October 2010.
³ Bio-aerial Locomotion course featured in “What you can learn from 8 of Boston’s colleges on iTunes U”, on BostInno.com (Jan. 23, 2012)