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A laptop computer is a core requirement
for every student on the UOIT campus.
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A Teachable MomentCanada's Newest University Breaks Ground with Hybrid Instruction
It took a few minutes longer for me to get in to see Dr. Bill Muirhead, Associate Provost of Ontario University Institute of Technology (UOIT) than I'd anticipated. When he was finally ready for me he explained that he had been speaking to one of his staff members and encountered "a teachable moment." Dr. Muirhead is acutely aware that in teaching, as in comedy, timing is everything.
That is probably why we find this recent transplant from Alberta in Ontario at all. He has realized that it is a rare opportunity to be invited to be part of a university start up team and that by being part of the ground floor efforts he has a unique chance to instill his passion for eLearning into the very core of how this new university will be structured.
Unlike any other university in Canada at the moment, a laptop computer is a core requirement for every student on campus. Lectures continue to be held in large auditoriums and lecture halls but every seat is equipped with a power outlet and access to high speed Internet. Software tools like Silicon Chalk allow professors to deliver part of their lecture directly onto the student's laptop computer while allowing students to record lectures and annotate the lecture material with their own notes. This combination of face to face instruction, with eLearning is referred to as Hybrid Education.
Dr. Muirhead explained that as with any ground breaking project they have encountered the unexpected. "The first time we first put three hundred students with 300 laptops running in an auditorium in the middle of winter, we were shocked to find that we needed to run the air conditioning. Another surprise came on a day when Microsoft released a new Windows update. When the students began to automatically upgrade their Windows XP operating systems
the entire school network became unstable and for a short period of time and the university network ground to a halt."
UOIT is located on the same physical campus as Durham College about ten minutes North of downtown Oshawa. Their goal as an institution is to provide service to an under served university population east of Toronto and at the same time use this opportunity to create a new type of learning institution by starting with a clean slate .... or in their case, a clean hard disk. UOIT is currently in the process of building the campus' online and face-to-face architecture while growing enrollment. Now in year 2, they expect to have a total enrollment of better than 6500 full time students and 200 full time staff by 2008.
Other lessons learned by the university include the fact that: lap tops are an asset to the educational process but do not have to be an inextricable part of that process. Situations still exist where learning without electronic aids is the best strategy. They have also found that the availability of laptops and ubiquitous wireless connectivity leads to the acquisition of more powerful software which in turn creates the need for more powerful hardware, as well, increased on campus connectivity is driveing the demand for more off campus connectivity at the same time.
UOIT represents a fresh start at defining what a university could and should be. They are inventing methodologies for delivering higher education by blending the traditions of a conventional university instruction with the efficiencies of broadband technology. Most of all the UOIT start up team has freed the learning environment from the struggle between innovation and tradition in order to create Canada's very first true 21st century institution of higher education.
For more information about UOIT see: www.uoit.ca
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