Jeff Weiss, professor of economics, Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business, is giving an April 11 seminar entitled “iMovie and QuickTime: technologies that will transform higher education” at Apple’s Manhattan Market center location.
“While I will be giving a short iMovie tutorial and attendees will be invited to take iMovie out for a spin, the focus will be on how these technologies have changed what I do as a professor and how my students educations have been affected,” Weiss told MacCentral.
As described in a recent Macs-in-action story, “Desktop movies help business students strike the right notes,” the prof’s microeconomics lectures are taped, edited, and made available on Baruch’s Blackboard site. This feature alone changes the entire educational experience for his students, he said. Now they can review the lecture materials as often as they need to, either at home or at school.
“And knowing they could do this, I felt comfortable raising the level of the class — I covered more material than in previous semesters and I used new and more complex techniques,” Weiss said.
While the “Desktop Movies” article enumerates a number of additional pedagogical benefits that he will also present at the seminar, the professor will also be showing how the power of QuickTime can be exploited to break down barriers to understanding. A student watching a video lecture, for example, may not understand the economics because he doesn’t understand a mathematical derivation.
“Instead of waiting (a day or longer) to talk with me about it, he can ‘click’ on that portion of the derivation that he fails to understand, and he will be taken either to a separate explanatory lecture that I’ve created or to a Web site where he can get assistance,” Weiss said. “In addition, I will show how QuickTime movies can be used within, say, an Excel document as video help files — files that explain the structure of the excel document itself as well as the economics contained in the document.”
In both of these instances, the obstacles that stop learning are overcome with QuickTime’s tools, he added. After seeing these demonstrations, it will also be clear to the attendees how these technologies can be used to improve teaching effectiveness in the sciences and the humanities, according to Weiss.
For more info on the seminar, including directions and registration go to the seminar Web site.