Deans discuss teaching and technology at Rice

By Mengjia Liu     1/31/15 8:48am

At a lecture sponsored by Scientia on Jan. 27, Dean of Humanities Nicolas Shumway and Dean of Social Sciences Lyn Ragsdale discussed challenges faced by their respective schools and the impact of technology on teaching at Rice.

According to Ragsdale, the School of Social Sciences faces the challenge of large class sizes due to the popularity of its majors.

“We have over 200 psychology majors and almost 200 economics majors at Rice,” Ragsdale said. “The average class across the entire curriculum in economics has 43 people in it and almost 50 in psychology. In addition, our intro classes are sort of bursting at the seams with 700 students a year in Intro to Psychology [(PSYC 101)].”

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Ragsdale said the school considered offering its large introductory classes online when the first wave of Massive Open Online Courses began, but the idea did not take off because faculty members were not enthusiastic about videotaping and creating online versions of their courses.

“The social sciences currently have two summer classes that are solely online, but they are teaching very small numbers of students — roughly between four and eight students per summer,” Ragsdale said.

However, Ragsdale said the School of Social Sciences has adopted technology in other ways to facilitate active learning and to allow students to study human behavior more effectively.

“While we haven’t done the online component in the last five or six years, we have a number of courses across departments that are either flipped classrooms or are classes that take place outside of a truly academic setting,” Ragsdale said. “There is also an opportunity to actually engage students based on the way in which they like to communicate, such as through Facebook.”

Shumway said technology will impact the educational system and research by enabling access to information and new methods of assembling information in ways that were inconceivable before.

“Looking at a dissertation in music history now, [using technology,] you can actually see the score, hear the music and parse out the parts all at the same place and at the same time,” Shumway said.

According to Shumway, the vast amount of information made available by technology poses new challenges.

“When we generate knowledge, the first thing we do is eliminate all the information we cannot possibly deal with,” Shumway said. “We have to interpret, eliminate and organize. Technology has made that task so much more complicated because we have so much more information available.”

Lecture attendee Mackenzie Nettlow said she expected more discussion on specific uses of technology in the classroom rather than generalizations.

"I thought the lecture was interesting, but I expected them to focus more on the actual classroom than what people would study outside the classroom or in research areas,” Nettlow, a McMurtry College junior, said.

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