The College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) within the University of Minnesota has the largest experiment for usefulness of the iPad by any college of education in the nation. Dean Jean Quam committed the college to a multi-year experiment by providing an iPad to all 450 incoming first-year students to CEHD beginning in Fall 2010. Nearly 30 faculty members in the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning (PsTL) received iPads and training to integrate them into the first-year classes that new CEHD admits enroll in during the fall and spring semesters. David Arendale, Associate Professor of History, was one of these faculty members who integrated the iPad into his Global History and Culture course and the learning community called History Stories that linked his history course with one focused on international literature. As a graduate research assistant with a background in program evaluation and qualitative research methods, I worked with Dr. Arendale to analyze qualitative findings from a survey of students in his course about their experience with the iPad. This chapter presents an overview of Dr. Arendale’s motivation for using the iPad, implementation of the iPad in his courses, evaluation methodology, and key findings from the study.
Why Interest in the iPad?
Dr. Arendale’s interest in use of the iPad was an extension of his personal use of the device he purchased when they went on sale in April 2010. There were four features of the device that intrigued him in the six months before the iPad was used in his class.
- Due to its slim design and modest weight, mobility was a key feature. He uses it in different places: email reading from bed, access information while watching television, reading news publications in the living room, and catching up on personal reading from his front porch.
- For him, the touch screen with the iPad is an enjoyable way to interact with the device. This tactile interaction with the iPad is different from use of a traditional keyboard and a mouse.
- Ease and enjoyment of reading has been increased since Arendale can use the touch screen easily with his fingers to enlarge the image or text to increase readability and focus attention. While the pinch and zoom feature is not available through all apps, nearly all of them allow easy increase or decrease of text size as well as changing the font and the background color of the publication.
- With over 500,000 apps to select from, there is an app for nearly everything. The app store through Apple provides a very democratic way for people to widely share their work with others. Arendale created his own personal annotated guide to his favorite 300+ iPad apps, http://z.umn.edu/davidipadapps
Integrating the iPad into the History Course
The iPads were distributed to the CEHD entering students in early Fall 2010. The PsTL faculty had received their iPads in summer 2010. The Fall 2010 academic term was designated as a time for students and faculty members to experiment with the devices for personal and academic purposes. Some students used them for Facebook and other forms of social media. In addition, some began to use them for class session note taking and accessing resources from the Moodle and WebVista course management systems. Faculty experimented with displaying web pages accessed through the iPad, presented their slide shows using the Apple Keynote software program, and accessed audio and video programs that were displayed using the video projection systems in the classrooms.
The first priority for Arendale was to replace the traditional expensive paper textbook with PDF documents using the GoodReader app, which allowed students to manage and annotate articles and is also accessible without a WiFi connection. This allowed him to significantly reduce the cost for the students. The iPad also expanded his horizons for new audio, video, and print materials for the students to review for in class discussions. Students were able to access media related to current events through the New York Times, BBC, France 24, and Al Jazeera TV apps. These strategies were a modified version of “inverting” the class so that students prepared for class sessions with a larger portion of class time devoted to guided discussions and activities to apply the material. Eventually other social media channels and small group media projects were integrated into the class, illustrated with the following graphic.
More information about how he is transforming his class sessions is available through his personal web site http://arendale.org, and he can be contacted via email at arendale@umn.edu
Successes and Surprises
At the end of the spring semester, Arendale distributed surveys designed by the CEHD iPad Project team to his students in his Global History and Culture Course. The surveys consisted of both forced-choice and open-ended items related to students’ usage and views of the iPad during the academic year. The four open-ended items were the focus of the present study, which were coded by Arendale and his graduate research assistant using an inductive analysis scheme for qualitative data. Twenty-five students were enrolled in the course:15 females and 10 males. Four were recent immigrants from East Asia, two were immigrants from Southeast Asia, and one from Euroasia. The remaining 17 were of European ancestry but not recent immigrants. Data was collected from 19 of the 25 students enrolled in the course.
Dr. Arendale and I engaged in a qualitative analysis of student responses to the open-ended items on the survey. Because of Dr. Arendale’s interest in technology and investment in incorporating the iPad into his courses, I believe it was useful to have a second researcher who had not directly observed the use of the iPad in the classroom to provide an outside perspective on the results. .Accordingly, the analysis revealed several positive themes regarding the student experience with the iPads, but a few unanticipated ones emerged. Whereas the complete results of the qualitative study will be reported in a separate publication, one theme will be analyzed for this chapter.
Distraction resulting from the iPad emerged as a salient theme for many of the respondents. 80% of respondents described the iPad as “distracting” or “somewhat distracting” in the classroom, or in group or individual work, with 20% reporting that it was “not distracting” (see Table 1). For example, one participant responded, “It actually was a distraction to a certain extent. There are a lot of games (free too) that you can download for iPad, so me and most classmates would just use it as one big toy sometimes.”
Students most frequently reported using the iPad as a distraction during classroom lectures. One respondent noted that the iPad was “very distracting. I would rather play the games on my Ipad than listen to lectures, and sometimes I did just that.” However, students also found the iPad to be a source of distraction outside of class. Another respondent stated that because he/she could not do work on the iPad due to its limited word processing capabilities, “it helps me procrastinate [instead].”
For other respondents, the iPad did not individually sidetrack them, but other students’ use of the technology for non-academic reasons could prove distracting. One student noted that it was “Somewhat [distracting], because some students play games or Facebook during class.” Another respondent described how it could be distracting during group-work activities. “I know it was a distraction for others. Sometimes frustrating in group work situations.” The availability of free apps, in addition to easy access to the internet, appeared to divert attention for many of the students in the sample.
Table 1. Frequency of responses to item measuring the extent to which the iPad is distracting
Response |
Frequency |
Percentage |
Distracting |
6 |
40% |
Somewhat distracting |
6 |
40% |
Not distracting |
3 |
20% |
Implications and Vision for Future Uses with Students
Using the iPads for more student collaboration and production of media is a priority in Arendale’s history class. The most frequent uses of the iPads by students have been reviewing assigned readings and media, taking lecture notes, accessing current events through international news venues, and creating history music videos and interviews. However, with these innovative uses can come downsides of integrating new technology into the classroom, such as added distractions for students. Although distraction is not a recent trend among post-secondary students, technology can provide a new, easy and engaging target for students’ attention.
These findings also have key implications for classroom management in post-secondary settings, as researchers and practitioners explore ways to maximize utility of the device while minimizing distraction. Possible strategies might include guidelines or open discussion with students of appropriate technology use in the classroom, greater monitoring of device use, or setting aside specific times during class sessions where iPads or laptops are not used.
For Arendale, the next stage is to have students collaborate with each other through Google documents. Some colleagues in PsTL have experimented with students working in small groups to edit online documents and share those with the entire class. He and I continue to work on evaluating the student experience with the iPad in his courses as faculty become more familiar with the device and find new and innovative ways to incorporate them into their classes. This study also suggests the value of including faculty, staff and researchers directly involved in the project, as well as outside evaluators or stakeholders in research on technology in the classroom. The iPad has great opportunity to move beyond its typical use as a media consumption device into a knowledge generation venue with the built-in camera and even more powerful and featured iPads. That has the the potential to transform the student learning experience.