Arkansas State University recently announced their iPad Initiative where each freshman student starting this year is supposed to own an iPad or iPad mini that can be either purchased outside or in the university’s IT store or can be rented out for the course. It all began two years ago when Arkansas State University first started experimenting the educational value an iPad can add in a student’s learning. After testing it out immensely and planning various well thought out use cases ASU made it a compulsion for every student to own an iPad.
ASU’s new motto, “Learn on the move”, aims at improving teaching methodologies as well by sending out student instructors out into the field equipped with an iPad, allowing administrators greater freedom in monitoring teachers’ progress. Once the student teachers get acquainted with iPad ASU plans to expand the use case to monitor students instantly using Apple’s very successful FaceTime technology that improves response time compared to current system.
For students it will start off with a ASU-developed iBook as part of a required course, “Making Connections”, aiming at teaching students how to use the iPad in a learning environment. Under the same proposal ASU is looking to measure the device’s impact on note-taking, news writing, geometry, cooperative learning, and more. Other universities like University of California Irvine revealed that its iMedEd Initiative — in which students follow an iPad-based medical school curriculum — resulted in “an average of 23 percent higher scores on their national exams, despite students having similar incoming GPAs and MCAT scores.
We got to see how well iPad adapts to current teaching methodologies and how rapidly it will evolve by helping out the new era students further.
Source: AppleInsider