The student laptops for all new students have the potential of improving the quality of education at Lappia AO and Kemi-Tornio UAS if they are employed in the right way by both students and staff. However, they equally have the potential to complicate things in class, particularly, since the teachers have not worked with those laptops themselves and the software in the teacher PCs is not the same as in the student laptops. Having the laptops may create expectations in students that they will be used in every class when that may not be case, depending on the course and the teacher.
For those who have not seen one of those Dell VOSTRO laptop up close, there is a short slideshow available (suomeksi ja englanniksi) that shows the ins and outs of the machine.
If experience is anything to go by, a considerable number of students will encounter problems of one kind or another with their laptop. The IT-support services risk being overburdened with support requests from the over 1500 students who have received a VOSTRO. To stop this from occurring the teachers should direct students who have software or hardware issues that cannot be solved in class to the instruction and help pages at edu.tokem.fi that were opened for this purpose:
http://edu.tokem.fi/?Deptid=15315 (suomeksi)
http://edu.tokem.fi/?Deptid=15330 (English)
Undoubtedly, having the laptops in class will also entail practical issues, such as access to wall power sockets. Students may want to sit near them. Having extension cords handy will be a good idea in certain classrooms. Another item that comes to mind is the fact that all student laptops have Open Office installed and most teacher machines have only Microsoft Office. So long as not all teachers have access to Open Office, students should be instructed to hand in their work in a format that the teachers can open (Usually, MS Office 2003 formats will be the best option).
As for the eLearning Center, we fully expect that the availability of laptops to all new students will lead to an increase in the use of the Moodle learning environment to support classroom courses. With an eye to that, we wish to ask all teachers for two things:
- Please, check that you have access to all your courses in Moodle. There is presently a large number of courses in Moodle that have no teachers anymore. The eLearning Center will remove these courses if no teacher shows up for them.
- If you have no previous course that you can use, when ordering a new course from the eLearning Center, please state the following information clearly in your message:
– The full name of the course
– The student group (or the unit)
– The number of credits
– The enrolment key (kurssiavain)
– Possible other teachers
Thanks to all and let’s work together to make this a successful course year, laptops or no laptops 🙂