Lectures remain a principal teaching activity employed in higher education, although their efficacy remains under debate (Bertozzi 2016; Richardson 2008). Over the last decade, slideshows have replaced whiteboards and chalk boards as the principal visual aid, with accompanying concerns over reduced interactivity and increased rigidity (Felder and Brent 2005). As an eschewer of slides where possible, I sought a technological intervention that would retain the unique advantages of the whiteboard as a live and organic visual aid, while updating it with the ability to share and review content as students now expect of slide-centric lectures.
Initial experience of interactive whiteboards and digitising monitors as lecturing aids proved largely unsatisfactory. The usability of both was far inferior to dry-erase markers on a standard whiteboard. Archiving and sharing of presented material required multiple manual steps to be followed after each session. Consequently, these avenue were quickly abandoned. However, the ability to recall and share previous work proved invaluable in addressing group and individual follow-up queries, and sowed the seeds for further experimentation.
A number of existing and emerging software products were investigated. Development of a custom solution to provide some or all of the required functionality was additionally considered. Although primarily marketed as a personal notetaking application, Microsoft OneNote appeared to fit most of the principal requirements. Bundled with the Microsoft Office 365 suite, it is effectively available to all staff and students within the institute. Additionally, OneNote supports my own preferred Mac and iOS platforms, in addition to Microsoft Windows and Android. It also offers a web interface for users of other platforms, and allows shareable links to be created to any notebook.
OneNote was trialled in a number of courses over the past year for live whiteboard usage and capture. In the introductory Digital Systems course, I utilised an iPad and active stylus feeding into the video projector to provide a large readable whiteboard in a large lecture room. Having a large and easily read whiteboard increased the interactivity of the lecture, and the ability to recap and critique the previous day's material proved invaluable on many occasions. In smaller settings, including the advanced Cloud Architecture and Operating Systems courses, I wrote on the standard dry-erase whiteboards and captured them using the OneNote smartphone application. Each course was chronicled in its own OneNote notebook, which was shared read-only using a link on Moodle.
Initial experience was largely positive from the lecturer's viewpoint. Adopting OneNote facilitated review of classroom work and additionally improved the whiteboard's visibility and legibility in large classes. Student experiences and perceptions of the whiteboard in its traditional and technologically-augmented forms will be investigated in a planned qualitative study.
Keywords
whiteboard, OneNote, lecture.
References
Bertozzi, Carolyn R. 2016. “Back to the Lecture.” ACS Central Science 2 (8): 483–85. doi:10.1021/acscentsci.6b00224.
Felder, Richard M, and Rebecca Brent. 2005. “Death by Powerpoint.” Chemical Engineering Education.
Richardson, Daniel. 2008. “Don’t Dump the Didactic Lecture; Fix It.” Advances in Physiology Education 32: 23–24.
