Phil Ice, Ph.D.
"Acrobat.com brings everyone on the same page—literally. It's a central and reliable resource for authoring and sharing documents, and for reliably connecting students and faculty."
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Through research, education leader finds Adobe Buzzword improves quality of student work, while Acrobat.com fosters better collaboration overall among students and faculty
Project Details
Fostering teaching and learning
Dr. Phil Ice likes solving problems. With much of his work focused on exploring strategies to improve how students learn and how professors teach, Dr. Ice has great insight into the challenges and trends in education today. In his role as Director of Course Design, Research, and Development at the American Public University System (APUS), Dr, Ice’s interests and work dovetail nicely, enabling APUS to benefit from the latest research into the tools and technologies that foster learning—especially in online environments.
While reliance on online learning is accelerating at universities and colleges worldwide, APUS has been at the forefront of distance learning long before the term was even coined. More than 80% of the 45,000 undergraduate and graduate students at APUS are active military personnel, so delivering courses via the web is by far the best way to reach the diverse and dispersed student body. The university's vast experience with distance learning has made it one of the leaders in the field.
"Online courses have to be interactive to engage students and provide maximum benefits," explains Dr. Ice. "And that is just the first step. Students and faculty also need online tools that enable them to collaborate and work on assignments online." This insight prompted Dr. Ice to take a closer look at online tools to support common student and faculty tasks, such as authoring documents and collaborating in large and small groups.
Tools of choice
For Dr. Ice, Acrobat.com—including Adobe Buzzword, ConnectNow, and the Share capabilities—offered the ideal combination of widespread accessibility, ease of use, and powerful features. In fact, he felt so strongly that Acrobat.com tools could provide real benefits to students and educators that he put his convictions to the test, evaluating student performance using Adobe Buzzword, as well as other online authoring tools.
“My research findings clearly show that Adobe Buzzword is the tool of choice for students," he explains. "They found the Buzzword interface and experience much richer compared to other online authoring tools. Equally important, the overall quality of their work improved. Using Buzzword, students were more likely to include graphics, charts, and active links in papers because the authoring process was more fluid and reliable. Students viewed Buzzword more as an intuitive multimedia creation tool, not simply a word processor." Additional information on Dr. Ice's research can be found at www.sloanconsortium.org.
An added advantage of using Adobe Buzzword is that faculty and students found they could share information more effectively. It also gave students a more reliable and universal tool for completing assignments, which is critical because remote military personnel do not always have access to standard word processing applications. "Acrobat.com brings everyone on the same page—literally," says Dr. Ice. "It's a centralized, reliable resource for authoring and sharing documents and facilitating meaningful interaction between students and faculty."
Dr. Ice found that many Buzzword features are received better than the capabilities in costly word processing applications. For instance, students enjoy the ease of working with images and tables in Buzzword, and making comments on documents is cleaner than in other applications. Faculty appreciate the ability to view historical versions of documents, so they can quickly reference content that previously appeared in student work.
Many students and faculty are taking collaboration further with Acrobat.com by using Adobe ConnectNow to meet live online and instantly share their computer screens to view projects and work through questions together. “Acrobat.com brings new levels of collaboration and clarity to online learning," says Dr. Ice. "With the suite of tools, students and faculty can quickly engage in productive, dynamic interactions that would otherwise be difficult to achieve."
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