Third-year College student Catherine Neale said she could not have completed her classes without it. Professors say it can change the way students learn. And beginning this fall, 400 students will be able to judge for themselves the benefits and drawbacks of using Tablet PCs in their courses.
A pilot program in the University's College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, it will allow students in biochemistry, psychology and statistics courses to use new Tablet PC hardware, equipped with learning applications specifically tailored to their courses.
The project, expected to begin this month, is a collaboration between Microsoft, Thomson Learning (a textbook publisher) and the University.
The experiment will run for at least two semesters and is expected to continue for two years, University Chief Technology Officer Charles Grisham said.
Weighing just over two pounds, Tablet PCs are notebook-sized personal computers that allow the user to create, store and transmit handwritten notes and voice input. They allow wireless Internet access and have keyboard and CD attachments.
College Dean Edward L. Ayers, who has a reputation for incorporating technology into coursework, said Tablet PCs have the potential to improve teaching at the University.
"The tablet puts the new technology in the hand of the student as well as the professor," Ayers said. "Instead of just having students sit and watch, it's a tool they can use in the classroom and beyond."
A unique feature of the University's Tablet PCs is OneNote software, which allows students to draw or make notes on any page on the computer screen, ranging from a blank page to a diagram on a PowerPoint slide.
Neale said the handwriting software was especially useful to her last year, when she tore a ligament in her arm and took notes on the tablet with her left hand.
"It could actually translate my left-handed scrawl into text," Neale said. "I took all my notes on it and completed my papers on it. I wouldn't have been able to complete my classes last year without use of the tablet."
This semester, the tablets will be used in Grisham's biochemistry class, Prof. Jeffrey J. Holt's statistics course and Prof. Dennis R. Proffitt's cognitive psychology course. The courses were selected because of their moderate size, use of a Thomson textbook and suitability for using the technology.
Neale, a history and American studies major, said the tablet was very useful in her humanities and social science courses as well.
Ayers said he hopes the Tablet PCs will eventually be tested in a wider variety of classes.
"We would hope to expand it throughout the humanities, languages and arts as things develop," Ayers said.
The University and its partners hired two independent research firms, Reed Haldy MacIntosh & Associates and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, to study the use of the tablets in the classrooms, Grisham said.
Students who choose to use the tablets will be asked to participate in a voluntary research study to help judge their usefulness.
Grisham said the University, through the Office of Institutional Studies, will extract grade data in a manner that protects student anonymity and compares it with the performance of students in the courses in previous years.
"We're not sure what we're going to find," Grisham said. "We're hoping it will be a springboard to point U.Va. in the right direction as far as the future direction of learning."
Ayers said the pilot program will move the College forward in its quest to be a technology leader.
"This strikes me as where we've wanted to go all along," Ayers said. "My dream is for the College of Arts and Sciences to be the real leader in adaptation of these new technologies."
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