The mission of ZOLE is to promote and support the use of technology to enhance learning. We interpret technology broadly, from courses delivered purely online, to the use of Excel in a traditional classroom format. The unifying theme is the application of new technologies to engage students, build skills, save resources, and advance learning.

There is so much pedagogical experimentation going on in Zicklin that we need these pages to keep the community up-to-date. But ZOLE includes evaluation. We want to know what works and equally important, what doesn’t. We have two IT fellows, Karolina Krystyniak and Ethan Kinory, who will work with faculty to design and assess the effect of changes in classroom instruction. The goal is to create a repository of results so that we can recommend changes based on data and not anecdotes.

In these inaugural posts we describe the randomized experiment in economics that is testing whether students meeting once a week do as well as students who meet twice if both have available the same level of online resources and support. We have interviews with Professors Ted Joyce and Sean Crockett about the experiment as well as students from those classes.

There are posts and interviews with Professors Friedman from Statistics and Professor Eyuboglu from Marketing. Each faculty is teaching a class in a hybrid format and comparing the learning to the same class taught in a traditional format.

We also describe the initiative of introducing Excel-based projects into curriculum of Business 1000 and Finance 3000 courses in Spring 2014. We discuss the importance of Excel skills for business graduates with Dean Zadra, Professor Benbunan-Fich and Professor Ferns, both from Computer Information Systems Department, as well as Baruch business students.

Lastly, Ethan Kinory, one of the two IT fellows, discusses how attendance is being taken in a large lecture economics class by having students swipe their ID into a card reader.

(Description by Ted Joyce)