Innovative Approaches to Teaching--a conversation with Jean-Claude Bradley

I had the opportunity to talk with Drexel University's Jean-Claude Bradley last week, and he was gracious enough to let me record our conversation about his innovative approach to using technology in teaching and the benefits of an open approach. I've known about Dr. Bradley's work for about three years, and since I'm often referencing it in any workshops I do on technology and teaching, I thought it would be useful to have him speak about his approaches for the purpose of sharing it with the BCIT community.

Dr. Bradley is an Associate Professor of Chemistry, and the Coordinator for E-Learning at the College of Arts and Sciences at Drexel University. He was probably one of the very early adopters of creating podcasts for teaching. In addition, he uses wikis, blogs, and Second Life in his teaching. For me, the interesting piece isn't that he uses a range of technologies, so much as he has completely reconceptualized his teaching environment as a result of the benefits that these technologies can provide. As a result, he no longer uses classtime for lectures or content delivery, having turned this valuable face-to-face time with students into a workshop format instead. Students can access the lecture podcasts, screencasts and lecture notes on their own time, and these are also publicly available to anybody who wants to use them.

Dr. Bradley adopts an open approach to both his sharing of content and his professional activity. Whereas some instructors might be hesitant to sharing their course materials and intellectual property, he has embraced what he sees as an opportunity to share and the benefits that come with doing this. Dr. Bradley is also well known for his Open Notebook Science approach (not discussed in the interview).

The interview is 13 minutes long, and a synopsis with time markers is provided if you want to jump to particular sections. This was a quick and dirty audio editing job on my part, so although the quality of the sound is good, the cuts aren't as polished as they could have been.

The full interview(mp3)

0:00 JCB talks about the use of screencasts for his teaching

If you are interested in this approach, the LTC can help you get up to speed on this simple but highly effective technology

3:28 JCB discusses the evolution of his teaching in including blogs, wikis, podcasts as a pragmatic solution. Explains his use of the institutional CMS, and why he uses largely non-institutional tools.

The LTC can demonstrate and point you to some of these tools if you are interested in knowing more.

7:58 JCB begins talking about some of the numerous benefits he has experienced as a result of adopting an open approach.

10:07 JCB concludes by underlining that what he has done hasn't required a lot of effort

You might find it useful to consult these resources for more information:

• An example of one of his class blogs can give you an idea as to how he connects all the dots of the content delivery.
• His use of Second Life is explained a bit on this wiki.
• A talk he did on Open Notebook Science
• The Open Notebook Science Research blog
• A good article on JCB and his work
  
• The Drexel e-learning blog