Fall 2017 Report
Fall 2017 saw 12,057 students and faculty use the Media Commons, Maker Commons, and Immersive Experiences Lab initiatives across the Commonwealth. Much of this use was focused in 240 classes in nearly every discipline offered at Penn State. To facilitate these interactions outside of University Park, traveling consultants visited campuses 64 times to offer instruction and consultations.
For the first time at University Park, Lynn Klees’ Nutrition 360 students were asked to create a webpage using Adobe Spark, to house all of their nutrition research, thoughts, and content created for the course. This included blog posts, public service announcements with accompanying video, and the creation of their Brochure assignment, in order to establish a professional portfolio of work.
Students also began using Adobe Spark this semester at the eastern campuses. Of special note was the use of Spark Video in SUST 200 at Penn State Abington. For the assignment in SUST 200 the students were challenged to create a video based on the prompt of “what nature means to me?” The students created videos incorporating footage they filmed, photos they collected from online resources, and narration they recorded. The entire project was completed within Adobe Spark Video.
AED 322: Visual Culture & Educational Technologies, taught by Karen Keifer-Boyd at University Park, had their first 360° immersive video assignment. Students filmed themselves in 360° playing various board games where each game would represent different social justice issues. Students combined this footage with news media related to the topic. This culminated in a 17-minute video that was screened as an art exhibit in the Immersive Experiences Lab.
At Altoona, the Railroad Transportation Technology (RTE) program began using 360º video equipment provided through IMEX to document in the field best practices and procedures. In-class training for students in RTE 303 followed faculty consultation throughout the semester.
Students across the Commonwealth created 3,171 3D prints in pursuit of their own curiosity and course work. One such course, Architectural Engineering 124 at University Park, introduced a new assignment for students to design and 3D print architectural building joints which were used to build structures with yardsticks. The yardstick structure then formed a tower which was subjected to a load test by crushing it to its breaking point.
One Button Studios at 16 campuses helped students and faculty create 11,637 academic videos, comprising over 20 straight days of video. During the Fall, University Park staff made 2 campus visits in support of One Button Studio installations.
The bottom floor of the Penn State Hazleton Campus Library was renovated, and with this renovation came a brand new One Button Studio! Their new OBS was soft-launched for late-Fall semester, with a grand opening to take place at the beginning of Spring 2018.
During Summer 2017 an updated One Button Studio app and some hardware upgrades were deployed to campus studios. This upgrade greatly improved the reliability of the studios as well as improved the data collection capabilities of the app leading to better and easier reporting of studio use by the campuses.
Strengthening Campus Partnerships through Shared Data Collection – During Summer 2017, Media Commons partnered with University Libraries to advocate for the adoption of the LibCal scheduling system to reserve Media Commons resources across the Commonwealth. Improving our data collection helps us to better understand student needs at individual campuses and scale resources at each campus appropriately. Nine campuses, including University Park, adopted LibCal to schedule Media Commons resources during Fall 2017 which has greatly increased the amount of usage data we are able to collect. We hope to bring more campuses online with LibCal in the coming semesters.