Discussions

Your Name and Title: Usha Jagannathan, IT Lecturer

School or Organization Name: Arizona State University

Co-Presenter Name(s): Dr. Risa Blair, Corporate Training Consultant & IT Adjunct Professor at Kaplan University

Area of the World from Which You Will Present: United States

Language in Which You Will Present: English

Target Audience(s): novice, intermediate, expert, or all audiences primarily focusing on educators in IT/Engg. disciplines

Short Session Description (one line): Empowering Educators to adopt Virtual Labs in Online IT Classrooms

Full Session Description (as long as you would like): 

In recent years, online learning has taken a new dimension with the introduction of virtual labs in the higher education field. More and more, we see students from around the world actively participating in our classes.  There has been a huge initiative to engage professors in professional development for working to embrace students of different cultural backgrounds.  Additionally, since we do not see our students face-to-face, we find it even more challenging with our international students to teach in the IT field.  To that end, we have initiated the use of virtual labs. 

Virtual labs help students in connecting the abstract theory and concepts to practice. Through the use of virtual labs we can provide individualized training for students, so they experience much like a flipped classroom.  When we come together for webinars, we are able to utilize breakout rooms to build teams and promote global collaboration of students. Virtual labs are in fact preferred in many higher educational online settings for addressing the inability to visualize complex phenomena in a virtual setting that will help students to attain their learning goals through virtual labs. As we know, faculty plays a vital role in determining the success or failure of developing teams and promoting collaboration in online classes. Virtual learning systems can be utilized to help engage learners and facilitate global collaboration. This presentation is geared towards catering to faculty in all levels of Information Technology (IT) and Engineering disciplines, to evoke curiosity and excite them about the potential and possibilities of adopting virtual labs in their online classrooms.

This session will help inspire online educators across the world in the IT field to integrate virtual labs for their IT courses that would highly motivate students to apply their theoretical learning to solve real-world application problems.

Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session: This will be added before the conference.