And as technology becomes more integrated into University life, its demands for doing things in a new way become harder to ignore. Many UC faculty members have heeded this call and are collaborating with colleagues across their campuses and throughout the UC system to develop pedagogical tools and resources that get to the heart of the university itself: teaching and learning.

In 2000, the UC Teaching, Learning & technology Center (TLtC) launched a grants program to leverage these innovative efforts by funding their implementation on as many UC campuses as possible. In its first year of operation, the TLtC grants program distributed more than $350,000 to collaborative projects that include: an interactive website for learning about Sacred Sites of Asia , an archive for multimedia activities for Spanish and French instruction ( ELMA ), web resources that enhance the teaching and learning of writing throughout the UC curriculum ( SPIDER and UC Writing Institute ), and a self-grading tool that makes writing-to-learn assignments possible in even the largest UC classes ( CPR ).

What these educational technologies all have in common is that they don't use technology for its own sake, but rather as a tool that supplements other pedagogical strategies. These tools also don't dictate how a teacher should teach or what a student should learn but rather offer both a richer and more flexible educational environment. Collaboration is the key to these efforts as is a selfless commitment to enriching education at UC.

Sacred Sites of Asia Instructional Resource

Imagine taking a pilgrimage to an ancient temple complex in Asia, in which you traverse various shrines and buildings, listen to devotional chanting, and watch a religious festival celebration. Also imagine that you could experience such a journey from various spatial and temporal perspectives, as well as from the varied viewpoints of members of different castes.

Students at UC will soon be able to take many such pilgrimages, virtually that is, thanks to the Sacred Sites of Asia Instructional Resource now being developed by a group led by UC Santa Barbara's Barbara Holdrege, a professor of Religious Studies.

The georeferenced multimedia website will allow students to explore sacred sites in Asia through superimposed map layers, zoom in on specific geographical regions, delimit specific time periods, and investigate data resources pertaining to the site complex. The website's database will store a variety of digital media for each of the sacred site modules, including maps, textual sources, iconographic images, photographs, video footage, audio recordings, animated material, and ethnographic data.

Holdrege believes this Internet resource will transform the students' approach to the subject matter, allowing them to move beyond the confines of the classroom and enter into a virtual world whose sensory richness, conceptual complexity, and interconnectivity more closely approximates the worlds they are studying. Students will also have more control over the learning process because they will be able to self-direct how they navigate through a sacred site.

"It's one thing to stand in a class and lecture about these sacred sites, but it's another to give students an immersive experience and in a sense let them become virtual pilgrims," says Holdrege. "Some students are more oriented toward sensory experiences, and this website will allow them to integrate the material more effectively than they could if taught only through a straightforward lecture style."

The Sacred Sites team received funds from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, the UC Pacific Rim Research Program, and the UCSB Academic Senate Committee on Effective Teaching and Instructional Support to collect and catalogue the georeferenced multimedia resources that will serve as the foundation of the website. They will use the TLtC Full-scale Implementation Grant to build 12 sacred site modules pertaining to site complexes in India, Nepal, and China that will be incorporated into 14 courses taught by seven faculty at three UC campuses.

Holdrege and UCSB colleagues William Powell and Juan Campo established the Center for Analysis of Sacred Space (CASS) at UCSB in January 2000 to support these efforts. They have developed intercampus partnerships with three major UC initiatives that are concerned with the research and instructional applications of geographic information systems (GIS) and technologies. They are collaborating with UCSB's Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) in building a special collection of georeferenced multimedia resources on site complexes in Asia that will be stored and archived in the digital library. They are working with UCSB's Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT) to build a collection oriented around one of the Sacred Sites project's targeted courses, Pilgrimage Traditions of South Asia (Religious Studies 158), which will serve as an ADEPT pedagogical prototype for the humanities. And, they are collaborating with colleagues at UC Berkeley's Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI) to adapt the principal interface custom-designed for the ECAI datasets for use in the Sacred Sites website.

Through these collaborative efforts the Sacred Sites website will be accessible as a broad-based instructional resource for the study of Asian religions and cultures not only at the University of California but also at other colleges and universities throughout the United States and other parts of the world.

"We see ourselves as a multidisciplinary center, and what we'd like to do is to help bridge the gap between the human sciences and the social sciences by developing geohistorical models for mapping cultural and historical data," says Holdrege. "We hope that our website will serve as a resource not just for scholars of religion but also for scholars outside the discipline."

Electronic Language Materials Archive (ELMA)

UC's language departments appear to be fertile territory not only for collaboration but also for pedagogical innovations, perhaps because emerging technologies offer their faculty unique audio and visual opportunities to enhance instruction.

In an unprecedented endeavor, language instructors at five UC campuses have pooled their resources and are leveraging their individual innovations to enhance the systemwide language curriculum for first- and second-year Spanish and French courses.

They are building the Electronic Language Materials Archive (ELMA), a Web-searchable multimedia repository that can be used to customize syllabi according to content-based learning practices -- a pedagogical approach that incorporates authentic materials (or content that is produced for native speakers, such as radio broadcasts, videos, etc.) into the language learning experience. The ELMA team expects that the project will have an immediate impact on 10,500 students and thousands more once ELMA reaches more UC campuses.

"I think this is central to ELMA, this desire for collaboration, because it is very time consuming to build these materials," says Susan Schaffer, an ELMA team member and Lower Division Coordinator for UCLA's Department of Spanish and Portuguese. "And why not pool resources? That allows us to double and triple material that we have at our fingertips." In the spirit of sharing, the ELMA team is planning to ask that faculty who take from the archive also contribute to it.

The archive will draw on the extensive collection of Web-based authentic materials already developed by the participating campuses, including: a cutting-edge digital dynamic grammar lesson for Spanish; a series of self-diagnostic quizzes and electronic modules that feature video clips from Spanish-language television for grammar instruction; and a wide array of Web-based activities that target culture, grammar, and composition for French students.

This Web-based content will be accompanied by a battery of activities aimed at activating a student's previous knowledge, facilitating the student's ability to organize information and develop interpretive skills, and at generating class discussion. Faculty may use these ready-made activities in their courses or develop their own exercises by customizing the templates provided in ELMA.

"Our preliminary research at UCLA indicates that students are very motivated by exposure to authentic material," says Schaffer. "We use an authentic text, such as a video interview with Oscar de la Hoya, and then we illustrate a grammar point by showing how he uses grammar in real life." Schaffer has also found that students react favorably to the visual aspect of multimedia technology and that they are attracted to the interaction, flexibility, and immediate feedback that it affords. And instructors like the fact that they can move some activities out of the classroom and into the virtual environment.

"Technology is helping instructors create a space for more communication in the classroom," says Schaffer. "If I can, for example, transfer a quiz from the classroom to an online environment, and include automatic feedback and grading, I've freed up class time for students to work on another skill, and saved time for the instructor who otherwise would have to administer and grade the quiz."

SPIDER: Shared Pedagogical Initiatives, a Database for Electronic Resources

Faculty at UC Irvine developed "Shared Pedagogical Initiatives, a Database for Electronic Resources" also known as SPIDER, as a tool to teach basic research skills to undergraduate students. The project not only leverages the vast resources of UC's California Digital Library (CDL) but also the ingenuity of UC's faculty at Riverside, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. The SPIDER team is collaboratively developing Web-based instructional materials for students in lower division, general education courses, with the goal of enriching writing-across-the-curriculum initiatives in all academic disciplines at all UC campuses.

The project will create a comprehensive Web-based archive of instructional advice about design principles for classroom instruction and activities, as well as a corresponding faculty enrichment program. SPIDER will provide coursework templates, which are developed in collaboration with experts in writing pedagogy, instructors, and librarians, to make use of the sophisticated research resources available through the CDL.

"The advantage of SPIDER is that it ensures the connection of seeking out and producing knowledge and the act of writing, which are closely related at a research university," says Principal Investigator Michael Clark, who is Associate Executive Vice Chancellor of Academic Planning at UC Irvine.

"The CDL is this amazing resource; however, like many large-scale initiatives to make electronic text and resources available, it doesn't get integrated into pedagogy, into actual teaching," says Elizabeth Losh, Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course at UC Irvine. "We were interested in how instructors can take these extraordinary scholarly databases and get students to use them, so that they learn how to become intelligent users of this resource."

The CDL puts a wealth of information on virtually any academic topic at a student's fingertips, making new types of learning possible. "It would have been impossible before the advent of the Web to send 1000 students in a general education course to the library to write on the same topic," says Losh. "These activities teach much-needed skills, such as the ability to paraphrase an academic argument, which is something with which students typically have difficulty."

What has made SPIDER already a success at UC Irvine - 16 ladder-rank faculty have contributed materials thus far and it reaches 80 to 90% of undergraduate students through the lower-division writing requirement - has been collaboration, flexibility, and integration. "An essential component of this work to date has been our successful partnership with the library," says Losh.

Another reason for success: "It's a combination of large-scale goals for our courses, and for our campus, combined with a personalized approach that makes our teachers feel that their pedagogical approach is of value," says Losh. "A lot of course management systems don't recognize this. It's far more flexible than any pedagogical tool that we have and is transportable to any campus."

UC Writing Institute

As with the ELMA project, a primary goal of the UC Writing Institute is to use technology to mitigate the demands on the faculty who will be most affected by increasing enrollments on UC's campuses. Its developers envision it as simultaneously a think-tank, and as a publisher and disseminator of recommended teaching tools and practices to college and secondary-school teachers.

"Writing teachers are among the first members of the University to encounter the increasing number of students from previously underrepresented communities, whose complex linguistic histories present new challenges to traditional pedagogy," says Principal Investigator Elizabeth Abrams, a lecturer in UC Santa Cruz's Writing Program. And, she says, efforts to respond to these populations currently take place ad-hoc on each campus without a system in place for rank-and-file teachers to confer with each other about the best practices.

"The demands on writing faculty -- to articulate their theories and practices, to confer with secondary and college teachers, and to mentor their newest colleagues as more faculty are hired to cope with increasing enrollments -- are increasing exponentially," says Abrams. "Hence, writing faculty need quick access to materials that they can trust truly represent the best UC has to offer in the teaching of writing."

Another principal effort of this online Writing Institute will be to investigate the most promising uses of technology in writing classes and make recommendations for writing instructors in the UC system. "We think it is essential to evaluate these technologies and present them accessibly to writing teachers who have not until now considered using technology in their classrooms," says Abrams.

And technology is something that the developers of the Writing Institute believe is integral to the future of writing instruction. "Students, unlike faculty, have been on computers probably most of their lives and are very comfortable -- in fact very attracted to -- interactive ways of being on the computer," says Roz Spafford, Chair of UC Santa Cruz's Writing Program and Abram's close collaborator on the project.

The Institute will also make some course syllabi available systemwide, so, for example, a teacher planning a technical writing course at UC Santa Cruz could consider versions of such courses taught around the system and, via an online forum, consult with colleagues on other campuses. Or, as UC Merced becomes a reality, writing faculty there could see what other campuses expect and do.

Although the Institute is geared mainly to the instructor, it will also provide resources directly to students, such as information about how systemwide writing requirements are handled on each UC campus. The Institute will also conduct outreach in an attempt to improve the preparation of high school students by explicitly identifying UC's expectations for academic writing, and supporting outreach to high school and community college students by clearly articulating those expectations for their teachers.

"Though the heart of this project is the collaboration of UC Writing Program members, we expect to work closely with other entities mounting sites and using technology to do outreach, provide services, and share materials," says Abrams.

Calibrated Peer Review: An Online, Multidisciplinary, Writing-to-Learn Instructional Tool

The Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) program is already being used by thousands of students -- from middle school to graduate school -- all over the world. The UC Los Angeles-based project team requested TLtC funds so that they could integrate this tool closer to home, specifically in Life Sciences courses at UCLA, and Chemistry courses at UC Riverside.

"CPR is a Web-delivered tool that enables instructors to use frequent writing assignments even in very large classes without increasing their grading load," says its creator, Orville Chapman of UCLA.

Although it was originally developed with a National Science Foundation grant for curricular reform in Chemistry, it is expandable to any subject. Based on scientific peer review as a model, this "writing-to-learn" tool enables students to learn by writing about important topics in a course and by evaluating other students' essays.

"TA-graded writing assignments are simply not a viable instructional option in large classes, which typify the sciences and engineering disciplines. CPR removes that grading barrier," says Chapman. "Not only do students understand more deeply when they write about what they are learning, the evaluation process of CPR requires that they develop higher-order, critical-thinking skills."

Regular use of CPR assignments teaches students to articulate ideas coherently and to critically evaluate both their peers' and their own work. This is how it works: CPR offers instructors the choice of creating their own writing assignments or using already developed assignments in the library. In a CPR assignment, students write short essays on a specific topic. After submitting the essay, the student reads and assigns a score to three "calibration" essays (poor, medium and exemplary quality) that were written by the instructor. When students demonstrate they are competent reviewers, they read and assign a score to three anonymous peer essays, and finally, to their own essay.

The CPR web server at UCLA currently has 22,080 student accounts in 784 courses from 200 schools and institutions. CPR is being used in biology, economics, English, ESL, geology, history, physics, psychology, and sociology classes.

According to Arlene Russell, a senior lecturer at UCLA who evaluates the effectiveness of CPR, the program has already influenced teachers and students. An economics instructor at Cal State Northridge who uses CPR heavily has changed the ways he teaches, says Russell, and now has students complete an assignment in advance of class time so that he can use the lecture period to discuss the issues, instead of presenting new material.

Carefully designed studies in chemistry, biology, and economics courses at three different universities independently document that students taught using CPR assignments perform approximately 10% better on exams than do students taught through traditional lecture and textbook methods, says Russell.

In fact, evaluation of student performance is integral to the project and to CPR design. Analysis of student errors and misconceptions in the baseline data informs both the selection and the design of the CPR assignments, says Russell. "We have found that students who initially did not write very good essays can review themselves accurately by the time they finish the assignment," she says. "They know what they didn't know. This is meta-cognition. Thinking about how you think about things is a very powerful cognitive tool and a very difficult skill to acquire."

The TLtC grant will provide a venue to disseminate CPR to other disciplines and campuses within the University of California system, including UC Riverside chemistry courses. Chapman and Russell will incorporate CPR into UCLA's Life Science courses, specifically Life Science 1, which enrolls over 3,000 students each year, and in Engineering and ethics courses. They will also provide training and support for instructors and students.

"We really are grateful for the support from UC," says Russell. "It solves an otherwise insurmountable problem in these very large classes. None of us is seeing a future with smaller classes and I don't think anybody is happy with multiple-choice exams."