Educational Technology as Community Development Tool

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Educational Technology as Community Development Tool

8/15/2006

By Zan Tansey, Assistant Community Development Educator, Weinstein Hall, New York University

New York University is the largest private university in the United States. This urban university has a residence hall program that houses 11,701 students in 23 facilities. The facilities themselves are located across the Manhattan landscape, although many are within the general footprint of the campus. About a third of housed students are freshmen, though the campus provides housing to 57% of all undergraduates and 23% of all students. As one might expect, the university serves a very diverse student population.

With such a diverse resident population and this distributed environment, the NYU Resident Education program faces a major challenge in developing community among the full range of residents.

To meet this need, NYU looked for a system that the students would find easy to use, and one that had the power to promote collaboration. Addressing this challenge, the Department of Residential Education began using the campus’s Blackboard system, which provides students with a means of communicating and collaborating within their courses. The thinking at the time was that, rather than educating students on how to use a new system, most students were already using Blackboard in the classes and were fully familiar with the key modules of the system.

Beginning in the fall of 2001 an individualized Blackboard page was created for each residence hall. Much like a course home page, each of the hall residents was “registered” for the hall “course.” While the structure was the same – a course orientation – the goal was different. These Blackboard pages were not delivering course content. They were facilitating the development of community by utilizing the same tools found in campus courses.

One benefit of using Blackboard as a community development tool was the students’ familiarity with the technology. Many instructors utilize the technology at NYU, and students were familiar, not only with how to access the Blackboard resources, but also with the format of the sites and the key tools within Blackboard. The layout of the page, as well as the aesthetics of the site, were familiar to students. This made navigation simple and user-friendly. For Resident Education, this meant no training of the students was necessary.

In addition to Blackboard, NYU provides all students with access to a well-developed Web portal. Each student at NYU accesses his or her Web mail, registration, and financial records through a single online service known as NYUhome. A key part of each student’s personal home page features the student’s personal Blackboard pages, including their courses and residence hall pages. Having the residence community-building efforts appear on the NYUhome page was a big plus.