We devoted a good chunk of last month’s issue to Breeze Presenter and Breeze Meeting, and this month we take this topic a little bit further with a synthesis of an interview we had with Ellen Wagner, senior director of Worldwide eLearning Solutions with Adobe Systems, and an example of Breeze adoption from Mesa Community College.

Wagner is well known in the field of online teaching and learning and has published and presented extensively. For instance, she is author of “On Designing Interaction Experiences for the Next Generation of Blended Learning” in the “Handbook of Blended Learning” that we featured in this issue.

Beyond the Traditional Classroom

Wagner talked about how instructors, students and education technology support personnel are increasingly thinking beyond the traditional classroom and adopting technologies that are a better fit for a growing population of increasingly mobile learners. She also made it clear that technology itself does not guarantee effective learning, which is something she has addressed in her published articles, including an interesting May/June 2005 EDUCAUSE Review article titled “Enabling Mobile Learning”(www.educause.edu/er/erm05/erm0532.asp). Here she explains how “technology can engage learners by structuring and organizing information, by displaying and demonstrating procedures and operations. . .,” by “simulating a range of conditions, and immersing people in virtual environments.” It seems to us, from talking to educators and seeing live presentations in our day-to-day work, that Breeze Presenter and Meeting are easy-to-use and effective tools for building such teaching and learning environments. (Editor’s Note: Educational Pathways is not affiliated with Adobe.)

“Whether or not an institution is feeling compelled from the sheer academic or intellectual reasons for doing this (adopting technologies such as Breeze for creating interactive learning experiences for mobile students), the fact is, if they want to be competitive, they cannot have themselves standing apart from what the rest of the world is doing with technology now,” said Wagner, referring to the growing use of digital technologies in our everyday lives.

Engaging Learners to Create Content

So, the next question is how does a department, a college, a faculty member, a student, and/or an educational technology support division get started with Breeze? The short and easy answer is through word-of-mouth and exposure to the software’s capabilities that spreads from one faculty member to another. Wagner points to Purdue University as a good example of this. Purdue engineering faculty had their students create SCORM- and AICC-compliant learning objects, based on their personal research and knowledge, in Breeze Presenter. “You can make a SCORM-compliant learning object in Breeze Presenter very, very simply,” says Wagner. “It is designed to do it so you don’t have to really think about making it SCORM compliant.” Other faculty took note. “This got some of the folks in other academic departments interested. It gave the students a chance to engage in the academic dialogues as true contributors, and it did something for faculty that was really important, which was a means for getting content and more examples created for their courses. They saw the benefit of getting students engaged in creating content.”

Case in Point

Mesa Community College (MCC) is another one of many examples of how Breeze tends to grow organically on a campus through evidence presented by fellow faculty members who are using it in a variety of ways.

MCC’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) introduced Breeze Presenter to a pilot group of about five faculty in the summer of 2004, and a year later added Breeze Meeting to their licensing agreement. Today, according to CTL Programmer Analyst Jeffrey Anderson and CTL Instructional Technologist Donna Gaudet, approximately 200 MCC faculty are using Breeze Presenter, primarily in the institution’s distance learning courses, which enrolls more than 3,500 students, and also in its face-to-face classes.
 
“We knew faculty would probably catch on quickly (to using Presenter) because we have a lot of people who use PowerPoint,” said Gaudet, adding that the growth of online learning at MCC, has also contributed to a growing use of Breeze Presenter, and, more recently, Breeze Meeting.

Breeze Learning Curve

When learning how to use Breeze Presenter, Anderson explains that the “main hump” for faculty to get over is converting to an asynchronous-oriented PowerPoint presentation as opposed to the live PowerPoint lecture-oriented presentation that faculty are more accustomed to. “You have to think about the fact that people will be looking at your content later, in the future. So part of the authoring process is that you have to feel comfortable with recording your voice, which can be a little disconcerting. But after that I think people catch on.” Plus, as faculty realize, from a student’s perspective, how their presentation is going to be viewed externally without the benefit of the typical physical animations (i.e. hand movements) and visual aids used in a live class, they start looking at how to include virtual animations and graphic illustrations to their PowerPoints.

Using Breeze Meeting

As far as using Breeze Meeting, Anderson says that he has found it very useful for training faculty how to use both Presenter and Meeting itself. “I use it as a support tool. If somebody can’t meet with me, or if they are having some sort of problem with using some sort of technology, I have them jump into my little support meeting room and have them share their desktop with me, which allows me to control their computer. That is how they learn about the tool for the first time. Many times their reaction is ‘Woah, how are you doing this?’ They think it’s pretty cool.”

Final Words of Advice

When asked for advice that other education technology groups could use if they are thinking about adopting Breeze, Gaudet said: “It’s expensive enough now that I think a college really has to be sure that this is going to be utilized. And in order to ensure utilization, I think that starting with a tool that people are familiar with, such as PowerPoint, and getting instructors to wrap their ideas around the different ways you can use PowerPoint with Breeze, is sort of the first step. Then start to integrate the meeting tool into as many different areas as possible, such as using it to host meetings and using it for faculty support. You also need to embed it within the culture so everybody just gets really used to it being around. Then you’ll get your usage up to justify the cost.”

MCC Distance Learning
www.mc.maricopa.edu/distance/index.html

MCC Center for Teaching and Learning
www.mc.maricopa.edu/other/ctl/index.jsp

To get a 15-day free trial of Breeze, visit
www.macromedia.com/software/breeze/trial/