Instructional Technology

The College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics is at the forefront of harnessing technology to significantly alter the way in which science and math are taught. Visit some of these "classrooms of the future" to discover more about these advances in computer-aided pedagogy.

In the Biology Teaching Lab (301 Morrill South), students use terminals loaded with course-specific software that allows them to manipulate concepts, images, formulas, and data specifically related to every lesson of the semester.

The Center for Educational Software Development is a campus organization that designs, developments, and disseminates instructional technology, and builds collaborations between with UMass faculty and external institutions, community groups, and Massachusetts K-12 schools.

The Chemistry Resource Center (Goessmann 152) is a teaching resource that offers a range of software and networked Macs and PCs to Chemistry students.

The Computer Science Educational Laboratory (Lederle Graduate Research Tower 223 and 225) offers technological tools for middle- and upper-level Computer Science courses.

The Personal Response System (PRS) is a comprehensive response system for electronically testing, polling, and surveying a group of people, from students in a large classroom to marketing researchers, political analysts, and pollsters. Teachers at all education levels can use it to evaluate and test their students and receive instant feedback about the response results. Students say that processing information during class inspires confidence and success in dealing with difficult concepts.

Dr. GEO is a virtual observation laboratory that supports student observations about geological graphics, hypotheses and evaluation of inferences.

The Research in Presentation Production for Learning Electronically (RIPPLES) project investigates how to most effectively use the World Wide Web and CD/DVD-ROM to deliver lectures and course materials outside of the classroom, with a focus on asynchronous learning environments in which students proceed at their own pace. Students can access lectures as digital audio or video, synchronized with slides, overheads or other materials.

The result of more than ten years of development, Online Web-based Learning (OWL) is a comprehensive, web-based homework system that currently serves more than twenty departments at UMass Amherst. OWL chemistry and computer science homework modules have been published nationally.