Making IT Innovation Work at Coppin State University
Maryland HBCU making a name for itself through technical innovation
By Ronald Roach

As a high school student in Trinidad, Ambika Ramsundar could not make much use of information technology tools such as laptops and PDAs in her education. IT products are a heady expense for the small Caribbean nation’s education system, and its individual students. Since enrolling at Coppin State University, a small public historically Black institution located in gritty, inner-city west Baltimore, however, Ramsundar has had access to some of the newest IT tools aimed at the higher education market.

Last spring, Ramsundar and dozens of Coppin students tested a device known as the Tegrity digital pen, which allowed her and fellow students to write classroom notes, retrieve the notes electronically over the Internet and then have them synchronized with video and audio recordings of professors’ class presentations. Access to the recorded lectures was made possible because campus IT improvements have enabled them to be uploaded to the university’s Blackboard course management system. Similar to the WebCT software used at many other schools, Blackboard is the virtual base for the school’s online academic programs. Students can replay entire lectures online while reviewing their notes as they were written, or they can select specific notation to replay a corresponding part of the lecture.

“It records the notes as you write them down,” says Ramsundar, who used the Tegrity Campus technology in an organic chemistry class.
“Organic chemistry is a lot of memory work. I like the fact that you have your professor’s lecture online and you can compare your notes to what he or she said in class,” she says. “You don’t have to be in doubt about anything the professor says.”

Nursing professor Denyce Watties-Daniels was among a handful of Coppin faculty who eagerly volunteered to have students use the Tegrity Campus technology in their courses. Watties-Daniels says the technology is appealing because it works well for the mix of students attending an urban university. Many of Coppin’s 4,000 students attend part-time and juggle family and job responsibilities.