January 24, 2008
New Biopics program matches student faces with names
When Biology Senior Lecturer Mary Pat Wenderoth and Communications Chair Gerald Baldasty were asked to talk to a group of Freshman Interest Group leaders about teaching last fall, they started by asking the students what they saw as the difference between a great instructor and a not-so-great one. Not surprisingly, the students said that a great instructor is organized and passionate about his or her subject. But they also mentioned a third, not so obvious matter: The great instructor is one who learns students’ names.
“As soon as one of the FIG leaders said that, there was lots of head nodding around the room,” said Wenderoth. “The University is such a big place that I think when you learn students’ names, it buys you a lot of goodwill.”
Of course, learning names is no easy task in a university this size, but Wenderoth’s department, biology, has done its best to make it possible. Each quarter for a number of years, the students in the biology introductory series (Biology 180, 200 and 220) have had their photos taken, and instructors have had class lists that include photos of each student.
The effort has come with a cost. “The head TAs and the associate faculty who manage the labs used to spend about 10 hours the first week of the quarter taking pictures, putting them into tables in Word, printing them out, and getting them to TAs and instructors,” said David Hurley, manager of biology’s departmental computing.
But no more. This fall the department unveiled a new program called Biopics, created by Hurley to simplify the process. It works like this. Students sit down at a computer that has a camera built in. They enter their student number in a form, and the computer verifies their name. They can add a nickname if they want to. Then they take their own picture — up to three shots allowed, from which they choose one — and click OK. The photo gets uploaded into the server and sits in a database connected to their student number.
Meanwhile, class instructors go to a Web page designed for the purpose and paste in the list of student numbers for students in their class. They can ask to have the list divided according to lab sections or any other grouping they want and they can put a title on it. When they click “create,” the program makes a PDF for them — a page full of photos and names, much like a high school yearbook — that they can print out and use. It even prints a list of the names and e-mail addresses of students who haven’t yet had their pictures taken, so they can be sent reminders.
“There are two of these computers in each of the labs that students come into the first week of the introductory class,” Hurley said. “It’s a three-hour lab, so there’s a few minutes here, a few minutes there when a particular student may not be doing anything. He or she can go up and take the picture then.” Students can complete the process in about 15 seconds, he said. It’s similarly fast for the instructors.
Now that the system is in place, photos taken for the introductory series can be saved and used again for upper level classes. In the meantime, instructors of upper level classes can simply ask students to stop by the Biology Student Area, where Hurley’s office is and where there is a computer loaded with the program, to get their photos taken and uploaded.
And are the instructors learning the names? TAs in the introductory series do, Hurley knows, and at least one instructor in that class — Scott Freeman — does as well.
Wenderoth knows of several other faculty members — Scott Weigle, Karen Petersen, Merrill Hille, Alison Crowe and Linda Martin-Morris — who also learn names. “I think more biology faculty will use the program in the future as they become more familiar with Biopics,” she said. “It only really started for upper division courses this fall.”
Hurley has observed some of the program’s impact. “I was driving a van full of students in the introductory class to a field trip and they were talking as if I wasn’t there,” he said. “One of them remarked, ‘Dr. Freeman came in the lab the other day and he walked right up to me and knew my name. How could he do that? it’s such a big class.’ I got the sense as they were talking that they felt they needed to step up. They couldn’t hide behind the anonymity.”
Wenderoth, who has always made an effort to learn students’ names, said she was teaching an honors seminar recently and one of the students noticed the class roster, saying, “Are those our pictures?” When Wenderoth said they were, the student said, “Wow.” “Students always seem to be impressed that I would take the time to learn their names,” she said. “I also find that when I know students’ names they engage with me more. They’re more willing to ask a question, or come and talk to me after class.”
Hurley said it took him less than a week to create the program, which he says encrypts everything. The photos are stored as image files with only serial numbers on them. Names and student numbers are in separate files. There’s nothing to associate the photo’s serial number with a student name and ID number, except in the database itself. The PDFs go only to instructors and are to be treated with discretion. If students don’t want to have their photo taken for any reason, the department doesn’t insist.
Hurley said he’s more than willing to share the program with anyone who’s interested. “It would have to go hand in hand with a department’s server software, but it’s not that complicated and could be easily recapitulated in any typical scripting language,” he said.
He and Wenderoth are hoping that the project will someday be taken over by central administration and run in conjunction with student ID photos. Wenderoth did some preliminary research and learned that four other schools in the PAC-10 — UCLA, UC Berkeley, Arizona State and USC — already have such systems.
But in the meantime, biology is happy with its system. “There’s such a big payoff for so little real effort that I’m surprised it hadn’t been done already,” Hurley said.
