Students develop apps for better learning

Office of Academic Services (OAS) at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar (SFS-Q) has developed various technologies, by exploring the use of current technology, to help students achieve their best academically.

Anne Nebel, assistant dean for academic affairs, described the goal of the technology initiative as putting resources in the hands of students. “At OAS, the focus is to support student achievement across the curriculum. We have looked at apps related to economics, geography, French and Arabic as foreign languages, and academic writing across disciplines,” she said.

Through the years, OAS has offered academic support to all Georgetown students in the form of one-on-one tutorials, workshops and guidance. The tutors are adding a new dimension to their services by tapping into the multitude of possibilities now available through technology. “Because we are in this unique, exciting and very multilingual society and context, we see students with lots of different strengths and with different kinds of needs. We try as best as we can to identify student strengths and help them find ways to build on their weaknesses,” said Nebel.

And it’s not just apps that are making their way into the collection of tutors’ tools. Due to ease of use and portability, tutors can send a podcast or a video from Khan Academy, for example, to be accessed through an iPad or a laptop with a message to the student saying “here’s a little something that can help explain the concept we discussed earlier”. As for helping students with writing, tutors have found apps that focus on mind-mapping, conceptual-mapping and conversion of mind maps to outlines for papers. In foreign languages, there are apps to create flashcards should students want to study a subset of vocabulary words and quiz themselves.