For years, associate professor Christopher Stoney has been hauling the equivalent of a small electronics shop to class. He likes to enhance his lectures with everything from news clips and YouTube videos to audiotapes and old slides.
“Students like it because it tends to bring the real world into the classroom,” says Stoney, who teaches in the School of Public Policy and Administration.
Unfortunately, all of that multimedia content requires a thicket of playback equipment, wires and projectors. It also requires Stoney to spend a lot of time at home finding files, editing them and converting them into a usable format. “The night before a class, I’m often up until three in the morning,” he confesses.
A few years ago, MA student Ken Doyle observed he could save Stoney a lot of time and hassle by developing a computer program that would allow the professor to digitally store all of his files in a single format on his laptop, and to catalogue them by topic and lecture. Stoney immediately knew such a program would be more
efficient, flexible, reliable and professional than his current patchwork system.
“This will be a lot sleeker,” he says with a chuckle.
Together, Doyle and Stoney developed a prototype program, which they called Project Lanevo. The name comes from a combination of the words “LAN switch” (a networking technology) and “evolution.”
“I think there will be a great need for it,” says Stoney. “I think using audio-visual stuff is something that many teachers would like to [do]. It’s just…so time-consuming to do it.”
The university obviously agrees: it recently gave Stoney a Teaching Achievement Award for the idea. The $15,000 prize will fund further development of the prototype. By this time next year, Stoney may be able to leave most of his electronics at home—and get a bit more sleep.