It’s Not Oprah, but a TV Show Works for Professors at Stony Brook

Graham E. Glynn will gladly spend an hour giving a tour of the state-of-the-art projects under way at Teaching, Learning + Technology, his center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He’ll show you a new Web site that offers on-demand videoconferencing for students who are having trouble with homework. He and his colleagues have also built a “classroom finder,” which allows department chairs to allocate classrooms according to a dozen criteria.

But one of Mr. Glynn’s signature creations at the center, where he is executive director, doesn’t feel so au courant. In fact, it looks like something beamed in from a public-access channel circa 1991.

That project is Innovations in Education, a talk show in which Mr. Glynn interviews Stony Brook faculty members about their classroom experiences. Sitting at a hand-me-down news desk donated by a Long Island television station, he and his guests chat about redesigning courses, giving online tests, and keeping students engaged.

The show might be modest and low-tech, but Mr. Glynn says it has been one of his office’s most effective tools for prompting conversations on the campus about how to improve instruction. The program is broadcast on the university’s cable system and is distributed on YouTube, Facebook, and other Web platforms.

On a recent morning, the show’s director, Dini Diskin-Zimmerman, ran the control room as Mr. Glynn prepared to interview two instructors. Ms. Diskin-Zimmerman, a veteran of decades at ABC News and CNN, issued a stream of instructions to the camera operators through her headset: “OK, give me a nice two-shot there. ... Tell Graham to move just a half-inch to his left. ... Camera 2 is looking a little bit greener than the other two. ... Tell Phil to brighten up or I’m going to walk in there and tickle him.”

The Irish-born Mr. Glynn, who is an assistant provost at Stony Brook, is a burly, genial man with a low-key presence as a TV host. He studied neuroscience in graduate school but drifted into educational technology; he arrived here in 2006 after several years at a similar center at Penn State.

“Teaching tends to be a closed-door activity,” he says. “What we’re trying to do with this talk show is to make things more open, more available for conversation.”

He has been able to produce the show on a shoestring because the campus’s television studio happens to fall under his center’s purview. Other than allocations of staff time, the show’s only cost is roughly $400 an episode to hire temporary camera operators.

Since creating the program, in late 2008, Mr. Glynn’s center has released 24 episodes. Fifteen more are in various stages of production. Each episode includes video snippets from Stony Brook classrooms, but 90 percent of the material is pure talking heads, in the vein of The Charlie Rose Show.

‘A Pretty Homey Operation’

Stony Brook’s faculty center is not the only one that has experimented with video. Washington University in St. Louis and Central Michigan University, for example, have similar series. But Stony Brook’s appears to have far more episodes in a talk-show format than any other such project.

A recent guest was Ayesha Ramachandran, an assistant professor of English. When she arrived at Stony Brook, in 2008, she found that she had trouble assessing students’ collaborative work in a course on drama. She turned to Mr. Glynn’s center for advice and, a year later, was asked to appear on the show to talk about her experience.

“It’s a pretty homey operation,” Ms. Ramachandran says. “I was actually surprised that they didn’t instruct me more on what they’d be asking or what they wanted to talk about. It was very relaxed and ad hoc.”

Informality works to the show’s advantage, she says: “Almost every guest manages to say something really interesting.”

Edward J. O’Connell, a clinical assistant professor in health sciences who also works as a radiation-safety officer on the campus, found his way onto the program through a similar route. Two years ago he wanted to improve an emergency-medicine course he was teaching, and he saw a notice that Mr. Glynn’s center was offering to conduct midsemester focus groups with students. Mr. O’Connell set up such a focus group. Some of the responses were emotionally bruising, he says, but it led to profound improvements in the quality of the course.

A few months later, Mr. O’Connell’s phone rang. Would he be willing to appear on Innovations in Education to talk about the experience?

“I hadn’t really been aware that Graham even had this TV show,” he says. “But I think it came out very well. I think it captured what I was trying to do.”

‘Getting Out of Their Silos’

As the “hadn’t really been aware” comment suggests, Innovations in Education has not become must-see TV at Stony Brook. But Mr. Glynn says he is satisfied with a viewership in the mid-three-digits—for now.

“One of the great things about this project is that it has created an excuse for us to have more conversations with faculty,” he says. “My colleagues and I will talk to instructors about what they’re doing. Even those who don’t appear on the show can be drawn into our center’s activities. And we walk away with a better sense of what’s happening around campus.”

The person who books the guests is Mr. Glynn’s colleague Nancy Wozniak, whose job title is “learning architect.”

“Our dream with Innovations in Education is to get dialogue going across the disciplines,” she says. “We want to see faculty members getting out of their silos, getting out of their departments, to talk about quality and teaching.”

Joseph W. Lauher, a professor of chemistry who appeared on an early episode, says he occasionally hears comments about it from colleagues. But more often he hears from students who have caught it on cable TV in their dorm rooms.

“I don’t know whether most of them watch for more than a few minutes or really pay much attention to the discussion,” he says. “But they seem gratified to know that I care enough about the quality of the course to appear on a program like that. So, in that sense, the mere existence of the program sends a positive signal.”

As for Mr. Glynn, he sees the program as a work in progress. In future episodes he hopes to incorporate more classroom footage. And he would also like to bring in guests from other SUNY campuses.

But he isn’t planning on finding fame through this. “Sometimes students will walk up to me and say, ‘Hey, you’re the guy from the teaching show.’ But then I remind myself, students will watch anything at 3 a.m.”