Berge Collins Associates

Zane L. Berge, Ph.D.

Director, Training Systems Grad. Program

UMBC

Northern Arizona University has a long tradition of delivering courses at multiple sites across the state. While NAU promotes itself as the best residential student experience in Arizona, NAU also has the mission of providing 3^rd and 4^th year higher education to the rural areas across the state. For many years, this was accomplished by "circuit rider" faculty and part-time faculty who lived close to the various sites. Over the past seven years, NAUnet, headquartered in Flagstaff, has been implemented, using federal and state dollars. NAUnet is a professional-broadcast-quality, two-way audio, two-way video instructional television system. It has been set up with a control room at each site, so any site on the system can both originate and receive courses. The system features two digital circuits between the south of the state and Flagstaff; the balance of the circuits are analog, carried on a microwave system designed with sufficient bandwidth to carry audio, video and data signals.

At the front and rear of each television classroom is a 60 inch viewing screen. At the heart of the video system is a nano-splitter that divides this viewing screen at each site into nine panes. Each of those nine panes can be divided into four so that there can potentially be up to 36 sites across the state interacting with each other. The students talk to each other over voice-activated microphones situated on each student desk. The site operator can bring up to full screen the speaker at any site so that, for a few moments, that person has the stage. Courses are broadcast live to the various television classrooms across the state, broadcast over local cable television systems, and some are digitized for delivery via streaming technology over the Web.

The IITV system provides a face-to-face environment where students and faculty can see and hear each other and engage in discussion. Most of the usual social context cues (for example, age, gender, ethnicity, educational level and socio-economic status) are evident or can be deduced so are available to aid in the communication and community-building process. Time, however, is limited to 55 or 70 minute periods, which limits the time available for each student to give input into the discussions. Typically, the instructor lectures, with the occasional question to the students. As in face-to-face classrooms, a limited number of the more verbal students often provide the majority of student input. Learning by observation and listening may occur, but many students do not have the opportunity to express their opinions or ideas to their peers or to the faculty person.

Recently several courses delivered via NAUnet have acquired a web-based conferencing enhancement so that discussion continues in the NAU Online Virtual Conference Center (VCC). This allows asynchronous discussion among students and faculty between the broadcast classes. Forty-three televised and classroom-based courses were enhanced using the VCC during Spring semester, 1998.

The NAU Virtual Conference Center is powered by Caucus Software (http://www.screenporch.com). This web-based, asynchronous, conferencing system was chosen, in part, because it is accessible via any web-browser and any Internet Service Provider (ISP): local and national commercial ISP, college labs and wired dorm rooms; from work, home, public libraries or public computer labs on campus. Many students and faculty have experience using a web-browser before they start using the VCC, so accessing the web-based conferencing system is a relatively small step.

One humanities professor has made particularly good use of the integration of synchronous television with asynchronous computer conferencing and it is his courses from which the following observations are drawn. This particular professor teaches to as many as 16 sites across the state and has as many as 150 students in each of two courses taught each semester.

The instructor’s teaching philosophy is learner-centered and his practice can be summarized in the following principles:

His teaching methodology and student assignments have not changed in the transition from classroom to live television to live television with web-enhancement. Some courses focus on a single topic or theme; in some courses the student chooses their own topic of study and applies the designated learning methodology to it. The instructor has developed a series of twelve, cumulative, written assignments that the students must complete; one assignment a week during the semester. Weekly assignments are accompanied with the injunction to consistently read and comment on other student’s work.

The first assignment is to explain the cultural evolution model used for the course (http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~hgb/303/303hex.html). The 2^nd assignment is to "dump out" what the student knows about the topic of the course, or the topic chosen by the student, without reference to any external data sources. This sets a baseline against which future elaboration can be gauged. The 3^rd assignment has the student examining the work of the other students in the class to determine if common cultural underpinnings are emerging. It is not until the 4^th step that the student is instructed to consult external sources, then to research only as much as can be accomplished in one week. Students are to determine at least 3 different sources of information on their chosen topic, or the topic of the course.

Each assignment elaborates on the preceding one to illustrate the acquisition of the intellectual tools addressed in the steps of the learning model. These assignments follow the same "escalator format" whether the course is focused on a single topic, or the students apply the steps to their own choice of topics. Student acquisition of knowledge can be seen from their first, baseline essay through their final project.

The instructor received several hours of personal coaching in his office over a week’s time. Instruction included how to navigate within the VCC and how to customize his conference space to me his personal course requirements. Considerable time was spent in discussing the most effective use of the conversational spaces the VCC afforded both instructor and students, based on the instructor’s desired course outcomes.

An hour-long demonstration is given in the televised classroom during the second class session for each course. "Why do I have to use a computer in a Humanities course?" is always the first question addressed for the students. The value of the acquisition and practice of computer skills and the added market place value this gives to the student are stressed.

Students receive a handout with instructions for accessing the VCC (http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~caucus/reginfo.html), the steps to register their user id and password, complete their personal information and find their way to their course conference. Students are shown how to step through the printed access instructions, shown via a pad camera and the actual activities demonstrated on a computer display (with the text sized increased significantly to make reading from a television screen possible). Several times students watching the course on cable have followed along on their home computers and created their own conversational spaces as directions were being given, much to the surprise of the instructor and other students.

The VCC manager has remained available to students by email and telephone to answer questions for the first two semesters; the instructor will now assume that responsibility.

Prior to the implementation of the web-based conferencing system, students kept their weekly written assignments in a folder and turned them all in at the end of the semester with their final project. Some students completed one assignment a week as instructed; some students put off their writing until the last week or two of the semester. The teaching methodology always required collaborative work: typically students exchanged their written assignments with others at their own site, offering verbal and written critique of each other’s work. The course work culminated with a final project in which students could demonstrate, in their choice of media, what they had learned about the course topic, or their personal choice of topics.

Students start the course with an A grade and maintain that A by showing increasingly sophisticated levels of elaboration, analysis and integration in their written work, and appropriate application of the steps of the learning models. This was and is problematic for students who are used to regular graded assignments and tests (turned in and returned) as they received little or no feedback on their work from the instructor until the end of semester. Students felt unable to ascertain a satisfactory answer to their most pressing question: "What must I do to get an A in this course?" not realizing that the question required rephrasing to "What must I do to retain my A in this course?"!

Before the VCC was added, students at the individual state-wide sites got to know one another and sometimes talked before and after class. Students across sites were rarely able to socialize with one another or to easily pursue any collaborative learning efforts. The professor got to know only those students who typically spoke up in class. He was also faced with an overload of reading in a very short time at the end of the semester when assignments and final projects were submitted for grading.

Introducing web-based threaded conferencing "conversational spaces"

At the beginning of Fall semester, 1997 a web-browser-accessible "virtual conference center" was introduced to NAU using software that created conferences for individual classes, and used "items" as conversational spaces within the course conferences.

Students continued to attend two televised classes per week. In these humanities courses each student created their own virtual conversational spaces in the VCC in which to put their weekly writing assignments rather than writing them out on paper. Other students could then enter these conversational spaces to read and comment often getting into lively discussions. Students soon discovered the fastest way to attract other students who could offer information and critique was to read and leave comments on other students’ work, thus creating some sense of reciprocal social obligation.

The addition of this online venue for class discussion has had several remarkable results.

Students from across the state can now interact together online, building on their accustomed interactions in the television classroom. The television course provides an ongoing personal context - for the most part, students can eventually put names, faces, and voices together when they read the online conference contributions. Students who take the course over the campus cable system can also participate in the VCC with their peers in a way that has been impossible in the past. This has led to greater identification with the class group and increased participation on the part of these formerly invisible class members.

Students enter greetings and welcome to each other in their conversational spaces at the beginning of the course so celebrating each new arrival. They read and leave their critique of each other’s work, offer each other suggestions, and find and share resources with one another. Reading each other’s work allows students to bring multiple perspectives to bear on their own work and often "unblocks" students when they reach an impasse in their own thinking. Typically, in large classes, students will eventually select a small group of other student’s work to read, rather than trying to keep track of the work of up to 150 peers.

Comments, while mostly task-focused, sometimes include personal information and comments. Absences or personal events — joyful, mundane or traumatic, are followed up with inquiries and expressions of concern and support.

The instructor quickly found that he did not have to comment on each student’s work - the other students were doing that. He does read all new input at least four times a day. Students are directed with strategically placed questions and comments as they work their own way through the steps of the learning model he has provided for them. The instructor has remarked that his consistent reading of student assignments and commentary provides him with a window into their cognitive processes that was never available to him before.

Integration of technologies

Points raised in the television classroom are commented and elaborated upon by the instructor in the web-based computer conference. The instructor also remarks during the televised portion of the course on what he has read in the web-based computer conference. This gives constant emphasis of the equal value placed by the instructor on class participation in both technologies.

The potential conversational time available for these courses has expanded from two 70-minute class periods televised each week to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (given a student has this duration of access to a networked computer).. Students are entering assignments and commentary into the course conferences day and night throughout the week, at a times convenient for them.

The time and date is noted with the student’s name at the beginning of each comment entered into the discussions. It is evident from observation that many students spend 8 or more hours a week on task. Items authored by other students that a particular student read is also tracked and recorded by the conferencing software.

All students can to contribute to the online discussions, without feeling pressured by the limited time available in the televised portion of the course, or by fears commonly experienced in front of a camera. Students can now take the time to reflect and consider their input, revise and edit their contributions until they are comfortable "publishing" them to their peers. Students can engage in multiple, concurrent conversations with other class members and read, study and critique each other's assignments. They often offer insightful suggestions and valuable resources. Students say they quickly experience the delight of recognition when other students leave comments and the equally sharp disappointment when no one "notices’ their work.

The ethnic population of Arizona is as varied as its topography. Flagstaff in the north is at 7000 feet, Yuma in the south at less than 2000 feet. The northern non-white population is heavily Native American, whereas the southern non-white population tends to be more Hispanic. There are two large urban centers in the state (Phoenix and Tucson) and vast expanses of rural reservation where many homes have neither electricity nor running water. Languages typically spoken among the course members include English, Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Spanish.

Non-native speakers of English are not hampered by lack of facility in spoken English when making their comments in the web-based conferencing center. They can take their time and consult dictionaries or grammar books or more facile English speakers. Nor are students with disabilities penalized as they might be in a synchronous classroom.

Each student has their own particular point of view and opinions influenced by their ethnicity, culture, life experience, age, gender etc. These different points of view can be shared with other class members as each topic is discussed from multiple perspectives in the VCC.

One student who is partially sighted and another student with cerebral palsy who uses a wheelchair and had a severe speech impediment found themselves, for the first time, on an equal footing with their peers. In fact they found themselves ahead of many classmates as they had already mastered the skills necessary to use the VCC.

The instructor has found his reading load is now spread over the entire semester. The evolution of the student’s learning is accessible to his inspection as he reads their weekly assignments and listens to their classroom comments where it was not before. He can have greater input into each student’s learning experience as he is able to comment continually on their online assignments and written comments to other students. Student work can be easily tracked and those falling behind with their written assignments can be quickly contacted and remedial assistance offered by the instructor or concerned class members. This assists students to stay current with the course and encourages course completion.

Most students are able to gain access at regular intervals to networked computers running a web-browser, but some still can not. Only one of the television classrooms is still without networked computers, and those will be installed during summer 1998. Those students who are without Internet access have been encouraged to fulfil all the course assignments on paper. During the televised classes some students who were without Internet access have expressed a sense of dislocation and of missing out on the sense of community developed by those who were working together in the virtual conference center.

Some students flourish under the learning regime used in these courses. While they report working harder than in most other courses, they also report experiencing greater personal growth and acquisition of transferable intellectual tools that they can use in other courses.

Other students are continually frustrated by what they perceive to be the lack of expected faculty-imposed structure and the divergence from teaching models with which they are familiar. They are at a loss to gauge their own progress towards the A they are seeking, when they can not "psych out" their instructor and their progress is not constantly validated by quizzes, tests and graded assignments. These students seem to have difficulty grasping the notion of a grade based on consistently demonstrated acquisition and use of various intellectual tools, rather than their ability to produce evidence of efficient information transfer from professor or text to student.

Both students and instructor report spending more time on course work. Students find that communicating with their fingertips takes more thought and consideration than speaking aloud and that they are more conscious of grammar and style. It is easy for misunderstandings to arise when communicating via the written word, which does not allow the immediate negotiation of meaning between correspondents.

During the first class meeting of the second semester students were introduced to the combination of technologies used in the course.

To assuage the anxieties of students new to the combination, students who had taken a similar course the preceding semester were asked to express their opinions. The following comment, transcribed from the video-tape of that meeting, was made by an adult student at one of the state-wide locations. She is a nurse, who works at nights and is a single parent, working on her bachelor’s degree. Her words summarize comments made by a number of other students who also added their opinions:

Mauri Collins is Research Associate and Adjunct Assistant Professor in The Institute for Learning and Technology at Northern Arizona University. Zane Berge is director of the Training Systems graduate program at UMBC. Both are widely published in the field of computer-mediated communication used for teaching and learning. Most notable are seven books they have co-authored: Computer-mediated Communication and the Online Classroom (Volumes 1-3) (1995) and a more recent four volume series, Wired Together: Computer Mediated Communication in the K12 Classroom (1998). Berge Collins Associates also consults and conducts research internationally in distance education and computer mediated communication in teaching and learnng.

Mauri Collins, MA

NAU Box 5751

Flagstaff AZ 86011-5751

Phone: 520-523-4059

http://emoderators.com/mauri.shtml

Zane L. Berge, Ph.D

1000 Hilltop Circle

Baltimore MD 21250

Phone: 410-455-2306

FAX: 410-455-3986

http://emoderators.com/zberge.shtml