TechTalks Transcript
Tools for Teaching and Learning Online
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 Joan Getman [JG] |
 Nick Laudato [NL] |
April 29, 1999
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JB: Welcome to the CREN TechTalk Series for Spring of 1999 and to this session on Tools for Teaching and Learning Online. You are here because it's time to discuss the core technologies in your future.
This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today, and I'm pleased to announce that we're at another milestone with the CREN TechTalk series with this, our first externally-sponsored program. Our sponsor for today's session is Blackboard, developer of the CourseInfo software, one of the new course management tools that makes it much easier for faculty to get started in teaching and learning online and also much easier for IT staff to support.
Both of our guests today, Joan Getman and Nick Laudato, were featured speakers at a recent Blackboard summit here in Washington. More about Blackboard and other Web course management tools are at the event Website for today.
And now I'm pleased to welcome our technology anchor for TechTalk, Howard Strauss of Princeton. Howard is a well-known Web and all-around information technology expert. And Howard, I think I can almost start saying that you're a permanent feature here on TechTalk. Welcome, Howard.
HS: Well, I hope so, Judith! Sometimes when people say something is permanent, that's the end of it, right?
JB: Oh, let's scratch that, then. We won't say that!
HS: Right. But thank you anyway, Judith.
As you said, I'm Howard Strauss and I'm the technology anchor for the TechTalk Series of technology Webcasts. The job of the technology anchor is to engage our guest experts in a lively technical dialogue that will answer the questions you'd like answered and to ask those very important follow-up questions. You can ask our guest experts, Joan Getman and Nick Laudato, your own questions by sending e-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during this Webcast. If we don't get to your questions during the Webcast, we'll provide an answer in the Webcast archives.
Not too long ago, all you needed to teach in the humanities was a piece of chalk and a blackboard. A multi-million-volume library was also nice to have, and having some typewriters made reading students' papers a lot easier. For the sciences, you also needed some laboratories equipped with smelly chemicals and sinister-looking instrumentation. It has been noted that if Ben Franklin could somehow return to late-twentieth-century America and visit an airport, he'd have no idea of what was going on. Absolutely everything would be alien to him. In a hospital operating room, he'd be even more astonished to see anesthetized people having surgery performed on them. In fact, almost anywhere Franklin went, he'd have little understanding of any facet of modern American life -- unless, of course, he went into most classrooms. There, he'd be right at home.
While every other facet of our lives has undergone radical technological change, we still largely teach using the talk-and-chalk technique that Franklin would completely understand and would be totally comfortable and familiar with.
There are signs that this is about to change, but such signs have been around for over 50 years. In 1950, it seemed that adding broadcast TV to classrooms would revolutionize education. It didn't. Ten years later movies and slides, along with closed-circuit TV, seemed to be the answer. They weren't. In the '80s, personal computers were going to revolutionize education, if only we could teach enough faculty and students Logo or Basic. We did that and produced students who could draw spirals on monochrome computer screens but didn't have enough time to learn basic math and could barely read.
Today it looks like Web technologies and their brethren are the answer. Along with that, attempts are being made to change learning from teacher-centered to learner-centered, and distance and distributed learning are now all the rage. But we need to be wary, lest we replace Basic and Logo with Java and HTML, and we replace teacher-centered learning with Web-centered learning.
Many questions must be answered before we proceed. How do we get these technologies in the hands of our faculty in a way in which they can be used effectively? Which technology should we concentrate on? What should our priorities be in doing this? Will these technologies really make a difference? And how will we know if they do?
We'll challenge our guest experts to help us untangle this technological web of instructional technology in today's Webcast of TechTalk. Judith?
JB: Well, thank you, Howard, and let me go ahead then and introduce our guest experts for today's TechTalk. Joan Getman is manager of the Academic Technology Center at Cornell University, and Nick Laudato is Associate Directory of Instructional Technology of the Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education at the University of Pittsburgh. Both of our experts work closely with faculty and are also active writers and presenters at conferences of higher education-related IT organizations such as EDUCAUSE. So I'm anxious to hear what they have to say about supporting faculty and also supporting teaching and learning.
Welcome, Joan and Nick, and thanks for being here.
JG: Thanks for having us.
NL: Thank you.
JB: Great. I think we have a really good list of questions for you both today. Howard, do you want to start with the first one?
HS: Yes, I would. Actually, in my intro, I talked about the fact that we by and large today still do this talk-and-chalk stuff. And since it's been done for so long and it's still being done a great deal, perhaps you could start by talking to us about what's wrong with talk-and chalk. Why don't we just keep doing this stuff? Joan?
JG: Well, I think with talk-and-chalk, it's not necessarily all wrong. I can remember a lot of classes I wouldn't have missed for the world because -- and in fact, I took because I wanted to hear the lecture or presentation by that teacher. But I think it's passive in a lot of ways, and especially in large classes. You get one shot at it and possibly picking up notes later. And those are sort of the primary reasons why that doesn't always engage the student in the process of learning.
JB: What do you think about the phrase a lot of folks these days have been saying, "We really have to move from a teaching focus to a learning focus"? Are tools going to help us do that?
HS: Well, what's that even mean?
JB: Oh, good! That's a better question, Howard? What does that mean? Nick? Or Joan? Take it away.
NL: I think that means something similar to what Joan already indicated, a move from something that's more passive to something that's much more active. And chalk-and-talk can work and does work for many faculty members and for many students. But most people need to be engaged more, and we look to technology to help in that process, especially when you're looking at large classrooms and large numbers of students. How do we reach them individually, engage them, get them to actively participate in their learning?
HS: But you're saying that talk-and-chalk works sometimes. It sounds like it works when you have a really good person holding that piece of chalk. Does adding that technolog -- is that going to make really dull professors interesting?
JG: No, I'll venture to say. It starts with what they're teaching and the instructional design of their class and their objectives and knowing their students and all of those elements that have nothing to do with the technology but rather with the teaching.
HS: Could either of you talk about some kind of better model? I mean, when we talk about this learner-centered kind of education, what's going on? What do the students see that's different than coming into a class and having someone talk to him or her?
JB: And how many times are they going into class? Are they going to stop going to classes often as we move into these new tools?
NL: There are all sorts of options available typically nowadays, and some of them involve limited classroom experiences or remote classroom experiences -- technologies like interactive TV.
What do they see that's different? I don't know, we talk about instructional technology, and now when we talk about instructional technology it means computers and Webs. But that term has been around for a long time, and there is a technology associated with instruction, the application of learning theory and instructional theory to the process of teaching and learning.
And I think that's at the core. When we're trying to engage faculty at Pitt, a part of our training is not just the mechanics of using a Web-based tool like CourseInfo or a classroom tool like PowerPoint, but rather, what do you do with it? Can you articulate clearly to students what the learning objectives ought to be? Do you analyze the objectives and determine what tasks students need to complete in order to be able to attain those objectives? Do you pick instructional methods and strategies to allow them to attain precisely those objectives, and do you test at the same level?
If you don't have those three components alone -- objectives, the materials or the activities that get students to accomplish the objectives, and the assessments, the sample tests and actual quizzes to determine whether or not they've got there -- those things need to be in sync. And they get in sync by going through a process of instructional development, instructional design.
HS: When we talk about these tools for teaching and learning, are we just talking about distance learning or are we talking about distributed learning? Are we talking about both? Are the tools the same? Joan, could you talk to us about distance vs. distributed learning and how we might treat those things differently?
JG: Well, I think there are areas of supporting distance learning that are very unique to having students that are never going to be on campus, students who are sometimes going to be on campus.
But I think in a lot of cases, we're talking about distributed learning because it's taking learning from the class time and extending that time so that when you leave and you're in your dorm room or you're going to a lab, you still have opportunities and access to information beyond class time to keep the learning process going.
And that's where I think a lot of the technologies that support it are the same. The issues that are unique probably have to do with assessing your audience that's remotely located, what their technology access is out there, what their support is going to be out there, and all of the administrative stuff that has to do with curriculum and any kind of tuition structure and that sort of thing.
HS: When you talk about distance learning, it seems like you're talking about folks who you said would never be on campus or would be on campus very, very rarely -- essentially would take the entire course off campus. Is that right?
JG: Well, I'm saying it can be any combination of those. At Cornell, we're definitely in an experimental state with that. I think we're doing it at all different combinations of having students that don't live on this campus or don't come regularly to this campus.
HS: When you were talking about distributed learning, it sounded like you were talking about things that students would do on their own, in their dorm rooms or somewhere else. But what about the tools for helping the person in the classroom, the professor in the classroom?
JG: Whether those tools be the same or different?
HS: Yeah. Are they the same? Are they different?
JG: For in the classroom, I think some of them are the same and I think some of them sort of spill over into a group that we have called Classroom Technologies, where now you're talking about you've developed applications and what kind of tools do you need to actually use some of that IT stuff during class time? And that's a whole other set, and we're trying to integrate our consulting with faculty so that we bring those two things together. So it kind of spans outside the classroom, in the classroom, and there's a lot of sameness to the tools?
HS: Could we talk about what some of those tools are? Could we go through and say in the classroom, here's the kind of things that this instructional technology is going to enable our professors to do, and outside here's some of the things that students are going to be able to do? Could you talk about some of those?
JG: Oh, sure. I think that you have the list of Websites, the ability to search and doing that on your own or in the classroom. Simulations, any kind of interactive multimedia application that you might develop. And I think some of the other tools that we're paying attention to now and are really trying to help faculty become adept at using are data video projectors, if you are going to do that in the classroom, or we have a classroom that in English -- the freshman writing seminar students get to work in that's a collaborative networked classroom. So one student's work can be projected and the entire class can comment, or you can pass a document around and edit it in groups.
HS: That sounds like quite an expensive setup, right? All the students are in a classroom and they have access to some kind of computer.
JG: We don't have a lot of those classrooms on campus, but that was one that was funded with the advice of a faculty group here. And we tried to involve the faculty in making that kind of investment because they see a potential or they have a need. It comes from what they're trying to teach, and we help them match that up with what technology can get them there. So no, not every classroom has got that capability, but we have one of those on campus.
JB: That sounds like that's a pretty big piece of infrastructure.
HS: But do you think that's going to be the model for the future, I mean, that's where we're going to go?
JG: To have a whole lot of those?
HS: Yes, is that where a lot of the instruction is going to be done, in classes where students either bring their own laptops or at least have access to computers?
NL: There are movements in that direction in certain areas. Our School of Business has just taken that step. We've built some classrooms that are pre-wired, a port at every seat, with multimedia projection systems and places for students to bring in their laptops and plug them in. There are huge expenses associated with creating such a facility. Typically power, heating and cooling and the ports themselves are all fairly expensive. But there are movements in those directions.
JG: Depends what you're going to do in that room and what you're trying to teach. I think it really depends on the courses.
HS: Do you both think that the main thrust of the instructional technology today is Web-based stuff? Is that fair to say?
NL: Overall, I think that's probably true. The Web has been taking off dramatically, for all the same reasons really that it's affected businesses in the corporate world: It's relatively easy to develop materials. The infrastructure is easy to put together. We have campuses that are wired and people have PCs and there's not a lot of proprietary software involved or extra costs. So it's a pretty simple and direct delivery mechanism that's almost ubiquitous in terms of its availability anymore.
JB: When you say that the Web is easy, Nick, certainly faculty have been working for some time to really figure out how to get the components of instruction -- i.e., objectives and assessments and interactions -- over to the Web. How do we help faculty do that? Sometimes it can take many hours for one to move just one activity over to the Web.
NL: Or make that easy, relatively speaking, compared to the alternatives! I think there is a whole new breed of software like CourseInfo, which we have used both at Cornell and at Pitt, that really does simplify the task dramatically.
When we looked at Pitt -- at what it took to create a Webpage for a faculty member in our standard environment -- there were a lot of technical obstacles. The faculty member needed to understand something about the Unix operating system, which was where they had a default Webpage set up for them. They had to understand text editors like VI.
HS: Oh, yeah, that's a wonderful text editor, VI!
JB: I certainly haven't learned how to do those myself.
HS: Do a commercial for that here.
NL: They had to be able to log in and they had to learn HTML and understand that markup language, and that could be challenging. And if they used the nice, simple tools like FrontPage or even something like Word or Page Mill or Netscape Composer to create their own HTML with a visual editor, they still had to understand how to get that HTML up into the server and position it properly and protect it properly so that the world could have access. So they had to know things like FTP.
Packages like CourseInfo take away virtually all of that and really make it a matter of filling in forms and clicking buttons to get that kind of material up on a Web page.
HS: Nick, you're actually getting close to answering a question that we have here in the mail, so maybe before you answer it completely, I'll ask the question. It's a question from Mark Decker from University of Texas in Austin. Mark is really asking the question to Joan, but I think it would be nice for both of you to answer it. He says, "What factors made -- he says Cornell, but what factors made you choose Blackboard over some of the other Web course development tools?"
JG: Want to go first, Nick?
NL: Sure. We went through a pretty long process. We formed a committee of staff from our central computing group, our library group and my unit -- the unit I work in, the Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education -- as well as faculty from all over the university. They spent nine months analyzing tools and trying to articulate what kind of characteristics those tools should have, rating all the packages that we could get our hands on, and actually bringing packages in and trying them out with instructors in real-life situations.
HS: Sure, but what was there about Blackboard that --
NL: That made the difference? The difference, I think really most simply, is the user interface. The fact that it truly is easy to use and it truly is possible to bring up course materials without having knowledge of HTML. More than anything else, it was the user interface.
HS: Joan, wasn't Blackboard developed at Cornell?
JG: Yes, it was. It was developed by two students while they were undergraduates, and now they've graduated and they've really jumped fast-forwarded into their business career life with Blackboard.
HS: In fact, I've seen the CEO of Blackboard and he looks like an undergraduate!
JB: He's actually a Cornell grad, though, is he? Matt?
NL: Matt was from Cornell, isn't he? I think so.
JG: So, yes, we have a long history with it and we started with it. We went through an evaluation process despite the fact that it was developed here, and we would have had a natural bias to adopting it. We did look at a lot of other tools, same as Nick -- what he did at Pitt. And we came down to the user interface. And also for us, the communication and collaboration tools are wonderful.
And it's a great entré for our faculty. We actually have a slightly different take on the distribution of who uses independent Websites and created independently with editors and CourseInfo sites. And we have both on our central instructional server. And probably throughout the campus, there are departmental servers that have their own course sites that are not CourseInfo.
But we did need a tool (and it has really filled that need) that's accessible and manageable when you don't have the time or a support staff yourself and you are doing it as a faculty member.
JB: It sounds like both of you went through a process that's often used on campuses in terms of forming a committee that has both faculty and IT staff on it and going through an evaluation process. Is that correct?
NL: Yes.
JG: Um-hum.
JB: And I think that some of the folks may want to go through that same process and again. With folks having different environments, they may come up with another solution or another decision.
Are those evaluation tools that you used available anywhere?
NL: We do have a Webpage that is available that lists a lot of detail -- the minutes of meetings, the matrixes that were set up to rate software and a final report. I can give you all that URL.
HS: In both your cases, you're having faculty members go off and use CourseInfo to build course Webpages -- is that what's happening?
NL: Yes.
HS: What percentage of the courses at your university actually now have Webpages built by faculty?
JG: At Cornell (because I just pulled this stuff together) we have 250 CourseInfo Websites, and this is on our central server again. Our environment -- we have centralized services in a very distributed environment, so there's a possibility for a lot of courses living on departmental servers. So there's 250 CourseInfo sites and right now, 400 total non-CourseInfo Websites, 200 of which are inactive at the moment and date back. Some of them will become active again, but 200 actives this semester.
HS: Out of how many courses that you offer? Cornell must offer a zillion course.
JG: A zillion. I don't have an exact number on that, but many, many, many!
HS: We'll figure what percentage 250 is of a zillion.
JB: Or 450 + 250 of a zillion, right?
HS: It's the same, Judith.
JB: Probably so.
JG: It's many. I would not say it's 90%, but --
NL: Those are really tough numbers.
JB: How many do you have at your place, Nick?
NL: We actually have about the same number of CourseInfo courses up today.
JB: That's interesting.
NL: We've had it for about a year now, and by the fall we expect there'll be over 300. But the number of courses is outrageous. Perhaps another metric. This current term -- Spring term that just ended -- we served 5,400 students in CourseInfo courses.
JG: That's a good metric.
NL: Out of about 27,000 at Pitt, so just to give you a rough idea.
JG: And we served 11,000 students with those 250 sites, which gives you an idea about the size of some of those classes that really benefit from having a course Website.
JB: Wow, that's huge numbers!
HS: What are you both doing to get more faculty to put up more courses?
NL: That's a great question. It's funny, it's the question we were asked to answer at the Blackboard summit.
HS: So you've had plenty of time to think about it, Nick.
NL: At Pitt, the answer is that we haven't really done much. In fact, we've had the opposite problem. We've had much more demand than we thought we would be able to handle, so our problem has been really containing expectations.
The first official announcement of the existence of CourseInfo really didn't go out until last week, but to date, we've trained over 300 faculty and have at least 100 more signed up for training in CourseInfo. So it's been a very poorly-kept secret, and we haven't had to ask people to get involved.
JB: So would you say there's a lot of pent-up demand by faculty, then?
NL: There was a huge demand for assistance in this task.
JB: We do have a question that is coming in, a second question from Richard Danielson from Laurentian University up in Ontario. He's asking the question -- going back to the evaluation process you all used -- and that is, which instructional management package was your second choice?
NL: For us, it was WebCT. WebCT, many people thought, actually had more functionality. But I think the simplicity of the user interface is what drove us to CourseInfo.
JB: Um-hum.
NL: And really, the flexibility. Ironically, CourseInfo seems to appeal to people at both sides of the spectrum -- to novice faculty members who know absolutely nothing about Webpages and don't really want to know about HTML, but also on the other extreme to people who are very sophisticated.
We treat CourseInfo as a container -- something that organizes and holds Webpages. And as such, as sophisticated as you can be, you can put anything into this container. And that seems to be appealing to people who can make very sophisticated Webpages that have dynamic components -- even Java applications that can be embedded into the CourseInfo pages.
HS: But somehow they have to get those things.
NL: Create them or get them, yes.
HS: But I mean, somehow they have to build these Java applications. How do they do that?
JG: There are a lot of different ways that gets done. And I think you'll always have your pioneering, enthused faculty who are going to launch projects and do that stuff on their own.
HS: But is the Instructional Technology group doing that for them? Do you help if somebody comes along and says, "Gee, right in the middle of this course page, I would like some kind of fancy animation."
JG: We have a very small group at Cornell. We have four people -- two trainer/consultants and two people who pretty much support all of our Instructional Technology services and respond to the support questions and online requests. And they together -- our group has pretty much targeted for hands-on production projects that we can generalize.
So if it's something that either we're going to learn a lot about that technology or it's something that we can share with other faculty because we invested our time in developing it (and we've done a number of those projects over the past year), then we'll go ahead and get hands-on involved. But generally, because we're so small, we really have to rely on faculty-staff partnerships or faculty-student partnerships or faculty working with us to accomplish a prototype.
HS: Okay, so it sounds like people scrounge around to find some way to get it done.
NL: That's pretty much the way it is.
HS: They'll grab a grad student or a faculty member or whomever they can find.
JG: Yeah. We work with them through the process, and definitely can guide it and even -- if they were at a prototype stage, too, we can help them do a piece of the larger project.
But we can't get involved in massive -- like a multimedia authoring project. We just finished a CD/ROM prototype because it has a lot of potential and generalizeability and it helped us figure out how a design team might work. And it's going to contribute to a proposal process that we're working on where we are going to try and do some full faculty projects next year. But that's been the model that we've worked on.
HS: Nick, earlier you talked about providing training for faculty to use CourseInfo. Could you give us some idea of how much training it takes or what kind of training?
NL: Yeah, we've done a variety of things. When we first acquired the package, we targeted a specific group and designed a very intensive week-long training program -- really touching not just CourseInfo, but all the related pieces of technology the faculty might use. That was over the summer, and that seemed to be a reasonable thing to do, our Summer Institute.
After the summer, we condensed the core training into a day, essentially -- a day that has an introductory hands-on component to get faculty familiar with the way the CourseInfo works, and then a three-hour instructional design component that takes them away from CourseInfo into a planning and design phase in terms of how the course ought to be structured and what materials they should bring together. And then a follow-up three-hour piece that takes them through implementing that design and creating course materials.
We follow that up with a whole series of more technical independent modules on using individual tools that can read HTML for them, or on embedding graphics, or audio and video components. So it's a modular approach at this point.
JB: What are some of those other tools that you are finding that faculty want to use in conjunction with the tool?
NL: We started focusing on the simplest and most easily available ones -- Microsoft Word, for instance. When you open up Word in HTML mode, it actually makes a fairly good what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor. It allows you to embed graphics and sounds and tables and charts. And converting that to HTML is fairly straightforward process if you understand the basic ideas.
HS: You just save it and it's HTML!
NL: Right. If you start out as an HTML document and use features like tables, it works very, very well.
HS: Yeah. Why not use that instead of CourseInfo?
JG: There's a lot of other features in CourseInfo.
NL: It's not a matter of instead of; it's a matter of this is a tool to build the content that you plug into the CourseInfo container.
CourseInfo does much more than contain the documents (but it does in fact do that). It organizes and contains them and then gives you all of the other associated tools -- like tools to create quizzes, to take the results of the quizzes, grade the students, give them feedback, put the results into an internal database in a gradebook the students could also access as chat tools and threaded discussion tools.
So there are a lot of communication tools built into CourseInfo as well, so it provides that overall environment that makes the course work.
HS: Okay, and then you're just using Word to add additional text pages and things?
NL: Exactly. Exactly.
JB: You were kind of working on a list of other tools that you generally teach faculty, Nick. Did you have couple of other ones you wanted to mention?
NL: Well, we use PowerPoint as well. PowerPoint is a fairly effective tool in the classroom, and the HTML generator lets you embed the PowerPoint presentation converted to HTML in CourseInfo and lets students see the faculty notes and navigate that. We also typically let students download the raw PowerPoint presentations so they can print out note pages if they wish. I've found in my class that they get very upset if I haven't posted that before class so that they can print out pages and write notes on it. Otherwise, they get angry because they have to do too much note taking.
HS: So far, it sounds like we've been focusing on teaching, whereas at a lot of research universities like Cornell and like Princeton, there's a great deal of research going on and a lot of focus of the faculty is on research. Does your group support faculty in giving them tools to help with their research, or are we strictly helping them with instruction?
NL: Our group is centered on instruction. The same kind of projects that Joan alluded to are the kind of things that we can tackle. We have a photography group, a group of video directors and producers, a graphics group, an instructional computing group, an instructional designers group. We can pull teams together from those different areas, depending on the needs of a particular project, and work on a project like an interactive CD or on a Web page or creating a Java application that illustrates some concept.
It's a limited resource, of course, so we do have some processes whereby faculty can apply for grants where essentially what they get with the grant is they get our time and our resources to be used at their disposal.
JG: As for the research -- meeting that challenge -- I think that's a huge challenge to support that.
And primarily, we are an instructional group, but we just did a database event which was kind of scary to do because it's really hard to teach that. It's a huge both art and science to develop databases.
And where that ties to the research piece is that I think it has crossover. If you use something like that with your students, you're also creating research opportunities for undergraduates -- and that's been one of the Provost's missions here at Cornell, to create more of those opportunities for undergraduates.
And we launched a database workshop because of faculty demand. In the end, it was a really mixed group of staff and faculty, primarily staff, actually. But that gets at another issue about who's doing what with the tools.
JB: Why were the faculty wanting to learn databases for their classes?
JG: Well, for some of the ones -- and I'll use a graduate student as an example because they are sort of "the faculty of tomorrow" and we consider them part of our audience.
We have one student, a graduate student who's putting a quilt research project into his database, but it's something that his students can access. Other faculty members have wanted to put data up there for students to explore and rearrange and see patterns in the context of whatever they're teaching.
So that's the way, but we started with the design approach because we're finding that a lot of people -- especially with easy database tools -- jump right in and start pouring data in before thinking through what they're eventually going to want out of it and how scalable it is. And those are questions that you need to be asking up front before you start pouring the stuff in.
HS: What kind of databases are you going to use? I assume these are going to be accessible through the Web.
JG: Well, yes. And that's where we really had a struggle about this conversation because we didn't want to just jump up and teach FileMaker, which we could do, and which is a tool that's easy and accessible.
We actually are looking at several tools. And we're looking at Access and Cold Fusion right now because it's more relational than FileMaker, so you have a better chance of scaling it up. But it's still something that a faculty member, grad student, someone who isn't a hard core programmer could do it themselves.
And that isn't going to be the right tool for every application, but that's where you have to get real about how much time someone has and what the learning curve of some of those tools are. And at some point, one of our topics was how do you know when this is too much for you and you need to step back and take the role of the content expert and hire someone to do this database for you?
HS: We have a question that just came in from Wayne University -- yes, Wayne State University, from Amy Kenyon. She says that she knows of one or two faculty here who have run a demo course in CourseInfo on Blackboard's server and have problems uploading materials from the Mac platform. Are you folks working on Mac's and PC's or just Mac's or PCs?
JG: Both.
NL: Yes. Actually, the biggest problem that our Mac users have is they're not used to something very, very simple -- naming files with extensions. If one doesn't use a file extension, CourseInfo has absolutely no idea how to interpret the file.
JB: So they have to learn how to use .doc or something?
NL: They have to get a little bit PC-ish here.
HS: Now, for Mac folks --
JG: It's not that you have a Mac bias or anything, Judith!
HS: It's completely alien!
JG: That's part of the training approach.
HS: But that might be Amy's problem here?
JG: Well, I don't know if that's her problem, and it depends on what specific issue is coming up -- what they're trying to upload and how they're doing it. But we tried to --
NL: And what version of CourseInfo they're using.
JG: Yeah, exactly. And we worked that into our training session, which we make mandatory. We have an online request system.
HS: But both of you have folks using both Mac's and PC's.
JG: Yes.
NL: Sure.
HS: And folks are obviously using them successfully.
NL:Yes.
JG: We think so.
HS: Okay.
NL: We have people using everything imaginable!
HS: We have another question from Bob Lucas at Syllabus. He says, "When you evaluated CourseInfo, WebCT, etc., was there any consideration of the back office functions like registration, paying bills, checking grades, etc.?"
JG: Not for us at this point because we would have to integrate that with a lot of other systems, and we have PeopleSoft going in as our underlying infrastructure database right now -- different components of it -- and that would have been a big integration issue. And I think that's what's coming up with Campus. That's the next level of this product.
JB: So you think not only that's just a general industry trend, then, that we're going to move from these Web course management tools onto --
JG: Student-centered tools. Yeah.
NL: I agree. We're beginning to evaluate Campus here, too. It really is a large step beyond what CourseInfo does. It becomes a true course management syste -- looking at the big picture as opposed to just the delivery of individual course.
JG: And it has a big impact on and becomes more, I think, than an instructional technology decision of oh, we're going to implement this. We really started looking at all of the other players who would have to have a say, and it would really impact on a university-wide level.
JB: Sounds a little bit like when we did talk about directories last week and the need to feed database feeds from multiple different places around campus.
JG: And agreement that that is the system that you're all going to go with.
HS: Did you get faculty involvement when you were selecting CourseInfo?
JG: At Cornell?
HS: Yeah.
JG: Yes, we didn't go through -- again, we have a small group and we didn't do quite as formal a process. I was very impressed with the process that Pitt went through to select it. But we did look at the same tools and we talked. What we did was we involved faculty hands-on with the tools and had them try them out -- different groupings of faculty looking at them and giving us their feedback, sort of focus groups.
NL: When we took a look at Campus, we found that that was in fact a very, very different group that we wanted to consult with as we began considering it.
HS: When you say Campus, you mean the Blackboard product Campus?
NL: Blackboard Campus product.
HS: Just so folks understand what we're talking about.
NL: It involves the Book Center, the Registrar's Office, the Admissions and Aid Office, the Bursar's office, all those units basically would be involved in the Campus implementation. So it becomes much more complicated decisionmaking process.
HS: We have another question from Martin White at Walsh College. Martin asks, "What would you estimate is the time investment required of faculty or staff to create an online course?"
JB: And he kind of extends, "How many hours of development per class hour would you estimate?"
JG: Wow! Oh, it totally depends what you're going to do. You can throw a syllabus and an announcement sheet up there relatively quickly just by importing from Word. But if you're going to do other stuff, that's a pretty broad question. It depends.
HS: You're saying something between a half hour and several days?
JG: And for some people, if you're creating something that you're going to link to out of CourseInfo or put in there that's truly interactive or multimedia, more than days.
NL: Yes, we've had people who've worked for months and delivered a complete package before the class started, and others who -- the most typical case is really that we prepare sort of the core materials, the course syllabus materials and one or two units of instruction and then begin the term and develop the materials one or two steps ahead of the students.
JB: That sounds like when you're teaching a new course for the first time, you use that model.
NL: Kind of, yes.
JG: But that's the flexibility of it that's nice, too -- is that if you really are kind of a little technophobic about it or limited on time, you can get a presence on the Web for your students to connect to and use the communications tools and build it from there.
NL: And refine it as you have the time, yes.
JB: No matter which tool that you're using, would you recommend that a faculty member start teaching on the Web during the same semester that they're getting started for their first time? Or would you suggest they start this a semester ahead of time?
NL: We've advised people to start the semester preceding, and that's the way we set up our training so that they have a few months to work with the materials and really have it well-structured at the beginning -- even if they don't have all the materials together, that the structure's important, the overall organization.
JG: I think we encourage a lot of people to do that because on any technology -- to work with it and get used to it. But I think the reality is sometimes you get back in August and classes start in a couple of weeks and there you are.
HS: Sure, it gets away from you. Easily.
JB: We had a question we had talked about in our prep session, and that is how to set up the support -- kind of like the campus support for the servers for Web courses. Nick, you mentioned something about having a system set up where you have a development server and then also a production server?
NL: Actually, we run three different servers:�
A test server that has very limited access -- we basically use it when there are new releases and bug fixes and patches so that we can test them before we apply them.
We have a development server that our office runs, where faculty work on the materials, build their course, we us it for training.
And before the term starts, we migrate the course from the development server onto the production server. The production server is run by the central IT group. It's managed completely under 7/24. It has someone watching it and making sure that it's always up and running, and that's where the students are and that's the production environment, so to speak.
And we've found that model works very well.
JG: We do a slightly different thing in that we don't really have a development server. We give a faculty member -- an account on what we call our "instruct server." And that's where it's mirrored as well, so that you have that stability of the system -- that if you're going to have all your students depending on it, it's there and it's in the 24/7 server farm environment.
HS: Okay, we have another question that just came in from Georgia Southern University. And actually, I think it's a very interesting question -- maybe difficult to answer, but it's from Judy Redmond and it's a couple sentences long.
She says, "I would like to ask you to expand a little on how you get beyond just teaching the tools. How do you help faculty avoid just putting a talk-and-chalk type course up on the Web?" Judy says, "I've seen many good examples of creative courses. I've also seen lots of Web courses that just look like the old programmed instruction of the 60s and 70s." I've certainly seen a lot of those, too.
JG: Good question.
JB: Probably learn from some of them!
NL: You see a mix of them on our Website as well. But for us, the answer is in that process -- that instructional design process.
I guess to make the parallel, we have a distance education program that's been around at Pitt since 1972, and it follows an instructional design model that teams up a person -- an instructional designer, a person who's usually at the Ph.D. level with a background in learning and instructional theory. It teams up that person with a faculty member, typically someone who's taught the course many times. And collaboratively, they work to develop a set of self-instructional materials over about an eight month period, typically. They're not doing this exclusively. Faculty usually do it as an overload activity.
That process of working with an instructional designer -- faculty member and instructional designer together -- is what makes the difference, I think, in a well-structured course and one that is basically just repeating (a guy at the Blackboard conference called it shovelware -- shoveling out the same kind of things that go on in the classroom). That type of process makes use of the media appropriately.
JG: I think that if we could pair up everyone with their own instructional designer, it would be great.
And I think that we handle it in a couple of different ways in that we're having peers talk to peers when we do faculty showcases or technical tech forums -- where they'll talk about their teaching as the primary focus, and this is how I got there with this technology. So they're really presenting an innovative approach to teaching something -- and, yeah, by the way, this instructional technology really enhanced that process.
And we also do instructional possibilities talks as part of our -- whenever we do a technology workshop, there's always an instructional twist in there.
JB: What about -- as we're getting close to the end of our session, which should always go so fast, practically speaking -- what problems are you having right now that you really need to solve over the next three or six months?
JG: We have a challenge in that we just finished a staff retreat where we talked about how we'd really like to see the faculty who have a good idea not fall through the cracks. And for us, it's putting together a proposal system -- sort of, it sounds, like what Nick already has in place at Pitt -- where we can help identify some faculty projects. And not do it on a first-come, first-served basis, either. Sort of involve our advisory board, our faculty advisory board in selecting some projects and developing them all the way through. That's one of our challenges.
JB: So you want to provide that support, but you want to organize in terms of prioritize the support areas.
JG: To address that complaint of, "Oh, I'd love to do more. I just don't have the time to learn that tool or do it myself" -- and just short of becoming a production house. We're trying to find a middle ground there.
HS: We often have another problem, which is our faculty rarely comes to us and asks for help in applying technology. How do we do some outreach to those folks where we could benefit lots of folks? How do you convince faculty to ask for help?
JG: I don't know how we convince them. We're doing a lot of outreach efforts and we're sort of trying to hone in on their individual needs -- making it, "Why would I want this and what's this going to do for me?" And doing a lot of on-site presentations. We're co-training with a lot of people out in departments.
HS: When you say on-site presentations, you mean in the department?
JG: We go to the engineering school and we do a week of Web courses or whatever courses that are custom-tailored to what they're looking for for their faculty and staff. Which is a little bit more work than sort of putting out a general course, but it seems like we're getting more mileage from those because people are coming with a motive, a motivation.
HS: You're hitting real close to home.
NL: That sounds like a good idea.
JB: Good. What about places where they don't have people like yourselves doing this? Any particular suggestion or recommendation?
JG: If you're going to go with a product like CourseInfo, make sure -- or CourseInfo themselves (I can say that their support is wonderful) -- that you're going to have good support from the vendor that you're buying that product from.
JB: So that's one of the characteristics you want to look for, then.
JG: Yes, and we're certainly getting that from CourseInfo.
JB: What about providing the 24/7 support? Nick, you mentioned that. How are you at Cornell providing 24/7 support for your faculty and students, Joan?
JG: We don't have a 24 hour helpline. We have a very elaborate online support system. We set up, as I said, the requests so we can track users. You make a request to get a CourseInfo site online and then we've got you in our database and we also have FAQs and a lot of online help documents.
And the 24/7 that I was referring to was the stability of the server system -- that you can always count on, now the site is mirrored and it's up there and it's not going to fall apart during midterms.
JB: And your central IT organization does that.
JG: Right.
NL: Our central IT organization did back in August move to a 24-hour help desk and it has made a difference. It hasn't been quite as necessary for CourseInfo per se as we originally thought it might be. It really has helped in general with questions from students about setting up their machines for dial-in access. That's probably been the number one issue that they've fielded. But the response to it has been extremely positive in terms of how we can judge.
When you do move to an atmosphere like CourseInfo you could look at the statistics in terms of when the product's being used, and you'll see there are no boundaries. There are users at every hour of the day into the night, and when people work at those hours, they really do need to have some way to get assistance if there's a problem.
HS: One last question in here. Actually, I'd like to get about nine last questions, but they won't let me do that. For folks out there who really haven't started doing this yet, could you talk about the first steps that one might take to begin to get some technology into the classrooms?
JG: You mean any kind of technology?
HS: No, I mean instructional technology. I'm sorry.
NL: Into the classrooms in general. This effort -- I think that planning effort is important up front, and making partnerships between units that support instruction and computing and directly involving faculty is critical.
When we look at what we did with implementing CourseInfo, it is true that there were an awful lot of associated pieces, like the server pieces and the help desk pieces and what goes on in a classroom. When we deliver a tool now -- and we encourage faculty members to use PowerPoint in the classroom -- we'd better have a way to allow them to make a PowerPoint presentation in a classroom.
JG: Exactly.
NL: So we did need to attend to equipment in the classroom and we have a unit that delivers technology to the classroom on demand. And we have a project underway that is renovating classrooms on a progressive system where we try to get the highest priority ones first and bring technology into the classrooms and move on down the list. Those are critical components. It really doesn't work without that.
We found that we need training facilities, too. There's a training facility that we've shared with the administrative side of the house that's been used for training in our Oracle systems, and that's been critical to have an environment where faculty can sit at a PC and work through the problems that we pose for them in CourseInfo for their training. That's helped enormously. There are dozens and dozens of little, seemingly unrelated pieces that have to be glued together to make this thing work.
JG: Ditto. What makes it. And partnerships are really important, and that's where we're making more of an effort to put the people who are building the classrooms, to get them thinking about what they're actually going to be teaching in there and put that in the process right at the start -- when you're talking about classroom renovation.
JB: So you're talking really about an awful lot of campus groups are involved with this.
JG: Yes.
JB: Sounds like we've identified a number of things today where everything requires a lot of coordination across campus.
HS: Sure. Almost nothing can be done really today without doing that -- no matter what you're trying to do.
NL: The things we're struggling with now are: Is it worth it? Does it make sense? Does it make a difference?
I think we're actually generating some nice research topics for Ph.D. students because we've got a few who have approached us who are beginning to work sorting through these mountains of data that we're collecting.
JB: That really fits with your Center for Instructional Development there, Nick, right?
NL: Yes, I think it makes sense for us to be pursuing those.
JG: And we have a research group on our campus that's located within the Communications Department that is looking at some of those questions that are being raised by the use of the technology.
JB: Howard, how are you coming on your questions?
HS: That's mine. I think we are out of time here. Judith, I think it might be time to wrap this thing up.
JB: All right, I will go ahead and do that. And I want to thank all of our Web participants for being with us here today for this time with Nick and Joan. And you can certainly send follow-up questions to expert@cren.net, and those will be answered individually and/or on the Web.
And be sure to mark your calendars for two weeks from today for May 13th. And this TechTalk will feature a known expert on the Web, our very own Howard Strauss with his semi-annual Web update. Check the Website for upcoming Spring events and, as always, we welcome suggestions. We're planning next year's TechTalk series, in fact, right now, so do send in some suggestions for topics and issues.
Thanks to all who made this event possible today: the members and board of CREN; our first official TechTalk sponsor, Blackboard (and especially Robert Jones of Marketing there); our guest experts, Nick Laudato and Joan Getman; technology anchor, Howard Strauss. This list is getting very long, but this is great! Web content producer, Terry Calhoun; Carol Ansell and Lee Perlis of CREN; and Paul Bennett and Martha vander Kolk at UM Web Services; and all of you for being here. You were here because it's time.
Bye, Joan. Bye, Nick. Bye, Howard.
NL: Bye-bye.
JG: Bye.
JB: Take care, all.
HS: Thank you, bye-bye.
