TechTalks Transcript
Support Issues for Campus and Course Websites
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 Karie Masterson [KM] |
 Ruth Sabean [RS] |
December 16, 1999
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JB: Welcome to the CREN TechTalk series for fall of 1999 and to this session on Support Issues for Campus and Course Websites. You are here because it's time to discuss the core technologies for your campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today, and a special thanks for support of today's event goes to Blackboard, a company powering online teaching and learning environments.
Let me welcome the technology anchor for TechTalk today, Howard Strauss of Princeton. Howard is a well-known, very energetic Web and renaissance-like information technology expert. Welcome, Howard.
HS: Thank you, Judith. Your intro gets better every time. We'll keep doing this!
JB: Thank you!
HS: I'm Howard Strauss, the technology anchor for the TechTalk series of CREN webcasts. As technology anchor, I'll engage our guest experts in a lively technical dialogue that will answer the questions you'd like answered and ask those very important follow up questions. You can ask our guest experts, Ruth Sabean and Karie Masterson, 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 answers in the Webcast archive.
What constitutes the good life? At the close of the last century, Teddy Roosevelt declared it would mean "a chicken in every pot." A century later, as we enter a new millennium, we are told that the good life at college or university requires a web page for every person on campus, every department and every course. Effectively, a website in every pot!
While Roosevelt's call to action raised the per capita chicken consumption from five pounds to its present 50 pounds, putting the chicken in every pot was not as simple as it seemed, nor did it really give us the good life it promised. Before we could put a chicken in every pot, everyone had to have a pot, a stove to cook it on and some fresh water to fill the pot. And is there any joy in just a plain chicken without spices, dumplings, biscuits, side dishes -- and perhaps the perfect wine?
Once our expectations were raised to expect a chicken in our pot, we were impatient to have our entire standard of living rise accordingly and we became envious of those with two or three chickens in their pot. Getting a chicken in every pot would have been quite an accomplishment, but we really needed to revolutionize industry and science and revitalize the economy. All the chickens in all the pots would never have done that.
On our campuses today, there's obviously an information technology revolution. Just a short time ago, we were struggling to ensure that every member of our student, faculty and staff could browse the Web. But that is no longer enough. The Web has become the place for ideas, information, data and services. If something is not on the Web, for all intents and purposes, it does not exist. That means that everything must be on the Web -- and that means everything must be on the Web and everyone must be able to publish his or her stuff there.
It seems imperative that every one at our college or university make use of the new information technology, but it is not obvious how to make this happen. Course web pages, for example, are not just a good idea -- they are essential. While there are many ways to create them, we need to realize that creating course web pages or departmental web pages, student web pages, etc., will not revolutionize teaching, learning and research on our campuses. In fact, if we get all these web pages built, we might be tempted to declare victory and go on to the next problem, having never solved the real problem.
To solve the real problem requires that we realize that web technology -- like Roosevelt's chickens -- play a peripheral role. Without the infrastructure and organization to support the technology, the policies to encourage and reward the use of technology, the leadership and vision to change the way we offer services, and without lots and lots of planning, creating web pages will do little more than add to the hundreds of millions of URLs already on the Web.
Our goal for the new millennium should be to reinvent the way our institutions offer education, not just to put a website on every PC. But Teddy Roosevelt realized that industry and science would take a great deal of time to reinvent itself. While it was doing this, people's pots remained empty, a problem that had to be solved immediately. Likewise, our lack of course web pages is an immediate need that needs to be addressed, but solving that problem needs to be done in the context of reinventing our colleges and universities. Whether we are dealing with chickens or web pages, there is no substitute for planning, experience and taking a look at our challenges from the right perspective.
Our experts, Karie and Ruth, have been involved with this problem for some time now and will provide us with choice nuggets of insight on today's webcast of TechTalk, which I'd like to remind you is the final TechTalk of the millennium!
Judith?
JB: Thank you very much, Howard, and I note that our audience is anxious to hear from Karie and Ruth about all their experience with -- was it chickens or websites? Ah, websites! Okay!
Let's go ahead and get started. We have two experts with us today who have been involved for, I believe, about two and a half years now with the UCLA Initiative for College-wide Course Websites in the Humanities. Karie Masterson is the Director of the UCLA Humanities Computing Facility and also in charge of the Humanities Network called HUMnet. Our other expert is Ruth Sabean, who is the Assistant Director for Educational Technology at the Office of Instructional Development at UCLA. And there's much more about our experts at our website.
Welcome, Karie and Ruth, and thanks for being here on CREN TechTalk.
RS: Thanks, it's great to be here, Judith.
JB: Great! Okay.
KM: Glad to be here, too.
JB: Thanks, Karie. Good to here from you there. By the way, I think our folks know that you both are out on the west coast there, at UCLA, and probably it's shortly after lunch, right?
RS: Right.
KM: Right.
JB: Okay. Let's go ahead and get started. I know we have lots of questions to address about both course sites and websites with you. Howard?
HS: Yep, just to start with, was it Karie? I thought we'd talk about what our users expect from us as the IT people who are supposed to be helping them out here.
KM: Well, this is Karie. I'll address that as far as the Humanities. The instructional enhancement issue is actually a college-wide initiative with all the divisions -- Humanities, Social Sciences, Life Sciences and Physical Sciences -- and I run the Humanities division support for that initiative. We've found that we had to come up with about 550 websites for every course in the Humanities in a short period of time --
HS: You actually built them for these people?
KM: Yes.
JB: And when was the initiative started again, Karie?
KM: It started in the fall of 1997 and the initiative was actually signed by Chancellor Young as his last act on June 30 of that year. So we had about two months to actually pick a software platform and get our programs together to batch these websites and get the support infrastructure in place, so we were quite under the gun.
HS: This is a website for each of 550 courses?
KM: Well, there are actually more than that. These were the Humanities courses, right?
HS: But there were 550?
KM: Yes, in the fall quarter of '97.
JB: Oh, I see. So that's how many were needed to be done before the fall?
KM: Right. And each quarter, we have to create 500 and some new ones.
HS: Just in the Humanities?
KM: Yes.
RS: So probably if you looked at all four divisions -- Karie, can you estimate how many across the entire college there were?
KM: I imagine about 1,500.
RS: And so --
HS: And you built them all. The faculty didn't really play a role here.
KM: Well, the faculty actually came back in the fall and found their websites were there for them. And we had graduate students that we hired to support them, and professional staff as well to let them customize them as they see fit. But the templates were there for them.
JB: Okay, and it's probably good for us to think about the fact -- this was the summer of '97, then?
KM: Yes.
JB: That was, you know, in that time, that was a long time ago.
KM: Right.
HS: Oh, yeah.
KM: Two and a half years ago.
HS: Oh, that's -- yeah, in web time, that is an eternity. Nobody was doing that back then -- were they?
KM: I didn't know of anyone else. We felt pretty under the gun just to find something that would work for us and get it up and running.
HS: Did you use any kind of special package or software or something like that to build this thing?
KM: We did. We investigated what was out there and found that WebCT was pretty much the only thing that would do what we were looking for at the time. And so we went with WebCT.
RS: And I think, too, an interesting point here -- and we'll come back to this, I'm sure -- is that the other divisions each made their own decisions, and in some cases, departments within divisions made their own. We had one division that wrote its own software package, and other people who had either home-grown or other products that they sold. I think probably Humanities and Social Science made the most centrally-distributed decisions (to kind of mix those terms). And as a result, we actually have some interesting experiments in terms of best ways to do this, and what worked, and a different culture surrounded by a different technology.
HS: Other than the fact that the Chancellor told you to do this, why did you do this? What were you hoping to accomplish.
KM: Well, the initiative also covers -- it's funded by student material fees and it provides revenue for our student labs and the support of web instruction, and so we basically did it so that we could have an infrastructure to promote instruction in the Humanities and across the college.
HS: When you say "an infrastructure to promote instruction," could you tell us a little bit more about what you were trying to do with this infrastructure? What were you hoping would happen? How was it going to change what the faculty did and what the students did?
RS: Well, we just believed that the Web is the future of instruction -- at least in an enhancing way, not in replacing the actual teacher, teaching, but to enhance instruction -- that this infrastructure of the course websites needs to be in place as well as student labs to support access for them. And so we wanted to put this out there in front of the faculty and give them the support that -- you know, some of them use them a lot, some of them barely use them. So there's a wide variety of response to the initiative, but the infrastructure is there and we're seeing how it's changing instruction in language and in literature, music -- just the gamut of instruction in the Humanities, how it's revolutionizing the fields. I think it's paid off.
HS: To make this happen, what kind of hardware and software infrastructure did you have to create? Or was that already in place?
RS: Well, it wasn't quite in place and we had to make sure that everybody had a web-enabled computer, which we did.
HS: And if they didn't, did you buy it for them or --
RS: Yes, we did.
HS: That's nice!
RS: Yeah! And then, as part of this -- it's not funded by the initiative, but we now have a supportable rotating structure for getting faculty computers on a three-year basis.
HS: In doing that, did you have to standardize on some kind of hardware? I mean, did you say that everybody will have a PC or everybody will have a Mac or you can have what you want?
RS: Yeah, we have a variety, so we have about 35% Mac users and the rest are Windows users. And we support both platforms.
HS: So the kind of thing you really said was, "You have to have this much memory and this fast a processor"? Is that the kind of -- when you said you made sure they had a machine that could do this?
RS: Yes, we said, "Okay, what kind of computer do you have? Oh, you have a 386. You need a new one. Now you have a 486, yeah, you probably need a new one, too." And we got those new computers out to them.
HS: And for the faculty, you said that you now committed to keeping those machines up to date so that three years, four years from now, they would get another one?
RS: Right. And so every year, we have a pot of money to renew their computers.
KM: I think, too, in terms of -- there were other infrastructure things that, if they weren't apparent in the first two months, became quickly apparent. And this probably falls into our Lessons Learned category, which is there's a ripple effect right across the infrastructure of the university, even in places that are not specifically college-related.
So you had -- we had to look at the impact on the modem pool when faculty began to rely on information being available on the Web for students. Students needed to be able to dial in, and only a small percentage of our students actually, beyond the freshman year, live on campus. So there's a great deal of reliance on dial-in.
We also had the issue of the infrastructure in the classrooms that we had to go back and look at because of the demand for some way of Internet access -- but really, an entire association of the use of media delivery in one form or another in the classroom-part of instruction. For example, also in -- just two examples of other components of the infrastructure that came into, let's say, need of associated upgrades.
HS: So you actually had to go into a classroom, then, and make sure that you could do things like have network connections and projection capabilities which could show them?
KM: Right. This is something we had been doing, but I would say this ratcheted up the need with which we needed to aggressively look at, for example, the resolution that some of our older projectors could cope with. Because if faculty became really engaged with the use of computers in instruction -- and teaching assistants and, indeed, students who were beginning to make presentations with the Web -- as the laptops that they were acquiring went up in capability, then so must not only the number of projectors on the campus but also the capabilities of those projectors go up.
HS: There's a couple of models I've seen to handle the ability of a faculty member to come into a classroom and do a computer presentation, and I just wonder which way you went. Did you put a computer in the classroom or did you assume that a faculty member will bring his or her laptop in and get the thing going?
KM: Well, actually, yes and yes and a third option, which is that we also loan laptops to faculty. So we really didn't feel that any one solution was going to work.
We have 200 general purpose classrooms and probably another hundred that are not scheduled by the Registrar's Office and we need to be able to serve all the teaching that's going on in their rooms, so we still have a hybrid solution. We actually only at the moment have four installed computers in classrooms. We have about 15 laptops and we sort of keep adding and playing with that tool. But there is an accompanying increase in laptop ownership. Sometimes the department buys one and shares it among the faculty, sometimes individual faculty, of course, are investing in these laptops, so that the need is being met in about a four-pronged approach here and this is something you don't decide and do once and live with it. You keep tuning it and asking and watching.
HS: When you did these 550 web pages for these faculty, what kind of things were in there and what did one of these things look like?
KM: Well, we have a number of standard tools. The discussion board, the calendar.
HS: Okay, so that you have the standard tools that were in WebCT and would be in Course Info.
KM: Yes, we removed quite a number of them from our standard template just to put the ones we felt would be the most used, and then the faculty were free to add in others as they choose. But we didn't put everything out there. We put the Discussion Board, the Calendar, the Message tool and the Project Tool.
JB: So you took a basic tool and then really simplified it even more, from what you're saying?
KM: Right. We didn't want to overwhelm the faculty that were just getting their feet wet in it with things that probably only a few of them would use. So the grading tool's another one that we don't --
HS: The which tool?
KM: Put in there. The grading tool.
JB: (I think the Grading tool.)
KM: Um-hum, online grading, which we promote the use of it, but it's something that can be added, you know, if the faculty member wants to use it.
HS: Okay, once all these faculty had these web pages, it sounds like you expected at least some of the faculty to go off and add things, enhance things here. And I wonder, for things like WebCT and for things like Blackboard's Course Info, how much training were you prepared to give your faculty or how much did you think was necessary to get them to use this thing effectively?
KM: Well, we found that our faculty in general don't particularly like to come to training classes. They really want someone to come into their office and show them at their computer.
HS: Yeah, and actually, we do that too, and it makes a great deal of sense, going and doing the thing at somebody's own environment.
KM: Right. It really does. It's much more effective.
HS: But it's more costly.
KM: More costly and time consuming. But we put a lot of our resources into the training aspect of it, with a full time instructional technology coordinator and about 20 quarter-time graduate students. And each of them were assigned to a particular number of faculty to go and help with whatever they needed help with and especially to introduce them to the environment and show what the capabilities are.
JB: So that happened pretty fast over a pretty short period of time, then?
KM: It did, it really did. It was a very fast paced summer where we had to get all the programming in place, get all the staffing in place. We actually already had this graduate technology consultant program on a smaller scale in place for the year before, to support research and instruction, and so we just ramped it up. We tripled the size of it and got them trained and out there.
HS: How many faculty members did you do? You did 550 courses. Did you go out to the faculty members from all these courses?
KM: Yes, they were given a list of faculty members, each of them, that they were responsible to contact and help.
HS: And you spent, what? An hour with each faculty member, a couple hours, what did it take?
KM: It varied. I mean, some of them probably didn't want to take advantage of it at all and some of them wanted, you know, a personal 25% for themself (which wasn't available). So, you know, there's a wide variety of response. But wherever the demand was there, if our GTC couldn't meet it, then we would look to OID -- Ruth's office, the Office of Instructional Development -- or find other resources in our staff to try to help with the development. We ended up hiring another full time programmer to do multimedia development for the next year, so we keep adding staff to this.
RS: In terms of both a more, let's say, training approach, we did do a couple of things, partly as a safety net and partly to augment the sort of programs that Humanities was putting in place in a more central approach.
We started a train-the-trainer approach among the graduate students. We already had a quite extensive TA training program, and we added a whole curriculum for the use of technology in instruction where select TA's are trained in a curriculum which they then go back and deliver to the TA's in their own department, which allows them to customize it for Physics or History or Spanish.
That was one approach, and then we also took that same curriculum and have begun to deliver it both online and face-to-face with faculty and other sorts of training programs for those faculty who do want to connect, either in an online course or a face environment. Karie, I would think we would agree that, you know, the wholesale training approach isn't going to work with faculty's very busy schedules. But there are those who do -- when they see a particular product that they wish to go into in greater depth -- will come to a concentrated training course.
HS: Just what are you planning to do for faculty who want to go beyond what WebCT or Blackboard's Course Info can do? I mean, if somebody comes over to you and says, "Gee, I'd like to do animations, audio," whatever.
RS: Well, one of the things we do -- we actually have two or three different things centrally, and Karie can add to this for Humanities and possibly other places. We do have both a faculty consultation center, which is for multimedia, where we help them in a do-it-yourself sort of way.
HS: Is that in the media center?
RS: Yes, right, it is.
HS: There's a lot of those around.
RS: Right. And we also, partially as a result of increased demand in our faculty funding cycle, we have an annual granting cycle for faculty for improvement of instruction and it was an immediate spike in the request for assistance with web development.
We created a development service so that for -- and we worked very closely with the staff in Karie's unit and other units on campus so that we will refer people back to resources that exist in their own department or division.
But if they have interests that go beyond what's available to them in their support locally, then we will develop, let's say, more expanded websites for them. Always, though, with an eye to what can be re-purposed and used perhaps in another course, in another discipline, or at lease for multiple faculty who may be teaching that same course.
And then the third thing we did was we opened a multimedia production facility for undergraduates where they can come and both -- they have access to hardware and software and training to work on projects that are associated with classroom assignments.
KM: Right, and we also have a faculty workstation where we provide streaming audio and video and multimedia programming. We, you know, if we go outside of the WebCT environment, we just put a link on the page to another website and they have a programmer who does animation and those kinds of things also, so there's more for people if they want to go beyond the basic tools as well.
JB: Okay, I would like to remind our listeners to send in questions to both of you at expert@cren.net and we'll look for those real soon.
HS: When a faculty member comes to you and says, "I want to do all this stuff -- animations, movies, etc.," are you willing to go off and do it for them or are you -- how do you decide if you're going to just teach a faculty to do this or if you'll do it for them? Are you building a lot of fancy things for faculty?
KM: We do -- we do -- we don't expect the faculty to become programmers or multimedia experts. You know, their expertise is research and teaching and so we, you know, if they want to get involved in technology, great. But they should have the support that they need for it and we actually, we invested in digital cameras and production equipment so that we can do multimedia for language courses and other multimedia needs.
HS: So a faculty member could expect you, then, to build a fancy web page for a course.
KM: Yes.
HS: Do you charge them to do that?
KM: No, we're supported by the Initiative.
HS: Sounds great.
JB: You want to move out there, Howard?
HS: Move out there and take advantage.
KM: It's interesting, though, because you're raising an interesting point, Howard. Although I think we would not say that we nearly have sufficient resource to meet the demand, the real -- having just come from a faculty discussion session on this whole issue of IT and learning, which they presented and then were very actively discussing, one of the key issues for them that keeps coming up is their own time that's needed. Something that pushes beyond just the technology and how to use it, to actually to how to use it effectively to change how learning will happen. And that's scholarly work and it takes time and an iterative process of trying things, watching it and adapting, and so that's something that faculty always mention.
HS: In talking about trying to make this thing work, you've already talked about having some grad students and talking about some people building web pages for faculty. I wonder if you could talk more generally about the organizational structures you discovered you needed to support this kind of thing, with everybody having a course web page or lots of web pages out there.
RS: Well, I think what we've probably begun to weave before your eyes is quite an interesting tapestry at UCLA of web and other technology resources related to instruction. We have individuals at the department level who do this. We have individuals grouped in, for example, Humanities Computing. We have any number. OID is by far not the only "central" organization that also provides sometimes unique, sometimes safety net, sometimes leading edge sort of applications.
I think in terms of an experience, I would say it's important to understand the culture of your own campus, what support enterprises are already in place and come up with strategies that take advantage of those two things. And I think that's what we have done pretty successfully. Sometimes it looks like there are redundancies, but there are often sort of relationship paths that make a lot of sense to individuals and that's where they go for particular products and services and support help and so on.
So I don't know if that answers your question, and maybe Karie can jump in here with what works specifically organizationally. Some things faculty need right next door to them. And graduate students and other things, they are willing and even eager to collaborate with other people outside, let's say, the hallway in which their office is situated.
JB: I would like to ask about what happens the second year and the third year with the course websites. Once the Websites are generally put in place for faculty the first time, can they take it over then and do they maintain it and expand it in the succeeding years? Or is that something, Karie, you do for them, too?
KM: Well, they're actually specific to the individual course. So we keep these on our server and so if they teach the course again, you know, the next year, then the materials are still available to them. But the actual -- the way our server is organized, it's by course, so the next quarter comes and we create a new batch of these websites and then move the materials onto the Websites or put links to the individual faculty member's own sites that they've already developed.
HS: So there's at lease some rebuilding each year, and obviously, courses are not taught every semester.
KM: Right, so they're different courses and we're trying to create a database of, you know, materials for the courses so that they don't have to be recreated. And I think we're coming into where we're -- now that someone has a great course in '97 and it's '99 and they're going to do it again, they have the basic infrastructure there to not have to re-do it.
HS: Okay, I see that Judith's plea for some questions has actually gotten us one.
JB: Well, yes, and more can come in! We can handle some more right now.
HS: That's right, we can handle lots of questions, so send them in.
But we have a question from Joan Gettman at Cornell, and Joan says, "With your grad students working quarter time to support and consult with faculty on their initial web setup, what's the extent of what they can or will do for a faculty member?" Joan says it seems to her that it could be like a long-term relationship and endless investment of time on the part of the graduate student.
KM: Well, we've found that there are certain things that the graduate students, they're not really qualified to do, so a lot of it's depending on the individual grad students. And they vary in terms of their technical skills and their discipline interests as well. So, you know, some of them are really great programmers -- HTML-izers -- and some of them are not. And they're not just general, you know, install-the-application kind of people, so those kinds of things they don't do. We have other people in Humanities Computing who do general end-user computing support.
RS: In terms of, I think, probably, though, Joan's implied question, when you do have people coming in requesting large development projects, those really -- assuming they've gone through a selection process -- they really do need to be codified in some way so that a particular project is not going to consume every resource available for development and that there's an end point, which doesn't mean that that person may not be able to come back in the next cycle and push forward to another development phase.
KM: Yes, and I think that the GTC's are more of --
HS: The GTC's?
KM: -- facilitators.
JB: The Graduate Teaching Consultants?
KM: Technology Consultants.
JB: Graduate Technology Consultants, okay.
KM: They're more --
HS: We're just very acronym-sensitive here.
KM: Well, we have a lot of them! They're developers, so they can help the faculty find, you know, one of our full time staff programmers to help them, or someone at OID, or help with writing a proposal to get a grant. Those kinds of things. But they're not going to be doing actual long-term development.
HS: Okay, we have another question here that I've got to move to the top of the stack, Judith, because it's from a colleague from my --
JB: Oh, is that right?
HS: Right across the street.
HS: Dave Harrington at Princeton, and Dave says, "In those instances where your IT group develops instructional materials in partnership with faculty, have you employed any formal project management techniques or methodologies that have worked well?" If so, Dave wants to know what they are. I know Dave's struggling to find out how to do that. First of all, do you do that? Do you work in partnership with the faculty to do this?
JB: And I think the critical point there is do you use any real tools or techniques that work well to manage the time sync that was mentioned before?
HS: Yeah.
KM: Well, we do in the program at our faculty New Media Center where we take on larger projects, as well as in our Instructional Media Production Group. We have the process that goes on there, I know those folks would love to talk to Dave and tell him what they do. And I know that the feedback we get from faculty is that they're very pleased with these services. And so from that success point, now, whether or not sometimes we go over the original amount of resource that we think we're going to have to invest, I would be surprised if the answer to that isn't "yes" because it is very often hard to see, going in, how long a project is actually going to take.
But yes, we have attempted to structure these processes so that there's well-known expectations, and almost more importantly, that what comes out the other end is something that fits into the technological environment of the department and the division so that it's sustainable. It can be supported and it can be built on further in the future.
HS: Okay, we have -- go ahead.
JB: Go ahead, Howard.
HS: Okay, we have another question from John Walsh at North Arkansas College, and John makes a comment first before he asks his two questions. He says, "Time for faculty at a small institution is a real factor, thanks for bringing it up." His two questions are, one, does your program allow adjunct or part time faculty to fully participate?
RS: Yes, it does. As long as they're teaching a course, they're fully involved.
HS: Yeah, I think you said the thing was, first of all, oriented toward courses, not the faculty anyway, but I guess he's saying if an adjunct faculty member wanders in, then you'll --
RS: I'm sorry. We also work with TA's. In fact, we found that the TA's have been quicker to embrace the Initiative in some ways because they're more focused on the teaching mission of the university than the research faculty a lot of times. So we work quite a bit with TA's in the developing of websites and course materials.
JB: That's interesting. So you don't restrict your assistance to the faculty in teaching a course, then?
RS: No, I think -- I mean, Karie hit it right on the had. The focus here is not the individual but the course, so you need to be able to articulate it for this course, for this purpose, and for the larger grants, some sense of sustainability and continuity of use so that it's not just perhaps addressing a very isolated use but something that's going to make a core difference to the delivery of the instruction of a particular course over more than one quarter.
JB: Okay.
HS: John's second question is a little more ticklish here. He asks us pretty narrowly --
JB: What was that acronym, Howard?
HS: We can imagine what John is really saying here. He says, "For those institutions that don't require publication as a requirement for faculty" -- I think he means more than just don't require publication -- "do you have any suggestions how we can encourage faculty to dedicate time to learning and using complex information technologies?"
RS: Boy, that's a good one! Karie and I were just at a day and a half retreat --
HS: We need to summarize the day and a half.
RS: Yeah, well, no, I'll just tell you one point to relate it to this one. The faculty on IT and Learning, they had a final Day-Glo slide about the four things that they really needed in order to be able to push forward with the integration of technology and instruction, and one of them was incentive.
And I think this is what the questioner has put his finger on. It doesn't really matter whether or not they have research requirements or "only teaching"' or anything else. They have to see that whatever their promotion and recognition system is in which they're functioning, that there has got to be some incentive there beyond just their own passion for their subject and their passion for teaching that's going to give them the resource, whether or not it's time, and then recognize the scholarly accomplishments that they are able to achieve.
HS: Okay, we have another question, a really interesting question, also, from Robert Dennis at Illinois State University. And he says, "Have you dealt with -- and if so, how do you resist the urge from some on campus to have entire volumes of information reproduced on websites, especially information that is subject to occasional change but not significant change?" I think what Robert is talking about is that people will take the old mimeographed sheets and damn near anything else they can get their hands on and just put it on the Web and say that volume means something, even though it's not very interesting.
KM: Well, our policy is if the faculty member wants to put it up on the Web and, you know, feels that it's going to enhance their course, then we'll put it up for them.
HS: Sure. But how do you encourage them to do the stuff that's going to be -- I think what his question really is, how do you encourage them to do the stuff that's going to be more interesting?
JB: And perhaps how do you encourage folks to do some of the design analysis of the usefulness and relevance of, you know, the type of information that's going up?
KM: Yeah. We have professional staff who, you know, specialize in the web design and so we consult them on the design of materials for the Web. But you know, it's basically the faculty member's final say as far as what they want to put up, so I think the answer is delicately. We don't censor anything that, you know -- oh, we don't like that so we won't do it.
JB: Okay.
RS: And I would say, too, that students give very effective feedback.
JB: That's a good point.
RS: They might be the first to say, "Look, if you really want me to read those hundred pages, the most effective way is let's get a copy printed and get it, you know, copied broadly so we can each purchase it and not print it." And I think that the idea here is encouraging people to think about what they're trying to achieve in their instruction and just talking about the nature of the content and how it's delivered in that process, and not necessarily taking that out of context to focus on.
JB: Okay, I've got one other question that I know we want to talk about just briefly before we take these other questions, and there is a lot coming in!
HS: Which you did, Judith, by encouraging folks to do this!
JB: This has worked wonderful! But one question we wanted to talk about was now that you've had these campus course sites up for two to three years, what questions have you been getting or what challenges have you have in terms of archiving this? You know, does a student want some of their content back? Do the faculty want to store their content someplace else? How do you handle those kinds of issues?
KM: Well, the faculty, it hasn't seemed as much they want to store it someplace else -- which is fine. They want us to store it, as far as I -- my experience has been. And, you know, we do run into the limits of space where we've actually had all of our courses still up on our website, you know, if you go to -- you can actually access any of the courses that we've had since '97. And we're getting to the point where we need to offload some of those and put them on some other medium where they'll be accessible to the faculty member but they won't be right there on our server.
JB: Okay, so actually, you are just in the process -- but you've generally kept them available?
KM: We have, and we feel that it's important to have them so that the faculty member can access the information that they worked on and have them available for the next time.
JB: Any questions or concerns about the privacy of the student information or content that's up there?
KM: Oh, yeah, we do have a lot of concern about that. All of our sites have a log-in ID and password. So you have to actually be a member of the class to access it.
HS: We have another question here from Barbara Gersch who is at the New Media Center in San Francisco, and Barbara says, "Often faculty in a particular discipline may not be exposed to useful pedagogical tools and techniques developed in other disciplines, yet there is much to be learned from the experience beyond a particular department. Have you implemented any programs to facilitate communication about using technology for teaching and learning among various disciplines?"
RS: Yeah, we have. Karie and I are a member of a work group that is at least college-wide and occasionally brings in folk from other of the schools on campus that has this as its focus. And one of the things that we do that we've found very effective -- and indeed, if folks follow the OID website, they will find a whole set of webcasts of forums that we facilitate where we bring faculty together to talk and discuss with each other the issues that are confronting them.
And very often these are show-and-tells that show specifically in a course and discipline what they are doing. This can be audio and instruction images, it can be a new tool, it can be experimentations with getting students engaged with the issues, etc. I think we've found that to be very effective, both in it saves time, but also as an archive of valuable stuff to look at.
And one interesting comment that was made to me after one of these events where someone came up to me after in our faculty center, came up and said, "You know, I haven't gotten to your last one, which I think was actually on copyright," and said, "But it was interesting. Nobody in my department got there, but we decided to talk about copyright at the departmental meeting that day because we realized this was a topic that we hadn't been addressing and we needed to know more about it."
So I think the ripple effect of creating space where people can talk and share these things is one thing you can do. And I think another thing is the whole idea of creating a website where people can find good examples of each other's work. And we've got numerous examples of that on our web pages where, in fact, we point to things going on at lots of other campuses other than our own.
JB: Ruth, this gives me a really good opportunity here. You know, I don't think we have your OID linked up on the CREN page, so if you would send it to us, we'll get it up and get it linked to folks. And also, I wanted to invite our listeners that if they had some good links that they would like to have added to this page or suggest to have added to this page, to go ahead and send them in to the expert@cren.net e-mail address.
HS: You said that your students needed to use a password -- an ID and password to get into a course site.
RS: Yes.
HS: Can they look at all the course sites, whether they're taking the course or not?
RS: They can get to the welcome page that has the course description that the faculty member provides and readings, etc. But they -- to actually get into their course, they have to have a login ID and password.
HS: What about faculty? You were saying that one of the things -- that one way the faculty could learn what to do here was by looking at examples of other work. Can faculty look at all the courses?
RS: No, they can't.
HS: Would that be a good idea, though?
RS: Well, it has its advantages and disadvantages, and we have gone with this model because we feel that the course websites are an extension of the classroom, and that there is an expectation of privacy in the classroom, that there should be this expectation of privacy on the Website as well.
Although, if the faculty member wants to invite the rest of the world in, it's certainly possible to do that. But we find that most of the faculty want to protect their intellectual property, that if they've designed something, they don't want it just to be out there for anyone to capture. And also the student projects as well. Under university policy, they are the property of the students, so we have to protect their rights as well. And there are issues of copyright, fair use, that any materials that might apply under the fair use of copyrighted materials --
HS: Yeah, what kind of support do you give faculty with respect to clearing copyrights and deciding what's fair use and what's not, and what they -- I mean if you bring up all these web pages, obviously, folks are going to occasionally bump into this.
RS: I think that the answer there is "insufficient." This is one of those bottomless pit issues, partly because it does create -- the beauty of fair use is that the vision is clear. The implementation, however, is a little bit more difficult and so I think the real answer for us and for many institutions in the short run has been the password, which at least lets you know that you're restricting access to those who are only directly related to the instruction being given.
But your answer is that this is really tough. And this is number two in the lessons learned, which is, if you think you have enough resource and information and people to provide consulting on fair use and copyright, you're wrong by some very large factor.
HS: Has this whole thing, this proliferation of web pages and things, has this required you to change some policies at the university in terms of what people are allowed to put up on their web pages and what they're not?
KM: I think it's made us determine that we need policy in place, and Ruth can speak more to that.
RS: I think we had a very good start on this long before the Instructional Enhancement Initiative, but we weren't starting from ground zero. Like many institutions, we had acceptable use policies, electronic mail policies. We've expanded those into electronic communications (so a higher level than just electronic mail). And these have been invaluable.
However, we have found the challenges in interpreting those policies which is even a different level than implementing them, helping people understand what they mean. Karie and I have just finished with a work group -- a campus-wide work group, in fact -- that has been trying to understand how one can provide, let's say, interpretive guidelines and case studies and so on for individuals who are called upon to make judgment calls when a student wants to, let's say, advertise a sofa for sale on their class web listserve or something of this nature.
HS: More dangerous is, they decide they want to advertise the fact that they'll give somebody a ride home! Really! I mean if you want --
RS: If that's the most dangerous you can come up with, Howard, I think your problem at Princeton isn't what I thought it was!
HS: Sure. It actually turns out that that kind of thing is more ticklish than buying a sofa.
JB: We do have a couple other quick questions I think we might want to get in before we have to wrap up here. And one comes from Gary Lambert at the University of Vermont. And he's got about, actually, I'll bet about three questions, and let's take just, perhaps, one.
About how many staff do you have to work on this, these websites? We talked a little bit about that, but have you come up with any kind of a ratio for if you're going to have, like, 500 websites, how many full time equivalent consultants need to be available? And I think a related question is, just what kind of budgets are you anticipating having to keep in place for this kind of support?
KM: Well, as far as the last part of that, I'd say that the Initiative -- the beauty of the Initiative is that it provides us a revenue source for doing this. So without the initiative, we wouldn't be able to do this and I don't think we'd be anywhere near --
JB: And that's right, that revenue source is a certain -- what is it, ten or 15 dollars per student per course?
KM: It's per credit unit, and in our division, it's $2.50 per credit unit.
JB: Okay.
KM: So a normal course is four units, ten dollars.
JB: So that's ten dollars per course.
KM: For sciences, it's higher at this point.
JB: Okay.
KM: And so it's providing us with a source to hire the staff and to provide the equipment in our labs, and the staffing for our labs as well.
JB: Okay, so that helps, actually, with this other question he was asking about access. So that same fund is used for that, then.
KM: Yes.
JB: Okay.
KM: And I think one of the things we saw is not even that the funding for the IT folk that are needed or the hardware and software and the support of IT folk, but we've seen a tremendous need and demand for graduate students who can help faculty find content and evaluate it, and graduate students to help create interactive learning modules, even for getting the technology implementation of those learning modules.
So there's a parallel need for content experts that help the faculty member and people who understand the teaching of the discipline. I don't know if we want to just lump them and call them people wit pedagogical expertise, but it's a mix of pedagogical and content expertise that is probably lesson number three that we learned. That goes up just as fast as the need for IT support people goes up.
RS: That is right. It's so important to have those grad students that know the discipline, that are familiar with the faculty, to be involved.
HS: Okay, we're actually more than out of time and I still haven't asked you about distance learning implications and portals and about ten other things I'd really like to talk about here. But as perhaps a final question here, I'll ask one of these two-part questions, too, that people are sending in here.
But you had this experience where you put up all these web pages. If you were going to do this today, would you do the same sort of thing again, or what would you change about things? And the second part of my question -- because I want to get the whole thing in here -- is now that you do have a web page for every course, what's next? Where do you go from here?
RS: Well, I guess I'll say that I would definitely do it again. I think that it's been a tremendous three years as far as the impetus for outreach of technology and in the revolution that's taking place in the learning environment.
I think that what I would do differently is we would have had more time to get the infrastructure in place, to make the choices to program the templates and also to involve the faculty more. Since it happened over the summer, you know, it had the unfortunate sort of a surprise effect on them and there was some resistance at the beginning from the faculty, feeling like this had been sort of foisted on them instead of being to help them. And as the years have gone on, we've overcome quite a bit of that, but I think if we had had more time to engage the faculty at the beginning, it would have been a better start.
JB: So you'd recommend more than two months lead time?
RS: I would, yes.
KM: Okay, that's a good lesson.
HS: And one way to do that is to have days with more than 24 hours.
RS: That's it, that's another way!
HS: A technological breakthrough!
And where do you go from here? You've done it. Right? Everybody has it? Everybody has a web page. There's a web page in every pot here.
RS: We have so much further to go.
HS: But where's the next couple of places you're going to go?
KM: Well, we're seeing the increase in use and the increase in complexity of what people are doing to where it's really affecting what happens in the classroom.
And I think in our discipline, especially in the language learning where, as Ruth knows, her group used to have language lab facilities with the old tapes, and seeing how the Web and streaming audio and video can do that function in such a greater way and interactive. So we have in our Italian department, they're sort of leading the charge where they're redesigning their whole makeup for their undergraduate language courses to incorporate web learning. And so we're just really starting to see it impact the way things happen in the classroom in a large way and I think that's the next step.
JB: So we may need to come back again, huh?
KM: Yes, oh, absolutely.
JB: Okay, very good. Howard, did you have any other final comment for today?
HS: No, again, I have about another dozen questions I could ask here, but I think we're going to run out of tape here, aren't we, any second now.
JB: Well, I think so. I think the only thing I'd like to say is there's another question that did come in that was focusing on student tools for course websites and I think we'll need to keep that as a topic for another time, but it's an excellent question.
HS: It's an excellent question and I think we can have probably a whole TechTalk session on that thing.
JB: I agree. So okay, Howard, any final words?
HS: No, it's just been great fun here and I wish we had a couple hours instead of one here.
JB: I wish we did, too! Well, I would like to thank all of our web participants and all of those particularly who responded so rapidly on asking questions. And to remind folks that you can still send some follow up questions to expert@cren.net for the next hour or so.
Be sure and enjoy the holidays and come back for the spring series of TechTalks. We have an exciting lineup under way including topics such as student portals, campus certificate servers, video over the network and others. Don't forget, we welcome suggestions from you all, so let us know what you'd like to see and whom you'd like to hear on TechTalk.
Many thanks to all the institutions who help support the TechTalks and we invite others to join TechTalks by becoming a CREN member. Thanks to everyone else who helped make this possible today: our vendor sponsor, Blackboard, powering online learning and teaching; to our guest experts, Ruth Sabean and Karie Masterson; to Howard Strauss, technology anchor; to Terry Calhoun, event page producer; to David Smith and Patty Gaul of CREN; to Julia O'Brien, Jason Russell, Carol Wadsworth and the whole support team at MERIT Network; to Susie Berneis, audio file transcriber; to Laurel Ericksen, transcript editor and indexer; and finally, a thanks to all of you for being here. Do have a good holiday! You were here because it's time.
Good-bye, Ruth and Karie and Howard, take care.
HS: Good-bye.
RS: 'Bye-bye.
KM: Thank you, 'bye-bye.
