Volume 4. No 1
Information Technology News of the University of California, Davis September 1995
Information Technology News of the University of California, Davis September 1995
Applied Science Professor Meera Blattner and her colleagues have one answer: combining the resources of UC campuses through distance learning.
The distance learning idea is nothing new. The university has been offering distance learning courses for at least 20 years, most of them one-way video, two-way audio courses aimed at adult students working at full-time jobs.
But what Blattner and 19 other professors on three UC campuses have in mind is using the latest in distance learning technology to enable faculty from different campuses to work together to present courses - and eventually programs - to full-time students. The idea is to offer the same courses to students at several campuses at the same time, and to not just replicate a traditional classroom, but to improve on the traditional classroom by taking advantage of sophisticated new interactive, multimedia classroom tools to present information.
Says Blattner, "It's hard to develop a new area at a university. It takes years for students to work through a program and get a degree, so you can't start new programs and drop old programs easily. And there's no point in having one professor on a campus trying to hold down a whole area. The answer seems to be to work across campuses, to have faculty at many campuses who interact and work together to form new areas."
Blattner, who teaches at UCD's Livermore site, was prompted to begin thinking about the possibilities of distance learning by the exploding demand for graduates trained in the field of digital engineering, one of the most rapidly evolving areas in computer engineering and information science. Digital engineering, which combines audio, video, graphics, and computer networks, has begun to reach across the face of society, affecting science, engineering, education, home entertainment, medicine, business, and the arts. Yet, digital engineering does not fit comfortably into any one traditional university department, and no one UC campus has had enough students and qualified faculty to offer the needed courses or to successfully launch a digital engineering program. UCD/Livermore has three digital engineering professors, but partly because of its geographical isolation 80 miles from the UC Davis campus, lacked enough students to be able to offer advanced classes on a regular basis. UC Berkeley has lost critical faculty in digital engineering to early retirement, and UC Santa Cruz, with a growing computer engineering department, needed additional faculty to enlarge its course offerings.
Says Blattner, "I thought, wouldn't it be nice if we could group together to present a sequence of courses in this vital new area."
The result was a pilot project, funded by the UC Office of the President and conducted this spring, in which faculty from UCB, UCD, UCSC and Lawrence Livermore Lab shared the teaching of two graduate courses and one graduate seminar in digital engineering, with instruction beamed simultaneously to students at the four sites. Todd Reed of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering presented the course emanating from UCD - Image Sequence Processing (EEC 209).
Digital engineering, which requires examining complex design details and therefore requires high quality media transmission for real-time audio, video, graphics, and image processing, has presented an ideal testbed for the new distance learning technology.
With traditional distance learning technology, students can see and hear the instructor and be heard in return, but they cannot be seen, interact freely with the instructor and other students, or participate in hands-on activities, and they may have trouble getting needed materials.
But the technology now available brings distance learning students into the full classroom experience. Students and instructors are able to see one another in life-size displays projected on a screen and to talk back and forth in real-time. Collaborative tools allow professors at different sites to share data sets, graphics, and images to create a product interactively in a virtual shared workspace. With the incorporation of desktop technology, students can interact one-on-one with an instructor, use a projected whiteboard to draw sketches and correct notes, or work with the instructor to annotate documents and databases. Any needed materials can be transmitted to the student electronically. And just around the corner is virtual reality technology, which will allow students to use a projected three-dimension image, for instance, to dissect a frog, with the movements translated electronically into an actual dissection, or to learn to use a potter's wheel in virtual space. The technology is expensive and not all of it is available yet on the UCD campus - the pilot project had to make due with more limited capability - but Blattner and the other distance learning project participants hope to change all that. A new proposal, to be considered this fall, would build on the pilot project, expanding the courses offered to nine. The proposal includes enough funds to incorporate new desktop technology and interaction techniques, and will bring project participants closer to the goal of establishing an intercampus digital engineering program.
And a third proposal, still pending, would allocate $1 million to create classrooms with the full range of multimedia and interaction capabilities, allowing faculty to conduct office hours, tutoring, and student-to-student collaborations via desktop. Whatever else happens, says Blattner, distance learning is the movement in higher education. "In ten years we'll be able to teach students at opposite ends of the earth and it will be as if the student were sitting in the classroom."
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