Volume 4. No 5
Information Technology News of the University of California, Davis February 1996
Information Technology News of the University of California, Davis February 1996
Editor's Note: More information on the conference on Distance Education and Intercampus Programs can be found on the World Wide Web at http://education.ucdavis.edu/
More than 80 representatives from various UC campuses envisioned the future at a conference on "Distance Education and Intercampus Programs" held at UC Davis in December. The event gave faculty from a variety of disciplines an opportunity to share and evaluate their experiences in using emerging new technologies in teaching.
A major aim of the conference was to explore how faculty can accelerate changes in their own teaching and delivery of distance education as well as initiate and participate in campus and systemwide changes.
A panel, keynote speakers, and work groups discussed the use of multimedia, interactive video courses, course contents on the World Wide Web, and e-mail. Faculty members from several campuses told of experiences in distance teaching. Moderator was Maureen McMahon, Division of Education, UC Davis, selected because she specializes in how multimedia and computers affect cognitive processes of learners.
"As learning on demand becomes more commonplace within education, we will be challenged to research and understand the needs of learners," McMahon said. "Distance learning can provide for active unique learning communities if we allow our vision to transcend the understandings of how we currently teach and structure courses. A new teaching-learning paradigm must be developed to maximize the characteristics of the distance education tools we have at our disposal."
Conference co-conveners were Meera Blattner, Applied Sciences, UC Davis and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and Naomi Janowitz, Religious Studies, UC Davis, who both have received Intercampus Academics Program Incentive Fund (IAPIF) grants from the UC Office of the President for pilot programs in distance education.
Funds for the workshop came from IAPIF, LLNL, National Science Foundation, the Religious Studies Program, and the Teaching Resources Center, which coordinated the conference. Key advantages of new technology in education emerging from the conference included the following:
One of two keynote speakers, Carol-Tomlinson Keasy said the "University's role in the information society will be changed. We will still be the central point for the creation and evaluation of knowledge.
"We will still have a major role in the storage of knowledge, especially archival knowledge," she continued. "Our role in the transmission of knowledge will, however, change significantly. We must learn how to transmit information in hundreds of ways, including using technology in a whole variety of ways to teach a wide array of students."
She warned that the University could "abdicate its position in the transmission of knowledge" to large corporations, which are beginning to offer accredited courses leading to degree programs.
Meera Blattner
Applied Science, UC Davis
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Distance Education Conference co-convener Meera Blattner spoke of the impact on universities of teleconferencing, multimedia, communication networks and the World Wide Web. "Universities that use these new media successfully will attract the best students and faculty," she noted.
"Education is still in the Stone Age of chalk on slate. For the past 25 years distance learning at UC Davis has meant someone points a camera at a lecturer writing on a board. At best this is a limiting and impersonal experience," she said. But the strategy survived because students were motivated and instructors were great lecturers.
"Networking technology," she continued, "is making available to us virtual classrooms. That is, a classroom distributed over different locations, but where the students at different sites can be seen and spoken to as if they were on one site."
Blattner suggested a variety of achievements possible with the new technologies, such as courses taught by the best teachers in the UC system, every campus not having to duplicate a teaching staff in essential areas but able to hire faculty for breadth instead, and students taking courses at the time they need them rather than when they are offered at one campus.
Jan Roser
Equine Physiology, UC Davis
Jan Roser said she was able to provide Davis students with equine specialists from other campuses. Without this new technology, new courses in the field of equine physiology, production and management could not be offered to UC Davis students. The technology actually increased interaction among professors - and professors "sat in" on each others' courses, she said.
Jonathan Heritage
Physics of Microwave Devices
UC Davis
Jonathan Heritage told of the video conference facilities originating at UC Davis being used in one section of a graduate course, "Physics and Engineering of Microwave Tube Devices," which tied together UC Davis, UCLA, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
"The instructors of this course," Heritage explained, "require extensive graphical capability to project literally scores of pages per lecture of complicated mathematical expressions, two and three dimensional graphs and detailed photographs of actual devices and components in complex electromechanical assemblies."
In addition, students' frequent questions for clarification require the instructor to sketch a diagram or write a new mathematical expression on demand.
Heritage said the experience shows the potential of the application of video conference techniques.
The predominant lesson learned, he said, "is that for video conference to be a truly effective means of sharing teaching resources over multiple remote sites, we must find ways of making large amounts of bandwidth available, at a fair price, on a global scale, to a nearly unlimited number of addressable locations."