>From owner-trad-l@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Thu Jan 30 02:39:16 1997 Received: from listserv.vt.edu (listserv.vt.edu [128.173.4.9]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id CAA17384; Thu, 30 Jan 1997 02:39:16 -0500 Received: from LISTSERV.VT.EDU by LISTSERV.VT.EDU (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8c) with spool id 317054 for TRAD-L@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Thu, 30 Jan 1997 02:39:15 -0500 Received: from sable.cc.vt.edu (sable.cc.vt.edu [128.173.16.30]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id CAA51426 for ; Thu, 30 Jan 1997 02:39:15 -0500 Received: from [128.173.40.198] (tuxedo.cs.vt.edu [128.173.40.198]) by sable.cc.vt.edu (8.8.4/8.8.4) with SMTP id CAA24930 for ; Thu, 30 Jan 1997 02:39:06 -0500 (EST) X-Sender: fox@vt.edu (Unverified) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-Id: Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 02:40:02 -0400 Reply-To: "Edward A. Fox" Sender: trad-l Discussion List From: "Edward A. Fox" Subject: 2 Years Out -- A Progress Report: VT Cyberschool, pt1 To: TRAD-L@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Hi! See below part 1 of a report from Tim, converted to text only. Regards, eaf - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - -- - - -- - - - - - Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1997 13:17:09 -0500 From: Timothy Luke To: fox@vt.edu Subject: cyberschool report draft Ed: I have sent the file with Joanne's and my report for the NonTrad Learners Self Study committee as well as a note from David Taylor about what he has for evaluations. Attached to this note is the draft of the cyberschool report from November/December 1996. Should I get a copy of the CD-ROM David has? Let me know. I will bring hard copies to the meeting on Thursday. Thanks, Tim - - - - - Two Years Out -- A Progress Report: The Virginia Tech Cyberschool Timothy W. Luke Department of Political Science College of Arts and Sciences Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, VA 11.2.96 I. Executive Summary After two years of preparation, planning and practice, the Virginia Tech Cyberschool now is proving the potential of computer mediated communications in teaching university-level classes "virtually" for both traditional students on campus in Blacksburg and Extended Campus learners elsewhere. To advance this project from an experimental test-bed to a more routine aspect of VPI&SU's operations as a "model land-grant university," these additional actions need to be taken: A. Continue to support existing Cyberschool activities with additional computer, faculty, financial, and staff resources B. Establish a clear university-wide identity for Cyberschool, perhaps as a "virtual college" or "virtual school" pulling together instructors and courses from all of VPI&SU's existing colleges, which could operate as a central clearing- house, organizational center, or administrative office to serve institutional, student, and faculty needs as part of the University's Extended Campus C. Expand the number of new undergraduate courses, and eventually entire degree programs of undergraduate study, for Cyberschool D. Oversee the development of new graduate courses, and eventually entire degree programs of graduate study, for Cyberschool E. Support existing departmental efforts to buy equipment, develop courses, hire technical staff, and expand academic programs for Cyberschool activities F. Establish a workable system to receive payment for, conduct assessments of, register students in, transfer credits through, and assign faculty to Cyberschool classes as a regular administrative feature of an Extended Campus for VPI&SU G. Explore new applications of Cyberschool methods for enhancing student retention on and off campus, recruiting new students with K-12 outreach, connecting with nontraditional students in need of new training, maintaining ties with alumni, or training those with special, more focused, and narrow educational requirements in government, business, and not-for-profit organizations H. Plan, organize, and administer a more efficient, capacious and powerful client-server network to avoid server overload, network failures, or lack of user access for Cyberschool with network redundancies, responsiveness to extraordinary use surges, and mirror server sites II. Overview Our first effort to envision the Virginia Tech Cyberschool, "Going Beyond the Conventions of Credit-for-Contact: A Preliminary Proposal to Design a "Cyberschool" for VPI&SU," was presented in November 1994 (see http://www.cyber.vt.edu/docs/papers.html for the document as cited here below). It now is two years later, and a progress report might help us assess what we have done thus far. In turn, this reassessment might give some directions for how we should advance in the months ahead. The central place of information technology (IT) in the unfolding analyses of the University's new Self-Study is, in part, due to our efforts in Cyberschool; and, our collective experience -- both positive and negative -- to this point will assist the Self-Study working groups and the central administration decide where we want to go next. Similarly, the realignment of the Vice President for Information Systems to work more directly with President Torgersen underscores the new sense of urgency about preparing VPI&SU to conduct more of its teaching and outreach over the new statewide broad bandwidth computer-mediated communications network, or "NET.WORK.VIRGINIA." Finally, President Clinton's recent call to wire every school room and public library for Internet access by the year 2000 suggests that there will be tremendous demand for educational content over the network very quickly. With its Cyberschool experience, VPI&SU is well-positioned to be a leading educational provider of educational services on computer networks. Still, even if all of these new IT infrastructure initiatives do not come on-line as rapidly as promised, the various participants in the Virginia Tech Cyberschool, as the operators of an up-and- running assemblage of workable educational infostructures, need to think about what kind of content it can provide, to whom it can deliver it, how it will provide services, when it shall be accessible, where it wants to provide serviceable access to its content, and who will be responsible for doing all of this with what material resources and rewards? To evaluate all of our options, an overview of Cyberschool's original purposes and progress is in order. III. Review of the Original Cyberschool Design To consider how far the Virginia Tech Cyberschool initiative has gone, we might return to the tentative outlines of "a cyberschool design" that was proposed in November 1994. In that document, we suggested: Rather than remaining in the operational register of getting "computers into the classroom" as our vision of the educational promise of new technologies, we need instead to get "classrooms out of the computer." Technical infrastructures composed of distributed personal computer networks tied together in high-speed networks capable of fairly transparent, cross platform image/audio/text/data transmission should be seen as technologies for fabricating and utilizing new social spaces suitable for virtualizing many educational activities. In other words, the cyberspaces generated by distributed computing allow us to reinvent some of what we do in virtualized terms in virtual classrooms on virtual campuses; hence, the notion of a cyberschool. Most personal computer software now emulates some artifact or collection of artifacts in the virtualization of typing as wordprocessing, art studios as graphics packages, the post as e-mail, casual conversation as bulletin boards, bookkeeping as financial management systems, and recordkeeping as hypertextual databases. Cyberschool software packages would incorporate all of these innovations into the workings of a virtualized campus encompassing emulations of ordinary classrooms, art studios, university libraries, faculty offices, student centers, media centers, science labs, and administrative offices in different mixes for an on-line and off-line format. In its on-line manifestation, the VPI&SU cyberschool could be designed to operate something like an on-line information service. That is, access to the system could be represented aesthetically or graphically as a trip to campus where the screen would display a rendering of campus. To access the course space, one might travel to or click on an icon/image/photo of McBryde Hall which would move one to a classroom where course syllabi, tests, lecture notes, student-teacher/ student-student interactions, and multimedia presentations could occur. To access the assigned class readings, one might travel to or click on an icon/image/photo of Newman Library where reserve readings, videotapes, audiotapes, reserve room information sources, and other on-line library services could be obtained. To access required readings, one might travel to or click on an icon/image/photo of the Campus Bookstore where full text facsimiles could be pulled down for actual printing or quick delivery through the mail of books and articles might be obtained. To access faculty, one might travel to or click on an icon/image/photo of a faculty office where an on-line real-time chat session or desktop video conferencing session could be scheduled just like ordinary "real" office hours. To access lab experiments as well as communications, music, art, and architecture studios, one might travel to or click on an icon/image/photo of science and art buildings where on-line virtual lab exercises, image generation, computer assisted design, or multimedia mixing software packages could be accessed by students. To access other students, one might travel to or click on an icon/image/photo of Squires Student Center where on-line real-time chat sessions or study tutorials could be scheduled for peer learning projects. And, finally, one might even have access- times and/or access-points driven by other graphic clues to film series, video programming, teleconferences, speaker's series, and athletic event broadcasts available only on-line through the cyberschool campus ("Beyond Credit-for-Contact," 1994). After two years, we have made considerable progress toward many of these goals. It is true that we have done much more on-line work than off-line, and Cyberschool is not so much an on-line information service as it is a constellation of loosely-linked websites for university-wide intranets. We have found self-paced, teacherless modules do not work as effectively as mixing such modules with traditional teaching. Indeed, the practice of self- paced instruction is not appropriate for some students. Our graphical interfaces are still quite rudimentary, and we have not redesigned Virginia Tech entirely as a "Virtual Tech" or "Virtual/Versity" -- a vast task even as we proposed it in 1994. Nonetheless, we have made progress toward virtualizing library resources, lab experiments, studio practica, lecture halls, and course tutorials. Building a rich graphical emulation/simulation of VPI&SU, like we imagined in 1994, is worth doing, but it also will take higher levels of material support. So now in practice during 1996, as we proposed in theory during 1994, Cyberschool is a working experiment at "pulling down" virtualized course activities and contents from interactive networks rather than "projecting out" canned noninteractive programming. In some sense, as we proposed in 1994, the Virginia Tech Cyberschool is partly distance learning, but in a new register. Instead of relaying information from the Blacksburg campus to students elsewhere in the state in point-to-point two-way TV links, Cyberschool courses use the teleconferencing, telepresencing, and telecommuting capabilities in computer networks to bring teachers and students together on virtual campus sites accessible from anywhere equipped with the requisite computing/networking links....Some classes are on-supply synchronous interactions, linking students and teachers as a group interactively. Other classes are purely on-demand asynchronous interactions, looping individual students on their demand into self-paced, stand-alone course modules. Many classes include much more peer learning and team teaching, but a few also are small tutorials involving one faculty member with a small group of students. When fully developed, it should be possible for a student to do almost anything "virtually" in the cyberschool's infostructures that he or she would do in VPI&SU's physical infrastructures: attend classes, meet faculty during office hours, discuss coursework with peers, do library research, check a reserve room article, purchase a textbook, see a movie from a film series, perform a science lab exercise, submit a term paper, hear a distinguished speaker, etc. ("Beyond Credit-for-Contact," 1994). We have not brought all of these innovations on line, yet. However, instructional innovations like these are coming from Cyberschool, the Newman Library, and NET.WORK.VIRGINIA. The key issue for Cyberschool, as we anticipated in 1994, is the valorization of instruction in virtual teaching environments. Does a Cyberschool approach enhance and enrich the education we now provide? For the most part, our students tend to agree that it does, both as an on-campus complement for face-to-face instruction and an off-campus virtualization of on-campus educational activities. Students indicate that Cyberschool classes increase their interactions among themselves and faculty, expand more convenient access to learning opportunities, and enhance their opportunities to work with course materials in newer, more informative ways. At this point, then, we can say that Cyberschool has fulfilled many of our original design agendas. That is, as the 1994 cyberschool plan proposed, the cyberschool must be designed as an experiment to change (but not increase) faculty workloads, enhance (but not decrease) student interactions, equalize (and not shortchange) the resources, prestige, and value of all disciplines, balance (and not over emphasize) the transmittal of certain vital skills, concentrate (and not scatter) the investment of institutional resources, and strengthen (and not reduce) the value of all academic services. Technologies do not have one or two good and bad promises locked within them, awaiting their right use or wrong misuse. They have multiple potentials that are structured by the existing social relations guiding their control and application. We can construct the cyberschool's virtual spaces and classrooms so that they help actualize a truly valuable (and innovative) new type of higher education ("Beyond Credit-for-Contact," 1994). The multivalent potentials of computer mediated communication technology are being tested by Virginia Tech's Cyberschool, but we still are bound by the curricular forms, administrative procedures, disciplinary divisions, and time economies of a contact institution working with supply-side models of service provision. To be honest, this constraint many times has led to outcomes we do not want: increased faculty workloads, decreased student interactions of some types, less participation by some disciplines, and an overemphasis on skills for "net work" instead of "course work." The speed of technical change, a shortage of financial resources, and the search for real world practical skills drive many of these less welcome outcomes, but we should continually guard against existing social relations pushing us down paths we do not want to follow. There have been many rewards in Cyberschool; in particular, the students are enthusiastic about these innovations and many measures of their learning show considerable gains. Nonetheless, it has also proven sometimes to be a punishing way to work for faculty. Instruction modules take time to develop, and some on- line course interactions with students often are much more intense, time-consuming, and demanding than regular face-to-face teaching. Keeping machines, software packages, network links as well as course websites, listserves or chat rooms up and running can be an exhausting ordeal on top of simply "teaching" the class once all of the IT components do, in fact, work on-line. The instructor for a virtual class actually becomes all too often, the functional equivalent of a computer help desk, a network troubleshooter, an on-line cop, an information service provider, a software consultant as well as remaining "the teacher." A website is a built environment with its own special maintenance needs. Even though it is a virtual domain, the professor frequently is by default "the webmaster" with roles, statuses, and powers that must be implemented gracefully to succeed. Otherwise, things will not work. Moreover, very few outsiders are attuned to how teaching in virtual spaces significantly alters student-teacher behavior in terms of the timing, frequently, or intensity of their interactions. The rewards of such teaching can be considerable, but they do not come without demanding new work obligations, particularly when so few departments can materially support or financially reward these creative new initiatives. And, of course, success brings additional new demands as faculty colleagues and administrators make demands upon the pioneers to do demonstrations, speak their mind about the pluses and minuses of cyberschooling work, or consult with the next generation as they launch Cyberschool-like classes. Our 1994 proposal carried with it several important provisos. In reaching for this new space of teaching and learning, we sought to "change but not increase" faculty workloads as well as to equalize the resources, prestige, and value of all the disciplines involved in the project. In retrospect, these goals have proven, in a context of shrinking resources, the most difficult to achieve at the institutional level. Many of the changes in workloads have been, at bottom, increases as well as innovations: we do new kinds of work, but we also do more of it. Resources have been provided temporarily in some cases through infusions of one-time grants and other funds, but we have not made changes to the foundational structures of faculty rewards, let alone to an academic culture that still balances, for instance, the prestige and resource needs of humanities programs as against those of the sciences, business or engineering. Nor have we succeeded in substantially altering the rewards (in tenure and promotion, as well as in salary and the like) for the kind of teaching-centered research-and-development work that lie at the heart of many Cyberschool innovations. These combined faculty challenges-measured in terms of workloads and rewards-already are after only two years leading to some cases of "burnout." Some who have helped initiate the Cyberschool project now feel that they cannot afford the costs that their participation weighs against professional research projects or the dangers this work can create for their tenure and promotion reviews. These early Cyberschool pioneers often now express a sense of exhaustion as they struggle to achieve excellence on both the new and the traditional scales of teaching, research and service. Cyberschool has been an initiative originating from among Virginia Tech's faculty, most importantly Len Hatfield in English, Valerie and Gary Hardcastle in Philosophy, Mary Beth Oliver in Communications, John Husser in Music, Karen Swenson in English, Patsy Lavender in Theater Arts, Lucinda Roy in English, Bailey Van Hook in Art History, Scott Patterson in Communication, Richard Winett in Psychology, Bill Claus in Biology, Tim Luke in Political Science, and Art Buikema in Biology. In turn, most of Cyberschool's efforts have focused on the classroom. However, no school is merely a collection of classrooms for faculty teaching; every school also needs administrative infrastructure to support its activities. It now is time for Cyberschool to develop administrative spaces, procedures, and schedules, which can operate alongside Cyberschool classes in support of expanded instructional offerings on-line. These administrative resources could take the form of a new office to coordinate Cyberschool activities or they might come from retasking already available administrative personnel. Whether the university creates a new office or simply redesignates the responsibilities of existing personnel to manage this virtual college or school, Cyberschool now needs administrative innovations to be even more successful. Professor Edward A. Fox, Ph.D. Department of Computer Science 660 McBryde Hall Virginia Tech Blacksburg, VA 24061-0106