>From owner-trad-l@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Thu Jan 30 02:40:16 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 CAA38902; Thu, 30 Jan 1997 02:40:10 -0500 Received: from LISTSERV.VT.EDU by LISTSERV.VT.EDU (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8c) with spool id 317056 for TRAD-L@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Thu, 30 Jan 1997 02:40:09 -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 CAA17392 for ; Thu, 30 Jan 1997 02:40:09 -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 CAA17434 for ; Thu, 30 Jan 1997 02:39:51 -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 02:40:47 -0400 Reply-To: "Edward A. Fox" Sender: trad-l Discussion List From: "Edward A. Fox" Subject: 2 Years Out -- A Progress Report: VT Cyberschool, pt2 To: TRAD-L@LISTSERV.VT.EDU - -- - - part 2 from Tim follows- -- -- - - - IV. Some More Practical Recommendations Up to this point, Cyberschool has been run on a "demonstration project" basis. In times of very tight budgets, Dean Robert C. Bates in Arts and Sciences was able to support Cyberschool with some college funds and the time of his staff, especially Associate Dean Lucinda H. Roy. Terry Wildman in CEUT has provided seed money for developing on-line courses, John Moore and Tom Head with their FDI support staff have helped immensely, and the Departments of English, Communications, Biology, Art and Art History, Music, and Political Science also have contributed to the Cyberschool initiative. Yet, it is now time to move beyond the "demonstration project" stage so that Cyberschool does not either lose momentum entirely, or merely become Project Demonstration to show an Internet-crazy world that "we've got some of that, too, here at Virginia Tech." With scores of courses in several of VPI&SU's eight colleges using Cyberschool-like methods of instruction, the university needs to create a more solid economic footing for such instruction in terms of: a) rewarding faculty materially for their efforts; b) supporting departments materially for their engagement with these innovations; c) developing immediately administrative software, procedures, or rules for coping with expanded Cyberschool teaching; d) preparing students for Cyberschool by insuring "one student-one PC" access levels with adequate network and computer support for all students; e) publishing information about Cyberschool course availability more widely to increase enrollment; and, f) organizing all of their activities through some central site to avoid duplication of efforts, standardize curricular planning, and reduce lead times in scaling up Cyberschool-like classes for access by anyone anywhere anytime. This will involve new expenditures of time, energy, and money, but the investment will be well-worth the small risks involved. With Cyberschool, VPI&SU can provide a wide array of courses to offer anywhere that students can pull them down to their desktop -- at home, in a high school or community college, at work, in a public library. With NET.WORK.VIRGINIA, the Commonwealth does indeed become our campus along with any other market in the U.S. or abroad capable of accessing our virtualized education sites. And, with these distance education innovations, the conduct of classes on VPI&SU campus grounds -- in NOVA, Blacksburg, Richmond, Tidewater, Roanoke, Riva San Vitale -- also would be enhanced. In 1994, we hoped to construct some virtual environments for Cyberschool that could provide: A. a set of basic orientation, enrollment, credit acquisition, syllabus, and fee payment information about all cyberschool instructional sessions; B. a system of secure access and use rules to insure that students are who they represent themselves to be, are fee-paying legitimate users of the system, and are guaranteed confidentiality in their interactions with the cyberschool, which also would guard this fair use of copyright restrictions of on-line materials; C. a series of multi-user domains, structured as on-line chat sessions or time-delayed bulletin board structures, that can be assigned to an instructor, a student or groups of instructors and students in order to work through pre-arranged course of instruction; D. a linkage to second-source educational packages switched from VPI&SU libraries, other VPI&SU college cyberschool systems, or off-campus sources of video/audio/textual educational information; and, E. a means of collaborating with off-campus corporate, university and government offices to test new networking, software, hardware, multimedia technologies and services that might improve the VPI&SU cyberschool campus ("Beyond Credit-for- Contact," 1994). As this review indicates, the ACCESS/Sloan and LIT projects have begun, in part, to address Objective E, while changes at Newman Library with VT OnLine Course Materials and the "digital library" initiatives of many librarians there have moved us, in part, toward meeting much of Objective D. Clearly, there still are bottlenecks and shortfalls, but Cyberschool has done much to accelerate everyone's access to digitalized information held by both on-campus providers and off-campus partners. The Cyberschool server network in Educational Technologies, the EBBS server located in the Department of English, and the new Computer Integrated Classrooms around campus have moved us toward fulfilling Objective C. Indeed, the array of our courses offered during 1995 and 1996 can provide many examples of such assets being used very well. In addition to enhancing our work as teachers, Cyberschool methods can be used to answer other challenges. For example, we could look at "student retention" issues. The asychronous, on-demand learning structures of some Cyberschool courses appear well-suited for maintaining contact with VPI&SU students that must "drop out of school" for financial reasons. Unable to pay for living in Blacksburg and carry a full credit load, many of our students return home to earn the money that they need to return to full- time student status in residence. While they are away, many do not continue with their studies, while some enroll elsewhere on a much reduced load in the hopes of transferring these credits back to VPI&SU. A Cyberschool contact with this population of students could pay-off in several ways. Students would remain enrolled in active virtual classes from home or their places of work. They would not need to "drop out" when they return home. We also would not lose enrollments to competing institutions in NOVA, Richmond or the Tidewater regions during the students' absence; and, those students who decide to simply finish at George Mason, VCU or ODU after a reduced load there would not be lost to us. The on-line community building techniques of some Cyberschool courses also seem well-suited for addressing the needs of VPI&SU students that choose to "drop out of school" due to some sense of alienation in large lecture classes. Anticipating that the changing academic drop and eligibility policies might increase this reaction among students, Cyberschool teaching techniques can be deployed to combat this sort of alienation and underperformance in large classes. By rethinking how such large lecture classes are conducted in terms of material presented, how the material is communicated, numbers and forms of required student written assignments, or means of student interaction with the instructor and other students, Cyberschool course design actually can increase student involvement, satisfaction, and learning in large lecture courses without watering down academic expectations. In addition, the on-line, asynchronous and often collaborative learning environments of Cyberschool courses are suitable for exploring the needs of VPI&SU students that elect to "drop out" of the university studies due to a sense of burn-out from an endless regimen of seat-time in lecture and discussion sections on campus in Blacksburg. Some students seem to leave school to experience different intellectual challenges at paid work or volunteer activity settings. Cyberschool teaching approaches can be used to restructure courses around outreach activities, service learning contexts, cooperative education/internship settings, or other "learning by doing" activities out in the local, regional, or commonwealth context away from campus. Virtual class sites can serve as flexible meeting and instruction spaces, common collective projects, open community resource creation experiments, or team-centered writing/research/discussion spaces. Getting students out into these kinds of courses regularly every year or perhaps on the threshold of their decision to opt out of VPI&SU might keep many students enrolled who otherwise might quit their studies. Arguably, our biggest needs now are logistical or administrative. We do not have friction-free means of publishing Cyberschool course details through an on-line catalogue, updating Cyberschool courses in an on-line timetable, registering students on demand for Cyberschool classes with on-line registrar packages, managing the mechanics of on-line class enrollments, administering the demands of on-line student grading or major/minor/core requirements fulfillment, or perhaps most importantly paying for class credits and other student fees on-line. Initially we imagined that the university could create a new office to cope with the extraordinary managerial demands of Cyberschool as a "virtual school" operating all year round, much like Summer School once was organized as a separate set of budget lines, course offerings, and administrative rules to provide courses to students in Blacksburg over the summer. Cyberschool now needs a fixed administrative housing to more effectively supply increased numbers of classes on-demand at any time both on campus and outside of Blacksburg. This will necessitate modifying some administrative policies and practices, which were installed to cope with a fixed calendar, on-supply, face-to-face, synchronous course of contact instruction. Yet, Objectives B and A cannot be adequately addressed, and Cyberschool cannot live up to its full potential until this administrative infrastructure is constructed. With NET.WORK.VIRGINIA and the Cyberschool project, we have the IT components and instructional content for creating a virtual campus with thousands of potential students who can demand instruction from their homes, high school and community college computer labs, public libraries, government offices, and corporate settings. We need to make these reforms now, and then publicize them as widely as possible that we can provide our services efficiently and effectively. Cyberschool has been, up to this point, on a trial run. All of the courses have been undergraduate classes, no single program of study has been put entirely on-line, most of the courses have been core curricular offerings, and no course has been designed outside of the normal time/credit/work rules of conventional contact teaching. In the next phase, Cyberschool planning needs to turn its participants' time and energy to new challenges: graduate courses need to be developed, entire programs of study need to be readied for on-line delivery, more than core curriculum classes should be set up in on-line forms, and new classes should be given rein to be recast outside of the familiar time/credit/work rules of our existing conventional credit-for-contact teaching practices. Cyberschool can help us retain existing students as well as recruit new ones. V. Summary As we suggested in 1994, all of the technical capabilities required for Cyberschool exist right now on campus. In 1996, we still only need to reorganize these existing pieces, while addressing some fairly complex institutional, legal, pedagogical and structural issues, into new administrative configurations to support our Cyberschool capabilities. The Cyberschool has involved administrators, faculty, and students in the design of its on-line and off-line forms to make them as user friendly as possible. We now need permanent administrative infrastructure to open these courses to more users. Getting resources to invest in such assets is not easy, but this now is what must be done. This commitment of new resources is essential. Cyberschool thus far has been carried by VPI&SU professors without any clear sense of what the existing system for faculty rewards could contribute to their work on this project. Many untenured faculty have contributed to Cyberschool with a level of intensity that has put them at risk for promotion and tenure. Likewise, tenured faculty also have concerned about merit raises and/or further promotions given their participation in Cyberschool. Without some significant and consistent recognition of their innovative contributions to the university through Cyberschool, there is a danger that faculty simply will stick to more tried-and-true conventional paths of career development. To continue this project in the very short run, the Cyberschool could follow the lead of summer school sessions by stressing introductory courses, courses from the core curriculum, and courses tied to independent study/internship/co-op credits. These courses either are in high demand (so shifting load to Cyberschool settings would improve course loadings on campus) or are well- suited to close computerized interactions (so the discipline of Cyberschool meetings could enhance what would otherwise be independent study experiences). With administrative support, all departments could be invited to offer courses in Cyberschool, but they would not be forced to do so at this time. Nonetheless, a more systematic means of determining Cyberschool course menus beyond the first-wave of already up-and-running pioneer classes clearly needs to be determined. And, this new Cyberschool office should be directed toward coordinating all of these tasks university-wide as the platform for a virtual college or school. At this juncture, the Virginia Tech Cyberschool is still largely experimental. However, it has not fallen flat on its face due to a lack of interest; in fact, it is in many ways a resounding success, if only as a new curriculum reform movement on the VPI&SU campus. Cyberschool ideas work well in practice, even though they may not meet all of the most promising expectations sometimes promised by them in theory. If Cyberschool is publicized more widely, if it presents many more courses-for-credit, if it continues to provide high-quality instruction unavailable elsewhere, and if it taps new constituencies of learners both inside and outside of Virginia, then Cyberschool will move beyond its current role as a successful but small experiment to answer some of the big challenges facing higher education at VPI&SU as well as the Commonwealth of Virginia in the coming years. Professor Edward A. Fox, Ph.D. Department of Computer Science 660 McBryde Hall Virginia Tech Blacksburg, VA 24061-0106