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Long & Short of It, The

ASEE Prism, Apr 2006 by Shute, Nancy

DISTANCE EDUCATION HAS MADE GREAT STRIDES AND TAKES MANY FORMS, BOTH ON AND OFF CAMPUS.

In the past decade, universities around the world have embraced distance learning as a way to increase student enrollment without having to build more lecture halls and dorms. The notion has great appeal for working students and parents, and employers love the fact that their staff members can advance their education without disrupting the workday.

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THAT COMES AS NO SURPRISE to schools of engineering. Who, after all, is better equipped to apply technology to human endeavor than engineers? "Technology is moving at a very rapid pace, and the rate of change is accelerating," says Paul Peercy, dean of the University of Wisconsin's School of Engineering, which launched a much-praised distance learning master's program for mid-career professionals in 1999. "The advances in information technology have a lot to do with driving distance learning. There are enormous advantages, especially in today's increasingly global environment, where scientists, engineers and managers are traveling around the world."

But as the field has exploded, moving far beyond the old model of dropping videotapes into the mailbox, questions arise as to whether students can get as good an education without interacting with professors and their fellow students. That question is particularly relevant for engineering students, for whom strong communications skills are especially important. Distance learning veterans say the quality of the program's output is directly related to the quality of the input. "We've got some people who put an incredible amount of effort in it and produce a sparkling product," says Frank Burris, who directs the engineering program at the University of California-Los Angeles's extension program. "But I spent an hour in a meeting this morning talking about someone who has been scribbling handwritten lecture notes and scanning those and putting them on the Web. It looks terrible. We're dealing with that problem now."

Indeed, for many schools, including UCLA and Stanford, the trend in distance education has not been so much toward coming up with fancy new technology to deliver lectures halfway around the world. Instead, it's been expanding partnerships with corporations eager to offer professional education to their employees at competitive prices. In this growing market, "distance education" means the instructor gets in the car and drives a good distance on the freeway. Stanford's Professional Education Unit, launched in 1999, now enrolls more than 6,000 students a year through their employers. And at UCLA, although online engineering courses remain a large part of the university's extension offerings, with about 10 of the 120 online courses each quarter, Burris estimates that more than half of his department's revenue comes from on-site delivery of short courses to companies in the region. "Probably six years ago, 90 percent of those short courses were public offerings on campus," he says. "Today, 75 percent of them are on-site delivery."

Still, a number of schools not only continue to offer true distance learning, but they're also coming up with novel efforts to solve the biggest problem in the field-the lack of interaction between instructor, student and peers. "We've learned there's no silver bullet," says Greg Moses, associate dean for research and graduate programs in the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin. A researcher in nuclear fusion, Moses got drawn into distance learning in the late 1990s when he received a National Science Foundation grant to develop new methods for using the Internet. "It seemed like video was going to become the killer app." Along with John Strikwerda, a professor of computer science, he created eTEACH, a software package that includes streaming video of a professor's lecture, slides, a table of contents and relevant Web links. They first used it to teach an introductory undergraduate computer science course in 2000, and Moses now uses it with a computer science course he co-teaches. Students watch lectures on their own time, and the 40-plus hours of classroom time are used for small-group, problem-solving labs. "My focus has been how to make better use of the one hour I have students face-to-face."

Benefits to the eTEACH model, Moses says, are that lectures are half as long as they are in the classroom -evidently professors don't play to the gallery when they're staring at a camera lens instead of 300 sleepy faces. Students can take 50-second jumps back to review points they didn't get. But the Wisconsin group also found that students learn the material better than they do in a solely classroom environment only if they are sufficiently motivated. For undergraduates, they found, that requires weekly quizzes. "Where students are basically forced to watch this stuff, we did see some improvement," Moses says.

Moses is now experimenting with another tool he hopes will help the bewildered or bored undergraduate - concept mapping. With undergraduate education, there's a huge gap between novice and expert. The expert-the professor-realizes how all the topics in a subject fit together. "The novice doesn't see things that way, they don't glob stuff together as a macro concept," Moses says. Basing the notion on research in cognitive psychology, Moses and colleagues around the country are now using an NSF grant to create software that would let professors write their lectures into a flow chart-like graphical format. Students could click and browse among the nodes as they please. "You've got big things, and you've got little things, and you can connect them all," Moses says. He hopes to have the program up and running in a year.

Long & Short of It, The

ASEE Prism, Apr 2006 by Shute, Nancy

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