Long & Short of It, The

ASEE Prism, Apr 2006 by Shute, Nancy

George Tech is considering new technologies to improve the nuts and bolts of distance education, such as compressed video feeds sent via the Internet, which are cheaper than mailing DVDs. Many students can't download lectures because of bandwidth and firewall issues. Many others no longer have VCRs, meaning the university is sending more DVDs (which cost between $2 and $3 to reproduce, versus less than $1 for a videotape). Another notion is "telepresence" - an enhanced video image taped with multiple cameras that would allow students to change their point of view to get a better view of the whiteboard, for instance, or to "move" the professor away.

Some of their most intriguing experiments, however, focus as much on the students on campus as off-"distributed" learning rather than "distance" learning. "There seems to be a mindset with distance learning that you have someone learning by themselves-the online version of a correspondence course," says Lonnie Harvel, associate director of the institute's Arbutus Center for Distributed Engineering Education. But many of Georgia Tech's distance classes are synchronous - 33 for undergraduates, 64 for graduate students - with students watching the professor and each other and asking questions live. "We probably have one of the largest video conferencing systems in the nation with our synchronous classes," says George Wright, assistant director of the distance learning center.

Starting in 1997, Georgia Tech has been taping and banking on the Web more than 3,000 lectures from more than 100 courses. They have found that students on campus spend more time with a taped lecture than they do with a live class, playing some sections over and over. "We can even go to a professor and say, 'Do you realize that everyone keeps going back to this one section? It's either extremely interesting or very confusing.'" Professors use the archive to review their lectures - and to see how their colleagues teach a subject.

They're also testing a system to improve the value and utility of lecture notes. "When students become most engaged in the material, they stop taking notes," Harvel says. The "embedded access" system allows students to search their notes for key terms on a handheld or a laptop, which then connects to an online database. "Now you go back and look at your notes, and it's connected to the lecture. You can also click a button and it will include all the notes of the professor. If you're not a good notetaker, you can still get the message."

Tom Barnwell, another professor of electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech, says that "distance learning is anything past the second row." "I laugh about it, but it's really true," Jackson says. "There's as much to be gained for the students in the classroom as for students elsewhere. The goal is to make sure they have the same educational experience. Whether it comes in the same form is beside the point."

Nancy Shute is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.