Instructional Technology Instructional Technology [Ed: Links to web pages and/or e-mail addresses which have become inactive since the publication of this article have been enclosed in curly brackets { }. Replacement links have been provided where possible.]
New York University pioneered distance learning in the 1950s with its Sunrise Semester series, which aired for twenty-five years on national television. In the spirit of Sunrise Semester, NYU's School of Continuing Education introduced the Virtual College in 1992 to expand the boundaries of learning and respond to the increasing professional education needs of working adults.Currently, 6.7 million Americans are enrolled part-time in colleges and universities. Over 80 percent of these part-time students are adults aged 25 and over, and 60 percent are women. These large numbers mask an even larger adult population that would like to attend college but cannot.
SCE's Information Technologies Institute enrolls over 2,000 adult students who are completing one of seventeen professional certificate programs in the information technology field. Most of these students work within a mile or two of the Washington Square campus, and all live within a fifty-mile radius of NYU. But what about the remaining 24,800 miles of the planet? SCE would certainly like to enroll students beyond the typical commuting range. And traditional on-campus instruction definitely creates spatial limits for millions of exurban and rural adults.
Most of our students are systems professionals and managers, and like their colleagues in other fields they have felt the impact of downsizing and globalization in very tangible terms—more responsibility, longer hours, frequent travel. We recently surveyed a representative sample of our students to identify how many classes were missed for business related reasons such as having to work late and being out of town on business trips. The answer was troubling -- students missed twenty percent of their course sessions for these reasons. This in a discipline where subject knowledge is very cumulative and gaps are difficult to make up. How many potential students, anticipating these temporal problems, never even registered for our courses?
While eliminating spatial and temporal boundaries are oft-cited goals of distance learning programs, the real payoff comes when online technologies address the more subtle instructional boundaries facing adult students.
Like many disciplines, information systems is characterized by two broad categories of knowledge—declarative and procedural. Declarative knowledge represents the concepts, methods and tools of our field—just the facts, ma'am. Declarative knowledge is relatively easy to teach and relatively straightforward to learn, lending itself to traditional classroom lecture and discussion.
Procedural knowledge represents the processes inherent in a field—the difficult and very human interaction of generalist users and technical specialists that transform methods and models into working business information systems. Procedural knowledge is best acquired by doing, through collaborative teams of students simulating the real thing.
Many of our faculty have tried to get students to meet after class and team-up on case study systems projects—all to little avail. Time and again they recount students' frustrating attempts to meet, only to have them spend more time in agreeing on a meeting time than they actually spend meeting. The result is too often courses that instructionally reduce the key procedural concepts to declarative how-to lists.
Digital Video—Videos consist primarily of computer animations, faculty demonstrations and case study simulations to increase student mastery and retention of telecourse concepts, methodologies and tools. Each telecourse session contains approximately one half-hour of video files.
Audiographic Tutorials—Tutorials provide additional course and software instruction in the form of graphic and audio presentations. Similar to narrated slide presentations, these full-screen audio-visual lessons both provide more content on the digital video topics and walk students through the features and use of telecourse software packages.
Discussions and Laboratories—Computer Conferencing supports asynchronous student-faculty discussions of telecourse topics, case studies, projects, and assignments. Online laboratories permit collaborative student groups to complete projects using sophisticated systems software tools.
Hypertext Readings—Online readings give students dynamic cross-references to all text materials and permit them to "jump" to various information sets as desired. All hypertext readings provide complete text search, annotation, print, and navigation capabilities.
A study conducted at West Virginia University found that transmission speeds of 80 Kbps made users believe that they were on a local LAN. The teleprogram's Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) phone lines provided a 128 Kbps remote local area network connection to the teleprogram servers, projecting the on-campus computer laboratory "look and feel" of sophisticated software applications directly to student home PCs.
A 16-credit, graduate certificate in information technology for non-technical managers and professionals has been the academic basis for most of the program's curriculum design, delivery and assessment. The program consisted of four 6-week courses—Systems Analysis, Database Management, Systems Auditing, and Information Security—that were taken sequentially by a cohort of twenty students.
During the six-week telecourses, students and faculty collaborated online to analyze, design, and build a prototype information system using Lotus Notes and various applications software packages. In each course, the twenty students were divided into four groups to work on various phases of systems projects. Functioning as members of their virtual project teams, the students established discussion guidelines, critiqued and edited each other's work, managed online workplace responsibilities, and at times ran an asynchronous groupware package as if it were an online chat service. This level of interaction was maintained even when many students were traveling on national and international business trips.
Session 1. Course Overview (5 days) This session familiarizes students with the conferencing and electronic mail features of the Lotus Notes groupware package and with its use as an effective workgroup collaboration tool. Students are introduced to the systems development life cycle, the case study systems project and client, and to each other.
Session 2. Preliminary Analysis (10 days) This session covers the preliminary analysis phase of an information systems project. Within their five-member project workgroups, students identify, survey and analyze data on aspects of the case study database and communications system.
Session 3. Alternatives Analysis (8 days) This session requires the four project workgroups to propose and analyze alternatives to the current case study system. Students identify the scope and objectives of their proposed alternatives and analyze its costs and benefits.
Session 4. Output Design (6 days) This session designs the initial set of information outputs for the new case study information system. Two of the workgroups are chosen to identify the data elements and output formats for the new case study system.
Session 5. Input Design (6 days) This session covers the principles of data input and data file design. The other two project workgroups are chosen to determine the client's input requirements, and translate these into final Lotus Notes input forms for the new system.
Session 6. System Implementation (7 days) This session completes the development of the prototype case study system. All four groups work on completing the system's final Lotus Notes output views, online help, and user documentation.
To get a clearer understanding of what actually goes on in a typical telecourse, let's look in more detail at session 2, Preliminary Analysis. During this ten-day session, students collaborated online to collect the fairly-detailed workload, procedural and cost data necessary to prepare the preliminary analysis of the case study system. In the interests of time, the students were divided into four equally-sized groups with each group being responsible for one aspect of the preliminary analysis' data collection and analysis. Each group conducted its work within its own Lotus Notes discussion database.
During the
first two days of the session, the students and I discussed the overall
requirements of a preliminary analysis, and we reviewed the organizational and
operational environment of the California-based case study project. On the morning
of day 3 of the session, I provided each group with their particular preliminary
analysis responsibility (see figure above). Students used their own group
database to discuss approaches, divide responsibilities, and formulate questions
for the client or me (see figure to right).Both the client and I actively monitored
each group database to insure that work was progressing satisfactorily and that all
questions for us were answered promptly. While each group's deliberations were
private, there were often questions or findings raised that had to be shared with
the class as a whole, and these I posted in the course discussion database.
Each group's
survey form or questionnaire had to be completed by 11:00 a.m. on day 6 and transmitted to the client in San Francisco. The client then collected as much
data as possible and returned the completed survey forms to the workgroups by the
evening of day 8 (see figure to right).The student groups analyzed the returned
data and prepared a short summary for me by 9:00 p.m. on day 10 (see figure below). I
incorporated the four group summaries into the completed preliminary analysis
report.
During the
course, a total of 1,400 documents were created by participants. Within this
aggregate total, students and faculty generated 1,100 course- and group-database
documents related specifically to the curriculum. This was an average of 50
discussions, analyses, questions, and assignments per student—a level of
participation that would be rare in most on-campus courses over a similar time
period. Computer conferencing and electronic mail provided 24-hour faculty access
to answer questions, evaluate assignments and examinations, and provide
advisement.
Introductory course topics delivered using digital video had the highest student achievement levels, with a mean score gain of 13 points over the baseline hypertext score of 80. At the intermediate level, video was a close second to conferencing in achievement with mean gains of 14 and 16 points respectively over the hypertext score of 76.
Introductory topics delivered using video were the most cost-effective, with a production/delivery cost of $89 per point of achievement gain, as compared with $136 per point gain for conferencing topics and $195 per point gain for audiographic topics. At the intermediate topic level, video was also found to be the most cost-effective with an $83 cost per point gain versus $102 per point gain for conferencing topics and $292 per point gain for audiographic topics.
The teleprogram evaluation found that while faculty-led computer conferencing could effectively instruct students in the process inherent in a subject area, it could be unnecessarily labor-intensive in conveying the subject's content. NYU's Virtual College has shown that well-designed digital video presentations can often cover in minutes what asynchronous discussions would take hours to complete—and do so in a highly cost-effective fashion.
Responding to this need, future Virtual College courses will be offered in an "education-on-demand" format. Once students are admitted to a program, they can register for telecourses anytime—and have from four to fourteen weeks to complete each one. The telecourses will use Notes workflow automation capabilities to track, prompt, and record student progress through the courses. Each on-demand telecourse will consist of multiple sessions that contain video, tutorial, laboratory, and reading modules.
While students largely work independently on these courses, computer conferencing, electronic mail, and even desktop videoconferencing access to faculty will be available to answer questions, evaluate assignments and examinations, and provide advisement. And throughout each telecourse, the network will support groups of students and faculty to work together on lessons and assignments.
The physical infrastructure of the global economy is rapidly changing from concrete
and steel to computers and communications. The quality distance education program
will likewise change to give working adults those collaborative and technical
skills necessary for working within (as well as on) decentralized and networked
workplaces—in effect, a virtual college preparing employees for tomorrow's
virtual organizations. ![[ C ]](../icons/CSmF97.gif){kind=icon}
Posted 1 Sept 1997. Last reviewed 6 December 2005.
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