This article comes under the heading of teaching an old dog new tricks. The old dog is a university professor who has been teaching the same way for a long time. MIT media expert Nicholas Negroponte, in his book, Being Digital, observes that while a medical doctor from the previous century would not recognize the technology in today's hospital, a college professor from that era would see virtually no change in the tools of education. The teaching tools I use are not much different from those of Charles Dickens' era, or for that matter Plato's. So I set out to leverage all this new technology - wring out the possibilities. Icrept out of my shell and tried an experiment. The proposal: teach a required, mainstream course using every possible new technology available and see if there is a measurable improvement in results. The course selected was MIS 201, an undergraduate requirement taught perhaps eight times per year, and aimed at introducing pre-business students to the concepts and the tools of computer-based automation in a business setting. This type of course is taught at most universities and junior colleges in the U.S. - very mainstream.
Result: A Major Success - But Technology Wasn't the Reason
First, let me cite some of the bottom line results. The students did a lot more than is usually required - and they loved it. I used all the technologies - World Wide Web, Internet, CD-ROM, audiocassettes and videocassettes, distance education, touch-screen multimedia training, autodidact teaching systems for learning spreadsheet and database programming, and many more. Nearly all our students have jobs and some do not finish in exactly four years so the idea of working a lot harder, but doing most of it away from the formal classroom delighted them. They worked better, learned more and we even reduced the unit cost of course delivery.
The work output expected of the students was increased significantly but the delivery system was drastically changed. Time in the formal class setting was reduced from 45 hours to 12 hours. There were no formal exams. Most lectures were on TV or audiocassettes or in cyberspace. Extensive writing and practice with information technologies were required. And there was a major individual research project which offered the option of presenting the results through the campus TV studio.
It was a much more difficult course than the normal version. Students were required to use a graduate text instead of the undergraduate version. The course was definitely not "dumbed down" - just the opposite, in fact. Was technology the reason for this success story? Only partly. In fact, technology was only a bit player - the star of this show was a completely different model of what teachers and students do in the learning process. Here are the specifics.
Time in Class - A Drastic Reduction
A three-credit course traditionally requires 40-45 hours in class. In most universities these class hours are divided up in segments of either one, one and a half, or three hours. So the number of separate class sessions required to gain three credits can be as low as 15 and as high as 45. In the latter case the student has to leave his or her job 45 times per semester, drive or bus to campus, hope to find a parking place, go to a one-hour class, and reverse the process, returning to work a little bit wiser but a lot more tired. In the case just cited the student uses about 90 hours in commuting alone for three credits! I made a huge change in that statistic. In MIS 201 the class met in a formal classroom setting for about 12 hours, a reduction of more than two-thirds from the traditional approach.
Learning Model - Students as Discoverers, Not Receptacles
The model that many of us professors have used for centuries views the student as a vessel to be filled at regular intervals with knowledge. It's certainly the one I have used and that the students seem to expect. The alternative, and the one employed in MIS 201, is that the student is a co-discoverer of knowledge and the professor is responsible for seeing that the discovery takes place. This model means that we don't need to be strapped to a classroom if discovery can take place in different spaces, even cyberspace. By the way, discoverers still need some traditional navigating tools so I picked an absolutely outstanding text for this course and lots of TLC was supplied for the computer-based discovery projects.
Technology - Everything But the Kitchen Sink
I used everything available to exploit the technology that is so abundant in the U.S. education system. Like most universities, we have TV facilities, links to the Internet and World Wide Web, a capability to post our own course home pages, PCs for students to use if they don't have one at home or work, CD-ROMs in the library and some of the labs, and so on. And we also have some automated classrooms. In many institutions automated classrooms are used for distinctly mundane purposes; that is, for their better slide and transparency projectors but not for the more difficult and challenging tasks of real course design with multimedia objects, online conferences, etc. This is mostly not the case at George Mason. I couldn't get a reservation for the automated classrooms, mostly because some of our young English and Astronomy professors were monopolizing these rooms and teaching with some of the most amazing Web-produced materials I've ever seen.
Several weeks before the course started, students received a note from me giving them all the particulars about the new approach and encouraging them to make a decision ahead of time about the extra work involved - with a tradeoff of no exams, far fewer classes to attend, etc. They were given a series of tasks to complete, networks to connect to and audiocassettes to listen to long before the course began. In fact many students found it a big help to be able to get "out of the way" about a quarter of the course work before class started.
Traditional Exams - Not Needed
For MIS 201 there were no exams, at least not in the traditional sense. When the model is one of discovery rather than metering out facts, a lot of new measurement methods become possible. First of all, this course involved a lot of writing. Students were required to keep a detailed notebook, which I reviewed often. At a minimum I expected them to find about a dozen pages of things to write about in each of the 15 book chapters. My friends in psychology tell me that there is no relationship between learning and filling a perfectly good textbook with underlinings from a marking pen, but a high correlation between writing and learning - so we wrote, and wrote, and wrote. Even a single error was grounds for having a paper returned, so standards were easy to establish and enforce. Zero defects.
There were also case studies, fresh new ones featuring real companies and organizations. The only rules about each written case study were that they must be very well written, look great and have no errors, not in punctuation, word usage, grammar, format or spelling. Students can quickly accommodate a regimen of this type if it is insisted on from the start and if they can see some examples of what is expected. Also, if they are coming to class less often, it's reasonable to give them tasks that are demanding but can be done at their own pace.
Lectures
Because we only met in the formal classroom setting for 10 hours, there had to be a way for me to impart my spin on the material as I have been doing in lectures for decades. So I became a TV personality. In the section on telecommunications I was able to digress briefly to contrast the current capacity of microwave transmission with the message sent by Agamemnon to Clytemnestra about the conquest of Troy, using fires at the top of mountains across Turkey and Greece. And I spoke of Ned Ludd, who caused a lot of trouble when a computerized loom displaced workers in an English mill a century and a half ago. The lectures appearedon the university's Northern Virginia cable channel and were also available in the library. Since most of the students had jobs they either set their VCR for the appropriate time or went over to the library when they were on campus.
Discovery Projects
The university system also made it possible for us to have a class home page, a place where students could get daily tips from the professor, student volunteers and each other. The home page was also the location of about a half dozen discovery projects, where students had to use technology to figure out a problem from another class. For instance, on one day they had to use the Internet to get the prices of the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrials, check the online Wall Street Journal for the deflator coefficient and then compute the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the day. What they discovered was that the Net is not always the best way to get that kind of data. Score one for the daily newspaper and the local library.
I believe all classes will eventually have home pages because they are current, very helpful and trivially easy to set up and use. Some of the best home pages on campus are in English, Astronomy and History, so there is no bias whatsoever toward technology curricula. (Course home page is at http://web.gmu.edu/ruth/MIS/391HOME.html)
Laboratory Exercises - Using Autodidact Tools
A part of the grade in this type of course is based on gaining skill in the practical use of the two major software packages used in business, spreadsheets like Lotus or Excel and databases like Oracle. This sort of activity is important and necessary but does not need to be "taught"; that is, it is a perfect application of self-teaching, or autodidact methods. Today's autodidact tools are so good that they teach far better than a professor could, and, of course, a college course should not be cluttered with class time devoted to these skills anyway. So the students were assigned about a dozen problems, not toy problems but mainstream, challenging cases of increasing complexity.
TLC
No matter how good the autodidact tools, it's still necessary to offer some tender loving care to students who are trying to learn to use software. The TLC for MIS 201 was in three forms. First, some former students and I prepared an audiocassette for the class students to help them over the spreadsheet and database exercises. It was a very practical cassette, dedicating about 10 minutes for each of the 12 problems. Students could sit at the PC, or wherever they happened to be working on the exercises, and have the cassette in their ear with the autodidact text nearby. The cassette was very detailed and concentrated on the kinds of frustrating problems that can reduce confidence in computer situations. We described the quirky printers in Robinson Hall, the importance of backing up their work, a misprint or difficult-to-use idea in the autodidact text, etc. It was completely free-form but designed to ease the student into a successful result. The second type of help offered was very popular. A small cadre of students who had done problems like these in previous courses agreed to have informal office hours at convenient times. (All students in the class have other jobs, so these times tended to be in the early morning or after 4 p.m.) The third help was a network hotline where the students could contact a larger group of volunteer experts about particular problems with the exercises. The students were using the network nearly every day anyway so this was just another network service.
Meeting with the Students
A lot of taxpayers will rightly complain if students have only a dozen hours with the professor in class and no other contact. While it's true that we were in touch by e-mail all the time, that is clearly not enough. First, I drastically increased my weekly office hours from about 5 to 15. And I got to know the students a lot better, since these visits were not only required, but helpful on both sides. We talked about the course, about students' jobs, and anything else that needed to be discussed. They usually spent a half hour to an hour on these visits so there was a lot to discuss beyond just the course. During the course evaluations I was pleased that most of the students said they had gotten to know the professor in this course more than in any other they had taken at the university.
The Bottom Line: Tougher, Better Course and Lower Unit Cost
What were the results? The indicators that are most important to me were positive. The students unanimously preferred the new approach over the traditional way. Obviously they produced more and learned more. The dean of my school approved subsequent use of the approach, not just in MIS 201 but in other classes, including graduate classes. And Dr. Johnson, the university president, invited me to present this approach to a delegation of state legislators. They seemed to like it, too.
As one who threw everything but the technological equivalent of the kitchen sink at the problem I was surprised at how little was really new. If the learning process were Shakespeare's Hamlet, technology would not be the prince, or Ophelia, or the queen or the evil uncle. It would have a role like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, definitely a player but a bit player, not a star. In other words I have visited the promised land of technology and I have found out that it helps, but it is not the main answer. Good content and good teaching, along with a model of the students as discoverers, not as receptacles - is what makes the difference
Incidentally, most of the technology I used in this course is available at just about every university - or for that matter many junior colleges or high schools. With the exception of automated classrooms, there is no waiting list or availability problem with using these technologies.
Summary: Opportunity to Help Students and Lower University Budget (a little)
If this approach works, how can we take advantage of it? I think the answer lies in looking very closely at the customer. Our customer at George Mason University is a culturally diverse student, closer in age to 30 than to 20, who has at least one job. It is clearly possible to offer that customer a lot more content in a way that allows far fewer visits to campus. Instead of coming to campus 15, 30 or 45 times for every three credits, it's possible to come to campus perhaps once a week for class. This can mean other visits to campus can be for attending cultural events or symposia instead of punching a time card in a class.
The question of cost displacement often is raised. This process will not work in all classes. It may apply to about a third of the courses universities teach. Does the method I use save education dollars? Yes, but there are several caveats. First, my MIS 201 class was subsequently taught by an adjunct professor at a drastically lower unit cost than mine. Students get the content I developed - lectures, examples, etc. but with an expert spin by the adjunct professor. The TV lectures need to be redone every other semester, but that is not a major difficulty. If cost displacement is possible, we must be mindful of the studies that indicate that university professors are among the slowest to adopt new technologies - five years is a possible periodicity from such studies. But to me the most important opportunity is saving money through much greater use of the technologies already available to universities, and already paid for. My approach needed nothing new, nothing that had not already been purchased with state funds.
To conclude, I have to confess that this process was very satisfying for me - an old dog learned a lot of new tricks. I actually got to know these busy, capable students. Their work was excellent. Many said some nice things about the professor, so I will keep my copies of their talks close to my VCR and run them as a morale-booster. But the most memorable part of the course for me was a semester-long bout with a student, whom I'll call George. He was never sure he would finish and I kept prodding him to stay with it and to complete each module. At one point I said something to the effect that I had faith in George, that I knew he could do it. He did do it, pulling a B in the course by getting everything done with about two minutes to spare. Shortly later I got a nice e-mail from George saying, "Professor, thank you for having faith in me." I know it's a bit corny but if this approach can help more Georges to have more faith in themselves, it will be worth it.