At the podium, Eldin Leighton of the Seeing Eye lectures about dog breeding in Professor Pascal Oltenacu's Animal Science 321 class Sept. 21 using distance learning facilities in Ives 115. Robert Barker/University Photography
At first glance Ives 115 in the new Ives Building looks like an ordinary classroom, at least for this high-tech age. There are tiers of desks with swivel seats attached. At the front of the room, the guest lecturer has a microphone clipped to her blouse and a transmitter on her belt. An LCD projector hanging from the ceiling throws PowerPoint slides on a screen above the lecturer.
But this room has two more screens, one above and to the left of the lecturer and another at the back of the room. On these, students are sitting around a long library table, fidgeting and leafing through handouts just like the ones in the tiered seats here. Periodically the scene shifts: more students around different tables, one a classroom with only three people in it.
The class is Animal Science 321, Animal Genetics, and Anita DeStefano of Boston Medical School is explaining how to locate genetic markers for a hereditary disease. At the end she asks for questions. There's a moment of silence, then a disembodied voice says, "We have a question from Massachusetts."
The extra screens cut to one of the tables we've seen before, zooming in on one young woman. DeStefano's examples were diseases in human beings, so the questioner wants to know what insurance companies will do with the results of genetic testing. This sparks a discussion in the local classroom. When a student here asks a question, a camera at the front of the room zooms in so the students on all the video links can see them.
Students at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Vermont, Penn State and SUNY Cobleskill are all taking this course along with those here in Ives 115. They see the lecturer, the PowerPoint slides and each other on their own video screens.
Welcome to "distance learning."
It's happening in Ives 115 and the similarly equipped but smaller Ives 109, highly automated classrooms whose design was honored by TeleCon, an international telecommunications conference for educators and business executives, for "offering a fresh approach and achieving the highest and smoothest level of interactivity."
It's also happening in a classroom in Stocking Hall equipped with a portable PictureTel system, and sometimes via satellite uplinks from Media Services in Martha Van Renssalaer Hall. It soon will be happening via video streaming on the Internet.
It's not really new. For years the university has offered remote engineering and management courses for corporate clients and provided training to cooperative extension agents via telephone and satellite links. Correspondence courses by mail, recently augmented by the web and e-mail, abound. In fact, according to Jon Levy, executive director of Cornell's Office of Distance Learning, when you count extension programs, Cornell has more students off campus than on.
What's new is technology that makes video links between classrooms almost routine, and a movement throughout higher education to reach out to students who can't easily come to a campus.
"Cornell has a small and somewhat unique window of opportunity to move into a leadership position with this," Levy said. Recognizing this, the provost created the Office of Distance Learning two years ago, with ILR professor David Lipsky as director and Levy as executive director.
Seeing the person at the other end is not just a frill, Levy said. A nod or a frown tells you whether or not you're being understood. "I think the word is 'presence,'" he said. "You're right in the room with them. You can see them, you can hear them, you can interact with them, you tell jokes."
Most of the time, he believes, it's a good as being there. Often it can be even better, providing opportunities not available in the traditional classroom. Other times it's not quite as good, but that might still be better than not being there at all.
Most of the remote sites in Animal Genetics 321 have fewer than a dozen students and wouldn't have been able to justify setting up such a course; and most of the guest lecturers the course uses would probably not have been willing to deliver the same lecture at five sites.
"If the student can't be in the classroom, or if the faculty member can't be with the students, face to face, now you can do it," Levy said.
The university has another distance-learning maven, H. Dean Sutphin, associate dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences for academic programs. Four years ago, Sutphin formed a committee of CALS faculty and staff to formulate a strategic plan for distance learning activities. The plan, published in July 1997, earned Sutphin the 1998 "Barrier Buster" award from A*DEC, a consortium of land-grant and other agricultural colleges organized to further distance education.
The CALS plan was published at just about the time the Office of Distance Learning was created by the provost, and Levy and Sutphin collaborate closely. They both tick off about the same list of benefits offered by the new distance-learning technologies:
·Enriching the curriculum by bringing in experts from off-campus, linking students with others around the world and linking faculty with their colleagues. Sutphin is involved with a course on environmental issues called The Global Classroom, which brings together students and faculty in agricultural colleges in Sweden, the Netherlands, Honduras and Costa Rica.
·Finding a critical mass of students for courses that might not otherwise be offered.
·Reducing the cost of faculty travel. "We just installed videoconferencing in our Washington, D.C., office," Levy reported. "Now we will be able to have faculty teach from here, fully interactive."
·Making courses available to "non-traditional students" and alumni. "It opens up access to lifelong learning," Sutphin said. "It can be a service to our students after they have graduated." Several courses to be offered to alumni via the web are now in development.
·Finally, creating new sources of revenue for the university by adding students without building more on-campus infrastructure.
We can't just take any existing course and send it out, Sutphin said. "My experience has been that any faculty member who wants to move material to website-based technology or other forms of distance learning has gone through a major revision and re-look at the organization of the course," he said. He envisions a gradual evolution where faculty members will first test modules of their courses on campus.
Levy hopes to let faculty concentrate on the content and not worry about the technology. "We're going to stay with them all the way, teach them how to use the technology and in some cases operate it for them, so they can do what they're paid to do, which is teach," he said. "They don't get paid to be video camera operators."
No one thinks distance learning is going to replace traditional education.
"There's an education outside the classroom in a campus like Cornell, the active engagement with each other, access to the libraries, group meetings, social events that happen in the dorms -- the whole range of events that are important to today's college students will remain," Sutphin said. "But it is certainly creating new educational institutions that are not bound by buildings or real estate. I think it will ultimately lead to a better educated society because we have better opportunities for everyone."
More information on Cornell's distance learning programs is available at http://www.dl.cornell.edu.
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