Trends and Opportunities in Educational Technology

By Victor Edmonds, Ph.D. (注1) University of California, Berkeley

ABSTRACT

Educational technology has been supporting and supplementing teaching and learning in American Universities for many years. But it is only recently that technology has begun to show its promise for improving the quality of student learning and opening up the University to new levels of cooperation with partners around the world.

There are two main factors responsible for this development - the integration of the world wide web in the life of the University and the movement from desktop computing toward enterprise computing.

University of California, Berkeley, is one of our country's preeminent public universities. Computers are everywhere. But it is only recently that computers have beenshavingsa serious effect on what happens in classes. The use of computers in classrooms has been growing rapidly since 1998. More recently Learning Management systems are offering an easy and inexpensive means for moving course management and learning functions to the web. Webcasting of course lectures is proving useful to faculty and students. Teleconferencing over IP is connecting Berkeley with distant sites, most recently a course with instructors and students in both California and Korea.

The University has created Educational Technology Services to put these systems in place and to support faculty in their effective use. This organization is looking to an "enterprise" way of thinking, introducing systems that customize for individual classes and individual students the vast resources of the whole university in a way that is easily and inexpensively replicable.

Berkeley offers some courses in distance learning formats, but the community of scholars is a large part of its mission and face to face interaction with students is highly valued. As professors integrate new media they are beginning to move toward the blended course - a course made up of both classroom meetings and web based experiences. The growing presence of convenient Internet based teleconferencing has more professors giving lectures at other institutions without leaving campus. Both of these developments should facilitate regular exchanges between professors and classes throughout the world.

Educational Technology Services

Educational technology has been supporting and supplementing teaching and learning in American universities for many years. But it is only recently that technology has begun to show its promise for improving the quality of student learning and opening up the University to new levels of cooperation with partners around the world.

The University of California Berkeley is our country's preeminent public university. We have about 30,000 students and a beautiful campus across the bay from San Francisco. The university is home to some of the world's great researchers. Its teaching mission, especially at eh undergraduate level, is focused on the people of California. But it does attract students from all over the world. It embodies the diversity of the state of California. When the university counts its students by gender and ethnicity, females of Asian descent re the largest single group.

Educational Technology Services is the department I head at the University. This department is a new and rapidly evolving organization, sensitive to the trends in the applications of technology in teaching and learning and sensitive to the needs and ideas of the Berkeley faculty. One of my staff members is Chinese. In fact he is in the country now, visiting family. He tells me that China is rapidly catching up in technology and in many ways is ahead of Berkeley. He says the main contribution I can make is to share my knowledge and experience about making technology effective within a University and especially about the effective management of a technology service department that makes it easy for me. I just have to tell you about what I do all day.

Some people with jobs like mine report to the library. Many are called Director of Academic Computing and report to the Information systems and Technology group, the computing infrastructure group. I am part of the growing number who report to the academic side of the University. My boss is the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.

Educational Technology Services is part of the campus central administration, not part of a specific college or department. There are college and department staff who do locally what we do centrally. In total mysgroupsof 40 is about half of the positions in the University supporting the use of educational technology. Then there are the more than 200 staff members in the Information Technology sgroupssupporting the University infrastructure. They do our programming, maintain our networks, and manage our servers. They see us as the front line people who deal directly with the faculty, their course web sites and the classrooms.

In addition to our staff we have about 20 students who work for us part time. We teach no courses and offer no academic credit. Our main facilities are in one of the largest classroom buildings and we have spaces around campus such as control rooms for auditoriums and equipment closets in buildings with classrooms.

In simplest terms we manage the course web site program, provide the audiovisual equipment for the general classrooms and run the campus video and radio studios.

Our organization was put together last year, made up of smaller organizations and new positions. We represent a trend toward central services and toward professional technology specialists within the University.

In the recent past the use and support of educational technology was in the hands of the faculty. A few individuals with the inclination, the motivation, the skills and the resources created visuals for the classroom or computer based instructional materials to enhance their classes. Individual faculty using technology were seen as "pioneers." Their work was often supported by grants. In some universities service departments were set up to support these individuals. The idea was that these faculty would be leaders and other faculty would follow. Grants by the government and private foundations committed hundreds of millions of dollars to this concept in the 70, 80s and 90s. Some schools are still giving it a try. But despite all the money and effort it made little difference. A few classes were more effective for a year or two, but that was all. The vast majority of faculty did not follow.

There were four main reasons for this failure. First this approach demanded faculty learn a whole new set of skills. A faculty member had to become a programmer or a designer or an equipment operator. It was just too time consuming for almost everyone. Secondly, the content was tied to the tool. So when technology changed -- a new version of the software, a new operating system -- the computer based materials were no longer good and had to be built almost from scratch. Thirdly, each faculty member tends to have his or her own ideas about what should be taught and how it should be taught. Seldom did a faculty member use an innovation that was made by another faculty member. And finally these materials had to be served and used in specific computer labs, making them much less convenient for students that the wonderfully portable book.

In the early 90s the Internet came along, It separated the content from the programming and made servers available outside of labs. That solved two of the four problems and html was not terribly hard to learn. By 1997 the Berkeley Faculty Senate sponsored a Web Week that encouraged course web sites and a year later a Faculty Commission on Computing called for uniting the technology services sintosa central educational technology group.

In 1998 the University started using WebCT, a software package developed by a Canadian faculty member to simplify and integrate the use of the web in college teaching. In 1999 the University started offering as an alternative Course Info, a learning management system less feature rich than WebCT but easier to use.

In 2000 a local business called Best of Berkeley offered to set up course websites for faculty for free and in only 15 minutes. The university administration was not happy with the prospect of its course materials and student information being under the control of this unknown entity, but faculty members are famously free and some started using the service. The Best of Berkeley controversy gave the university an incentive to clarify the value ofshavingsthe University host its own courses. The University could integrate its student information system with the course web sites, giving faculty up to date rosters of students and a means to contact all enrolled students. This integrated software could add an endless list of features, the next being direct input of grades to the registrar's official record. The threat of Best of Berkeley helped the University see that course web sites should be a centralized service that integrate with all University systems in an enterprise system.
Best of Berkeley, by the way, died a pretty quick death. Its business plan was to make money selling advertising on the course web sites. Soon a Berkeley prof was horrified to find out that that when students signed on to his course they were greeted with an ad for on-line gambling. So money was allocated for the University to move toward its own enterprise leaning management system.

Other Universities were coming to the same conclusion. WebCT and Blackboard, which has taken over Course Info, were both preparing their own enterprise editions. Both of those products are being released for the first time this semester. We now offer faculty three options: CourseWeb which tiessintosour student information systems and offers an automatically generated course web site with just a few basic functions, and the older limited versions of the feature rich WebCT and the easy to use Blackboard. We will soon put all our efforts behind the enterprise edition of one of those two, both of which now are feature rich and easy to use.

Enterprise
The central notion of my talk is that educational technology must now be thought of as an enterprise activity. I am not certain we all have the same understanding of that word. I say that not because I am thousands of miles from home. I say that also in my own office.

Our University, like most large organizations, had been dependent for many years on large software packages that touch every part of the operation. These are generally financial packages. Payroll is the one that matters the most. Our university just changed the University wide budgeting package and the system we use for purchasing. After a couple of years of transition it is now much easier to manage your money and make purchases almost paper free. We are in the process of converting all our human resource functions to a new package. These kinds of packages are called enterprise packages because they are central to how things work and they touch every part of the organization. The administration is also used to spending tens of millions of dollars on such packages.

Meanwhile other than faculty salaries the University is not used to spending much on teaching. Chalk never cost much. Till 1998 educational technology was not seen as critical and was funded when money was available. Administrators understand now that education technology is even more essential to the whole organization - the enterprise - than budgeting or purchasing. They are adjusting quickly to the notion that it might cost a lot. At Berkeley, even with state funding for the University falling, the local campus allocations for educational technology continue to grow.

Californians have a strange way of talking that is hard enough for Americans to understand. I cannot imagine how this all translates to Chinese. Californians like to combine informal slang with unnecessarily complex technical words. My English dictionary does not contain the word "enterprise" the way I have been using it. And now I have to tell you about my department's four central guiding principles, three of which are not in my dictionary.

When we look at a project, we talk about replicability, scalability, extensibility and love.

Replicability is the simplest notion and the closest to real English. It means that the effort we putsintosthis project can be used or applied many times. Can we do this project for this language instructor, for example, in such a way that we can reuse the technology for other projects in other disciplines?

Scalability means that a project can scale up from one to many users. Can I easy accommodate one user? How about 2000 users? How about 5000 simultaneous users? If it meets the needs of one instructor, can it meet the needs of a whole department? A scalable learning management system, for example, can generate one course or thousands of courses. Each can be customized and all can be upgraded at once.

Extensibility is based on the word extend, which means to get longer in one dimension. We use it to mean the ability to get larger in many dimensions. It is close to the slang use of flexible as in a flexible person being one who can handle whatever challenges comes his way. Is this technology built in such a way that we can change it and put it to new uses?

The other question we ask isswheresis the love?

Student Learning

We have never had a discussion about what we mean by "Where is the love?" But when the question is asked we talk about the basic human factors. Will students like it? Will they relate to it? Is it fun? Will it help people get together? Will it enrich their lives?
Berkeley is a very moral place. Ethics, caring, social responsibility are important issues. Personal contact with students is extremely important to the professors. The main objection to technology is that is can get in the way of the personal connection of students and their professors. It is true we have one classroom with 700 seats but most of the professors who teach there are personable and available to students. Most of our 6000 classes are small. One of our fastest growing trends is the involvement of undergraduate students in professional research projects. Many undergraduates work in labs with the most distinguished professors. They make discoveries and write papers with them.

In this context a technologysgroupsmust be focused not on the technology but on teaching and learning. In our mission statement we say we encourage and support the effective integration of technology in teaching learning and communications. We do not push or promote technology. When we meet with faculty about a project we use an instructional design approach. We look at the learning outcomes - what will a student know at the end of this experience and how will we know if the student has learned. Then we work back to the best way to get there and then to technology only if and when it is the best way.
Technologies
In that context I would like to tell you about the technologies we are using.
I have mentioned Learning Management Systems earlier. On the practical level these integrated software packages offer modules for making announcements, emailing students, organizing studentssintoswork groups that communicate among themselves, setting up a threaded discussion or a chat group. They serve as repositories for the syllabus, study materials and readings. Instructors use them to give, collect and grade assignments and for testing and grading.

After a year of dramatic change WebCT and Blackboard are the only two learning management systems left that serve the higher education market with full-featured products. Many Universities use what we call "home grown" systems. The School of Business at UC Irvine created their own system, for example, which our School of Business is adopting. The Social Studies division at UCLA has a system that meets the needs of those disciplines. At UC Davis learning management system functions are being builtsintosthe student portal. We looked seriously at the idea of making our own learning management system and we did a significant amount of work in that direction putting together the CourseWeb facility that is now widely used but very limited in features. We decided it would be much less expensive and much quicker to buy the enterprise edition of WebCT, called Vista, or the enterprise edition of Blackboard. We will choose between the two in October and then the people in our Student Information Systemssgroupswill devote their time and efforts to integrating the selected product with our campus databases.

We have also been involved in the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI). This is an effort led by Stanford and MIT to create a way for Universities to share the modules they develop. For a while it looked like the OKI might become a learning management system product itself. But WebCT and Blackboard have become involved in the OKI and taking on many of its ideas. As a result of this effort I suspect that in a few years users of OKI compatible learning management systems will be able to share not only learning objects but whole modules that add new capabilities to the systems.

o Learning objects can be as broad as course packs, which are the digital, visual and interactive equivalent of textbooks or as narrow as an individual illustration that conveys a single idea. These have tended to be incompatible and inflexible. They might come with a given textbook or be available from a professional organization. We are part of an internationalsgroupscalled IMS. Thissgroupsis setting standards so that learning objects can be shared. Major universities, major training companies, textbook publishers and software developers such as WebCT and Blackboard are involved in this effort. I am confident it will lead to a future in which rich and customizable learning objects will be readily available around the planet.

Video
Video has been the richest part of educational technology. Your country has educated so many citizens through the TV University. Your television channels are rich with information programming that educates all viewers. Many of the best computer scientists are now at work merging the computing and video environments. Educational technology people and librarians are beginning to work together around the concept of digital repositories, a concept that will some day merge with the idea of learning objects.

We have an existing video distribution center on campus from the days when video was broadcast from a central source. We have recently changed the central switch in this room to one that is both analog and digital. We can take in video in any format, transform it to any other format and send it anywhere. The most common use is to feed in video from atriums and classrooms and encode this video as digital files to stream on the web. We are also connected to the video distribution system that feed network and cable TV. Our professors then without leaving the University can appear as experts on news and talk shows, which they do on a regular basis.

The service that is currently getting much attention and support is one we call Webcast.Berkeley. Our second largest lecture hall is set up as a TV studio. Many of the courses from that room and courses from other classrooms, a total of 15 course a semester, are web cast in their entirety as they happen. The videos are then available afterward for one or two semesters. We have done research on the usage of this video. It is used heavily by our students to review and study the material and it is used by a number of people through out the world for their own study or enrichment.

We have a listserv called Teachnet on which faculty discuss issues related to teaching at Berkeley. Recently a professor of biology complained that because of Webcast students were no longer coming to his early morning class. They slept in and watched it later on their computers. He said he was going to stop the webcasting of his class so students would come to class. An interesting discussion came about. Other professors suggested that if students could get the material better by starting and stopping the webcast and by watching it at time when they are fully awake, why should the professor object to that. Another suggested that he should let his students watch the video lecture when they wanted and he should spend the class time on the kinds of interactions that can only be done in person. I am happy with the way that our webcasting program, by simply making lectures available on computers, is getting professors to look at how best to use their precious class time. It is quickly leading to the hybrid course, which I will talk about later.
o This month we are starting a new service called Webcast Special Events as a public service. Every day the Berkeley campus is alive with special lectures and events of interest to students and anyone interested in current events or the world of the mind. Each week we choose the two or three best of these events, webcast them live and archive them on the webcast web site. You and your students can find them at webcast.Berkeley.edu.

Our colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) have taken this idea farther. The University has committed itself to making vast amount of its teaching materials available freely on its websites. The project is called the Open Courseware Initiative. They are currently hiring a large production staff to work with faculty to make their materials more visually rich and more useful for all who come to the website to learn. MIT is also a prime force in the Open Knowledge Initiative and the IMS Standards process. Their work is a challenge to all of us in higher education to freely share the incredible content we not have on our campuses.

o This is not to s ay that the concept of "intellectual property" has been abandoned. Questions of ownership and use of intellectual and creative property are being hotly debated in our country. The congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to try to address ownership issues. But technology changes quickly and, from my point of view, the law is causing more problems than it solved. The international sharing of learning objects and teaching modules will demand some new agreements that hopefully will be more like the MIT Open Courseware Initiative and less like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Classroom Technology
I have emphasized the web side of our operation - the virtual space - but the real space is important also. The campus has 240 general assignment classrooms that are served by my group. There are also a few classrooms run by individual schools and departments, especially the School of Business. Of the 240 rooms 62 have built in technology. These tend to be the larger rooms and account for more than half the seats in the University. A technology classroom has data projection permanently mounted, an Ethernet connection to the Internet, video input of VHS and DVD, stereo sound, a high quality screen and is ready for the instructor to bring in his or her own laptop computer. We have a staff of10 persons with 20 student assistants who assist faculty with technology problems, operate complex facilities or events, help get portable equipmentsintosrooms that have no built-in equipment and sometimes capture video of the class.

o Videoconferencing has been an important service for years. Its usage has grown very much since September 11th, 2001. We run the University Teleconference Center and have portable equipment for Internet based teleconferencing. Most of our conferencing is done in the Center, which is a nice facility and ISDN conferencing is still the most reliable and highest quality. Videoconferencing over IP, or internet-based conferencing, is greatly improving and quickly gaining in popularity. The University of California is building a new campus at Merced in the somewhat remote central valley of California. The plans for the classroom building include the infrastructure for videoconferencing in every classroom. Last year we used videoconferencing for 7 full courses that involved students or instructors at other colleges. One of those courses was co-taught and co-attended by a professor and students in Korea. We use videoconferencing for so that our professors can guest lecture at other universities without traveling, for dissertation defenses and job interviews and for many meetings.
Missing in our department is Assessment Services. I hope to create a team that will help faculty focus on student learning by providing expertise and assistance in designing assessments that are customized, formative and outcome based.

There are many things happening on the Berkeley campus that I have not touched on. A professor of Buddhist Studies, for example is heading up the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, a worldwide effort to make visuals and information about cultural artifacts available through an interface based on time and location. The University is in the process of adopting portal technology, which will be the main interface of the students, faculty and staff with the systems we support. A number of people on campus are interested in the handheld, especially the Palm OS. Most of us use these regularly and are forming asgroupsto create ways to use them in teaching and learning. This semester one faculty member in information sciences gave each student a digital camera. We are looking forward to the results of his experiments.

I am frequently asked how we get the faculty interested in using technology. I have never seen that as a problem. At Berkeley, at Loyola Chicago before that and everywhere I have been the problem has been keeping up with faculty ideas and needs. A centralsgroupshas to have a visible presence on campus so that faculty are confident that there is support available. There needs to be training sessions, especially given by other faculty, to show how technology is used effectively. Not everyone will use technology, but enough will that they will inspire others and students will request technology that they found useful in other classes. Then there will be those faculty who never use technology, but that is good too. Students should have a variety of learning experiences.

The Hybrid Course
I think we are movingsintosa time in which different educational institutions represent different kinds of learning experiences geared toward different kinds of learners. My wife, a mother and social worker, is considering a completely on-line Ph.D. program. My 18-year-old daughter, on the other hand, wants a college swheresshe can interact with other young people. My wife is the kind of disciplined person who will work on her courses every evening. My daughter probably would forget she was enrolled in an on-line course. She needs the discipline imposed by class meetings and assignments.
A few years back thousands of American colleges were trying to be Harvards or Berkeleys, research universities with a resident undergraduate program. As distant learning technologies took away their place based advantages, many of these institutions began to scramble for a more realistic niche. That process is still going on and corporations are movingsintosthe education market offering intelligent alternatives. A large and painful shake up has begun. I think the large research universities will continue to thrive.

At Berkeley now there are about 6000 classroom based courses and one on-line course. (There are many on-line course offered by Berkeley Extension). Today about a thousand of those classroom courses have some web component. And that number is expanding rapidly. Faculty are beginning to talk about a hybrid course - a blending of web based and classroom based components. The course web site could manage the course materials, assignments and discussion. Lectures or demonstrations could be webcast. Faculty would then meet with students for give and take sessions or would work with students on projects or in labs. I suspect that by next fall we will have a few officially hybrid courses that meet on a reduced schedule. I am confident that our faculty will evolve a new teaching style that is both warmly human and intellectually challenging

I think we have China is our future also. Berkeley has been close to China for many years, a lot of that contact put in place by our revered former Chancellor Tien, himself of Chinese ancestry. The technology managers, people like me and my counterparts here, need to establish ties. But real cooperation must come on a faculty-to-faculty or department-to-department basis. Sharing of guest lectures or courses by video conferencing would be a first step. As the technology world now in development takes shape there will be opportunities for sharing of teaching modules and learning objects, creating a level of international sharing and cooperation never before possible.

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