Interactive Instructional Technology
Northern Arizona University offers new long-distance
teaching strategies

By William Doyle

FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA
"GOOD MORNING, YUMA. Good morning, Prescott. Good morning, Thatcher. And Good morning, Flagstaff." So begins John Monsma's class in Family Communications at Northern Arizona University.

Professor Monsma is teaching not just the 40 or so students seated in this room but also another 200 students sitting in similar television studio-like classrooms all over the state of Arizona or at home, watching on their own television sets.

This is one of many interactive instructional technology courses, which play an important role in the partnerships that Northern Arizona University (NAU) has worked out with community colleges throughout the state.

Like other Sun Belt states, Arizona is expecting a big increase in higher education enrollments--an additional 50,000 students by the year 2015. Seeking ways to accommodate this flood of students without building expensive new campuses, the Arizona legislature has mandated NAU to provide upper division (junior and senior) classes for students in remote areas of the state.

NAU's response to this challenge is the Arizona "partnership plan," which provides upper division and some graduate courses in remote locations. Students at these sites, some of them hundreds of miles from Flagstaff, are considered Northern Arizona University students, and will receive NAU degrees at the completion of their coursework.

This year, almost 14,000 students have enrolled at 28 different locations, where they can choose from 70 undergraduate and graduate courses.

Most of these courses are taught in conventional classroom settings at local community colleges or other accessible sites by NAU faculty. But a growing number are interactive television courses like Professor Monsma's.

Interactive television makes it possible for students who are not physically present in Flagstaff to participate in classroom discussions. This is a big improvement over the old, one-way system, which allowed students at remote locations to listen to lectures but provided no way for them to ask questions or to participate in classroom give-and-take.

Monsma's classroom on the Flagstaff campus is similar to most modern lecture halls, with the exception of the four TV cameras that are aimed at the professor and the students, and three large monitors that dominate the front and rear of the room. The monitors bring back images of students seated in classrooms, or other locations around the state, accompanied by student comments and questions.

An operator in a separate room, near the broadcasting instructor, controls the monitors. In addition to lecturing, the professor can use an overhead projector or feed images from a computer into the monitors.

To ask a question or join in the class discussion, a student at one of the remote sites speaks into a microphone and the camera operator then focuses on that student. The discussion flows easily, with students in different locations addressing each other sometimes by name but often by such descriptions as "the girl in the white shirt."

Ed Grouenhout, interim vice president at Northern Arizona, said the interactive TV courses provide the best educational experience possible for a student who is not actually seated in the classroom with a professor.

The system is so advanced that much of it was not commercially available when the plan was being developed. "We had to go to Japan to find some of the technology we needed," Grouenhout said.

The technology is expensive (about $420,000 to equip a site, and another $40,000 annually to operate it), but Grouenhout said, "I can guarantee you that this costs less than building a new campus." He said the per-student cost of interactive TV courses is roughly equivalent to traditional classroom costs on the Flagstaff campus.

In Monsma's class, students in Flagstaff were able to discuss a problem in family communications virtually face to face with other students scattered around the state. The students were able to see and hear each other clearly, and those who were hundreds of miles away were just as engaged as those who sat a few feet from the professor.

A student who was watching from her home in Flagstaff called in to engage in "role playing" with a student in the classroom. The NAU students in Flagstaff, who were mostly traditional college age, and the largely non-traditional students at the remote locations exchanged very different views on some of the topics under discussion.

"The best thing about this is that I am able to reach so many more students," Monsma said. "That makes teaching this way really rewarding for me."

However, interactive television presents some difficulties for both professor and student. "A professor must avoid at all costs the 'talking head syndrome,'" Monsma said. "It's too easy for students elsewhere to tune you out."

Students, especially at the remote locations, must be willing to use the capabilities of two-way television to engage both the professor and other students. At least in the classroom, an instructor can shout or throw something to attract the attention of silent slumberers in the back row.

Although the use of interactive television is increasing, more than 90 percent of the "partnership" courses at local community colleges and other locations are offered in conventional classrooms and laboratories. Most of the instructors are adjunct, part-time faculty who are hired by the academic departments in Flagstaff.

In some locations, only a few sets of courses are offered, leading, perhaps, to a degree in nursing or teaching. In other locations, the partnership programs resemble a traditional university.

One of these is Arizona Western College, a community college in the desert town of Yuma, which offers a wide range of bachelor's degrees and graduate programs under the supervision of NAU. Enrollment on the mixed campus includes 7,000 Arizona Western students and 700 at Northern Arizona-Yuma, while another 150 students at other locations are taught by NAU-Yuma faculty.

Nick Lund, executive director at NAU-Yuma, said the goal is to eliminate barriers separating the two institutions, so that students can pursue a bachelor's degree as easily as they could at a traditional campus. "At first, people were very territorial," Lund said. "But we've done a marvelous job of breaking down those boundaries."

Students in Yuma do not appear to have difficulty moving from the two-year college, Arizona Western, to the four-year school, Northern Arizona, if they have done the required work. They seem to avoid the problems that California students frequently encounter when they try to transfer from a community college to a University of California or California State University campus.

As a result, NAU-Yuma has graduated more than 900 students with bachelor's or master's degrees in its nine years of existence.

At the heart of this collaborative effort is the educational resource building, a $5 million structure that houses a 135-station computer lab, several interactive television classrooms, and faculty offices.

Both Arizona Western and Northern Arizona students use this facility. A walk down the halls reveals that faculty members are grouped by academic discipline, not by institution. "This isn't just about offering courses," Lund said. "We've created an entire four-year campus."

In Flagstaff, faculty and staff members are working on what they call the "third dimension" of educational delivery--courses on the Internet. Sam Levy, director of educational systems programming, is sorting through dozens of courses that have been proposed for Internet delivery.

Before offering the technological wizardry of some of these courses, Levy wants to make sure that those students who stand to benefit most from new modes of delivery have access to them. This means providing computers and hookups that are capable of sustaining the courses. Once this infrastructure is in place, Levy said, new possibilities will open up for the time- or place-bound.,

NAU President Clara Lovett likes to call her institution "one university, geographically dispersed."

In an interview, the president said the success of NAU's partnership programs would depend on their ability to provide a mix of course delivery methods, including traditional lectures and laboratories, interactive television and the Internet. "We want to provide more education to more students with more options--and this does not mean bricks and mortar," Lovett said.

The new methods of educational delivery that are already in use, or that are being developed, are student-focused, Lovett said, and that has not been the traditional way of doing business in higher education. "We need to continue the process of moving the university toward being student-focused, without losing faculty as the center of the institution," she said.

The Northern Arizona University partnerships with community colleges are one way to break away from the old ways, the president added. But if the experiment is to succeed it will be necessary to move beyond the pioneering group of professors and administrators who started the program, and involve the more reluctant members of the faculty and staff.

"The biggest stumbling block for this program has been the traditional academic model," Lovett said--the idea that a university consists of a group of faculty members working in one set of buildings at one location.

Another obstacle is the lack of adequate instructional materials for students at the remote locations. They do not have the easy access to journals and other resources that students on the Flagstaff campus take for granted. An efficient and inexpensive solution for this problem has not yet been found.

Charles Connell, provost at NAU, is trying to solve these and other problems in order to provide quality education for students enrolled in the partnership programs.

Connell said NAU is moving away from defining quality in traditional ways, such as measuring the amount of time students spend in the same room with a professor. The new methods of delivering instruction, like interactive TV classes, are leading the university toward definitions based on outcomes--what does the student know at the end of a college career?

"Quality can be defined as the most amount of learning for the least amount of cost," he said. "That's what we provide here at NAU."

The students in Professor Monsma's class are preparing to write papers, which they might drop off at his office on the Flagstaff campus or mail to him from hundreds of miles away. Tests that were taken on Indian reservations, in Phoenix or Tucson, or in the deserts of southern Arizona are being returned. And students who might be shivering in Flagstaff's chilly winds, or sweating in Yuma's heat, are preparing to go on to their next course, which will be in the same university but not in the same zip code.