Departments
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Week of 31 October 1997 |
Vol. I, No. 10 |
Feature
Article
Distance learning
Reach (far) out and teach someone
by Jim Graves
In the old days teachers could reach out and rap knuckles. But it's for certain that no knuckle-rapping will take place in a course in elementary Chinese being taught this fall on the Charles River Campus -- the students are hundreds of miles away at the Montclair Kimberley Academy in Montclair, N.J.
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Xiaoyang Zhou, a lecturer in the CAS modern foreign languages and literatures department, uses a video visualizer at 15 Saint Mary's St. to project Chinese characters to students (pictured in monitor on left) at Montclair Kimberley Academy in New Jersey. ENG Manufacturing Engineering Prof. Peter Bulkeley innovated distance learning at BU through two-way interactive video equipment in 1992. Zhou's elementary Chinese class marks the University's first distance-learning course in a foreign language. Photo by Fred Sway |
The setup is called distance learning, and in the videoconferencing room on the first floor of 15 Saint Mary's St., lecturer Xiaoyang Zhou faces two monitors. One shows the BU videoconferencing room, enabling Zhou to assure that she stays within camera range as she moves about. The other monitor shows a high school classroom where students are entering and taking seats. The images produced by the PictureTel two-way interactive compressed video equipment are clear.
"Good morning," Zhou tells the class. The students reply in kind, with smiles. "Did you have any problems with your homework assignment?" A hand pops up. Determining the student's problem, Zhou clarifies the difficulty using a video visualizer, a high-tech version of the old-fashioned overhead projector, to transmit written material to the camera. Then she begins conversing with the class in Chinese.
Aside from the electronic aspect, the course works like any other, says Zhou, who is a native Chinese and a graduate student in applied linguistics, with six years' teaching experience. "We meet daily. And while I had to design the material for high school rather than college students, we're using college textbooks and other college material. We do grammar and practice conversation and writing Chinese characters. I give dictation lessons, and the students fax me their papers, which I mark and fax back to them. We use the same procedure for tests."
During the first week, some bugs crawled into the system, but they were soon cleared up, says Zhou. "Now I feel quite comfortable in class and sometimes forget that I'm teaching electronically. The students are relaxed, too, and I feel that I'm getting to know them quite well. The monitors don't allow eye contact, however, and I miss that."
The students work hard and are learning rapidly, she says. But what do they say about the class? When Zhou asks them, the students respond with comments such as, "It's great," "It's cool," "We love it." One student notes that she and two classmates practiced their Chinese at a party they attended the previous weekend. Another says the class is enabling her to begin speaking Chinese with a friend who is a native speaker.
Jeanette Chaffee, the director of technology at the private New Jersey academy, calls the students enthusiastic and the instructor terrific. The class, she explains, is a pilot program to determine the feasibility of electronically tapping out-of-state resources to enhance the school's curriculum. "To date, the course is a success. If it continues going well, we hope to continue it spring semester."
The course came about as a result of earlier electronic contacts Provost Dennis Berkey had with Peter Greer, the headmaster of Montclair Kimberley Academy and former SED dean. At Greer's request, Berkey taught several calculus classes electronically to students at the academy and also participated electronically in a discussion with U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley, who was visiting the academy. Last spring, Greer asked the provost whether Boston University could provide instruction for a distance-learning course, provided the academy paid the instructor and the cost of using the Bell Atlantic transmittal lines. As it turned out, BU could, and Sue Gill and John Crowley of the provost's office made the arrangements that resulted in the Chinese course.
The provost says that his experience with distance learning "impressed me with its possibilities. Courses in the humanities, which usually require extensive discussion, are probably less amenable to distance learning than courses in business, technical subjects, and language, which tend to be more modular, or segmented. I don't believe distance learning threatens the core of our teaching on campus, but it may offer us profitable off-campus academic and commercial advantages. I've asked faculty volunteers to examine distance learning in a self-study of the University that we're conducting. I look forward to their report."
The PictureTel equipment being used in the Chinese class was made available to MFLL by ENG's manufacturing engineering department, which made BU an innovator in distance learning in 1992 when Manufacturing Engineering Professor Peter Bulkeley taught a graduate course to corporate engineers in Connec-ticut via a two-way interactive video hookup. Since then the manufacturing engineering department has installed a master's degree program for distance learners, says Prof. Merrill Ebner. "We're teaching four or five distance-learning courses each semester, and the whole departmental faculty participates," he says. "The students are at locations from Maine to Florida. In the department, we see a major future in distance learning."