CL PD Q.: What will Distance Learning be in five years from now? General Expectations: Distance education will be the pioneer in the efforts to increase the efficiency of higher education and to adapt curricula to the changing demands of modern society. The very nature of distance learning, together with the deployment of modern information technologies and instructional designs will lead to the individualization of instruction, practicing, and evaluation. In five years from now the seemingly oxymoron of providing individualized education in the mass production learning environment of a virtual university should have become reality. We expect that higher education will serve possible future threads: · There will more emphasis on "just In Time/Drill Down"-learning where people receive segments of education in time they need and only to the level of detail that is required. There may be a bifurcation between classic Liberal Arts Education and Professional Education. The meta goals of these are similar: "learn to learn"; focus on critical thinking; life or career fulfillment. But a danger is that the former is perceived as a luxury while the latter is as a necessity. Over the long term this has obvious consequences as to what is publicly funded, what people (either via government, or directly as customers) with limited resources are willing to pay for. The main focus of Distance Learning will be on the professional education. Liberal Arts Ed., however, is not excluded. To make Distance Learning competitive and successful we have to identify and implement superior features of technologies in order to reinvent education. We consider it as a waste of resources (e.g. bandwidth, CPU, memory) to mirror current on-campus classroom education into a virtual university. "Distance" will become an archaic adjective when applied to education. We can envision a virtual university where all, the students, faculty, administration, and even computing resources can be distributed. Much more sophisticated means of evaluation will be available, which could enable the replacement of the credential (diploma or certificate) by point-of-hire testing. Database technology could keep track of detailed skills rather than abstract grades - the goal would be to keep an individual "profile" of each student instead of a grade average. This "profile" would be the base to provide individualized studies for each student. Prerequisite for this will be a finer granularity of educational materials and the deployment of artificial or semi-artificial intelligence in order evaluate the individual students abilities/weaknesses/preferences and to create adequate personalized learning modules for him/her. Distance learning no longer will be subject to time - traditional expressions such as "semester", "course", "section", etc. will have lost their meaning. The student will choose when to begin a segment of education. According to the students profile even the duration of an educational segment will be variable. Our goal is to achieve global asynchrony. Politics/Systems/technology that is needed: A automated, national-level credit transfer system is needed. This system could facilitate the very same model telecommunications is using today. This would cause the need for a new economic model, too. The future in distance learning will be mostly asynchronous. For this, we will need an asynchronous multimedia system for "virtual office hours" that can be edited, threaded, and organized like today's email but allows vocal communication, sharing of analog documents (white-board, slide-show, video) Also,(semi)artificial intelligence systems should replace FAQ's in order to personalize the communication with students looking for assistance while relieving the lead faculty from routine answers. We need systems that will monitor/evaluate the student. I/O devices from virtual reality research might be used in two means: to ease the communication of the student with his learning environment, and to monitor through sensors the students learning success. We need database systems that are able to create individual learning/knowledge profiles of each student. We need (semi)intelligent systems to create and support individualized curricula, tailored in four ways to the individual: content, delivery vehicles, instructional design, and timing. Testing/evaluation support systems that facilitate both process and content archiving/re-use. A database system must keep track of the "grains" of educational materials and their relation to each other in order to create individual instruction. Finally, questions. What is the role of the classic university in the globalization of education? Can the (slow) pace of change of university culture keep up with the rapid change in needs for both content and delivery? If so, we must find ways to help. GCF Thanks for your notes! Where do you see the professor in this scenarion. I see for professonals, asynchronous tools as supplating traditional synchronouds lecture, but I wopuld have thought that "office-hours" could be area of high-value personalized interactions? I would have guessed that that wheras today all universities provide instruction at roughly same cost (for universities at a given tier) one could see "educational products" at different cost points with more personalized instruction (and more synchronous interaction) at higher cost. (Cost and price are different but most interesting is cost) PD Question is about the value of these personalized interactions. Doesn't the efficiency and the quality of so called "personal instruction" depend too much on the actual personality of the professor and his/her ability to "teach"? I would like to go away from the traditional picture of the (one) professor teaching a course. The goal is to individualize education and to provide a curriculum that is best-fit tailored to the needs of the student this model won't work anymore. I rather see a team of faculty creating "virtual" professors - maybe assisted with "mentors", counselors, social workers, etc.. The current practice of office hours: 1. A try to compensate the educational shortcomings of mass production class room teaching. If the students curriculum is individualized (both in content and time !)a lot of these downfalls do not exist anymore. 2. (increasingly) to help students over the social problems they experience on campus or are caused by being away from their regular environment. A distance student selects his/her real environment - academic education no longer will mean a disruption of your life. Plus, most of the faculty are no more qualified than anybody else to help somebody through social problems. Office hours most likely will have a new meaning - they will serve to foster advanced learners (who require according to studies more attention / learning challenges / reinforcement) rather than being degraded to become an educational/social helpdesk. We consider synchronous education as valuable mostly because we don't know better yet. (Or, don't want to know?). Synchronous instruction comes with a high price tag that cannot be reduced due to the human factor (faculty) and his/her limited availability in time (a real professor cannot operate in parallel). .... So I agree re basic model with traditional synchronous classes being replaced (eventually) by appropriate asynchronous material I also see a natural hierarchy in mentors but I then deduce that (to be immodest) I can provide synchronous insight in some areas that no computer system is likely to. Thus I deduce we need to set up a system where both synchronous/interactive/asynchronous is technically allowed but in a framework where you can implement function at preferred price/convenience point Maybe when you go to university each student gets N learning credits ( as with Microsoft software help, you get some many hours technical support annd can buy more) which they can spend at .25 credit Basic asynchronous per hour .5 credit TA 1 credit Professor 10 credits World expert etc. So I have been very busy in move related issues and did not have time to discuss NSF proposal Here is letter of Intent (which is totally non binding) We need 5 page preproposal by end of december I took liberty of using FSU name in vain. I hope you can suggest ideas etc. I only described aspects of what we have been doing with JSU and MSU in detail So please make suggestions. I note relevance of Florida A and M to HBCU's I see two natural "applications" 1) Needs of State of Florida 2) Needs of minority institutions PD. However I'd like to clarify something: My intention is not to get rid of synchronous instruction at all. What I see is that in a distance learning environment this kind of instruction should be rather used for those issues that cannot be dealt with through technological means - the "synchronous insight", as you worded it. Plus, in certain fields on-line group interaction will be desirable. The question about how to "pay" for the services is quite interesting. Will there be a nominal fee for an intruction unit (traditional), or an itemized payment for the efforts it takes to (successfully??) commit this unit to the memory of the individual student? Should we require payment at all if our education fails? LETTER of INTENT: NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) Program - ------------------------------------------------------------------- (Information Technology Education and Workforce, and Information Management areas) PI: Geoffrey C Fox, Florida State University co-PI: Chris Lacher, Florida State University co-PI: Joe Thompson, Mississippi State University co-PI: Willie Brown, Jackson State University co-PI: Nancy McCracken, Syracuse University Possible Participating Institutions: Florida State, Florida A and M, Jackson State, Mississippi State, NCSA, Rice, Syracuse Possible Title Computer Science Curriculum and the Next Generation of Education Technologies Summary ------- Rapid advances in computer technology requires computer science curriculum changes to best prepare students for jobs in business, academia and government. These advances further allow new types of interactive courseware , new types of learning environments and new business models for educational infrastructure. This proposal weaves these themes together and will develop prototype undergraduate computer science curriculum combined with research and development in the distance and distributed learning environments that could be deployed 5-10 years from now. We will have a focus on the particular needs of Historically Black Colleges (HBCU). We will research architectures that allow modular courseware integrating different authors and different authoring strategies. Further we assume that learning environments should allow integration of capabilities from multiple academic and commercial sources. The major components of the project will be * Development of interactive computer science courseware that exploits the best educational technologies and prepares tomorrow's undergraduates for careers involving computers. This courseware will be integrated into course sequences appropriate for our university coalition and outside use. * Research in and prototype development of a next generation learning environment exploiting the best academic and commercial ideas in both the education specific and general information areas. This environment will support synchronous, asynchronous and interactive learning models. * Delivery of the new courses with teachers from the participating universities and a broad based student body. * Assessment and evaluation of new relevant Information Technology and their application in delivered courses from both outside and inside our new center. A major result will be a networked Computer Science courseware delivery system which will supplement on-campus CS curricula at HBCUs with CS courses from other HBCU's and from major CS departments around the country over the Internet. It will also enable HBCUs to offer courses to other universities via the Internet. This will build on experience gained from delivery from Syracuse of several regular semester Syracuse CS courses at Jackson State (an HBCU) over the Internet. Jackson State now is using this technology to teach their own CS courses at Morgan State. This effort is having a significant effect on the pipeline of minority CS graduates, enhancing the quality of their education and also serving to increase the attraction of a computer science career. We have already shown the potential to be expected from enlarged effort across all the HBCUs, as well as the rewards from involving CS faculty at HBCUs both in the use and enhancement of the underlying information technology. We will enhance this activity by integrating the Florida State distance education CS curriculum into it. The technology approach will be built around the concept of a collaborative portal with shared events supported in both synchronous and asynchronous mode. We will build the system from scratch using ideas and components from Syracuse's TangoInteractive system developed over the last two years. We will integrate Florida State's experience using the commercial Blackboard technology and a recent complete evaluation of current practice from Mississippi State. Geoffrey Fox gcf@npac.syr.edu, http://www.npac.syr.edu Director of NPAC and Professor of Physics and Computer Science Phones Cell 3152546387 Office 3154432163 Npac 3154431723 Fax 3154434741