Howard Strauss, Princeton University

There have been some very exciting things happening here at Euphoric State University. We have been trying for some time to get all of our courses online without much success. Of course by online I mean on the Web. Today, if something is not on the Web – at least for students – it might as well not even exist. For faculty, "online" seems to mean that they can use e-mail in their courses and that those photocopied handouts they used to distribute to their classes can now be obtained from the Web. Our IT staff thinks that having a course online requires having lots of pedagogically useful material on the Web, or at least something beyond the course reading list.

Our problem is that it is just too hard to get faculty to become experts in HTML, Java, JavaScript, DreamWeaver, Flash, FrontPage, Perl, and XML; to become competent in the basics of good online design and online pedagogy; and to become world-class graphic artists. Nonetheless, some folks here at Euphoric State do not feel these are insurmountable obstacles and are determined to teach faculty HTML, FrontPage and the like anyway. However, most of us know we need a better solution.

When our IT staff builds world-class online courses for our faculty, even with our most talented IT people, it takes at least a person-year to build a single quality course. Our parabola Website took four person-years to build, which is not that unusual. And once we build a course we need to maintain it, which is an increasing burden until we have to nearly completely rewrite it in five years because it is out of date and because the hardware and software have radically changed. At Euphoric State we offer about a thousand courses each year. Even if we were to devote our entire Web services staff of ten people to this task it would take us at least 200 years to get all of our courses online, and that ignores the burden of maintenance. Almost no one here believes this is a viable approach although we continue to devote considerable staff to the effort.

A few years ago we decided to build a simple, easy-to-use, user-friendly Web-page generator for faculty. We called it AcademicProductionLine or APL. We advertised APL widely, taught courses on how to use it, and assisted faculty when they needed help. Unfortunately APL was not the great success we hoped it would be. Faculty who tried it – and there were very few of them – demanded new features almost immediately. They had us almost continuously updating APL. It just wasn’t worth the effort for the 50 or so rather simple Web pages that faculty built with it over three years. By then we could not withdraw support for APL because the few faculty members who did use it were very influential and insisted on continued support for their APL Web pages.

The CMS
It was at about the time we were giving up on APL that we learned about course management systems such as BlackBoard, WebCT, and TOPS – The Outstanding Pedagogy System. Course management systems claimed to be able to make it possible for faculty to put their courses online with very little help from our IT staff. Vendor demos convincingly showed us that a faculty member who could just use Notepad or MS Word could have stuff online nearly instantly. And course management systems also included all of the critical communications facilities essential for a course, including e-mail lists, chat rooms, discussion groups, user forums, and more. We tested all of the course management systems. TOPS came out on top; we adopted it and installed it.

We launched an extensive TOPS training and marketing program. Most of our training was one-on-one in faculty offices, but we also trained many graduate students as TOPS trainers. While the results of this enormous effort were rewarding they were far less than our expectations. One hundred and eighty six courses were on TOPS in the first year, almost four times the number of courses we were able to get on APL in three years. But this was still only one fifth of all our courses online and this improved only a tiny bit the next year.

Little more than . . .
A glance at the courses that we did get online revealed that most were little more than course descriptions, reading lists, syllabi, and the like. Faculty we interviewed said that it was still too hard to get started even on a system as easy as TOPS. To solve that problem we had our IT staff take all of the data we had on courses from our student systems and copy it to TOPS for all one thousand courses and seminars we teach each semester. We also built e-mail list for all courses and automatically updated them every day.

For our students this was a wonderful thing. For every course there was the same TOPS Website with the same communications infrastructure, class lists, and faculty descriptions with the same user interface. For most faculty this meant that with no effort at all they had their courses online and could e-mail to all students. To do much more they had to edit the courses we automatically built for them.

All the courses
With much local fanfare and carefully placed articles in several journals of higher education we proudly announced to the world that Euphoric State had all of its courses online. All! One hundred percent! No exceptions! We should have felt wonderful but in fact we found ourselves right back where we had started. While about a third of our faculty did modify the tiny amount of information we automatically created for them, two thirds of our faculty didn’t even do that.

What’s Euphoric State to do? We have all of our courses on line. Now what? Now we need to find a way to get lots of pedagogically correct, affordable online content into the great communications infrastructure provided by our course management system. Or do we?

At a faculty meeting one professor said that instructional technology had promised a new world of teaching and learning and had delivered little more than e-mail and Web browsers with personality disorders. In the end learning is a very personal, internal thing, they said, and it has been going on since the first humans walked the face of the Earth and will continue to happen long after the Web is just a distant memory. Moses, Machiavelli, and Nelson Mandela never learned anything from a PowerPoint presentation and they did just fine. So will our students.

While the faculty may have made some good points, they are never taken too seriously at Euphoric State, and besides, there are very strong arguments for the use of technology in instruction if we could just do it right.

Interactive learning
What is a good online course? A good online course is not a lecture or a book online. It doesn’t just try to pour information into a receptive or unreceptive brain. Instead, it creates an interactive learning experience where the student is in control, can go at her own pace, and can freely explore where the learning experience takes her. It uses the intelligence, memory, and connectivity of a computer to create the pedagogical ideal of a "guide on the side" which coaches, cajoles, and comforts a student struggling with a cornucopia of new ideas.

How do we expect faculty to create these online courses? By and large we don’t. We custom-build courses for them one at a time like custom cars. And like custom cars, they can be everything a faculty member wants if cost is no object. But cost does matter as does time. Therefore we need to reserve this technique for a very small proportion of courses, if any. At very least we need to use some standardized software modules in these custom Websites.

If left alone with a course management system faculty can enter their own plain text, as many do. Forget anything as complex as bold text or bulleted lists. They are not supported. Faculty can also link to an MS Word document or other text processing document. Potentially this should allow some nice documents that include images, gif animations, backgrounds, hypertext links, audios, videos, and all of the other things that MS Word allows in a text document. Just one mouse click can turn most documents into a Web page. And with two mouse clicks and some inexpensive software, almost any document can be converted to a PDF document preserving its exact format. But few people really know the capabilities of their text processors; most don’t know these features exist. Whatever else we do, we should at least teach our faculty how to use the word processing software they already have. It does not solve every problem, but it is far better than having them start afresh with some new software package.

Course cartridges
Several textbook publishers have taken their textbooks and converted them to electronic format suitable for inclusion into a course management system. They typically include all of text from the book plus additional exams, multimedia material, and simulations. Collectively this material is called a course cartridge. Currently there are very few course cartridges available, but the quality is superb. Clearly there were many person-years of effort expended to produce each one. While Euphoric State’s IT department cannot afford to do this because our market for a course is just a few professors – and sometimes just one – textbook publishers can afford to spend huge sums of money because they expect that the cost will be spread over many thousands of students who will use it. Rather than being like custom cars (the Websites created by our IT staff), course cartridges are like the Fords, Chevys and Toyotas that roll off the production line.

The best part of these course cartridges is not the textbook text or even the online illustrations. It is the simulations. The simulations, whether about the quantum mechanics of atoms or the workings of a democracy, allow students to learn by experimenting, asking "what-if" questions, and trying the thinkable and unthinkable. Students soon develop quantum-mechanics intuition. They can anticipate what’s likely to happen in some new situation because they have likely tried something similar. The simulations are also the hardest things to write.

With MS Word documents our faculty could learn to do the text and image part of course cartridges – though if a suitable course cartridge is available they should use it instead. The interesting assessments and quizzes in a course cartridge are part of the course management system already or can easily be added. This is well within the ability of faculty to do. But simulations, the most important part of online pedagogy is beyond the reach of virtually all faculty outside of engineering and computer science.

Possible solutions
One solution is to borrow material done by other people. Many collections of interesting material are available. Merlot at www.merlot.org is one of the best. Want to learn how human hearts sound with various diseases? Merlot will send you off to www.wilkes.med.ucla.edu/intro.html where you can listen again and again until the sounds are second nature to you. With considerable work you could incorporate some Merlot material into your own Website. Since this can be so difficult, you’ll most likely just link to it, though that may not be the best choice.

Another solution is to convince creators of course cartridges to make them cheaply available to higher education. Since this will not help textbook sales they are not likely to do it, and even if they were to do it, it would still be very difficult to include the simulations as an integral part of a Web course.

MESA
One last possibility is for universities to build a simulation library themselves. No one university could afford to do it or would even the have the expertise to do it. Euphoric State, for example, has no law school and would therefore not be able to contribute to building legal simulations, but we could do great things in Physics or Math. But why would these simulations be any easier to use than those found at Merlot or at a textbook publishing company? Because the consortium of universities that creates the Multidisciplinary Educational Simulation Archive (MESA) will have planned for its usability by ordinary faculty from the start. By spreading the work out across many universities, having universities work in areas where they have the greatest expertise, and by sharing the common MESA library we could quickly create interesting online content that anyone could include in their Website.