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April 18, 2001: Features Beyond
the Blackboard by Caroline Moseley
Sociology professor Miguel Centeno was accustomed to teaching his course The Western Way of War in a traditional way, using brief notes to guide his extemporaneous lectures. Still, when Douglas Blair '71, who at the time was working for the Alumni Council on distance learning, approached him about transforming his lectures into a multimedia, Web-based course for alumni, Centeno was interested. The opportunity to work with adult students with real-life experience in the subject "was tremendously appealing," Centeno says. Without previous experience in audio-visual aids, however, he didn't quite see how it could work. Blair, who by now was working with a new team, set out to demonstrate. "We built a demo for him," he says. "We took some of his notes, made them into a script, included appropriate illustrations and animations. We recorded the audio ourselves." When Centeno saw the initial results, he was "converted." "A lecture doesn't have to be linear," he says. "[Working on the online course] made me think about what a lecture course should be, what kinds of information it is important to give in a lecture, versus what is in readings or available on the Web." For example, "It's hard to visualize the movement of armies," he says. "At the third mention of a 'flank,' people just lose interest. Now, when I speak about a particular battle, I can have, for example, arrows superimposed on a map to show the Russians moving forward, the Germans counterattacking on both their flanks. "Before, it was just me and a blackboard." The team helping to develop the online version of The Western Way of War is a part of Princeton's newest academic initiative, the Educational Technologies Center, which was established last July by the provost's office. Aimed at introducing faculty like Centeno to the possibilities of multimedia, ETC is made up of specialists drawn from a variety of Princeton departments and brought together to help faculty enrich existing courses and create new ones using technology. Heading this new unit is managing director Kirk Alexander '72 *75, who was previously director of the Multimedia Engineering Computation Atelier (MECA) in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Joining him at technology central is Blair, who left the Alumni Council to become ETC's director of production and client services, and Rafael Alvarado, the former humanities computing expert in the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning who is now director of instruction and database development for ETC. They are assisted by an array of experts drawn from MECA, Computing and Information Technology, the graduate student population, and elsewhere. "Now," says Associate Provost Georgia Nugent '73, who oversees the initiative, "Princeton's instructional technology resources, previously scattered throughout various departments, have been consolidated in one unit." The unique composition of ETC is its primary strength. "We're not the information technology group saying to the faculty, 'Here's the technology. Now use it,' " says Alexander. "And we're not saying, 'This is the right technology for you.' We are saying, 'What is it about your course you'd like to do differently, or better? Let's brainstorm and see if technology can help.' " Alexander explains, "Teamwork is the operative word for ETC - teamwork with our faculty and teamwork among ourselves. We have people with a broad enough range of skills that, almost no matter what we are trying to accomplish, we have a way to do it." On the technical side, he says, the staff covers a range of skills from very intricate programming, to manipulating images and sound, to processing audio and video, to graphic design, to the ability to manipulate maps and satellite images. Just as important, however, is the staff's striking level of extra-computational expertise - which is essential, Alexander says, to engage the faculty in the kind of discourse necessary to develop courseware. Alexander was an art history major before earning his master's degree in engineering. Blair holds an M.B.A. from Columbia. Alvarado is an anthropology Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Many others on the 14-person staff, such as software and teaching consultant Kevin Perry *86 (math), intern Jessica Burr *94 (music), and multimedia specialist Anca Niculin, who earned her M.A. in architecture at M.I.T., also have advanced degrees in academic disciplines. In the past, says Blair, "If faculty wanted to incorporate technology, they were shown how to use software, and left on their own. Often, by the time they finished the project, the software was out of date." Now, promises Alexander, "Keeping materials working in the classroom will be our problem, not theirs. Carrying the course forward for alumni will be our problem, not theirs. We'll keep everything running." He emphasizes "the very collaborative nature" of the enterprise. "It is always a partnership with the faculty, because, of course, we don't create or update the course content - clearly, that is the professor's purview. We work with faculty to make sure the content makes it to the undergraduate course Web page or the online alumni version." There are approximately 20 projects currently under way at ETC, in various stages of conception, development, and production. For example, Professor of Near Eastern Studies Jerome Clinton has been working with ETC to create, in his words, "an electronic archive of Persian miniatures from illustrated manuscripts in the Princeton Library of the Iranian national epic, Shahnama [The Book of Kings]." Clinton says he identified the data - "mostly paintings, but ancillary data as well" - while Peter Batke, ETC humanities consultant, and Alvarado "created or adapted the software necessary to make the interface swift and intuitive." Clinton has used his Web site in two courses, including Word and Image in the Iranian National Epic this semester. The Web site, supported by a complex database juxtaposing images with relevant texts, is "a wonderful pedagogical tool," he says, "and also a terrific scholarly resource. It takes the usual art historian's tools - slides, light table, magnifying lens, slide archive, projector, and screen - and combines them into a single online resource that is faster and more flexible than those tools. I make heavy use of it in my own research and writing." Clinton notes that he has demonstrated the Web site archive to other scholars and museum curators, who were "dazzled. There is nothing else like it on the Web." Professor of Physics Paul Steinhardt is one of a number of Princeton cosmologists working with ETC to create an online course for alumni - with modules that can be used in the undergraduate classroom. "I wrote one on inflationary cosmology," he says. "That's the theory of what happened in the few instants after the Big Bang, when almost all the conditions that make our current universe were set up. "One of the things not well illustrated anywhere is the expanding universe," he continues. "I can't make the universe stretch in a classroom, but on the Web you can use motion and artistry to show the universe expanding, nuclei forming." Designing materials to be presented on the Web or online is hard work for all concerned. "This collaboration takes a lot of faculty time and serious thought," Steinhardt says. In numerous sessions with Alexander and Niculin, "we grapple about how to proceed. It's a two-way teaching and learning process. I have to spend a lot of time explaining the physics to Anca and Kirk, who have the artistic and computational skills I definitely don't have. I say what needs to be done - in fact, I try to imagine the most elaborate uses of the technology - and they say what it is possible to do." In every discipline, Steinhardt muses, "You think, 'If I just had the right illustration, I could drive this point home.' ETC is a way of getting from here to there." To those who fear seduction by mere technological glitz, he says, "ETC technology will not replace teaching, and will certainly enhance it." Centeno agrees. To traditional lectures and readings, Centeno says, "We can now add a third element - Web exploration. It's a whole different form of absorbing knowledge, one we don't yet understand well, but which it would be foolish not to explore." He also agrees that it's a lot of work. Creating a script from his lectures for online use, Centeno says, is "like preparing a book manuscript. And it's a partnership all the way. ETC edits my manuscript; they say, 'We really need an image to back this up.' I am a script writer; they are cinematographers. I say, 'This is what happened'; they bring it to the screen. "Without ETC, it's just a bunch of words." Undergraduates "will benefit hugely" from faculty work on alumni courses, he says, "because we'll take the animations, graphs, and illustrations created for the online course and use them for the undergraduate course, both in the classroom and in Web assignments." Even faculty members who were already technology-savvy have found that collaboration with ETC can take their work to another level. James Gould, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, has been digitizing images and using simulations, animations, and film clips in his Animal Behavior lectures for years - thanks, he says, to having two teen-aged children "who dragged me into the digital world." He was approached by Blair to prepare an online course for alumni. Working with Niculin, who "read all the relevant material, and really spent a lot of time learning about animal behavior so she could help me make various points," he found that "we came up with things I could never have done on my own." He is particularly pleased with Niculin's animation "of how spiders build their webs. It is simply wonderful. Plus, she was working on a whole lot of other projects at the same time." Gould points out, "Some people learn by hearing, some by reading, some by seeing. Students already have lectures, they already have textbooks. What we can do is enhance their visual experience." He has already incorporated into his Princeton classes some of the materials prepared for the online Animal Behavior course. All aspects of any project - programming, scanning, production, and creation of CD-ROMs and video clips - are carried out in ETC, which is located on the fourth floor of the Engineering Quadrangle. All new files are entered into the university's ever-burgeoning database, Almagest (from Arabic, "the greatest"), named for Ptolemy's astronomical and mathematical encyclopedia of circa a.d. 140. Almagest, says Alvarado, "is a multimedia database, originally created for use with art history projects, but now containing image, text, video, animations, and sound files. It is a broad-based tool, which can be used in any academic field." ETC is a uniquely Princetonian resource, Blair believes. "As far as I know, other colleges and universities have not combined online continuing education with classroom education," he says. "Many emphasize social gatherings and development functions for alumni, rather than ongoing intellectual enterprise." In addition, he says, "Elsewhere, external teaching is considered a separate activity from campus teaching - and that's it. A faculty member does one or the other." Nugent concurs: "We don't see on-campus use of ETC and off-campus use as mutually exclusive. We say, if a faculty member is interested in exploring how technology might be useful, let's create something that can go in either direction." All online courses will be made available not only to Princeton alumni, she notes, but also to alumni of Princeton's partners in the recently formed University Alliance for Life-Long Learning: Yale, Stanford, and Oxford Universities. Not that there isn't a long way to go. ETC would like to see many more faculty members take advantage of its resources. "Getting faculty to know about us and use us is a problem," admits Blair. Though flyers have been sent to the entire faculty, and ETC personnel have made presentations to academic department managers, "our most effective publicity is word of mouth." For example, Centeno was influenced by the enthusiasm of Professor of Near Eastern Studies Norman Itzkowitz *59, who taught the Alumni Council's first online course, The Demonization of the Other: Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans. Helping to get the word out, Alvarado teaches a course for graduate students on how to use technology in teaching. "We're emphasizing basic skills," he says. "We want them to know what's available." There can be resistance. Niculin points out, "Professors are used to two modes of delivery for their ideas, both linear: the lecture and the published paper. The most difficult part of our job is to help them see the potential of the new and very special medium we're dealing with, its capabilities for parallel presentation, for layering, and for branching. An online course should not be a video transferred to a browser; it should exploit that which makes the Internet special: the H in the HTML [hypertext markup language], that is, the hypertext links." The greatest barrier to increased faculty use of instructional technology, however, is "the amount of faculty time it requires," says Blair. Even entering a professor's material into the database "is far from a passive event," Alvarado notes. "The professor and staff have to think very carefully about how material is organized and categorized." And as to alumni involvement, "We still have only 2,500 alumni participating in online courses," notes Blair - though, since ETC introduced Animal Behavior online in February, some 650 people have registered. Then there are the constantly shifting goalposts of hardware and software. Off-campus users currently need a DSL or cable modem to maximize use of the online offerings. Animal Behavior is available on CD, but, as Blair points out, "That's not perfect, either, because, while online courses can be updated regularly, a CD is forever." While ETC is clearly a work in progress, acknowledges Alexander, its existence indicates that "Princeton as a university really does care about the role technology will be playing in education, both for its students and its alumni, and is willing to offer the faculty the resources necessary to explore what that means for their teaching and research. "We don't yet know how big an operation this needs to be. But, as of last July, ETC is a major group reporting to the provost's office, with a very clear academic mission. "This is for real."
Caroline Moseley is a frequent contributor to PAW. On the Web ETC: etc.princeton.edu/@princeton Alumni Council Learning Gateway: www.princeton.edu/~alco/gateway
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