Concurrent LEEP/Face-to-Face Classes
From GSLISWiki
There has been a proposal that we run concurrent classes that are both LEEP and Face-to-Face at the same time. This means that there would be one lecture given by a professor to a face-to-face class, the audio of which would be streamed to LEEP students, either at the same time or recorded and sent later. Professors who might be teaching these classes include Dean John Unsworth, Stephen Downie, and Allen Renear.
The anecdotes I have heard about past experience with concurrent classes has indicated that they are sometimes problematic. Therefore, I've compiled some thoughts that are probably good to keep in mind to help such classes be successful.
-Ingbert
Contents |
[edit] Designing the Infrastructure for a Concurrent Class
[edit] Real-Time Feedback
Instructors need real-time feedback from students during the lecture, so that they can be responsive to student needs and adjust the lecture to capture student interest or address student confusion. In most face-to-face classes the instructor can watch the students, their facial expressions, and observe where they are directing their attention. In the LEEP environment instructors monitor student attention by asking questions and viewing responses from students in a chat window (these responses are often in the form of an exclamation point "!" for "yes" or "I get it" or "I'm with you").
The challenge in a concurrent class is to be able to obtain real-time feedback from both LEEP students and face-to-face students at the same time, without one group being at a disadvantage with respect to the other group. This is likely to be difficult if the instructor needs to pay attention both to students sitting in front of him and a computer monitor of scrolling comments in a chat window, as it is likely to create a disconnect for both groups of students, and for the instructor as well, since he or she must divide his or her attention, spend time reading small print, and thereby interrupt the stream of the lecture. There are several possible solutions to these problems:
- It might be possible for the LEEP screen to be projected on the wall in front of the instructor (behind the students in the face-to-face class), so that he or she can monitor it while looking at the students in the face-to-face session (there is a possibility that the instructor will forget to pay attention to the projection when concentrating on the lecture and on the face-to-face students' reactions to the material, and inadvertently ignore the LEEP students).
- Another possible solution would be to have a TA present and monitoring the LEEP session, typing in questions into the chat room to make sure the students are following the professor, and interrupting the class to alert the professor if the LEEP students seem bored or do not seem to be following the lecture.
Different concurrent classes could try each solution (or a combination of both) depending on the preference of the instructor.
[edit] Asking Questions
It is important for the students to be able to ask the instructor questions without interrupting the class, to feel comfortable and natural doing so, and to be able to signal to the instructor that he or she is asking a question, or wants to ask a question. In the face-to-face environment students can either speak out when there is a lull, or raise their hands. In the LEEP environment, students use the chat room which is constantly monitored by the instructor.
One challenge in a concurrent class is to allow students in the LEEP environment to be able to interrupt or raise their hands just as visibly as the face-to-face students, but with the same level of gracefulness, so that they do not feel they might be disrupting the class by asking questions. Possible solutions include:
- Giving those distance students whose infrastructure could handle it VOIP (voice over internet protocol) access so that they could speak up in the class. There are several major problems with this idea, however.
- Around 25% of the students in LEEP have only dialup connections, and dialup connections are way too slow to handle VOIP. Not only would this give them an unfair disadvantage, but it would violate the ethics of the LEEP program which is committed to providing a top-notch education to all of its students, and is devoted to outreach to students who are unable to otherwise attend school. For many of those students, not only might they not be able to afford the infrastructure, but the infrastructure may not exist.
- People who are remotely connected via a conferencing system to a face-to-face meeting often feel very disconnected from the meeting, and have trouble following what is going on, or feeling confident enough to participate. LEEP students will lack the visual cues which would alert them as to when it would be appropriate to break into a conversation.
- Ringing an alarm bell whenever a question is asked over LEEP, but this is likely to be very disruptive in the classroom environment.
- Projecting the LEEP chat-room on the back wall of the classroom may allow the LEEP students to ask questions on a relatively equal basis to the face-to-face students, as long as the instructor remembered to monitor the display. This would not be the case if the instructor had to remember to check a monitor to look for questions, since that would mean they would need to wait until the instructor took the time to interrupt his or her lecture.
- A TA constantly monitoring the chat room might be a more effective spokesperson for the LEEP students, since he or she would have access to the visual cues which would alert him or her as to when a good time to break into the conversation would be.
To figure out which of these possible solutions is best, more research must be done.
Another challenge in a concurrent class is to make sure that both the on-campus students and the LEEP students can hear or see each others' questions. This is important because having the instructor repeat the question for the other group of students is disruptive to class flow, will slow the class down, and it is likely that the instructor will forget to repeat the question on occasion, creating frustration for the students who could not hear/see the question. For the on-campus students to be able to see the LEEP students' questions, concurrent classes must be taught in computer labs (like the one in room 52), where each on-campus student has access to a computer. This will allow them to have the LEEP classroom open in a browser window during class, and be able to monitor the questions and comments made by the LEEP students. This solution will have the added bonus of allowing on-campus students to interact directly with LEEP students using features such as whisper (a private chat). For the LEEP students to be able to hear the on-campus students, the only solution likely to be effective is to have a microphone for every on-campus student, so that the LEEP students can clearly hear their questions and comments.
Finally, there is anecdotal evidence that it is important to ensure that neither group of students is able to dominate over the other group:
- Dominance by remote questions: a student mentioned in a class how a concurrent class he attended as an undergrad was completely disrupted by distance students phoning in questions, and how way too much time was spend addressing those questions to the detriment of the face-to-face students experience in the class.
[edit] Interaction During Class
Distance education literature has found that interaction is one of the most important ingredients for successful distance education classes (Roblyer & Wiencke 2003). In the LEEP environment it has been found that interaction during class is very important, because students listening to a pure VOIP lecture for two hours become bored and distracted. In fact, lectures longer than two hours have been found to be unworkable in the LEEP environment. Thus, concurrent classes must have lectures that are limited in length to a maximum of two hours. In addition, interaction must be fostered in LEEP classes to keep students focused.
One of the most effective tools for keeping students engaged with the class via LEEP is breaking up the class into groups to work on activities. This technique is not used as much in on-campus classes. Thus, in concurrent classes it will be important to create infrastructure to support group work. There are two methods of doing this:
- Some would argue that it would be ideal if the groups were mixed groups of face-to-face students and LEEP students, which means they would have to be conducted in the LEEP environment. This would facilitate interaction between LEEP students and on-campus students, after all. There is, however, the potential to create resentment among the face-to-face students if such a rule is adopted. There is some anecdotal evidence to indicate that resentment might be a problem:
- At least one masters student has explicitly expressed that she would feel very resentful about sharing a class with LEEP students, because she would feel that why did she move all the way to Illinois in order to be here in person, when she could have just gone LEEP and gotten the same education.
- The second possibility is to have LEEP students break into groups on LEEP, and on-campus students break into face-to-face groups in the classroom. If this is the standard method of doing group-work, however, it probably will reinforce the differences between the two groups of students, and fragment the class.
Which solution is appropriate will probably have to be determined by a social negotiation between the students and the instructor in each particular class.
It may also be important to try and integrate the classroom experience of the LEEP students and the on-campus students. As mentioned above, if all concurrent classes are taught in a computer room (such as room 52) and all on-campus students are required to be logged into the LEEP environment, it would allow students to interact with each other in class, in addition to outside of class on the bulletin boards. This interaction may need to be encouraged in some manner, as neither group will have much motivation to interact with the other group.
[edit] Interaction Outside of Class
There is a need by students for interaction with each other and the instructor outside of class as well. In face-to-face classes this is provided by serendipitous encounters in hallways or study rooms, by planned face-to-face meetings such as group meetings and office hours, and by email. In some classes, the bulletin boards are used for this purpose, but this use sometimes feels forced or strained. In the LEEP environment this primarily occurs through use of bulletin boards. The extensive use of the bulletin boards by LEEP students means that in many classes this provides a particularly rich experience for the students taking the class (some classes have over 3,000 different posts on the bulletin boards), which means that taking a LEEP class can be a much more productive experience. Interaction also occurs through email, and occasionally groups will meet in their class’s chat-room at a pre-arranged time when the class is not scheduled to meet (the chat room is always accessible). LEEP students also have on-campus face-to-face sessions where there is also an opportunity to meet, but this happens only once per semester.
The main challenge for a concurrent class is to facilitate student-to-student interaction outside of class between the LEEP students and the on-campus students. To do this, it is likely that the use of bulletin boards must be made mandatory, and that their use be well thought out so that on-campus students have as much motivation to constantly monitor and post to the boards as the LEEP students have. Creating this motivation in a non-artificial way is likely to be difficult, but here a couple of possibilities:
- Limit the lecture to two hours (which is necessary for the LEEP environment anyway). Then, arrange for the class to “meet†at another time for an hour period, except require that the only communication for the class be through bulletin board posts. The danger inherent in this suggestion is that the vitality of the LEEP students' bulletin board posts will decrease significantly, because they will no longer feel it is necessary for them to spend time posting asynchronously since a synchronous time has been scheduled.
- Instead of creating a time for face-to-face students to use the bulletin boards, create motivation for them to use them asynchronously. The crudest such motivation would be to incorporate assignments which must be submitted as bulletin board posts into their grades, but it seems that a better solution could be found: one that involves a carrot instead of a stick.
It is clear that more work needs to be done before a satisfactory solution can be settled on. Other forms of interaction between students and between students and the instructor can be left untouched.
[edit] Manageable Classes
The class must be manageable for the instructor. In both face-to-face seminar classes and in LEEP classes the upper limit of students is around 30, with a better experience for all stakeholders in classes 10 to 20 students in size. Beyond 30 students it becomes impossible for the instructor in a LEEP environment to keep up with the student posts in the chat room and still be able to concentrate on the lecture, unless they have a TA who reads the chat-room posts and responds to them. In classroom settings, when a class is larger than 30 students, the class either starts to become more of a lecture rather than a seminar, or a significant number of students become marginalized because they do not find a comfortable opportunity to contribute to the class.
Keeping a concurrent class manageable for the instructor is a serious problem, and probably one of the problems that is most difficult to prepare for in advance, without any experience running concurrent classes. LEEP instructors have mentioned how hard and cognitively consuming it is to simply lecture and follow the chat-room posts at the same time. By adding the additional cognitive load of paying attention to a face-to-face class, it makes it that much more difficult. Thus it is likely to be impossible to have concurrent classes with more than 20-25 students enrolled (this is an estimate, not an assertion). Since concurrent classes have been run in LEEP before, perhaps we can use this experience to inform issues such as class size. Given that what is proposed uses a new medium, however, the best recommendation would be to limit enrollment to no more than 20 students for the first few concurrent classes.
[edit] Using Visual Aids
In many lectures it is necessary to use visual aids, and in sometimes it is necessary to create visual aids while the class is in progress. In the face-to-face environment, the instructor has access to projectors, can write on the board, and can use props which can be passed around the class. In the LEEP environment the instructor can publish slides, send links, etc. He or she can also use the virtual blackboard to create content (as can the students). Drawing pictures, or using non-standard symbols (such as logical operators) is much more difficult, and often must be done ahead of time. Props cannot be physically passed around, but can be shown in the web-cam that takes a series of still pictures throughout the lecture, and the students directed to view the web-cam's display.
Integrating the visual aid experience of the students in a concurrent class will also be a difficult one to solve. The solution will be highly dependent on the nature of the visual aid. Visual aids which are already in electronic format such as pdf files or powerpoint files are much easier to share between the environments. Instructors teaching LEEP classes have found that it is extremely important to prepare in advance, and that it I is often very difficult to be spontaneous or reactive in a LEEP class effectively. Slides must be prepared ahead of time so that students can download them before class, links must be provided so students can pre-load them, etc. Thus, it is likely that instructors in concurrent classes will have a similar experience. However, a more difficult problem is that of the blackboard in LEEP vs. the white-board in the classroom. Since GSLIS does not own any large, touch-screen displays, either they would have to be borrowed or bought, or any visuals must be drawn on a tablet, and simultaneously projected to the class and exported to the LEEP students. These and other technical hurdles relevant to the sharing of visual aids require more investigation before a satisfactory solution can be found.
[edit] Other Considerations
There are still some important considerations to keep in mind, which derive from anecdotal evidence from students consulted about this project.
- Resentment: I have heard similar themes from other students, but a masters student expressed to me that she would feel very resentful about sharing a class with LEEP students, because she would feel that why did she move all the way to Illinois in order to be here in person, when she could have just gone LEEP and gotten the same education. My impression from her comment was that she moved here in order to have face-to-face (f2f) instruction. She wouldn't have moved if distance education was what she was looking for, and that she felt the resentment due to being forced to be educated in a distance-ed model. The reason, is that she feels that education mediated through technology was inferior to getting educated in person, at least for her. The concurrent classes she felt would distract too much from the f2f experience of a "traditional" class.
- Response: Is it a priority for GSLIS to maintain a division of perceived quality between LEEP and traditional face-to-face classes? If it is, then this resentment toward distance students should probably be taken into serious consideration. Otherwise, maybe not. -wickett.
- Dominance by remote questions: a student mentioned in a class how a concurrent class he attended as an undergrad was completely disrupted by distance students phoning in questions, and how way too much time was spend addressing those questions to the detriment of the face-to-face students' experience in the class.
[edit] Comments Section
Many on-campus students avoid LEEP classes. Although LEEP delivery is impressive, in many areas it pales in comparison to the real thing. I have anecdotely seen many an on-campus student do a variety of things in a LEEP class other than take class--like leave, go to a restaurant, and eat dinner. Some on-campus students see LEEP classes as a joke. This might stigmatize an on-campus/LEEP mix.--Jenny
LEEP classes require an intense amount to self-discipline. Any class is only as good as the individuals involved make it, but LEEP classes take this to an extreme. -Wickett
Please post comments here. Feel free to add points I missed above. -Ingbert
