Wednesday, February 17, 1999

Stephen J. Merrill, Professor of Mathematics

    My presentation involved a description of "Marquette Electronic Outreach" (MEO) a distance learning project to Milwaukee area high schools begun in 1992. The current (Spring 1999) edition involves four schools and nine students taking the four credit course MATH083 (Differential Equations) remotely, with three additional students at Marquette. The project started as a way to provide mathematics courses to advanced students at scattered sites throughout the Milwaukee Metro area within the regular high school day. Lectures are given MWF with a fourth weekly contact through my visit to each school to answer questions and exchange paper (laboratories, tests, and review material). MEO utilizes PC's at Marquette and each of the remote sites linked through a conference call and the Internet conference tool, Microsoft's NetMeeting.

    This style of teleconferencing, no video "talking heads" and audio through a telephone conference call, is termed "audiographic" teleconferencing. It provides reliable high-quality audio and a access to high quality graphics through a shared interactive "whiteboard" which stands in for the chalk board. Any graphics produced on the scanner or through specialized software on the PC can be pasted and manipulated on the whiteboard - producing a richer environment than that available in a standard classroom or through static presentation package slides. The whiteboard is ideally suited for mathematics instruction where symbols and the order in which they appear form the text of the lecture. As 3 conference calls of 45 minutes per week are made, it has been important to limit participation to schools where a local call is possible. A hallmark of this project is the low cost and relatively high level of contact of students with the instructor. On the cost side, MU needed a fast PC, scanner, graphics tablet with pen, and a speaker phone able to set up a five-party conference call without operator assistance. We also set up our own "ILS server," the conference organizer for NetMeeting, on a departmental Windows NT computer. The total cost for all new equipment necessary this fall was $3000. Each remote site is responsible for getting a computer on the Internet running NetMeeting and a speaker phone. In addition, cooperation of the counseling staff, administrators, and technical staff at each school is essential. In the 1998-9 school year, 88 student credit hours have been delivered through MEO.

    Although the monetary outlay is modest, the time commitment for this mode of instruction is very high. The amount of planning: finding a common time of day for the course, working with individuals at the schools, site visits to test the installations, registration of the students, and much, more takes about 6 months. The course itself, primarily due to the technology and the lack of face-to-face contact during the lectures, requires somewhat different skills than the same course delivered to a MU classroom. Careful listening by the instructor and encouraging a less passive approach to the material by the students are two major differences. A major difficulty is that the technology does not work all of the time - and one must be ready to ditch a well-planned presentation and do what you can with a conference call. Partly due to the time commitment and the barriers to "normal" instruction posed by the technology, I have not been able to find another interested faculty member in my department for this instruction style. The only other example on the MU campus was the "Ancient Language Project" though the Graduate School which has successfully used this instructional mode in the context of scattered (highly motivated) students studying old texts in Greek and Hebrew (again a very graphical context). Due to the high demands on the instructors and additional strains on scarce technical support, this approach is not for all situations. But, given motivated students and technical support at remote sites, audiographic teleconferencing can be a cost- effective and pedagogically sound instructional method.