Q & A with RIT Distance Learning Instructional Technology Specialist
Richard Fasse
by George A. Lorenzo
Richard Fasse, Ed.D, is the Instructional
Technology Specialist for the Educational Technology Center (ETC) at the
Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). ETC provides the behind-the-scenes
technology support for RIT's distance learning department, which is one of the
most successful regionally accredited higher education distance learning
programs in the country. RIT's distance learning program currently offers seven
graduate degrees, three graduate certificates, three undergraduate degrees and
thirteen undergraduate certificates through the Internet, computer conferencing
and other multimedia technologies.
Due to the growing popularity of
distance learning (especially for time-constrained adult learners) and the
sophistication of RIT's distance learning department (which has been delivering
distance education to students all over the world for more than 20 years) ETC
has realized some unprecedented growth. In little over one year alone, the
number of enrollments in RIT's distance learning program has increased from
4,000 students to 5,000 students. Fasse is an integral part of that growth
as he provides the much-needed and highly demanding technological support to
distance learning faculty, staff and students.
Fasse said he began a
'trajectory to my computer-related career,' in 1960 as a fifth grader who wrote
a book report on a elementary school textbook that referred to computers. An
illustration was required to go with the report, and Fasse drew an imaginary
computer. He showed the report and illustration to his favorite aunt, a former
one-room schoolteacher, and she showered young Fasse with praise. The rest, as
they say, is history.
By the time high school arrived, Fasse was
enrolled in one of only three schools in the United States that offered a
computer curriculum, which at that time were data processing courses. At 14,
Fasse received the 'Data Processor of the Year' award which, as he says, 'set me
off further.' He went on to the University of Kansas on an Honor's math
scholarship and eventually earned a bachelor's degree in business administration
with a concentration in computer science, which was the closest program he could
find to a full-blown computer major at UK at that time.
He earned an MBA
in information systems from Penn State and a doctor of education from the
University of Rochester. His dissertation was on 'Electronic Texts as an
Alternative to Traditional Textbooks.' While studying for his doctorate,
Fasse taught an Introduction to Computer Science Course at the State University
of New York College at Brockport. After earning his doctorate in 1995, he landed
his current job at RIT, starting out on a part-time basis. He was part of a team
that brought in RIT's first major distance learning groupware product,
'FirstClass.' Following are some questions we asked Fasse in relation to the
work of an instructional technology specialist and the future of distance
learning in higher education.
Q. Explain what your job entails
and how you interact with faculty.
A. My position is a
little unique on our campus, but I suspect that what I do is done on every
college campus in some fashion. I am essentially a "broker" who tries to be
familiar enough with all instructional technology so that when opportunities
present themselves, I can consult and recommend reasonable solutions to faculty
who want to use technology.
We have a number of technology staff who are
familiar with "tools" but who don't have the teaching or education background
that "tempers" their appropriate use of tools. We also have staff who have
teaching or education background but lack the technology skills to stay up to
date on what tools are available. I try to be reasonably familiar with the
latest technology, and then refer to the technology expertise in the department
as appropriate.
Most of my faculty contact comes about through the
development of new distance learning courses, or training new faculty to teach
existing distance learning courses.
Our department, the Educational
Technology Center, is also involved with an annual campus wide technology
training "institute" that attracts about 100 faculty each year, and about once a
month I am asked to give a presentation to departments or groups of faculty,
primarily in the context of distance learning. I usually give a "big picture"
overview of distance learning and then tour the faculty through three different
"live" distance learning courses. I have found faculty to be very interested in
how other faculty actually do their distance learning courses, and I suppose it
would be even better to have the actual faculty present their courses, but as I
said, I am a "broker" of this kind of information.
Q. How do you keep
abreast of the latest trends and rapid growth in educational technology
today?
A. I read Wired, Syllabus, T.H.E., Chronicle of Higher
Education - especially their Information Technology section, follow discussions
at the Asynchronous Learning Networks site (http://www.aln.org/), subscribe to
the AAHESGIT listserv, and use AltaVista almost daily to look for useful and
interesting information I can use in my job.
Q. How have changes in
technology affected your job?
A. Actually, the more
things change, the more they stay the same. There is still no substitute for
faculty contact and that can be accomplished with some very basic technology.
But with the glut of "new" technology and information overload out there, I have
seen a growing confusion and lack of focus among faculty about what they should
be doing at any given point in time. I take most of the information I get about
specific courses and case studies with a huge grain of salt, but critical
analysis of all the information available about "new" technologies is a
tremendous challenge. So a large part of my job is trying to sort the wheat from
the chaff and then offer clear and simple alternatives to faculty who are
interested in using technology in their courses.
Q. Can you give us
some examples of "clear and simple" solutions to an otherwise complex
scenario?
A. One of the most common scenarios has to do with
the relationship between on-campus courses and groupware tools like CourseInfo
and FirstClass. I try to get faculty to think about the "big picture" before
they get too involved. For example, if they use a system like CourseInfo to post
class announcements, what are their expectations for how often students will be
accessing the web course to read those announcements? If an instructor posts an
announcement about a change for a Friday class, and the message is posted
Wednesday evening, how many students will actually get the "announcement?" In
our distance learning courses we know that about 65% of our students will read a
new message within the first 24 hours it is posted, but it takes 3 days to get
over 90% to read it. And that is in an environment where students only have
asynchronous access to announcements. On-campus students meet regularly and
expect announcements to be made in class. So some forethought and clarification
of expectations helps put all this technology in better perspective.
We
also believe that the current generation of students still want hard-copy
handouts of syllabi, course materials, and other course documents. So if a
faculty member is teaching an on-campus course and takes the extra effort to
post the syllabus to CourseInfo or FirstClass, but still hands out the hardcopy
version, the primary benefactors are the students who don't attend class! There
is certainly a convenience factor for students to be able to access documents
online from the library or elsewhere when they left their copy of the syllabus
back in their apartment or dorm room, but there is a productivity hit for
faculty to create that convenience that they need to be aware of.
Q.
What are some of the benefits for faculty when utilizing
groupware?
A. The real benefit for our faculty comes after
they have used FirstClass or CourseInfo for a semester. What they are finding is
that their productivity improvements come from having their course documents
organized on a server and accessible from anywhere. Once the course has been
created and organized, they can reference them easily and re-purpose them
easily. And they can access them and update them from any networked computer. So
the second and subsequent times they teach the course, they begin to get some
productivity advantages.
But in our distance learning courses we
emphasize interaction, and that is something that is dynamic and changes every
time the course is taught. Interaction is "where the action is", and we really
want that to be the focus of most of the energy in a distance learning course.
That discourse is not something that is used again and again, but is probably
more important to learning effectiveness than any content posted by instructors.
Keeping these basic points in perspective for faculty is what I do.
Q.
What kind of advanced technology is RIT currently applying to their DL program?
A. Actually, it might be an "advanced" idea to emphasize some
relatively simple technology. We have avoided focusing on synchronous and other
high band-width technologies for the core of our DL program and that direction
has proven to be a very good choice. There is a lot you can do with basic email
and group conferencing, and we want to make sure that we do the basics well
as a
first priority.
That doesn't mean we aren't constantly looking at the
latest technologies. We have done a number of pilots with different
technologies, and some of them are making their way into our mainstream DL core
technologies. For example, we have been doing "streaming" for special events for
almost two years now, and our phone conference system, which is used in
about 1/3 of our courses, records and then makes the audio sessions
available in streaming format for later review from the Web or 1-800 access. The
phone conference "recordings" are automatic and have been streaming for over a
year now.
We are producing PowerPoint RealAudio annotated lectures this
quarter for delivery by CD and web streaming, and we expect the CD format to be
a very popular alternative to the traditional video-taped lectures that have
been a mainstay of many of our courses since the early 1980s. We have been
experimenting with this for almost two years and now have a process we believe
any faculty can use at their own desktop that will create good results. One
faculty this quarter produced all his lectures himself and simply brought us a
master set of CDs that we are duplicating and distributing through our
bookstore.
We are in the third year of producing a DL CD-ROM with
installer software for programs like Netscape, Internet Explorer, Adobe Reader,
and FirstClass. This CD is sent to all DL students as a convenience so they
don't have to spend lots of time online getting their computers setup for DL.
The most recent version includes voice annotated screen capture movies of the
FirstClass groupware software we use to help students get started. The CD also
has orientation text for students so that we don't have to send out a lot of
paper documents that are easy to misplace. The DL CD has been a big success and
I am not aware of any other schools offering such a simple and useful resource
for DL students.
Q. How are faculty members adding their own voices
and styles to the DL environment?
A. Since this is a
technical college, many faculty members are in the forefront of this
experimentation themselves, driving some of the technologies we then help
propagate to other faculty. Some of our faculty are actually creating multimedia
course materials on their own. They are a small but important group of faculty
with the energy and interest to explore some of the newer technologies. It can
be as simple as working out ways to incorporate synchronous chat sessions into a
useful recitation session. That is not something I would have ever recommended,
but two faculty have done it on their own initiative, and now that I have seen
how they make it work, I am sharing their successes with new distance learning
faculty. And right now various forms of voice annotated slide presentations are
being created by faculty, and we are burning these to CDs or streaming them for
faculty.
Q. With the increased enrollments of "adult learners," is
there anything you can say that's relevant to their particular needs?
A. One thing that comes through loud and clear in our student
surveys is that adult learners prefer asynchronous formats and the flexibility
they offer. Teleconferences, required attendance at phone conferences, and other
time constrained formats don't fit their work schedule and personal life as well
as group conferencing, video-tape, on-demand video streaming, and so on. We do
have some synchronous events in some courses, but I think adult learners need to
have good justification for the inconvenience.
Q. What do you see in
the future for DL at RIT?
A. There is a joke that the
next killer application for the Internet will be email, but I don't think it is
that far-fetched an idea. I think the emphasis in the last few years on
"pulling" information has been overrated
and has resulted in a lot of
out-of-date and burdensome course Web pages.
If you assume students are
going to regularly stop what they are doing and purposely go to a course Web
page to "pull" some static resources, then you better have some pretty exciting
stuff there, or after a few hits they won't be back. But if you use "messaging"
to "push" some information to those students, and it comes to their attention as
part of their daily Internet routine (e.g. email), then you don't have to worry
about attracting their attention to your Web site.
And now we have
wireless on all the floors of our library, and wireless PDAs are going to be
more
popular, so messaging is going to become a greater part of our daily
networked activities. The FirstClass system we use now in DL allows you to have
messages sent to your pager. And there is now a "voice" mail routine in that
system that allows you to send voice messages on the system. And the messages
can include inline images, tables, and so on. And there is group calendering,
another "messaging" type of application with a big potential for improving
personal productivity. Buddy lists and network alerts are important features
that should be integrated into this new "killer" application
too.
So there is a clear trend to integrating all the small and seemingly
unimportant "messaging" functions into a cohesive system. I hate it now when
someone calls my phone and leaves a message. The phone tag routine is boring and
unproductive. But if they left a digital calling card when they phoned me so I
could email them back, that would be fine. I hope we will begin to see this type
of integration in the next few years.
But this scenario begs another
question. How do you sort through all the potential messages so you can manage
them in some sort of priority? And how do you manage the follow-ups, the meeting
schedules, and everything else that comes into play with messaging. The old
metaphors don't work. For example, conventional wisdom is to create folders and
file, delete, or reply to every message as you read through them. I heard an
"expert" give this advice on a technology show recently. But handling email the
way you used to handle hardcopy office mail requires a lot of clicking,
dragging, moving, and so on. We are experimenting in our tech group with a new
approach that seems more productive.
Q. So, how do you handle the
large influx of messages in this new wireless world?
A.
First of all, I never delete messages. That takes time, and the system is set to
delete them after 180 days anyway. Secondly, I don't file messages. If I get a
message from our director, and it is about Project X, and I need to follow-up on
it, do I file it in the Director folder, the Project X folder, or the Follow-up
folder? All I do now is set it back to "unread" so that it stays in my list of
unread messages. And since I keep my inbox sorted by "unread", all the messages
I need to attend to are kept constantly at the top of the list. Then once a
month I move all the "read" messages to a monthly archive. And when I need to
retrieve a message I know I have somewhere, I use the search feature instead of
trying to remember which folder it might be filed in. Works great for me and I
think it is saving me 10 to 15% of my time in messaging. I use filtering for
some listservs and that works fine too. But as messaging becomes more important
then we need to reflect more seriously about how we manage our daily routines.
Q. Do you think large-scale, real-time, multimedia presentations
presented online are in the future of higher education distance
learning?
A. I don't think large-scale synchronous events are
in the cards for distance learning, or even large scale multimedia
presentations. Again, conventional wisdom has driven a lot of the hype for live
Web casting,
live streaming, and expensive multimedia productions because,
for example, faculty are used to live lecturing on campus, so it would seem that
some sort of live lecturing or multimedia equivalent on the Web would make
sense. But it doesn't.
Because it is difficult and expensive to produce
Web lectures, I think the whole concept of lectures as a course component are
coming under more intense scrutiny. The old joke that the "content is in the
bookstore" has some merit, and if it isn't in the bookstore, then publishing it
as simply as possible (i.e. text messaging) seems so much more practical. We
never hear from our experienced DL students that they want more faculty
developed multimedia lectures, or more live lecture events, but we do hear that
they want the instructor to respond promptly to their messages, and they want
lots of good course interactions.
Q. What kind of distance
learning courses do you see developing and succeeding with
students?
A. I see more intimate DL courses that use
student-centered learning activities with the instructors guiding, apprenticing,
critiquing, mentoring, and coaching students through learning activities. And
groupware products like FirstClass and BlackBoard make it much easier to
integrate student group projects into the distance learning classroom, so I
expect that courses with significant group work will model new ways to get
things done in the work environment. And student group work relieves the
instructor from moderating the discourse to a more productive role of monitoring
the discourse. If you think more along seminar format courses than lecture
courses, you can begin to visualize where I believe most DL programs will
have to settle out. But you have to remember that most of our RIT DL
students are adult learners and that graduate degrees and certificates represent
a significant part of our program. If we were involved with more
undergraduate programs and less mature learners, these approaches may not be as
successful. But for us, it just seems so much more sustainable in the long
run.
George Lorenzo is a freelance educational writer who conducts
research on higher education distance learning. He can be reached at
george@edpath.com.
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