Tuesday, October 24, 2000

Instructors Try Out Updated MOOs as Online-Course Classrooms By JEFFREY R. YOUNG Educators have put a new face on one of the oldest forms of online communication by adding graphical interfaces to text-based chat systems called MOOs. The systems still aren't flashy, but some professors say they make ideal distance-education classrooms. Academics have long been drawn to MOOs as online meeting places. In a MOO -- which stands for Multiple-user Object-Oriented environment -- participants can move among virtual rooms and type messages that everyone else in a virtual room can see. The first MOOs -- and their predecessors, which were called MUDs -- date to the late 1970's, when they were popularized by teenagers playing an online form of the fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons. Professors adapted the systems for more august purposes like instruction and scholarly discussion, though an element of playfulness can still be found in most MOOs, which encourage nicknames and written descriptions of moods and actions. Early MOOs weren't very user friendly -- users had to learn written commands to move around the system. In the past few years, however, several educators have updated MOOs for the multimedia age by adding Web-like interfaces that let users move among rooms by clicking on icons. And many of the new systems also allow professors to incorporate still images and video clips. The updated MOO systems aren't as graphics-heavy as three-dimensional "virtual worlds," in which virtual spaces are rendered in constantly-updated drawings. Both types of software encourage group activity, but in MOOs the written word is still king and the pictures merely serve as links between areas of a text-based environment. One such updated MOO system, called enCore Xpress, is distributed free of charge online, provided that users agree to share any improvements they make to it. The software was created by Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik at the University of Texas at Dallas, where Ms. Haynes is director of rhetoric and writing and Mr. Holmevik is a visiting scholar in arts and humanities. Together, the two scholars also run Lingua MOO, which serves as an environment for online classes and a meeting place for people studying arts and humanities. By making the chat environments easier to use, they hope to "bring MOOs into the mainstream," says Mr. Holmevik. "We have probably seen over 100 to 150 educational MOOs start because of our software." Among the professors using enCore Xpress for online courses is Joel A. English, an assistant professor of professional writing at Old Dominion University. Last spring, he used the MOO to teach an advanced composition course. Ten of his students logged in to the classes from their homes via the MOO, while the rest of the students sat in a classroom. Mr. English used a video camera to stream his lectures live over the MOO. The students in the MOO could type to each other, or type questions for the professor, while they watched and listened to the lecture. A teaching assistant moderated the online chat and voiced students' questions to Mr. English. "That may sound cumbersome," Mr. English says, "but it was just my attempt at making sure that those students sitting at home at a computer could add to the discussion just like everybody else." Mr. English says he doesn't mind if online students chat among themselves during his lecture -- provided they discuss the material. "If they're talking so much about course content that they miss something I say, then something right is going on," he says. "The best classrooms are those which are active, where students have active participation and don't just sit there sucking down content." He says the MOO students developed a stronger sense of community than the ones in the traditional classroom. Other professors who've taught in MOOs report that the environment encourages free-for-all discussions rather than lecturing to a group. "It can feel like you're herding cats online," says Linda G. Polin, a professor of education at Pepperdine University. She says the trick for a professor is to allow students to drive discussion without losing complete professorial control. For her courses, Ms. Polin uses a MOO-software package called Tapped In, which is similar to enCore Xpress. Even with the updated MOO software, however, it can take a few weeks for students to get used to the environment, the professors say. "The biggest challenge for students, by the way, is typing," says Ms. Polin. "Some students are very fast and some are not." At its best, Ms. Polin says, the software can provoke discussions that are richer than traditional class sessions. "It can fulfill that fantasy we faculty all carry around in our hearts of the intense late-night coffeehouse intellectual discussion." Background articles from The Chronicle: Virtual Reality on a Desktop Hailed as New Tool in Distance Education (10/6/2000) College 'MOOs' Foster Creativity and Collaboration Among Users (2/09/1996) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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