Thursday, August 23, 2001

3 Colleges Share 1 Campus, 2 Technology Grants, and 200 High-Tech Classrooms By FLORENCE OLSEN Three Colorado colleges faced unusual challenges when they decided to spend two separate state grants on new classroom technology at one urban campus that all three institutions share -- not always comfortably. "The little jealousies were not easy to iron out, but it's been worth it," says Carl Pletsch, the co-director of a project to provide information technology for classrooms at the Denver campus, known as the Auraria Higher Education Center. The Auraria center provides classroom space for the University of Colorado at Denver, Metropolitan State College of Denver, and the Community College of Denver. Nearly 35,000 students take classes on the Auraria campus. U.C.-Denver, where Mr. Pletsch is a professor of history, was awarded a $9-million information-technology grant by the state for technology-enhanced classrooms at Auraria. Auraria itself was also given $6-million by the state for technology in the center's classrooms. Instead of using the separate capital-construction grants to hire two sets of architects and two construction firms, the institutions agreed on one architect and one technology plan for all of the campus's 200 classrooms. "We went with the equivalent of a cookie cutter through the whole place," says Mr. Pletsch. The project is to be completed by next February. Having identical technology in each classroom is essential, according to Mr. Pletsch, who has worked with classroom technology for about 10 years. "One of the things that dissuades professors from using all this stuff is they don't know for sure that next semester they'll be able to get that classroom again," he says. For 80 percent of his colleagues, "that's been the biggest hurdle," he adds. "They wouldn't develop a course that was electronic because they might not be able to do it two semesters in row, and it's an awful lot of work." At other institutions where Mr. Pletsch has taught, colleagues who did use classroom technology one semester often found themselves assigned the next semester to another classroom where all of the technology was different. "It was just too much hassle," he says. Mr. Pletsch says he hopes Auraria has avoided those mistakes. "For us, efficiency is really important," he says. "We're a no-frills campus." Videoconferencing equipment is one expensive classroom technology that Auraria did not buy for each classroom. Some higher-education officials, in fact, view it as a waning technology for instruction. Mary Beth Susman, executive director of the Colorado Electronic Community College and vice president of educational services for the Community Colleges of Colorado, says desktop video and broadband networks could soon make classroom videoconferencing equipment obsolete. To keep Auraria's classroom technology up to date, each institution has agreed to pay the center according to a formula based on the number of full-time-equivalent students it has enrolled at Auraria. Of course, it's too early to tell whether the three institutions will be able to pay for uniform upgrades of the equipment in the future, Mr. Pletsch says. "It looks very complicated." But some experts say that such a plan is feasible. "It can work as long as there is a well-understood agreement in place from the beginning," says George R. Boggs, the president and chief executive of the American Association of Community Colleges, in Washington. "It's when the parties understand things differently that there sometimes are problems down the road." At Auraria, the plan is to upgrade all 200 classrooms at the same time. But different pieces of equipment will probably burn out at different times, Mr. Pletsch says. The ceiling-mounted projectors that display information from the instructor's computer screen will probably last four to five years. But videocassette recorders "may go away entirely after two or three years, and we'll have only DVD players," he adds. Nevertheless, when the 200 classrooms are finished, each will have multimedia cabinets with the same equipment -- all managed by the same "touch-panel" software and identical remote-control units. Each classroom will have a fixed podium equipped with three network ports, with labels identifying which port belongs to which college. The three colleges that use the classrooms have their own separate networks. "What's nice about this project, at least in terms of equipment," says Mr. Pletsch, "is that it doesn't matter what classroom you're assigned." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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