A Computer Requirement for Students Changes Professors' Duties As Well

By KELLY McCOLLUM

When she surveyed students who have registered for the course, she found that most of them already own computers that can handle the elements she's including in the Web pages. To make the course as accessible as possible, she is designing it to work with older computers based on 486 chip technology -- even though a computer requirement that the university will put in place for half of its students this fall specifies more-powerful machines.

Ms. Roth is well aware that the computer requirement will change how she teaches and how she interacts with her students -- and that the changes will come both in ways she can plan for and in ways that she can't predict. She is hardly alone. Faculty members across the campus are preparing to meet a new crop of students who expect professors to be as computer-literate as the students are themselves.

Under the new requirement, all 42,000 students here will be expected to own personal computers by the fall-1999 semester -- freshmen and juniors starting this fall, and others next fall. That could cost students and their parents more than $1,000 each. To support the new users and the range of new expectations that shelling out a large sum is bound to create, the university is beefing up its campus network, hiring new support staff, and arranging to provide software and training to students.

But the most critical task -- assuring that faculty members are ready to teach the techno-literate students -- is still a work in progress. Florida's president, John V. Lombardi, says the idea behind the requirement is to make computing "a baseline issue" -- a seamless part of academic culture at the university. Professors here, like their students, have already made a good start down that path, but they still have bridges to cross.

While academic departments here are dotted with professors who have used technology in the classroom for years -- mostly on their own initiative -- many faculty members are relative newcomers to the idea of infusing their teaching with technology. They need training and advice for everything from setting up Ethernet connections and using course software to keeping on-line office hours and squeezing multimedia carts onto cramped elevators in older campus buildings.

Professors aren't the only ones who will need support. Although many students now come to the university from well-wired high schools, others will require a lot of help to complete on-line assignments and computer-based projects.

This summer, empty computer boxes on loading docks and in Dumpsters behind faculty members' offices signify newly equipped professors, many of whom are spending the summer's first weeks seated in front of monitors as they build Web pages or try out new software.

Ms. Roth, who will create and teach her Web-based course while completing a doctoral degree, says the computer requirement itself lets professors know how far they can go in building complex Web pages: "I can't design anything that would be beyond that requirement."

She has had some help from an expanded training center run by the office of instructional resources, the department that helps to maintain classrooms, projectors, and photocopying services. At the center, professors can walk in and use one of several multimedia stations -- high-end Macintoshes and P.C.'s equipped with scanners, VCR's, video cameras, and software for graphic and Web design. Two full-time "instructional designers" are on hand, although most of their time is dedicated to distance-education courses.

Like many other graduate students and faculty members, Ms. Roth believes that familiarity with high-tech teaching methods is now a requirement for professors. "The technology is here," she says. "The students coming in probably know more than I do about it." Her contract gives ownership of the courses she creates to the university, but she sees that as a fair deal. The time she is able to spend now learning about Web-page design and on-line instruction will make her more marketable as a professor, she says. "This is a wonderful opportunity for me."

Not everyone on the faculty is so sanguine this summer, however: The new course Web pages and new lesson plans are also giving rise to new concerns about the future of teaching. Some faculty members worry that the university is encouraging the creation of on-line courses like Ms. Roth's as a way of dealing with a demographic shift that is expected to boost the university's enrollment to 50,000 in the next eight years. The fear that distance education will be used to accommodate growing enrollments is shared by faculty members at other institutions as well. Some worry that administrators are eager to cut back on traditional classroom instruction and to substitute electronic courses that may cost less.

Joseph Glover, chairman of the mathematics department at Florida, thinks that distance-education techniques can present a danger to on-campus instruction. "We would hate to see students access a distance-ed course on campus and as a result stop coming to lectures," he says. "Students who are here on the campus should have the advantage of seeing a professor live and actually talking to someone."

One professor in the department is working with an instructional designer to build a distance-education calculus course aimed at high-school students in the state. But as far as Mr. Glover is concerned, "the students on this campus would not be well served by that distance-ed course."

In just about every department of the university, however, professors are making plans to weave technology into their classroom-based courses.

Jose C. Principe, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, already gives some of the most-wired lectures on the campus. Standing in front of a projection screen called a "smartboard," he manipulates computerized engineering simulations by touching the screen itself rather than using a mouse to move a cursor. His students follow along on their own computers, running their own simulations.

Mr. Principe also leads his students through an on-line textbook he designed. In the classroom, he depends on the electronic book as a visual aid, sometimes using a chunky plastic stylus to write or draw directly on the projection screen -- just as he once would have written on a blackboard with chalk. After class, when students are in campus computer labs or at home with their own computers, they still have access to the on-line text.

The computer requirement for students would seem to be a boon to professors who, like Mr. Principe, want to use such electronic course materials -- they will be able to rely entirely on on-line texts, confident that the materials will be as accessible to their students as books are now. In departments less technologically advanced than engineering, the computer requirement will let professors assign on-line work more comfortably.

The university recently merged the instructional-resources office with its computer-services department, bringing support services for professors and students under one roof. As director of the combined department, Sue M. Legg is interested in any troubles faculty members are having with technology.

She sees the consolidation of support services as a logical move, since support for students affects the amount of support needed by professors. Professors get frustrated when students don't have the technical knowledge to use assigned software or Internet resources, she says. In the past, professors across the campus have spent class time early each semester priming students in e-mail, computer software, and the Internet. "That takes away from instruction time," Ms. Legg says. "We have the responsibility to establish a baseline of literacy for the students."

As part of the computer requirement, the university has arranged to provide students with on-line courses in using various software programs and the Internet.

A fully wired student body may also mean an end to the need for professors to make dual assignments -- one for students who use computers and one for those who don't. Selman Herschfield, a physics professor, says that as recently as two years ago, he sometimes had to print out every page of his Web site for students who didn't have computer access, because he stores some of his course materials on the site. Now, he says, 80 to 90 per cent of his students have no problems using on-line materials. With the computer requirement, he says, "we can put things on the Web and require students to do them -- it makes our lives a lot easier."

Kenneth Wald, a professor of political science, surfed the Web with students last year during classes in his course on religion and politics. "The excitement of the Web is literally bringing it into the classroom," he says. "It has all these nice, unanticipated consequences."

He found that many questions his students asked could be answered by collaborative exploration of the Internet, where he could find primary sources provided by the religious groups the class was studying. "When you're learning along with the students and they see you developing ideas," he says, "I think it makes them feel more engaged with the material."

But he is unapologetically skeptical about the university's ability to help faculty members in this new endeavor. "In the past, when the university has come out with some great initiative," he says, "it has fallen on the shoulders of the faculty to implement it without having the support."

"John has all the enthusiasm in the world, but John isn't the one who tutors freshmen how to use a spreadsheet," Mr. Wald quips, referring to President Lombardi, one of the strongest proponents of the computing requirement.

Mr. Wald says keeping a computer and projector running and connected to the Internet during the religion-and-politics class was more of a chore than he had expected. One problem was with the multimedia carts, affectionately known as blimps, that the university provides for classrooms that don't have built-in equipment. The large, wooden carts, which hold a computer and a projector, are difficult to maneuver along the narrow hallways of the main classroom building, he says, and only one elevator is large enough to accommodate them. Moving the cart and getting the computer and the projector set up in the classroom can take 15 minutes of class time, he says.

Ms. Legg, of the instructional-resources office, acknowledges the problems professors have in classrooms. The university has installed permanent computer stations in most larger lecture halls, but there seems to be no easy solution for the smaller rooms, she says. The rooms present some basic difficulties: Computer stations take up space and can block students' views -- of the blackboard, of the professor, or of each other.

Many of the rooms don't have dimmable lights, so professors must deal either with displays that are hard to make out in brightly lit rooms, or with students dozing off in the darkness. What's more, not all classrooms are secure enough to leave expensive equipment inside. "Classrooms are simply not designed for delivery of this kind of technology," says Ms. Legg.

Mr. Wald says it was hard to get help from the university's computer-service department when he wanted to set up an electronic discussion list for his class. "Most faculty, when they need help with these things, get it from other faculty. We don't get it from the computer center," he says.

On the other hand, faculty members' learning from each other isn't a bad thing, according to professors who have found colleagues to be a primary source of support. Gene R. Thursby, a professor of religion at Florida, has used e-mail discussions and on-line assignments in his courses for several years. As an early adopter of technology, he made a concerted effort to share his knowledge by giving workshops for other professors in his department and by using class time early in the semester to help students get on line.

Ms. Legg's office, for its part, has sponsored a series of faculty forums in which professors get together to learn how others are using technology in their teaching. Those who attend, she says, are able to adapt techniques used by their colleagues, and the discussions have helped provoke new ideas about how to use computers and the Internet in the classroom.

Fallout from the technology requirement isn't limited to technical questions. Another issue that faculty members are grappling with this summer is the amount of time that wired styles of teaching require. Gregory Ulmer, an English professor, says the new emphasis on technology will "loosen the notion of the traditional class schedule" for professors.

Professors traditionally have been able to count on teaching for about three hours per week per course, and on setting aside a few hours a week as office hours. But when a professor posts his or her e-mail address for students, office hours last 24 hours a day. As Mr. Ulmer and others have found, some students who might be too shy to ask questions in class or during traditional office hours often have no problem posing frequent questions via e-mail.

Then there's the added time required to prepare on-line course materials -- finding Web sites, creating Web pages, and learning how to use new software. "Innovation always increases the workload," says Mr. Wald, who taught the religion-and-politics course. "But I don't think that's too huge a disincentive."