Moving the Seminar Table to the Computer Screen

Liberal-arts colleges experiment with online collaboration

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

The Internet is bringing new meaning to "team teaching." This fall, six professors from six colleges will teach an advanced-Latin course together, using a blend of high-tech gadgetry and old-fashioned face-to-face discussion.

It's the first offering of a "virtual classics department" that coordinates

ALSO SEE: Online Partners Colloquy Live: Talk live with William G. Durden, president of Dickinson College, about online collaboration at liberal-arts colleges, on Wednesday, July 5, at 2 p.m. Eastern time.

the teaching efforts of scholars from 13 of the 15 institutions in the Associated Colleges of the South. Getting the institutions to work together -- and getting the professors up to speed with the technology -- took tricky planning and five years of work. But by joining forces, the consortium has, in effect, created one of the largest classics departments in the country.

The program could become a model for liberal-arts colleges in the information age, according to many administrators who attended the Summit on Technology in Liberal Arts Colleges, held at Middlebury College here last month. The two-day meeting brought together more than 125 presidents, provosts, computing officials, and professors to mull over what the colleges' next steps should be, now that they have spent millions wiring their campuses.

When representatives of the virtual classics department presented their project at the summit, many officials seemed to be thinking, "That's it!" Pooling resources over the Internet, they said, would allow colleges to enhance their teaching in ways never before possible. Even though the colleges compete for students, administrators seemed willing to consider unprecedented levels of cooperation.

"You're not going to do it all alone -- there's too much going on," said William G. Durden, president of Dickinson College, in an interview. He explained that colleges will want to be able to say to students, "Enjoy the distinctly American residential socialization that the liberal-arts college provides, and we will bring in, via technology, not just elements from our own campus, but a globally networked enhancement to your education."

Despite continuing hype about distance education, few of the administrators at these liberal-arts colleges seemed interested in peddling their courses to off-campus audiences. "That's just the wrong business for us to get into," said Michael McPherson, president of Macalester College. "We need to deepen what we now do best, rather than to go out into some new business like selling courseware."

Gregory C. Farrington, president of Lehigh University, suggested in an interview that top liberal-arts colleges could even form an "Internet league" to formalize their sharing of courses.

Many here seemed to favor a more flexible network of alliances, in which institutions would work with some colleges for some projects, and with other colleges on other projects, without a single agent coordinating the whole process. Some colleges are already moving in that direction, and officials suggested that the number of such arrangements might soon increase.

Other ideas for collaboration include establishing digital libraries, setting up regional technical-support centers, and creating a peer-review system for online teaching materials.

Two forces seemed to be motivating the move toward collaboration: fear and money.

In spite of their institutions' traditions and strengths, some of the college officials in attendance here exhibited free-floating anxieties about competing with new, for-profit institutions or with other new educational entities that might soon emerge. Mr. Farrington, for instance, suggested that nothing would stop a large company from setting up an employee program that would mix distance-learning stipends with work experience as a replacement for college.

The goal of cooperative efforts among liberal-arts colleges would be to improve the quality of their educational resources enough to remain attractive to students who have a broader set of educational choices than ever. "We're not competing on price with anybody -- we're competing on quality," said Claire L. Gaudiani, president of Connecticut College.

There is also grant money to be won for collaborative technology projects. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which sponsored the meeting here, has signaled an interest in underwriting new joint projects. It has awarded grants for many such efforts over the past several years, including the Southern colleges' virtual classics department and Project 2001, a partnership of 62 liberal-arts colleges working to use technology to improve language instruction. Project 2001 is nearing completion, and Mellon officials came here looking for the colleges' input on how to broaden the collaboration.

"Our basic hope is that we'll get the collaborative genes injected into institutions," said Clara Yu, director of Project 2001. "Our worry is that small institutions doing everything for every student in their organization will be really severely under pressure in the coming technological change from the market pressures enabled by technology." Ms. Yu, a professor of linguistics at Middlebury, organized the summit.

But even fans of collaboration acknowledge that it isn't easy. "It takes a lot of time sometimes, and institutional cultural change, for that to take root," said Ms. Yu.

Not all of the fledgling relationships work out. "There is one that is just not going to make it," she said. "They hate each other, these schools." She declined to name the colleges involved.

One of the toughest parts of designing the virtual classics department's first course was finding a time when all six professors could meet to hold the class. "We have six different institutional calendars to wrestle with, and we have as many different daily schedules as there are institutions," said Kenny Morrell, who is director of the virtual classics department as well as an associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at Rhodes College. The group settled on Mondays at 6 p.m. Central Time.

The course will go something like this: At the appointed time, the professors and about 30 students -- a few from each of the six campuses -- will tune in to an online audio broadcast of a lecture. During the lecture, they can pose questions and make comments in a live chat room. The six professors will take turns lecturing each week. To supplement the online lectures, students from each campus will meet for a second time each week in a tutorial session with their own professor; those sessions are scheduled at different times on the different campuses. All of the students and professors will also participate in an ongoing online discussion.

The arrangement will let students on each campus have the close contact with a professor that liberal-arts colleges are known for. But the students will also get to communicate online with students and professors at a distance.

The professors call their design an I.C.C., for inter-institutional collaborative course. They've dubbed their virtual department Sunoikisis, after an alliance of Greek cities that revolted against the Athenian empire in 428 B.C. (http://www.sunoikisis.org/).

The Southern-college consortium identified classics as an area that could use the high-tech help, and professors at several colleges expressed an interest in participating. Departments on some of the campuses have a lone professor. "With only one classicist, it just wasn't really an option for students to get very much in depth studying classics," said Suzanne Bonefas, director of technology programs for the consortium, in a telephone interview.

Mr. Morrell, the virtual departments' director, said that together, the colleges could offer courses of a caliber of those offered by universities known for their strong classics departments, like Harvard University.

Richard F. Thomas, chairman of the classics department at Harvard, said the joint Latin course "sounds admirable." But he said he worries that a virtual department could lead to cuts at the colleges down the road, especially if administrators decide that courses can be taught online without using an on-campus professor.

Although some professors in the virtual department at first expressed concern about the project, Mr. Morrell said, many now see it as a way to keep their own departments from becoming irrelevant. "If we offer a more comprehensive and interesting program, more students will be interested in majoring in our programs," Mr. Morrell argued. And larger enrollments could mean increased institutional support on some campuses, he added.

For Halford W. Haskell, a professor of classics at Southwestern University in Texas who is one of the teachers for the shared course, the key factor is that professors will still be working directly with students on campus. "We're not doing distance learning. We're doing team teaching," he added.

As it is, the virtual department itself might soon be hiring to fill a virtual job. Mr. Morrell said administrators are considering creating a three-year position for a classics professor who would spend one year at each of three participating colleges. The virtual professor would fill in for faculty members who go on sabbatical.

The consortium has tested its I.C.C. model in an archaeology course comprising professors from a variety of fields, including biology, geology, classics, and religion. The online course, which has been given twice, takes place during the spring, and is followed by six weeks of fieldwork in Turkey, at a dig operated in cooperation with Bilkent University, in Ankara. Students and professors in the course arrived at the site last week.

Mark B. Garrison, a professor of classical studies at Trinity University, in San Antonio, Tex., organized the course. He found lecturing over the Internet odd at first. "It was very strange to be sitting there talking and to be wondering, Is anyone listening to what I'm saying here?"

But the course worked well, he said, and the interactive discussions were lively, with professors debating among themselves as well as imparting information to students. "I don't think students get to see that too often."

Other experiments in using the Internet to enhance courses at liberal-arts colleges have met with complaints from students.

At Middlebury College, for instance, the student newspaper panned a course that was taught partly online. "Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the State" was originally designed as a seminar for only about a dozen students. When more than 40 signed up, the two professors teaching the course decided to allow 19 students to participate in person and five more to participate by Internet. The "virtual students" watched video recordings of the seminar discussions over the Internet and joined in online discussions.

"Sadly, the broadcast of a class over the Internet makes the whole reason for being here at Middlebury pointless," wrote the editors of The Campus. "If we can watch the class over the Internet, participate in its 'discussions' online, and phone the professor for periodic check-ups, why bother living at the college?"

Ronald D. Liebowitz, the provost, who was one of the course's instructors, said that the virtual students performed well, and that the other seminar students also benefited because they, too, could review the class discussion on the Internet. He agreed that the in-person seminar is the ideal setting for learning, but he said that the Internet could help provide a close substitute. He compared the experience of the virtual students in his course to students doing independent study at a college.

Some administrators at the Middlebury summit had their doubts about whether collaborative projects are the wave of the future. "The slow speed of collaboration does not match the speedy response that many of us feel we have to make with technology," said Ruth Constantine, vice president for finance and administration at Smith College.

A virtual department is appealing for smaller disciplines, like classics, said Robert A. McCaughey, a history professor at Barnard College. But scholars in larger and more-competitive disciplines, like history, might not take to the idea as well, he said.

Robert H. Edwards, president of Bowdoin College, noted that among the presidents at the meeting, there was "a certain amount of skepticism that the sharing of total courses will come to pass." If colleges do enter such collaborations, he said, they should also look outside the liberal-arts world, even to their newest rivals: "We shouldn't pull our skirts around us and avoid talking to folks like the University of Phoenix."

But talk of collaboration is in the air. "There are some ideas out there about clusters and groups of colleges getting together," said David B. House, president of Saint Joseph's College, in Standish, Me., who did not attend the meeting. He added, however, that he was "a little skeptical" of some of the ideas he's heard. "Colleges and universities have their own unique, distinct flavors," he observed.

Amy C. McGill, an associate director of Middlebury's Center for Educational Technology, predicted that collaboration would emerge gradually. "It's going to be an evolutionary process," she said.

Some college officials compared the talk of collaborations to a recent rise in the corporate world of "B2B," or business-to-business deals. Perhaps "C2C," college-to-college transactions, will become a buzzword, with colleges taking on a new role as brokers of course material from other institutions.

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