Wired to the Hilt

At 8:30 in the morning, in a classroom that he refers to as "the Enterprise," Joseph M. Ragan's accounting class is moving at warp speed.

ALSO SEE: Technology on a Shoestring MULTIMEDIA: The $400,000 Classroom: an interactive glance at the gadgetry in the Teletorium at Saint Joseph's University. (Requires Flash 5. The plug-in is available from Macromedia.) Colloquy Live: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Malcolm Brown, director of academic computing at Dartmouth College, who talked about the trend toward high-tech classrooms, and about their costs and payoffs for colleges.

Mr. Ragan, an associate professor of accounting at Saint Joseph's University, scrawls for a few minutes on a whiteboard, then blasts through a lesson plan in PowerPoint. Soon he has the students playing with prototype accounting software that is available only online -- from a server 800 miles away.

The students sit behind glowing laptops that are plugged into power outlets and the campus data network. An arsenal of gizmos is arrayed near the front of the room: VCR's and DVD players, speakers and microphones, and even a remote-controlled camera that can beam the class around the world, via satellite.

Mr. Ragan calls the first row of seats "the bridge." There "Captain" Patrick J. McGettigan, a sophomore, taps on his laptop and guides his classmates through a lesson in 21st-century accounting methods.

It's not quite Star Trek, but it's not far off, either.

While technology in the classroom is nothing new, the very latest networked technologies, which permit unprecedented interactivity among students and professors, are changing the face of the lecture hall. Universities see those wired classrooms as the future of higher education, particularly for science and business courses, and are beginning to build them, component by component, room by room.

Kenneth C. Green, director of the Campus Computing Project, says the electronic classrooms that do exist are always in demand, and most institutions have plans to add more. According to his most recent campus-computing survey, installing technology in classrooms and helping faculty members integrate technology into teaching rank as administrators' top priorities for the near future.

Some colleges are ahead of the curve. The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio recently spent $2.2-million to beef up classrooms with digital projectors and multimedia systems. Drexel University is building a $15-million business-learning center that will house technology-enhanced classrooms and lecture halls. Institutions as diverse as Laramie County Community College, Purdue University, the University of Dubuque, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Wake Forest University, among others, have wired up their classrooms.

But few have committed to the wired classroom more fully than Saint Joseph's, a Jesuit institution with 3,400 students that has staked its future, and some $30-million, on "smart classrooms." The centerpiece of the effort, and home to "the Enterprise," is Owen A. Mandeville Hall, a $25-million neo-Gothic building stocked with technologically enhanced lecture halls and classrooms.

Saint Joseph's and other universities say the new classrooms can be assets on many fronts. For starters, they are a terrific marketing tool, attracting the attention of donors and corporations and dazzling prospective students and faculty members.

They also give instructors access to new materials and techniques. Many professors say that the technology is useful, even necessary, for everyday lesson plans, although they also acknowledge that they neither need nor want all the bells and whistles. "I don't use technology just to use technology," says Christopher Coyne, an assistant professor of finance at Saint Joseph's, who taught a class one recent morning using just a digital projector and Web access. "Just because you have the nuclear capability doesn't mean you have to use it."

But the technology can also be a distraction and a burden. Aside from the costs, the technology demands new investments of time from professors who want to incorporate it into lesson plans. And as students zone out on Web sites or e-mail in class, some professors wonder whether technology might be a hindrance rather than a help.

Dream Building

Mandeville Hall was the dream of the university's president, the Rev. Nicholas S. Rashford, who wanted technology classrooms when he was dean of the School of Management at Rockhurst University in the 1980s. "I wanted to enhance the classroom experience to teach process as well as content," he says, to get students in the classroom to use some of the programs and techniques that they would eventually encounter in the business world.

About a fifth of the building's cost went into its high-tech amenities. Most classrooms in Mandeville have an Ethernet port at every seat, digital projectors and cameras, audioconferencing equipment, and a computer-outfitted podium from which the lecturer can control almost all of the equipment in the room.

The two so-called Moot Boardrooms -- Saint Joseph's trademarked that term -- were focal points of Father Rashford's vision. Each has a boardroomlike table in the center of a pit, surrounded by ascending U-shaped tiers of seats that are trimmed in dark oak. Each seat has a control panel that lets a student, with the push of a button, send the image on his or her screen through a ceiling-mounted digital projector aimed at the front of the room.

Mandeville's crown jewel, however, is a 300-seat auditorium outfitted with an array of high-tech tools -- the Wolfington Teletorium. (Saint Joseph's also trademarked the term "Teletorium.") It was here, at the building's 1998 dedication, that the university orchestrated a satellite videoconference with the Vatican. To show off this $400,000 technological toy, Father Rashford steps up to the podium, where a touch-screen monitor gives him the choice of setting up the room for a teleconference, an audioconference, a distance-education class, or a theatrical production. He chooses the teleconference option, and with a click and a whir, cameras and digital projectors drop out of hidden compartments in the ceiling, movie screens slide down in the front and rear of the room, and the window blinds pull shut.

Impressing (Some) Students

But administrators here hope to do more than just impress visiting journalists. Mandeville Hall is the first stop on admissions tours for prospective freshmen and their parents. "There's a wow factor when we bring parents and students through this building," says Joseph A. DiAngelo, dean of the business school. "Some of the parents' eyes light up. You hear, 'We didn't have this when I went to school.'"

Mr. DiAngelo plans to add a $300,000 Wall Street-like trading room to the building, complete with digital screens that will display trading activity, stock prices, and exchange rates in real time. The room will have a big window facing an adjacent hallway so passersby can see the technology inside.

The university doesn't know how much the electronic classrooms influence students' decision to attend Saint Joseph's. Mr. McGettigan, the student in Mr. Ragan's class, says he came to Saint Joseph's because it offers smaller classes and a more intimate setting. But he also says he would have enrolled at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, his other option, if Saint Joseph's had lacked the electronic classrooms and other technology.

Some students who came for the technology, however, have been disappointed. Nick Gaudiosi, a junior and marketing major, sought a small institution and was impressed when he saw the technological fireworks during a tour of Mandeville Hall. But in his first two years at Saint Joseph's, he saw hardly any technology in use. "I was sitting in my freshman and sophomore classes thinking, I came here for this -- when am I going to see it?" he says. "I was a little frustrated."

The technology has also attracted corporate partners, such as the Vanguard Group, which sends its employees to executive MBA programs that convene in the Moot Boardrooms. And when corporations come to work in the building, Mr. DiAngelo adds, it gives students yet another opportunity to rub shoulders with future employers.

Perpetual Obsolescence

None of the technology was cheap, and Saint Joseph's does not have deep pockets. Most of the equipment, not to mention Mandeville Hall itself, was purchased with money from gifts and grants, as evidenced by the plaques that pervade the building, naming every nook and cranny for a generous donor: the Dale Classroom, the O'Hara Executive Lounge, the Dugan Lobby and Atrium, and so on.

Even though the building is just over three years old, however, some of the technology requires constant attention. As Mandeville went up, the university set aside a $255,000 endowment to help pay for maintenance and for equipment replacement; that endowment has since grown through donations to $434,000.

P. David Lees, director of instructional-media services, says that opening high-tech classrooms means more than just buying a bunch of computers and wiring a building. For example, some computer equipment can give off a lot of heat, so colleges must add special ventilation systems. In rooms that have digital projectors, colleges might have to customize the lighting. If a room tends to hold loud presentations, the college might have to consider soundproofing.

Colleges might also want to buy extra projectors or computers, so that if one breaks in a classroom, the technology-support team can quickly swap in a new component. Such computer support comes with its own costs. Mr. Lees's staff has risen from three to eight since technology came to Saint Joseph's. The university also spends $160,000 each year to contract with a local tech company for emergency repairs. The contract doesn't cover expected replacements, like lamps for the digital projectors, which alone cost the university $50,000 a year, at $300 to $800 per bulb.

"All told, it's about $300,000 a year to support all technology classrooms on campus," Mr. Lees says.

Then there's the perpetual obsolescence of technology. Some digital projectors had fans that turned out to be too loud, so the university replaced them. The old projector in the Teletorium cost $100,000 and lasted only three years (though its replacement, which is much brighter, cost half of that). The systems that control some of the technology from the podiums were outdated eight months after the building opened; the university is looking at new systems now.

"One of the problems that we're encountering right now is full-size VHS," Mr. Lees says. "A lot of our editing equipment is full-size VHS, but you can't buy full-size VHS camcorders anymore. So now we're having to look at a digital-video format, which presents some problems."

"It's not inexpensive to do this, and I think we do it pretty well," Mr. Lees says, adding that the technology is always going to change. He says the best thing an institution can do is buy the highest-grade wiring. "It doesn't hurt to plan for more because it's hard to add it later."

And it doesn't hurt to plan, period. Administrators sketched out ideas for Mandeville Hall 10 years before it was built, but they didn't hire a technology-consulting firm until architectural plans for the building were well under way -- a miscalculation that cost the university "hundreds of thousands," says Mr. Lees.

"We were called into the project about six months later than we should have been," says Richard J. Coluzzi of RJC Designs, the technology consultant for Mandeville. As the steel went up and the concrete was being poured, his firm had to rush to make major mechanical and electrical decisions about the technology infrastructure. "The further on you get behind the curve, the more money it costs you, because now you have to tear things out," he says.

Pleasing the Customer

In the end, institutions that spend money to adopt technology say they are doing so for one reason: to teach the new generation of students. Mr. Green, the campus-computing expert, says that high-tech classrooms counter what he calls "instruction interruptus" -- professors don't have to wait until the next class to answer a question with a graph or an illustration from a Web page.

Jason L. Frand, assistant dean of the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Los Angeles, has studied the use of technology in education for 20 years. He says students today have an "information-age mind-set," which means that they interact with computers more fluidly, learn better with hands-on activity, and become impatient with glitches and delays in delivery.

Those messages resonate with some at Saint Joseph's. "These kids grow up playing with computer games, so this is really not a leap in pedagogy," Mr. DiAngelo says. "The difficulty is when you go in and teach a group of freshmen and don't have any technology -- because they're used to it, and their attention span is such that if you're just lecturing like they would have lectured when I was a student, they get bored and they lose interest."

It's important that professors master the wired-classroom technology. Mr. DiAngelo and other administrators at the university say that although Saint Joseph's offers regular "button pushing" clinics, professors mainly learn about the technology from one another. The administration has pushed a bit, too. Father Rashford says he has instituted a half-serious ban on acetate, the plastic used for presentations on overhead projectors. Asked what happens to professors who don't embrace new technology, he quips, "We fire their asses," but quickly allows that Saint Joseph's professors can teach however they want.

Mr. Ragan adjusted his teaching style willingly, even enthusiastically. About five years ago, he started to see students tune out during old-fashioned lectures. Today, "students want visual, active stimuli, and technology gives them that," he says. "If you go in there and expect that they are only going to listen to a voice and have good response and retention, it's not going to happen."

As a teacher, he seems to be a natural performer, playing the inquisitor, the comedian, and the sage. In some ways, his delivery in the Moot Boardroom is the same as it has been throughout his 30-year teaching career -- he throws out pop questions and ad-libbed jokes to keep the students awake and attentive. But now his act has become a full-scale production. He uses the built-in technology to display information from Web sites, to work on computer programs with students, and to videotape student presentations. Next month, he plans to bring in a guest speaker from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm, via satellite.

But organizing even a simple classroom presentation is a chore. "I used to be able to walk into a classroom with an hour's preparation for an hour of lecture. Now that's easily quadrupled," Mr. Ragan says, adding that most of the extra time involves thinking up contingency plans in case there's a glitch. "If you're going to deliver with the computer, you've got to really anticipate all of the possible problems and be ready to go to another plan. ... You're not just preparing the class once. You're preparing it two or three times."

"Yes, it's time-consuming," he says. "I've put more time into my classes than I ever have. But I also have more enjoyment, because technology raises the roof a bit -- it creates a higher level of learning."

UCLA's Mr. Frand also points out that technology can be a distraction and, if it's not thoroughly integrated into a lesson plan, detrimental to learning. There have always been in-class diversions. "In my day, we read the paper or passed notes," he says. "Now there's so much more available to students." The temptation to read The Washington Post or Salon, or converse with a faraway friend, is greater than ever. So Saint Joseph's is looking into software that will let instructors monitor students' computers in class.

And not every course or discipline is ideally suited to being taught with high-tech gadgetry. Owen W. Gilman, a professor of English and chairman of the English department at Saint Joseph's, says it's great to have ready access to multimedia equipment. Lately, he has experimented with Macintosh computers and wireless equipment in his classes. But he doesn't do it just to cater to the video-game generation. His students don't expect him to use technology in class; in fact, some of them find it a bit clunky. "They just want to be engaged," he says.

A Familiar Message

Some of technology's potential and pitfalls are on display in a mid-morning finance course in Mandeville Hall. In a darkened room, Mr. Coyne, the assistant professor of finance, is going over the basics of a spreadsheet and prodding his students constantly with questions. The students, most of whom are following along on their laptops, will be able to save the lesson and return to it after class.

From the back row, the constellation of laptop screens glimmers in the darkness -- some are on the lesson, some are on Instant Messenger or Yahoo. Mr. Gaudiosi, the marketing major, is attentively taking notes as the professor explains the spreadsheet. "Today, this is helpful because we're going through this stuff together," he says. "But sometimes I'm chatting with my friends and at the end of class, I'm like, 'Uh, what just happened?'"

Suddenly, a message box pops up on his screen. Moments earlier, he'd sent a little note to a cousin who works in Philadelphia. Now she's writing back, with a message that's perhaps too familiar:

"Hey, Nick. You in class again?"