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The Interactive Campus: Administrative and Course Management System Vendors Take Up the Challenge
6/3/2002
"Adult life-long learning is adding an entire new category of enrollments to higher education," says Pittinsky. These enrollments have different preferences, and this is causing a shift in the way institutions think about the types of programs they develop, they frequency of those programs, and the mix of live classroom instruction and online learning modes. "It's the demand side, and the catalyst for institutions to move to adopt new learning technologies. It will fundamentally change the way we think about degree programs."eCollege CTO Mark Resmer says the typical student served by
his company is a life-long learner. "For eCollege, the life-long learner is
really the life blood of the company," says Resmer. eCollege is a distance
education technology provider, and most of the company's planning focuses on
distance learning as the learning context, differentiated from the on-campus
environment where course management systems may merely supplement classroom
instruction.
Resmer points out that bandwidth is a challenge in
exploiting new, highly interactive media. The industry as a whole is driven by
bandwidth. Often students are still using 56Kbps modems at home, limiting the
potential for interactivity until broadband becomes more ubiquitous. eCollege
has recently introduced a new technique called http compression in an effort to
address this ‘last mile' problem. The time it takes to render pages is decreased
by orders of magnitude, simply and cheaply.
The expense of creating
highly interactive and pedagogically rich content is another challenge. To help
facilitate production, eCollege has incorporated both synchronous and
asynchronous learning into the courses. Creating synchronous events is less
complex than structuring asynchronous ones, but students have a strong desire
for asynchronous learning. The ability to capture certain kinds of synchronous
events and then use them in an asynchronous context will go a long way towards
solving this problem. eCollege also has a large, active course development and
instructional design unit as a resource for faculty. Over time, faculty may
realize the true potential of the technology and take on more of the development
themselves.
Another area of interest is the new media capabilities of
commodity PCs, along with Web services technologies. With the advent of Windows
Media built into the operating system, and the possibility of leveraging new
tools on the desktop in the learning offerings, courses can be less dependent on
what is delivered purely over the Web. Hybrids can be created that are accessed
over the Web but take advantage of locally hosted client applications. Web
services technologies will create flexible deployment for those kinds of
applications and will open the door for collaboration, customization, and
ultimately, personalization.
One interactive technology application that
eCollege finds intriguing, says Resmer, is in the area of online labs. Virtual
labs go beyond simulation- they allow the student to do real work. The lab is
integrated into the student's learning environment, providing virtual access to
a physical resource.
eCollege also stresses Section 508 compliance, so
that learning experiences are designed to be accessible to users who may have a
wide range of disabilities. "eCollege is fully 508 compliant," says Resmer. "The
challenge is to maintain that compliance as content becomes richer and more
interactive."
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