Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Features
Bridging the Gap--Online and Offline Learning
5/1/2004
For residents of California’s sprawling Eastern Sierra Corridor, distance
learning is often a necessity—not an option. Cerro Coso Community College
serves this 18,000-square-mile stretch of mountain, desert and valley communities.
It is one of the largest community college service areas in the U.S., with a
population base of over 85,000.
The school has five on-ground instructional sites. A sixth site, its online campus, is the largest in terms of enrollment. Cerro Coso delivers 12 associate degrees online and over 250 distance learning courses a year. Since 2001, our Academy of Media Arts has offered online degrees in digital animation and Web design.
Studying digital animation remotely can be challenging, to say the least. Learning to work as an artist is all about critique. If you’re not teaching in a traditional classroom, you need a practical way to post a student’s work so that other students can comment and react to it.
Last January we began using Macromedia Breeze to create our digital animation courses. The Breeze system includes several components that can be used together to deliver both live and on-demand Web-based training and presentations. Breeze allows us to add narration, slides, and animation to PowerPoint and deliver this audiovisual material through any standard Web browser. Breeze Live, a component that extends the Breeze platform with collaborative features like screen-sharing and application-sharing, has completely changed our online classes. Seven evenings a week an instructor hosts a “virtual” open lab, a live, faculty-facilitated study group online.
During these sessions, the instructor answers questions and provides skills demonstrations for the various applications the class is learning to use. These include Softimage XSI, Alias Maya, Adobe Photoshop, and Conitec 3D GameStudio. Students ask questions through the chat window, and the instructor answers the questions via the desktop by going into the screen-share mode. Prior to the implementation, we had no immediate, cost-effective way to demonstrate techniques students didn’t understand. In the past, our only option would be to record the correct answer, burn it onto a CD-ROM, and snail-mail it to the individual student. With 20 or 30 such requests per week, this task was time-consuming and impractical.
Attendance at virtual open labs is not compulsory. We record and archive sessions that are of general interest in a searchable digital library for 24/7 access by all our students. This centralized library also contains individual student projects and presentations. The Academy of Media Arts has 11 online faculty, all of whom create their own course materials. When I introduced them to the system, it took them about 15 minutes to absorb the information. Admittedly, these were design professionals, but instructors in our other departments also catch on quickly.
The more faculty exposed to this new technology, the more they will undoubtedly dream up new applications. As designers and distance educators, we are constantly seeking affordable, media-rich methods to communicate more effectively with our online students.
Jim Kiggens (jkiggens@cerrocoso.edu) is director of The Academy of Media Arts
at Cerro Coso Community College in Ridgecrest, Calif.
Cite this Site
copy text (above) for proper citation
Recommended Reading
- Sun, Stanford Working To Archive History
In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world's history, right up to today.
- The Quilt Coalition Rolls Out XO Communications for High-Capacity Network Services
The Quilt, a coalition of 28 regional network organizations, has added XO Communications Services to its authorized vendor list. The Quilt represents 200 universities and thousands of other educational institutions across the United States. With this new relationship, Quilt members can purchase XO's high-speed IP transit and network transport services at competitive rates.
- Wimba Classroom 5.2 Expands Classroom Capture Support, Adds MP3 Downloads
At the NECC 2008 conference in Texas this week, Wimba launched a new version of Wimba Classroom, the virtual classroom component of the company's Collaboration Suite. The new 5.2 release expands options for classroom capture and adds a variety of other functional and ease of use features.
- Automation Chimera: Education Is Not Management
The lure of automating workflow online so human intervention is minimized is continually reinforced in the minds of higher education administrators by examples of automated campus systems such as financials, student information systems, and other enterprise systems. But what's good for management is not always good for learning.
- Cognos Releases BI Software for Linux-based IBM System z Mainframe
Cognos, which IBM acquired in January, has released an update to its business intelligence software that will run on the Linux operating system on IBM System z mainframes. IBM Cognos 8 BI was being developed by the two companies prior to the acquisition, but assimilation of Cognos into IBM accelerated development.
- Facebook and Collegiality: A Serendipitous Social Niche
Facebook is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.
