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Creating Tomorrow’s Classrooms

1/20/2005

By Dian Schaffhauser

The hope, Riffee says, is that in three, five, or 10 years, those same instructors will be building a base of paying students. Of course, to succeed, the pricing model is different. “Whatever their students would pay for a degree program there is what they’ll pay for a degree program here. And then we work out a financial split with that institution. We actually collect the money and pay the institution back their percentage for their marketing and student support.”

Face-to-face interaction will always play an essential role in education, Riffee believes. It’s currently being manifested for US-based UF distance students via Apple’s iChat AV, a full-screen personal video conferencing service that works over a broadband connection. Groups of students who want to speak to an instructor set up a meeting time, then sit in their offices or conference rooms, turn on their computers with the iChat cameras and interact through instant messenger. “So you have a small group, geographically separated, having a very intimate interaction in a small classroom,” says Riffee. In the future, he says that sort of thing won’t have a “Gee, whiz, is this terrific?” feel to it—it’ll just be standard operating procedure.

Behind the Scenes: Selective Outsourcing

Technology’s role in the University of Florida’s version of distance learning is to serve up the content, a mix of streaming video, text, animation, and simulations. “Every technology you’ve seen on the Internet, we use in our programs,” says Associate Provost William Riffee.
But rather than relying on campus IT to supply specialized services, Riffee has chosen to work with third-party service providers in many cases. “I have outsourced where I have felt it was important to get the best quality, the best turnaround.”

The outsourcing of streaming video was done to obtain 24x7 support. “In over three years [of operation], we’ve been down a total of two hours,” he says. “If a student calls one of our IT people, one of our instructors and says, ‘I’m having trouble with this streaming video,’ within 45 minutes we will know what the problem is—and it’s usually something in their apartment building. We can trace it back to where they live and what part of town. I needed that kind of support.”

Riffee has also outsourced marketing and customer service functions. On the marketing side, Riffee chose a service provider with a propriety system for tracking students. “Twenty eight to 30 percent of [distance learning] students took five years to make the decision to enroll in the program, after first contact,” says Riffee. “[The marketing partner] kept contacting them and keeping them up to date.”

The same company d'es quality assurance work. Riffee says they’ll call students and ask how things are going. Then he gets a spreadsheet of results. “And we say that within 48 hours every problem that has been identified will be fixed.”

Riffee believes the campus of tomorrow will turn to outsourcing for many of its non-educational services. “There are companies that are building niches out there that do a better job than we can do it and end up costing overall less than it would take for us to build it inside.



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