Alternate Approaches

At the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, technologists have explored different types of innovations in interactive technologies for synchronous communication, but one of their most successful undertakings operates asynchronously, as faculty members and students see fit. These rich media efforts revolve around a collaboration program called Webcafé, a glorified bulletin board designed to facilitate collaborative study partnerships, as well as extracurricular project planning for activities in and around the Philadelphia community.

The effort began back in 1998, as a portal for students in only 25 select classes. By 2003, every student in the school’s 450 business and management classes was given the opportunity to use it. Today, Webcafé is open to all students and faculty members, plus some staff, with 7,500 concurrent users at any given time. Rob Ditto, senior IT project leader, says Webcafé has become one of the most commonly used technologies on Wharton’s campus, second only to e-mail.

To use the system, users simply log on with a standard Web browser, from wherever they might be. Behind the scenes, Webcafé runs on software from EMC Documentum (www.documentum.com), an enterprise content management tool that helps users create and share any number of files, including digital text documents, engineering drawings, still images, audio and video files, and many others. Ditto says he wrote a separate program that enables students to upload assignments to a secure server, and allows faculty members to exchange comments with students in a secure environment that stores the comments as part of a gradebook database. The software also features more lifestyle-oriented collaboration spaces, which students use for more practical purposes such as maintaining a database of summer sublets, or voting on which stocks are the best bets for investment.

BANDWIDTH PROBLEMS don't impede distance
educators at Villanova, simple workaround works.

“For both students and faculty members, this simple approach really d'es enhance everyday goings-on around Wharton,” says Ditto. “We found this was the best way to build upon what happens in our classrooms.”

Because it is asynchronous, the Wharton solution addresses one of the most prevalent stumbling blocks for rich media: bandwidth. Generally speaking, most interactive technologies sap gigabytes of network bandwidth, so institutions that run mission-critical applications on the same network may not have much bandwidth left for the rich media apps.

Another element of the bandwidth issue revolves around student connections: Streaming connections require 150 Kbps of bandwidth, or roughly one-third of standard DSL line throughput. Short of requiring all students to have a connection of minimum speed, there’s no foolproof way for a school to ensure that all students are connecting at speeds that enable them to follow instructors in real time. In most cases, when bandwidth is an issue on either side, at least some students will experience five- or 10-second delays, effectively rendering the benefits of rich media useless.

To ensure that bandwidth isn’t a problem for their students, technologists at the College of Engineering at Villanova University (PA) have whipped up a blend of old-fashioned technology and even more archaic transportation. At the end of every distance education class, IT staffers help faculty members wrap class materials into Zip files, usually no larger than 150MB. Next, depending on a student’s connection, the staffers either make these Zip files available for standard download, or they burn the files onto a CD-ROM and then spend $5 or $10 to overnight it via the US Postal Service. With this approach, Seán O’Donnell, director of Distance Education, says that instead of downgrading quality to serve the lowest common denominator, the school is able to respond to the individual needs of students with all types of connections.

“We’re ready for anything,” he boasts. “But believe me, if you’re a distance education student paying for one of our distance education classes, you wouldn’t want to go into the race with a Pinto, you’d want a Porsche.”

Stumbling Points

As O’Donnell explains, schools can work to eliminate bandwidth as a problem for rich media on campus. One obstacle that has established itself as a more formidable challenge to the development of rich media is “educator comfort.” According to IIT’s Kapp, educators in fields such as engineering and science are comfortable enough with technology to explore new products as they come out. However, in fields such as English and history, where educators don’t rely on technology nearly as much or as frequently, Kapp says faculty familiarity with rich media drops dramatically, necessitating a learning curve that can debilitate a push for change.

In the latter cases, Kapp says faculty members are most likely to use rich media to do nothing more than mimic the experience in the classroom. While these educators might go through the trouble of hooking up a streaming videofeed during lectures, the application won’t offer anything beyond this feed itself, a poor use of rich media, by any standard.

One way to increase educator comfort levels with rich media is to make it easy for instructors to take advantage of the technology as a way to supplement what g'es on in class. At Drexel University (PA), for instance, the school’s IT department launched what they call a “Rich Media Drop Box” to automate the process of digitizing content to be used with interactive technologies. The system hinges upon command line encoders from Sonic Foundry (www.sonicfoundry.com), which cost about $20,000 apiece.

To use the system, faculty members drag and drop text, audio, and video files into a special folder on the school network; the files are then transported to an encoding farm, where they are converted into digital content that can be used in just about any rich media environment. Access to this encoded content is through RSS syndication. According to John Morris, Drexel’s coordinator of Academic Technology and Web Services, the school processed more than 400 objects during a recent 10-week pilot program with 10 faculty members.

“Once the faculty members learned that this made it easy for them to digitize content, the Drop Box was something that really resonated with our faculty members,” he says. “One way to ensure rich media is rich is to make it accessible for everyone.”

Even with accessibility bases covered, rich media presents two other sizable challenges for colleges and universities looking to increase interactivity across the board. First is security—Villanova’s O’Donnell and a number of other rich media experts say that a surprising number of students fall victim to issues pertaining to firewall controls. The problems arise because at a time when identity theft and other security threats are at an all-time high, few students have their personal firewalls configured to allow incoming data to stream unchecked.

What’s more, when students log on to a rich media application, and their operating system asks them if they want to allow the stream through the firewall, many students decline because they are afraid of leaving their machines vulnerable to attacks from elsewhere on the Web.

Perhaps the biggest challenge with rich media is the way a school uses it to support human cognition. Mayer, the UCSB psychology professor who also authored the recently released Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (Cambridge University Press, 2005), has studied the cognitive science since 1995, and insists that there’s a huge difference between a technology-centered approach and a learner-centered approach.

In theory, Mayer says that rich media can be a valuable tool. In practice, however, he insists that few, if any, schools actually use the technology the way they should. Looking forward, Mayer notes that in order for rich media to be more than just a fad, inventors must devise a way for users to rely upon rich media for something that extends and amplifies the ordinary classroom experience without detracting from it at all.

“We’re not even close to seeing rich media that, for lack of a better word, is rich,” he says. “The technology has the opportunity to revolutionize learning, but if it’s developed poorly, we will turn off more people than we attract.”