Santa Barbara City College
Committee on Teaching and Learning and Faculty Enrichment Committee
Minutes of Oct. 28, 2002

Intelecom Presentation

ATTENDING:

From Intelecom: Cheryl Chapman, Larry Bertrand, Stan Francus

From SBCC: Guy Smith, Gerry Lewin, Manou Eskandari, Pam Guenther, Michael Gallegos, David Kiley, George Federman, Nina Warner, Jan Schultz, Marilynn Spaventa, Jerry Pike, Melanie Eckford-Prossor, Curtis Solberg, Debbie Mackie, Jack Ullom, Morris Hodges, Patricia Nunez, Eric Wise, Annette Cordero, Bronwen Moore, Kathy O’Connor

Notetaker: Joan Cartwright

Guy Smith I’d like to introduce the people from Intelecom and they’ll explain what Intelecom is, but essentially we’re here to discuss and show you some materials on telecourses and tele-web courses. These three people, Cheryl Chapman, Stan Francus and Larry Bertrand have been kind enough to not only come today but they came last Friday and spent 8 or 10 hours here all day long discussing the three different groups of the tele-web courses that are offered by Intelecom. I want to thank them for making an extraordinary effort to be here to inform us and for having done so they get an honorary Santa Barbara City College sweat shirt. Three groups on Friday and I think the reception has been very positive so I’m going to turn it over to them. I want to say that we appreciate your having come all the way to do this.

Cheryl Chapman Thank you.

Stan Francus Well, we want to thank all of you. We really do appreciate the time and attention that you’ve extended to us. We’re colleagues; 2 of us are retired, but we’ve been with the community colleges for a number of years, and Cheryl will and Larry will introduce themselves. My name is Stan Francus, and retired out of Long Beach City College a couple of years ago after 34 years there. I did want to mention one thing about Intelecom. Intelecom is a group or consortium of 40 community colleges, all from California, mostly in southern California from Alan Hancock down to Mexico. The consortium got started in 1969 and the colleges tried to get together to figure out how to produce distance learning courses and deliver them at lower cost than could be done individually, and by a group effort. When we started off it was traditional telecourses, and over the years it has expanded into incorporating on-line elements and a lot of this product is what Cheryl & Larry will be talking about. The three of us are here—we have quite a bit of experience with distance learning, and I was mentioning to Guy earlier that at any time now or in the future if any one of us, or all three of us can be of help to the individual or to your departments on any of these issues, please give us a call—consider us a part of your Santa Barbara support team.

Cheryl Chapman My name is Cheryl Chapman and I work part time at Coastline Community College in the computer department as well a teacher ed and staff development, but the funds sort of went away for that, so I’m kind of volunteering

Larry Bertrand I’m a retiree from San Bernadino LA College where I was on the faculty for 25 years, retired after teaching 31 years. I have been using distance education over 10 years, coordinated that program with our 2 colleges and our PBS station . I was on Intelecom’s review and staff development committee. I taught telecourses for at least 10 years.

Stan Francus We thought we could find out your names and primary interests.

Gerry Lewin. I’m a Learning Disabilities Specialist, and am very interested in combining pedagogy, psychology and philosophy in terms of how people learn. My interest is to create good learning environments.

Manou Eskandari I am chair of the Poli Sci Econ Dept here and I’m starting an online course in American Govt., and my colleague Guy Smith pointed this out as a very good supplement. So I want to see how good it is.

Pam Guenther I am from the Math Department, and I’m hoping eventually I’ll be able to teach an Education course mainly for pre-service teachers. We’re going to try to do hybrid so do some of it will be off campus so that we can target and in-service teachers and fit their schedules better.

David Kiley I am from the Lbrary. I’m interested in doing library skills training, or library skills instruction using this.

Mike Gallegos Dean of Technologies.

George Federman I do not work for Mike, I teach Computer Information Systems—I’m doing our first online class and we really have questions about the issue of interactivity when you teach programming, database design & so on. I’m trying to find the best medium.

Marilynn Spaventa, Dean of Math, Sciences & Languages.

Jan Schultz Earth Science Dept. here.

Nina Warner Fine Arts Department. I teach drawing, painting & design. We are primarily a hands-on department. so a lot of this is initially turns out to be fairly useless to us, but I’m always interested to see what the possibilities are. We also teach art history and so we’re doing an online course, but it’s hard to teach charcoal on the screen, drawings…

Curtis Solberg American History. I could probably most easily be awestruck and intimidated by your presentation today more than anybody here, but I’m certainly willing to listen.

Guy Smith That was a mixed message

Jerry Pike Director of Learning Support Services, which is housed in the Learning Resource Center. We provide tutoring service, both online tutoring service and face to face tutoring, so I’m mostly interested in the interactive components, specifically as they relate to student support and tutoring.

Melanie Eckford Prosser English. I’m here mainly as a member of the Committee on Teaching and Learning. As you probably know, teaching English via the internet is notoriously ineffective. There hasn’t been a lot of success with it.

Debbie Mackie Counseling Department.

Morris Hodges Physical Education; I am the men’s basketball coach.

Cheryl Chapman… How do you want to approach this? Well, we have a lot of options. We found our coach for our online basketball team; that’s good. Obviously it’s just in theory, it’s a way to communicate. The thing that I’d really like you guys to leave here with is that regarding anything online, you guys have the greatest faculty resources, you have the tech thing going on, but as you think about online education or distance education, we really have to put it into communication mode and not the presentation mode. This is because there are so many things we can’t do online synchronously, meaning at the same time, such as art. I teach Dreamweaver and Flash this semester, and you were talking about math and educators. I teach the computer literacy class on line—totally online to inservice teachers along with teaching & learning. Now obviously I’m not doing their observations with them or doing any sort of that interaction, but they’re doing it on their own and my goal is for them to be able to use the tools that are available to communicate with them. Right. I help them through the process. So what we want to do is make sure that you understand what Intelecom has to offer in the video.

Stan Francus If you look in your packets in the course list, here’s a list there that the first 3 pages are courses offered through Intelecom & you can see on the third page the new courses that are coming. They’re being developed now, and one very close to completion, the Endless Voyage, is a replacement for the marine biology course right. The Unfinished Nation would be a two semester American history. The next page has short-term courses. That doesn’t mean they’re offered for less than 16 weeks or 18 weeks, what that means is these are courses that some of our member colleges expressed an interest in. But only a few of the colleges, so what we’ve done is the consortium has used our group buying power to get these leased from the producers and made them available to our member colleges at a cheaper rate than they could have negotiated on their own. So short term means that it’s simply used semester by semester.

Cheryl Chapman So the first 3 pages you’ll see that if there’s any course that fits into your discipline that would be already included in the membership. Now the few courses that are available today with the teleweb component are the Human Condition, which is the health course and Kathy O’Connor had looked at that on Friday. The other one is the Framework for Democracy which is the brand new Poli Sci History course, and that’s current through 9/11. And then the other one would be the Examined Life (the Joe thing). Joe White was here, and he helped create the study guide for the video to be used in a Philosophy course.
Lifelines in Madison Heights is the newest of the adult education entity and Intelecom also has a ton of products that you can use for that end and we talked a little bit about that insofar as using it with non credit. The Crossroads Café, I know when I was working in that department, I used that for basic skills training instead of the English as a second language. So again I want you to think about the scope of what’s available and the materials, and I’m going to show you a little bit of the video, and how it actually works in an interdisciplinary way. Because if you’re a member, 25 % of any course can be used in your course whether it’s traditional or in the classroom online, or a hybrid, as long as it’s not the full telecourse at that point, with no student fees. Meaning that you can use 25% of any of the materials that are available there, i.e., if you need a clip from any of the Preserving the Legacy, which is an environmental piece. So just keep that in mind too and ask questions along the way. What we’re going to do is look at the Examined Life?

Guy Smith No, the Health Course.

Cheryl Chapman This is the 30 minute preview and if you want to pick up one of the preview books, you can do that also. If you feel like you want to take a video with you, you can.

Guy Smith Let me just say a word before you start that. Intelecom has been around for about 25-30 years. We actually used to offer some telecourses here and what has reignited our interest in telecourses is that the web has allowed the process to become a lot more interactive than it had been in the past. It’s currently our thinking that we’re going to join this consortium for the next year, so we would be theoretically able to offer telecourses in Fall 2003. The way that those are going to be delivered would be either through Cox KCET, which currently broadcasts 9 or 10 of those telecourses, and then in addition to that, Channel 21 which has been programmed by UCSB and is now being spun off as a separate non-profit, the college is going to have some influence over it’s programming. We would broadcast on a schedule through Channel 21, so both those would be the venues for that. In addition, there’s some discussion about being able to stream these telecourses either locally or through a third party, so it would be video on demand. Those are the three delivery options it is. Then the fourth thing, which I think is very interesting, that is if you were doing a traditional online course, you could have access to up to 25% of this to incorporate into your online course regardless. 25% of the total!

Cheryl Chapman So that means you could do multiple courses.

Stan Francus And for the courses that are already developed, there’s the video component which can be delivered in a number of ways, it’s linked—and it often has a nationally recognized textbook associated with it. There’s a study guide for the student that links the video work and the textbook, and then any online web enhancements are linked through a student guide. There’s also a faculty guide to assist the faculty member and gives them more indicators and Cheryl will talk more about that.

Cheryl Chapman So there’s a lot of pieces that have been coming up through the years, as you said, many years in the making. But now what we’ve done is we’ve taken those materials that the instructor would normally use with the student, and put them in an online package. You guys use Web CT? Okay. Many of the pieces that are out there too by publishers have an e-pack that is ready for the web, either in blackboard or Web CT. This particular product that we just put together is totally html generic, so you can copy & paste & use it whether it’s on a website or on one of the course management systems. So first let’s show you a little bit of the video, and then I’m going to get into the online components that we have available. And again, only the three courses that are new have the online component.The group viewed The Human Condition.

Annette Cordero This is the Health Course?

Cheryl Chapman The Health course.

Stan Francus The three courses that she mentioned, the Human Condition, Framework for Democracy—Political Science and the Examined Life--Philosophy course are the first ones that we’ve done that have the Web enhancements & the web connection on line enhancements. The courses you saw that are on the third page—the course list where it says coming soon—every course from now on will be built that way. It will have the web components associated with it. We have not gone back into the older courses and because of the time and energy and cost. But everything now is in the digital format with the web enhancements.

Manou Eskandari I’m not sure I understand this web component. What is that?

Stan Francus Okay, that’s the thing that Cheryl will be explaining to you. She should be better at it than me.

Cheryl Chapman You can pick up one of those quick start cards. What Intelecom has put together is a resource center for instructors. But because it’s national and international, i.e., all of the campuses have their own faculty resources and things like that, we’re not there to duplicate them. We’re trying to create a course that can be the bridge between the telecourse delivery which is usually two or three meetings on campus, the traditional telecourse, and of course you know about all the hybrids in between. This is just to kick start somebody to get on the web in a format that’s generic enough that you can add your own material if you so choose, or you can actually run it—in other words, go with the information that’s there and it still is a full course.

Manou Eskandari This in connection with our online course? Is it a separate thing altogether?

Cheryl Chapman That’s hard to say because here’s a scenario. We’ve been teaching a specific course for 30 years, and now we want to go online because that’s “the thing to do”. This online material which looks just like a course will bridge the viewing of the tape with the book because the chapters in the videos don’t match exactly because you can use any textbook you want with the video, so you need to bridge it together. So this would mean that you would put it in Web CT and create the course. The added extra component is the video that you’re having the student stream, so you could get started this way.

Manou Eskandari So this would make my course obsolete if I would use this?

Cheryl Chapman You could use it instead of your current materials. But what we always suggest, of course, is as you are the expert. you would want to put your flavor in. In other words, once you see it you’ll see what I’m getting at. This is the way we start the course, facilitate the course, get the student going from step 1, 2, 3,4, 5 to meet all the goals, then whatever you decide is necessary to fill it in, you can devise. It’s more or less interactive—how many discussion questions do you want; it’s more about delivery. Again, this is just a preview tape.

Cheryl Chapman This is one of those courses that is current. The book that it uses—again Chapter 1 in the book does not necessarily go with video 1. So what we’ve done is match them up so the instructor doesn’t have to go through and do that. It is current video; they do take the concepts and interweave them into the video itself to give the learner a different way of focusing in on it. Again, we have the whole instructional design supporting why we do this kind of thing as a presentation, but you have to keep two things in mind: our teaching styles and the learning styles of our students. So the more varied materials that you can have at your disposal is something that gives you more creativity and a little bit more objectivity in reaching all the different learners also. Now the next one I’m going to show you is a little bit shorter and it’s on a CD which you can actually take with you, the Framework for Democracy. You can have one and this shows how the entire tele-web component is put together. It shows the prints, the actual video and then the tele web component. You can take one of those.

Gerry Lewin Are you ever going to talk about the cost part of it? What will be the total cost to us?

Cheryl Chapman Once you’re into the membership, which is $20,000 a year, they’re free to you to use. And then when you offer a telecourse, it’s a per student fee which is $15-$20 for a 3 unit course.

Stan Francus Guy, how much do you want me to go into this?

Guy Smith I don’t think you need to go into it . . .

Stan Francus In all of our member colleges we pay an annual fee based on the size of the institution. It is roughly about $15 per student for a 3-unit course. It’s about $5 and some cents per academic unit.

Guy Smith It’s my understanding that the college is currently budgeting for kind of a blanket license for these for two years.

Manou Eskandari Already budgeted?

Guy Smith Yes, that’s my understanding. The college has committed to covering it now so their won’t be a per student fee now. The student just pays the tuition. The student doesn’t pay; it’s what the college’s fee is to the consortium.

Manou Eskandari So for two years, this is already a fait accompli?

Guy Smith That is my understanding. Is it your understanding, Mike?

Michael Gallegos Yes.

Guy Smith So, you don’t need to worry about it –finding money for the per student fee.

Manou Eskandari Well, as long as we already have it, then we’re only here to learn how to use it?

Guy Smith That’s correct.

Melanie Eckford-Prosser I hate to ask the obnoxious question. I didn’t realize it was a done deal. But why?

Guy Smith Why what?

Melanie Eckford-Prosser Why do we need this? What does it do for us, for the fee that would be paid?

Cheryl Chapman May I?

Mike Gallegos I don’t think it is absolutely a done deal. If there are no faculty interested in pursuing this, obviously we’re not going to go forward with it. If there is faculty interest in it, we will.

Melanie Eckford-Prosser But I guess I’m asking, but what exactly does this do for us that designing courses with David Wong on our own doesn’t do?

Michael Gallegos It gives us another option for students. Another delivery method. I don’t know if

Guy explained that we are also partnering with Cox to be able to have access to the local cable channel, but we’ll be able to use that as a resource again. Providing another option for our students.

Melanie Eckford-Prosser So we’re seeing this as mainly for distance learning

Michael Gallegos Yes. Mainly for distance learning.

Jack Ullom But if there’s something in the materials that you can use in your course, you can use up to 25%.

Michael Gallegos Right, that’s a side benefit to being part of the consortium.

Manou Eskandari Since both deans are here, I can ask if the school can hire new people for a cheaper rate to administer these courses than they can pay me? Will I be replaced?

Jack Ullom It’s the same thing

Manou Eskandari —presumably our pay has to do with creating something new.

Jack Ullom Teaching will be the same.

Manou Eskandari Okay.

Cheryl Chapman Even the course comes in an integrated well-designed package, you’re not handcuffed by that. You can add, change, delete, use portions at your own choosing.

Stan Francus It’s primary that the faculty member needs to control their instructional delivery and what they think their course should contain. We try to tell administrators that.

Jack Ullom First we want to get your input into it so it enhances it.

Guy Smith How many of Intelecom’s 40 colleges, what are the total number of courses that are taught through Intelecom? How many faculty have been replaced by this?

Stan Francus Larry?

Larry Bertrand Well, I taught at Valley College for a number of years, we may have had 10-14 courses that would be the three terms, and I can’t ever recall any faculty being replaced. You’re dealing with a different student body. You’re dealing with somebody who can’t meet the typical schedule on campus. You’re dealing with self-motivated persons, you’re dealing with mothers who can’t find babysitters.

Manou Eskandari It’s the same rational for an online course.

Larry Bertrand But at no time is the instructor replaced. The instructor is still in command, the instructor is still giving exams, still requiring the papers, still meeting the students. They’re still lecturing to students in some form or another. The instructor should never feel that he’s giving up the ghost. If that’s the case, forget it, because then you are out. I’m going back to when telecourses first came out a number of years ago, and there were deans of instruction that ran the program and then the Academic Senate said, “Hey, we don’t have any instructor.” “We don’t have any knowledgeable person to run the Political Science classes”. The instructor of record had all of these students, so then it came about in an acceptable way; instructors need to become involved, instructors need to set up the program, need to review the exams, need to review the programs, and need to update things.

Manou Eskandari These questions may not be fair to ask here. Or you, but you know we’re always concerned with things like that. People might think: Why can’t this be something done by a part timer? Why do we need a high paid $400 an hour lawyer when a $15 an hour lawyer will do?

Stan Francus I say it’s because you need those high paid instructors that teach the courses.
I chair the Chancellor’s Office Distance Education Technical Advisory Committee, and I’ve been on it since 1996. One of the things we made sure that was built into the revised regulations which took effect this July 1 is a reaffirmation, a confirmation that in the distance learning courses the faculty will be selected by the departments the same way they are selected for any other course.

Manou Eskandari That’s part of Title V?

Stan Francus Yes. That any distance learning course must go through the curriculum review process even though it is already an approved course but now being taught through distance learning mode. The safeguards were built in there to make sure that distance learning is not misused. The only thing distance learning should be is another option that faculty have to teach their discipline and reach different audiences in a different way. So the protections have been built into the system.

Eric Wise I have two questions. One is when did Oceanis first start on video as a telecourse and had it ever been revised in it’s history? Since it began in the 1970’s, has there ever been a video revision of that program?

Cheryl Chapman Not until now. That’s what The Endless Voyage is. But that’s a different issue altogether. I’m going to explain a little bit of that so we can move on. Two things. Some of you have come to the online world without ever being through any other distance education door. I think that’s an advantage and a disadvantage to some. I would love for you to look at this as materials of education because you don’t have to deliver it any way shape or form. You can actually use this as content to develop your course. In answer to your question, which I’ve been dying to get to, it costs a lot of money, between $500,000 and $6 million, to create these courses. We use all experts from around the world so you know it’s high quality stuff. The piece that’s always missing in the online is to actually sit down and pay somebody to create those materials. It’s not easy. If you’re not a multimedia expert it takes forever. Or you are using your resources on campus, which is always wonderful. It’s between time that you’re supposed to be spending developing and time that you’re supposed to be spending teaching. Between that and your delivery mode, I think it’s all about options. We have people that deliver telecourses that only have 2 meetings on campus.
You guys are so unique in that you have online courses that have multiple sections where you meet the student. You keep it open to options that you can deliver. Here is a philosophy course it’s been taught by instructor A for years and doing very well on the campus. Then they have a telecourse version of it for those who learn that way best and then they have an online version and a hybrid version. It seems that they’re going more towards the sectional thing where you have multiple sections for multiple instructors and now for delivery modes. What we’re finding too is that the students that are more traditional love the traditional face-to-face classroom. But I’ll tell you if they miss a course or two or I’ve had students that are transferred in my traditional class from Boeing, if they’re transferred to Seattle, they can finish the course because I have materials available via the Web. I think it’s going to be better when we can use them as materials in our traditional classroom, because I don’t think that we’re using as many materials as are available. With all that said, let’s pretend that you’re having a traditional classroom course. Look at the materials as added extra value. But what if some day you want to bring that to a hybrid state? And that’s where these materials come in handy. Or, say you’re ready to go online and you don’t have the time to develop all the materials yourself for these particular three courses and/or you know exactly what you want to use in between. So we’ll switch over to the computer the video you can see—

Cheryl Chapman Okay, so as I said before, Intelecom put together some learning resources from the educational point of view. This would be that those again traditional classroom teachers and/or distance ed, or online instructors can have a place to come and get a few resources. Again, as I said, we have higher ed and adult ed stuff which covers English as a Second Language as well as adult literacy and I think the other one is like pre –GED, social community things. If you click, and it’s Intelecom.org/ilern and that’s how you get there. This will give you an example again of how the course management systems are out there—you guys are waiting on that, how to actually take materials from your traditional print and put them into online materials. And also the faculty guide that comes along with all the materials for the tele web course itself. And then there’s a little form you can fill out if you’d like to go and look at these preview materials and they just make sure that the license is in place.

Demonstration given

Stan Francus You mentioned about the submariners. I think it was a psychology course that was developed by Middlesex and what they did was they would take the video and then stop it. And then ask a question, and then the students responded to that question then went on. So it was somewhat interactive, and they found out that the success rate was very, very, very high. Could have been that it was a forced community, they were underwater,..

Cheryl Chapman Yes, they were visually … On the same note, Taking Leave, which is a business course also was created in that same model. It’s all on CD ROM which all these materials are all the videos are being placed on CD ROM for obvious reasons than DVD for space, and stuff like that. If I had my druthers as an instructional designer, I would make sure that where it says click and view the video, there would be just a short segment of the video that goes along with read the book, here’s the auditory part of it, built in the questions and the interaction as you go along, but again you can’t always know exactly what that student needs for their learning style. So that’s why it’s hard to pinpoint.

Cheryl Chapman Any other questions about the interface at all?

Gerry Lewin Are these materials accessible for people who may be deaf or blind? Do you have caption videos for people who need to use that? Are there textual descriptions for screen readers for the streaming video segments online?

Cheryl Chapman The videos themselves are all captioned. What happens with the streaming is that it has—the transcripts are also available electronically and we use Magpie which is the software that gets the transcript and will caption the streaming or the QuickTime video. Again, that’s Intelecom’s deal, mine is just here’s the material for you to use and call me if they don’t work. They’re working on all that. We had a really good discussion Friday about the auditory –maybe there’s a lot of pieces that belong to the video tape that are auditorily rich and not so much visually, so maybe some of those pieces can be used as an auditory enhancement to your course as well.

Demonstration Continued

Cheryl Chapman Any questions?

Jack Ullom One of the issues you brought up, Manou, is a real issue, and that is you’re the chair of a department. You have a colleague who’s developed some Poli Sci 101 around this class. It’s extremely popular and it’s bleeding all your students off of your face-to-face class. Do you have any control over that? Absolutely. The decision to offer the class is a department chair decision; it’s not an administrative decision. So that you just like you have now—have the opportunity to say, well, we need not to have this section so that this one is successful, etc.

Manou Eskandari We’re limited to that?

Jack Ullom Yeah, right. So this kind of control is still within the domain of the department because you’re the one that has to jockey the courses with the professors.

Manou Eskandari Just as long as you are sensitive to the faculty’s concern on these issues, I don’t see a problem. Faculty always feel they immediately have some concerns.

Jack Ullom Yes, and Melanie’s question was, “How come this is a fait accompli? What’s going on here? And your question following up on that was going a little deeper. And it’s very understandable. Basically, the reason the Intelecom is here is to show you the extra resources that are available. If you want to use this to develop your own course, great. And develop it in a way that’s richer or different than the online experience you’re already had, great. If you want to use portions of it in your existing interdisciplinary classes, great. It’s just another resource that we think is rich, and we also think that as time goes on it’s helping solve some of the problems with the bandwidth and the streaming video. The fact that you’ve got a video that gives you that and that for the students you simply can’t deliver the way you want it, you can give them that. It’s done, it’s made. I know, I went through the experience of developing things for an online course in music and simply said it’s got to be on a CD ROM or it’s not going to happen because of the quality and actually took the Power Points and the examples and cued it to the CDs, etc. so a person at home could almost get the same experience that they would get in the classroom, but not exactly the same. I wouldn’t have wanted to even develop the course at that time unless I could have done it my way. And it would have never happened. I think that’s probably the case for a lot of faculty who have developed their online courses.

Stan Francus The years that I programmed, I’d get the same reaction over and over again. But there’s only one case that I really thought made sense where I said well, I think you’re drawing from one class. For example, literature classes in community colleges were just going downhill with numbers throughout the years. There weren’t that many to begin with so there were two given online –the telecourse without the traditional. But that is about the only time I can remember there were other extenuating circumstances, but generally with courses like psychology, political science, history, and sociology classes, I’ve never seen any documentation or anything to that effect.

Guy Smith Generally, they’re very different audiences.

Stan Francus Yes I’d like to mention that I’ve been involved with distance learning since 1975 and if I could stress that there’s an absolute priority which is that the faculty control instruction. Distance learning courses should be able to be shaped and delivered by the faculty to express what they think that course ought to be. Isn’t that the wonder of our level of education? You can go to three different instructors in the same discipline and get a different perspective, a different feel for the subject. The whole idea is that this is a faculty enterprise. We’re 40 colleges driven by faculty;

Kathy knows from the great work she’s done with D Tac that the arguments that we’ve had at D Tac are not about taking away from the faculty, but helping the state and other bureaucrats understand that this is a faculty driven enterprise and that the faculty are not to be somehow relegated to a supplemental role. So that is a given. That will always be there, and these are instructional packages that you can use in almost any way you want. Don’t feel totally constrained by them or say, you know if I taught it just the way it’s there, it’s not what I want to teach, then change it. It’s open to change.

Larry Bertrand The significance of the faculty show in something that happened in Kathy’s area a couple of years ago. We were broadcasting a health education class from Dallas, and a doctor called in from Loma Linda and said that the directions for CPR were not quite accurate. Apparently there had been some changes and so we quickly had to put a disclaimer on that then the instructor again came through with giving the correct procedure, mailed that out to students for class lectures, and so on, so the instructor is always in command. But you never know what’s going to happen.

Kathy O’Connor Things change very quickly especially in a field like health.

George Federman I want to get on to that issue of change. First of all, my discipline isn’t in here anyway, so it won’t help me. However, the problem of creating that material, that’s issue number one, but I want to get to the issue of change. And dealing with material that’s very expensive to produce, at $600,000 to $2 million per video series, so clearly they’re not revised every month or every year. I’m wondering about creating the stuff, revising stuff, and whether it’s worth it to us to add it to all the other forms of online education. It feels like a very static medium in terms of being capable of being updated.

Stan Francus The video portion obviously is static, and we were mentioning about this being a faculty driven enterprise. The factor that sells our member colleges and also colleges throughout the country that lease these materials—they start telling us when they see things—gee, this is getting out of date, or this needs to be revised. Then either we, if we’re the producers, or if we’re leasing it from some other producer like Dallas or one of the other educational consortia, then we have to determine whether or not it makes sense educationally and financially to revise it, because we know it will reach at point at which if we don’t revise it or replace, completely replace it, that no one will show it. And that’s the control, that’s the academic control. That this is scheduled by each of the colleges and their faculty and if they feel that there’s a point at which this is no longer viable, where they can’t make adjustments in the non video portion that can clearly explain some new element or concept that’s come up in the field, that they’ll stop using it. So it’s got a natural governor to it and if a course gets to the point where we just can’t use it anymore we have to either revise it or scrap it and start with something new, which is what we’re doing with marine biology.

Guy Smith This is all faculty’s role too.

Cheryl Chapman Because it’s not canned. I think that’s what I think we’re trying to get everyone to understand is that there were and are times where a telecourse is delivered from beginning to end with very little interaction because of the fact that it’s set up for a certain population of student. That may not be atypical, and for us even at Coastline, our average age is 38, so we’re not really dealing with the 18-25 year old traditional student. So some of the issues that are involved in keeping up the course too are a little different. But also, they don’t have to be all used; that’s what I think is a misconception too. It doesn’t have to be used, it’s not sequential, where it starts at number 1 and goes right through. But some of the history pieces, some of the factual stuff has not changed. The updates are usually taken care of via CD ROM and I think the answer to your question is a little obvious in that the Web is now being used to update all those pieces that are not. I think you’re going to see a change in that the 26 episodes are going to be –well, there’s 26 and now here’s the new one. Maybe only one or two has to be changed. The exciting part is that many people are just not aware of what is there, you’re kind of assuming that it’s old and outdated all of it, and there’s like 30 courses—well, many more than that—but that are available to you that I’m sure that even if you don’t find something that is beneficial for what you’re doing right now, that there are instructors that can. Even as library resources. Even as an indexed library resource. The history courses are used tremendously a lot for that, so again, not everybody’s going to be able to use this as not everybody’s going to be able to teach online. I think it’s just a mix.

Kathy O’Connor You need to remember that this isn’t your whole course. You’ve got a 54 hour 3-unit class. This is 13 hours of video—you’ve got to get your own content, your own updates, your own labor into the class. So you use the videos that you think are appropriate and from what I’ve seen they’re very well done, they’re very up to date, even in a discipline like mine which evolves every day, My lectures don’t change. I don’t try a whole new lecture every day. There’s certain core material that you’re going to give your students and then you bring the updates to them, you send them the web sites to give them the new research. That’s how you put your own flavor on the course. I was never interested in any kind of TV kind of thing—I just never was–I’ve always said ‘no.’ But I think this is an operation that is done by faculty for faculty. It’s a non-profit group. They are not here to make money for themselves. They’re here to provide information for us, and I think it’s a really good thing for us to look at to see what we can use and what we don’t want to use, and after a couple of years if we don’t like it, we throw it away. If we like it, we get more involved. I think it’s a good opportunity to expand.

Michael Gallegos I also want to speak to the “done deal” thing. The only “deal” that’s done here is that we’ve set aside the money to join the consortium. We’ve been taking this from consultation for the past two days now. Friday it went through the Committee for Online Instruction, went to the ITC, now we’re bringing it to these committees, so nothing is being shoved down anybody’s throat from an administrative perspective at all. If there’s nobody that’s interested in using it, then we won’t spend the money that we have set aside to join the consortium.

George Federman Michael what kind of money are we talking about?

Michael Gallegos $20,000 each year for membership.

Guy Smith And that will probably—the way the formula is going, it will be that way for two years, and then probably drop depending upon our usage.

Stan Francus Drop the amount to less than $20,000.

Gerry Lewin Do you have to do pay every year for membership?

Stan Francus Yes. It’s an annual membership.

Guy Smith One other note, in 2005 or 2006 Cox Cable signal will go digital. When it does go digital, those two channels will be 4 channels so we can significantly increase our ability to deliver signal to 68,000 homes in this area and also when it goes digital it’s going to mean a move toward interactive television, which is really a thing we need to give some consideration to.

Stan Francus One of the points I was going to make is that a few years ago we looked at television as computers as two totally distinct technologies. They’re really moving very quickly to emerge common technology and whether you’re going to have an intelligent television or a big screen computer, they are going to be about the same, particularly with streaming video and digital technologies emerging. So really what you’re looking for, I think also and what most of our member colleges are looking for is not just today but for the future. You position yourself in such a way that you are a real presence in your community and educationally in your region by having this. Right now all of the courses that we offer are offered over CSat and that is shown over dish network, so if you have any dish network subscribers anywhere in western United States—in your area—they could get these courses right now over dish network. The other item I was going to mention is that the technology is merging.

Guy Smith It is becoming more interactive.

Stan Francus Once you get to pick up a lot of this programming time on a local public access station, what we did in Long Beach and a number of other colleges are doing, let’s say you don’t want to offer a particular course for credit. But let’s take the ESL course, Crossroads Café. If you essentially are going to be able to program 90 or 100 hours through a public access channel, maybe these courses (as being a member) you can put them on the public access channel identified with your college. This is what we do in Long Beach. Identified with Long Beach, or Santa Barbara as a public service. And you give an entire program on ESL to your community. You don’t have to worry if you don’t want to use it for credit, but the individuals there are learning at home. Family literacy is made possible by this type of method. You might say, well, we don’t want to do adult ed, or we have enough non-credit FTES, so run the Madison Heights as a contribution to the community on adult literacy. It’s a tremendous way to be a surface link and a real engine for local economic, social development in your community. And these products are all yours to use as a member.

Guy Smith Jerry had a question.

Jerry Pike My question’s about cost to students, about access to these materials, video contact on campus, and the demographics of standards.
Okay just basically, if the student is going to take and watch cassettes on campus and watch it over the local PBS channel, if they’re going to use it in the library, any way they can see the video there’s no additional cost other than what they would normally pay to sign up for a course?
Or they could opt to--as you said pay $55 for the set of videos…

Cheryl Chapman Yeah, they can get the whole set, or most of the students, if they’re taking an online or telecourse, they’re going to tape the model when it is shown, late at night, because you’re not going to view it at 2:00 am or 4:00 am, depending on the PBS stations. But I think that the way that you guys are probably going to integrate them you’ll be using more of the video server end of it if you’re going to do pieces, because then you can build it right into your web site or your web course or web ct or whatever. But they either rent them or they tape them themselves.
Stan Francus Most of our colleges provide sets in the library that students can come over and check them out like a book and go over to a machine.

Jerry Pike So they will need to use the LRC for viewing, and we will need to organize it, monitor it, and so on.

Cheryl Chapman While you’re building the empire, you’re probably going to want to go towards DVD because the tapes are being replaced by DVD.

Gerry Lewin Marilynn had a question.

Marilynn Spaventa Yes, I was just going to add that the non-credit ESL program uses Crossroads Café now and students can check them out for a period of time along with the workbook. But that requires coming in, checking it out, going through a process. It would be so much more wonderful to be able to serve many more people in that way (on TV).

Jerry Pike Are there assurances about costs to the institution, in terms of future costs to the institution after the –our latest web CT fiasco—

Guy Smith I think the difference here is that web CT is a for profit entity.

Cheryl Chapman Yeah, they are for profit.

Guy Smith Intelecom is a consortium of California Community Colleges.

Cheryl Chapman The membership dollars actually go into production. So anything that the members are paying and the student fees do go back into the production, so too with the Web CT and Blackboard; that ‘s why this is very generic. It’s not made for any one particular course management system for that reason. You are held hostage too long if you’re into one place and not the other.

Meeting Adjourned 4:30 P.M.