 |
||||
  
 
 |
SyllaBase internet learning system grows from a USU basement to a worldwide network of students By
Eric Buchanan
Editor's note: This story was produced for the USU mass communication class "Beyond the Inverted Pyramid," COMM 3110. Kathy Williams earned her master's degree in technical writing from Utah State University in December. The courses she took to earn her degree were offered entirely over the internet. And Kathy is blind. The internet courses that Kathy took were provided by SyllaBase, a system that has been developed by educators at USU. Williams is a retired medical rehabilitation counselor for the blind. She worked in this position for 20 years and gained technical knowledge in how to make electronic equipment more accessible to the blind. She said after retiring she wanted to use her experience and technical knowledge to write technical instruction manuals and hoped a degree in technical writing would help. Williams said when she first looked into getting a master's degree through internet courses, she checked at the University of Utah. It offered a couple of courses on the internet but not an entire degree. Then Williams said someone at U of U mentioned that USU might have other courses. Williams checked into it and found that USU was in the early stages of getting its online master's degree up and going. She spoke with Dave Hailey from USU's English department and the response she got was: "Here, go look at it and tell us what's wrong." "It was an interesting experience," Willams said. "No one knew what to expect, no one knew what to do." Making the SyllaBase system handicap accessible hasn't happened quickly, Williams said. "It's like chipping away at an iceberg. One by one the pieces come off, but it's a slow process." The developers of SyllaBase look at it as a process as well. Their web site says that SyllaBase is literally a work in progress. 3GB
is a highly technical name This work in progress began in 1995 when the Utah System of Higher Education awarded a grant to three colleges in the state. Salt Lake Community College, Southern Utah University and USU received $100,000 each. After the money was awarded, it was up to each individual school to come up with its own way of putting its course on the internet. The first attempt to put a class on the internet was mostly e-mail back and forth between instructor and student. The second attempt was a web page that was a permanent template, or a page that couldn't be changed by instructors. If the instructors wanted something changed on the web page to fit their individual class, it would be a couple of days, at best, before the changes could be implemented by trained technicians. In 1996 the System of Higher Education awarded another grant to USU, this time for $23,000. That money went toward buying three new servers for the online classes. The servers were vital to the project because they process the information that moves from where the information is stored to where the information is viewed. Around this time the 3GB group was formed. 3GB is a highly technical name that stands for "three guys in the basement." The three guys were originally Chris Okelberry, Adam Zamora and John H. Curry, but the group has other members now. The basement was the bottom floor of the Ray B. West Building on USU's Quad. Okelberry said that when the 3GB group first looked into education online, there wasn't a lot of technology in place for it. There were only a few companies that had any kind of system for education online. "The idea was to pay them to come in and build your online classes for you for outrageous prices," Okelberry said. He also said that the group wondered why building systems for education. Christine Hult, associate department head for English at USU and a member of the 3GB group, said, "The programs were made and you used them and stayed within their parameters. There wasn't any way of giving feedback to make improvements." "Regardless of what the cost was, we weren't fully satisfied with what the products could do," Okelberry said. So the 3GB group decided to begin its own project. Okelberry said SyllaBase technology started out by hand, using a computer keyboard to build classes on the computer one at a time. Each class took about an hour to build, so in a 40 hour week one might get 40 classes put together. Okelberry said SyllaBase might have come about sooner if the group would have been able to work on it full time. The relationship between the 3GB group and the USU English department became mutually beneficial. The English department received grants that bought equipment, the group used the equipment to develop the system, and the English department got classes online. In the summer of 1998, Okelberry said that SyllaBase as a system was born. The 3GB group had talked about charging for its services but then decided not to pursue a commercial route. Okelberry said that the group's real mission now is to expand the technologies it has found to complement educators. Educators who want to use Syllabase do not need to have any formal computer training, nor do they need to know HTML, a code using symbols, words and numbers to build a web page. The system is set up now so that the 3GB group doesn't have to build classes for an instructor, the instructor goes to the Syllabase website and makes his or her own class. SyllaBase is designed so the instructor can have complete control over the internet class. It does this by offering a special web site for instructors only. In this site are many options that the instructors can choose to tailor their class the way they would like it. For example, one option is not accepting any late assignments. With an online class, all assignments are e-mailed to the instructor rather than the student handing in a piece of paper. If the instructor chooses this option and the assignment is due on the 18th, and a student e-mails the assignment on the 19th, a rectangular image will come up on that student's computer screen with a message on it telling them that their assignment cannot be accepted. "Because SyllaBase provides instructors unique administration sites for their virtual classrooms, it enables us (the educators) to control the content, features, tools, and appearance of the course environment using nothing more than standard Web forms and buttons," Hult said. Also, according to Hult, the process of putting a course online using SyllaBase takes only 10 to 20 minutes. These options, however are not being used to their full potential, according to Williams. She said that although SyllaBase offers powerful options to the instructor, those options aren't being used. Sometime the instructor wouldn't respond when a student had a question. Other times, an instructor might leave town for a long weekend and forget to say anything on the class web site about it. She said there was a lack of communication on the online courses. However, Williams said that there was one course she took from an instructor who lived on the East Coast. She said his class was well organized and that each student was well informed and knew what to do for the class. She made the point, though, that this instructor was very familiar with computers. Technological competence seems to be one of the most complicated issues that SyllaBase or any other online class program dealing with higher education has to deal with. "You're dealing with ages between being raised with a computer to those who still know what a typewriter is," Williams said. She said it could be offered as a seminar or a summer workshop for people interested in taking online courses. Williams said there needs to be something like a manual to hold a student's hand through an online course. It wasn't uncommon for some of Williams' classmates to say, halfway through a course, "Oh, there's a chatroom?" or "How do I send a message to someone?" "It's a new medium," Williams said. She's right. Instructors have only started directing courses online for the past five years. Williams said when she graduated there was still a lot of tightening left to be done. Okelberry explained that education online is evolving. He said that the 3GB group sees SyllaBase as a research and development tool rather than a complete solution to online education. According to Okelberry, some potential users are turned off by SyllaBase because all they want is a solution. As the idea of online education continues to spread throughout the educational field, so does the word about SyllaBase. According to an article on the SyllaBase web site, students from Brigham Young University, Colorado State University and the University of Michigan are taking courses through SyllaBase. There are also individual students from as far away as Taiwan, Israel and Brazil using SyllaBase courses. For these students, using SyllaBase means going to class on a computer rather than going to a classroom. After students are registered for an "internet based" class, rather than going to an actual classroom at a scheduled time, they turn on their computers at the scheduled time. They click their left mouse button on their internet service provider's icon, type in the address of the internet class, type in their password (sort of like a secret word to get in the door), and then they are in the computer classroom. As a student in a computer classroom, one can type questions and e-mail them to the instructor, take part in realtime chat rooms, in other words, have a discussion with classmates by typing questions and responses rather than speaking them and hand in assignments by e-mail. These internet classes are designed for education, not for an easy way to a master's degree. Internet classes are not like correspondence courses that let a student do the assigned work whenever he or she has time. Internet classes are semester-based just like a regular face-to-face class would be. Homework is still due, and there are regularly scheduled class times. Kathy Williams, the blind student who got her master's degree by taking Syllabase classes, said these online courses are for students who are self motivated and willing to jump into their work.
|
Archived Months:
January
1999 January
2000 |
||