Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)
Professor Peter Deussen Presentation
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a real honor for me to tell you something about the efforts which the state Baden-Württemberg in Southwest Germany undertakes to virtualize teaching. Let me start with my transparencies.
That’s me, and that’s where I’m from. Here you see the tiny red dot, that’s Germany, and the even smaller blue dot--blue is the color of hope--that blue dot represents the state of Baden-Württemberg. I am only referring to Baden-Württemberg for two reasons, for two very simple reasons: I am a member of a university of that state; secondly, education, as you may have heard already, is not a federal task in Germany, rather it lies in the hands of the now 16 states of the Federal Republic of Germany.
I would like to give you an overview of the program. In 1997, the state of Baden-Württemberg allocated 50 million DM, roughly 25 million U.S. dollars, for a total of five years. This amount of money is subdivided into two broad streams. The first concerns smaller projects jointly with the Deutsche Telecom, and I’ll give you a rough overview; the first is digiMedia, Study Modules For Digital Media. The titles are very often self-explanatory, so I need not explain them in greater detail. European Social Structure and Cultural Globalization is the second one; it consists of on-line seminars about sociology. Bio-Inform@tik, a multimedia-based curriculum in bio-informatics, or bio-computer science, is again self-explanatory. And the multimedia-based curriculum in Electronic Commerce is also a self-explanatory project. These four projects are collaborations with the Deutsche Telecom.
But there are other rather greater projects, selected from 65 proposals. The first one is the Virtual University Upper Rhine. It combines four universities, namely the Universities of Freiburg, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, and Mannheim. They provide for joint multimedia and Internet-based courses of these universities on various subjects. VirtuGrade is, as you see, a virtual college for graduates, especially for Ph.D. students. It consists of virtual seminars, simulations, planning games, etc. A third, rather large project is called Docs 'n Drugs, which is really a German word right now. This is a virtual outdoor patient clinic located in Ulm, and the idea is to have multimedia and Internet-based courses for medical students. Finally, we have a Virtual Laboratory for Mechanical Engineering. These are labs, or at least one lab, to which other institutions have remote access, so that they can operate the various machines that are in these labs and can use them in the sense of a laboratory.
We also have Virtualization of Education; this is more or less devoted to virtual further education for teachers. There is also a Center of Competence located at the University of Tübingen, which is expected to combine all the efforts, to draw all the conclusions, and to bring people together.
Finally, I would like to give you some idea about the project which I am leading in Karlsruhe. It is called the Virtual Association of Colleges of Karlsruhe. So the point is that I succeeded in getting six different colleges at the same table, which for everybody who knows something about the university situation in Germany, and maybe it’s similar in other countries, this is in itself a big effort and a big task. But it works. It consists of universities: the University of Applied Sciences, the University of Education, the College for Design and our famous Centre for Art and Media Technology, the Conservatory of Music, and finally, last but not least, the University of Cooperative Education.
As you can see, we are faced with a challenge. Namely, the challenge is, and this is also our philosophy, reusing multimedia teaching modules, in the sense that they can be adapted to different requirements of different groups of students. The idea behind this is to reuse parts of the modules that have already been written, rather than redeveloping the modules from scratch for the different groups of students.
The goals are to provide necessary infrastructure for these six institutions, to prepare courses with multimedia technology by authoring groups of different institutions, and to develop new didactic methods and then to evaluate them. The means of reaching these goals, or one means of reaching these goals, is the partitioning of teaching courses into multimedia "Lego-elements", as I call them, which can be composed into a whole course by a configuration system. The idea behind this is depicted in the following figure.
As you can see, we have a development platform which should serve the authors, and which provides them with the multimedia documents. As indicated here, you have a pile, a stock, of teaching modules, which are the basis of a knowledge area. From this stock of teaching modules, somebody selects some modules which he feels to be important for a specific group of students, and produces a learning environment. Clearly, you cannot simply take the modules by themselves, you also have to have some sort of, say, gluing modules between these modules, in order to understand the subject matter. And you can also see from the picture that different learning environments are based on the same stock of teaching modules, thus realizing the idea of reusing these teaching modules, which typically involve a lot of work to prepare.
Sub-projects, other projects, are clearly technical and organizational infrastructure, plus we also have four content-providing sub-projects: Introduction to Information and Telecommunication Technology; a very interesting project is called Interlinked Knowledge: Art, Culture, Technology, in which, for example, the College of Music and our faculty of sociology and philosophy, as well as the College for Design, work together; Information Systems is the third one; and the final one, which is also very interesting, is Mathematics for Non-mathematicians, which clearly is a very important subject, at least in my country, and maybe in others as well. Finally, we have two projects dealing with didactics, one of which is an evaluation of all that we are doing.
So coming back to our infrastructure question, I completely agree with Sarah [Guri-Rosenblit] when she says that, in most cases, the virtual university simply consists of more or less the virtual learning environment. That’s why we try to have some sort of a portal for all six universities. You can see, from these catch words that are written down here, what we intend to have that behind that portal. A student can enter through registration. He then must look in, he is subject to administration. We have laboratories, we have information bureaus. A very important thing will be the communication aspect. And finally, we have both the digital library and the Learn Server, where the learning material is placed.
The Learn Server has been working since '96. It is very readily accepted by our students. It contains dates, materials for lectures, text exercises, etc. We have complex case studies in it, and we have images and graphics. Jointly with the university library, we are trying to have a digital library at that campus as well, so clearly we are a little bit behind what we have heard this morning about the State of California.
Finally, we have built a multimedia lecture hall, which, together with the multimedia laboratory, serves as a pilot installation to show what nice things one can have and how to use them: back projections, here in action in our multimedia lecture hall, where you see the different projections but not the audio and video equipment.
We are at the beginning of the first careful steps towards the virtualization of education. I personally believe that face-to-face teaching by good teachers is still the best way to do that job, that’s clear. But in view of the growing part of students, of higher education, let me ask, do we always have those good teachers? And if we don’t have them, then, we clearly must support our teaching necessities, our teaching efforts by these virtual possibilities.
© 2006 UC Regents
Last modified: 15 April 2006 | e-mail