Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)
Professor August-Wilhelm Scheer Presentation
(IWi), University of Saarland, Saarbrücken, Germany
WINFOLine Experiences in Development and Deployment of Curricula on the Internet
I will talk about special projects we have executed in the last three to four years. And this project has been supported heavily by the Bertelsmann Foundation, and I want to express my deep thanks to this organization.
But before I start to discuss this project, I will show that the impact of information technology on the structure of universities is not extraordinary. When we look back for centuries, after the invention of the print technology of Gutenberg in the 15th century, there was a large increase of funding of universities. And so I think it’s normal that this new technological innovation of the Internet will also have an impact on the structure of university. I don’t believe that it will also lead to new foundations of universities, but maybe the number of universities, at least of traditional ones, will decrease.
When we look at the different ways in which we talk about virtual universities, and you can see there are many different ways, we come to the question of how to include Web-based education with our traditional education. The first alternative could be that we have a wholesale replacement of traditional universities by virtual universities, as was already mentioned this morning, by the Phoenix Universities or others. The second alternative is, I think, a more common one, that we add some Web-based training to our traditional teaching. The third alternative is that we not only do it internally within our own university, but also combine the core competencies of different universities and assemble these core competencies for new studies. So we build virtual universities around some existing universities. We can collaborate not only with other universities, but also with professional organizations, in such a way that these professional organizations could be content providers, as well as customers for this content.
Our project combines all of these alternatives. That means, in a small part, we offer Web-based training, now without a local presence of the students; but mostly we subscribe to alternatives two and three. What we have done is that point universities in Germany have combined their core competencies in the field of information systems. This leads to an advantage for the students in that the students have a broader variety of content because they not only can use the lectures which are presented at each of the universities in a classroom structure, but they can also use the Internet and have access to the virtual studies and virtual lectures which are offered by all these universities. So that is one advantage for the student, that they have a larger variety. They have more transparency about the offerings of all the different universities, so they can compare the different content, and they can also compare the quality of the professors. So we have voluntarily accepted the competition between us. That is very extraordinary for German professors because our universities are mostly public, and so the professors are not used to competing in their lectures.
As for administrative procedures, each of us applied to become a guest professor at all the other universities. So all the universities accept the examinees of the other places, since all the professors are their guest professors, and they are virtually local, you can see. And that was a very easy way to handle it, as the other way around it would have led to problems. There are financial relationships now between the different states where these universities are located, and for our research project it was accepted, but I think more generally the states have to find administrative procedures to handle these situations. There are now eight different lectures available for the students, and two of these lectures were always offered by one university.
With our system, we want to cover the whole life cycle of the learning process. That means that we start with the exposition of knowledge, offering multimedia supported lectures, and you can see in the upper part, the traditional way in which this learning process is supported, and in the lower part there is the way we now support it with our virtual university. We offer multimedia-oriented lessons and lectures; we have interactive exercises; we have tailor tutors, which means that we have an interaction between the students and the professors, in a broader way than is normally offered in a regular university in Germany, since you normally have mass universities where there is very little contact between professors and the students. But we also have automatic discussions between the students, and the students and the professors, and between the students of the different universities. So we have a lot of different ways for the students to communicate via the Internet.
To talk a little bit about the way we represent content, as you can see, as usual we combine text information with graphical animated information, and also with video information. But all this information is linked, hyperlinked, so that you can switch from text information or from video information to graphical information, and vice versa. We also represent our content in new ways. It wouldn’t make much sense to just transfer our old-fashioned ways to represent our knowledge, by text or by graphics, into a web environment. So we have to think about how we can use this multimedia stuff in a new way, to combine it with new ideas to teach people over the Web. We have included, and you will see some examples of this, is entertainment, because our students have grown up with MTV and all this stuff, and so maybe they have new requirements for how they learn and receive information.
To give you some impressions of what we do, while 90% of our content has a more serious representation, here are some impressions of this entertainment stuff. For instance, here you can see it’s a very complex model, it’s an example of a data model, or business process model, if you want to cal it that. To reduce the complexity for the student, so that he does not get afraid, this artificial buffer serves in this model to ensure that the student has a very easy gateway to get in contact with this content. Then reduce the complexity, build these complex models from scratch, simplify it, and then at the end, we will also have this complete model description. But we started with the overview, reduced the complexity, and then we built it up again. So this was just one example how we play around with different ways to represent knowledge. The second one should show the interactive solution of some exercises. You can see when he solves the solution and then gets a response, and when he gets another response. So we try to combine fun with serious content. And this last slide, although it's still in the future, shows the quality that is possible when combining content with games or play. It's a little like Star Wars--the student can fly through this space and afterwards he will be questioned, and when he has solved a specific problem, then he is allowed to go to the next step and so forth. I would say that this is on a level of semi-professional multimedia stuff.
And the reason we can do this is that, on the one hand, we get funding from the Bertelsmann Foundation, and on the other hand, a spin-off company has already come out of this project. And this company is now very much involved in Germany in building corporate universities, especially for companies like DaimlerChrysler, or other big companies. They have more than 80 people. Then from this spin-off company, we get information back on how to build such multimedia systems.
What will be the next steps? As I mentioned, this project is so far a closed project. That means we work together with existing universities; the next step will be opening the system, both to include new content providers, new universities, and also to offer our content to students who are not enrolled in one of these universities. So we have a structure open to both sides--on the one hand to the content provider, and on the other to the students. But it is therefore necessary to have a common technical platform, so we developed something like an education portal, so that we agree about rules by which all the content providers have to abide, and we have a specific role for an education broker. He combines courses from different content providers to a specific study, and also guarantees the quality, defines the tests, and so forth. And all this is based on one common technical platform.
To wrap up, the experiences we have had in the last two or three years are very promising. At the moment, there are 500 students working with the systems, 150 of them in a distance learning way, meaning that they receive knowledge from universities other than where they are located. There are more than 100 hours of multimedia lectures available in the system. In addition to our development of the system, there is a professional evaluation which is done by another professor in another university in Germany. And the first results are that the students accept these virtual services as customer-oriented support; there is no decline in the number of students in the classrooms, and I have never had more students than in these last two semesters. But there is a change in my lectures, from presenting knowledge or content to more discussion. Because now all the content is available in such a way that it is not necessary for me to repeat in an old-fashioned way all this content. But I can ask questions of the students, and I can discuss with them concrete problems, and I can talk about background, and I can do other things that I didn’t have time for in the formal setting.
So this is my general impression, that we are on the right track when we talk about evaluation, but we have to take into account that we are in the beginning stages of the new idea. Compare this with the year 1920, when somebody wanted to establish a benchmark between a movie and a theater. And he would ask, ‘Which of you has color?’ The theater would have said, ‘Yes, I have.’ The movie, no. ‘Who has sound?’ The theater, yes; the movie, just a piano player. But the power of the technology was already available. We have to look at this present situation in the same way, we cannot compare this Web-based training with our traditional way of educating, which has a history of hundreds of years. But we have to look ahead to the future, to the power of the technology and to the ways in which we can change the structure of our universities.
[Audience Question: Do you have any idea of costs for the resources?]
As for the normal costs, one hour of multimedia content costs between $25,000 and $50,000. But it depends on the degree of multimedia support. When you have to prepare movies and video tapes, and so on, then it’s very costly.
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