Educational Pathways tries to monitor the growth and challenges facing providers of online learning courses and programs in higher education across the country. Fortunately, our physical location places us within a short one-hour drive to an historically sound, well-established provider of online learning: the Rochester Institute of Technology. Over the past four years, we have had the opportunity to see with our own eyes how the RIT Online Learning Department support unit has operated and adapted to change.

The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) has provided distance education programs since 1979. It moved from print-based to web-based distance learning delivery methods in 1991 through an Annenberg/CPB grant project called “The New Pathways to a Degree: Using Technology to Open the College.”

Today, RIT’s fully online curricula includes 11 graduate-degree programs, nine graduate-level certificate programs, four undergraduate-degree programs, and 13 undergraduate-level certificate programs. In 2004-05 it had about 8,500 fully online learning enrollments of which about 32 percent were courses taken by RIT on-campus students (a figure that rose from about 29 percent in 2002-03). About six to eight percent of this 2004-05 total were fully online international students from an RIT Center for Multidisciplinary Studies partnership with the American University in Kosovo and the American College of Management and Technology in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

The Online Learning Department, which provides the primary support for all these programs, is located in the basement of RIT’s library and is comprised of 18 full-time personnel, with some revolving co-op student assistance. Full-time staffers include a director and associate director, an information technology manager, a system administrator, an interactive media developer, a web administrator, two instructional technologists, two instructional designers, an instructional technology associate, a proctored exam coordinator, an online curriculum resources specialist, an online curriculum resource support person, a TLT Lab/Technical Support Manager, a student services/operations coordinator, and a customer services liaison.

The Online Learning Department also works in partnership with the RIT Educational Technology Center, which provides a host of multi-media web and video production services, including captioning production services. (All video must be close captioned at RIT, as the campus is home of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which is the world’s largest technical college for deaf and hard-of-hearing students.)

Another partner is the Office of Part-time and Graduate Enrollment Services, which helps with student services and the marketing of RIT’s online learning programs.

Watching RIT’s Online Learning Department grow has helped Educational Pathways understand, in general, how online teaching and learning works and, in many ways, has formed the growth of our editorial over the years. In this article, we review some of the RIT Online Learning Department’s latest efforts to stay on top of, and implement, strategies that are timely and important in today’s distance teaching and learning environs.

Changing Missions

The trend of more on-campus students taking fully online courses is starting to change the nature of the RIT Online Learning Department. In what could be described as a common development in online teaching and learning, Director of Online Learning Joeann Humbert explains how the department has been gradually moving from an historical mission of providing support to only faculty who teach fully online courses to a broader goal of also helping faculty who teach face-to-face bring instructional technologies into their courses. This newer mission has been gaining ground through the Online Learning Department’s relatively recent offerings of both live and online course management system (CMS) training to all RIT faculty.

Choosing A New CMS

On the CMS side of things it is interesting to note that RIT did not have an official institutional CMS until the Online Learning Department introduced Prometheus to the entire campus. The Online Learning Department became a Prometheus customer in 2000 for its online offerings, on a small scale. By late 2001, the Online Learning Department was starting to roll out Prometheus to the entire RIT campus for fully online, face-to-face and/or blended courses. (The Prometheus CMS implementation was called myCourses.) Then - surprise - Prometheus was purchased by Blackboard in early 2002 and ultimately folded into the Blackboard suite of products in 2004. In Spring 2003, as it became imperative to review the choice of renewing its Prometheus license to a new Blackboard license, RIT’s Online Learning Department put together an ad-hoc committee of faculty and staff, and an RFP, to explore other commercial CMS vendors. The committee looked closely at ANGEL Learning, Blackboard, Desire2Learn (D2L), and WebCT. In what RIT Information Technologist Richard Fasse calls “a very close race,” D2L won the RFP.

It needs to be noted that, in addition to using myCourses, the Online Learning Department also supports FirstClass, which is a communications system that integrates e-mail, group conferencing, real-time chats, file sharing, and Internet connectivity. In 2004, prior to converting over to D2L, approximately 58 percent of all online learning faculty used FirstClass, with the remaining 42 percent using the Prometheus version of myCourses.

Launching a New CMS

The Online Learning Department kept the myCourses name for the D2L change-over, which began with a small Spring 2005 implementation consisting of 12 faculty members who taught face-to-face classes. The 12 faculty were also Prometheus users who taught online and, in general, were very experienced with using instructional technologies. They were introduced to the new myCourses at a day-long training session held one week prior to the start of their classes.

This first implementation featured a faculty users group, hosted within the communities area of myCourses, where faculty could post to a Q & A section, a features request section, and a best practices area. It took about two weeks before faculty began to feel comfortable with the new navigation structure and features set.

Overall, the faculty, and most of the 340 students in these early-implementation classes, were very satisfied with D2L. Associate Professor in RIT’s Microelectronic Engineering Department Robert Pearson says he discovered several enhancements to the online quizzing tool in his Semi-Conductor Devices class. Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering Anthony Trippe notes that he was pleasantly surprised to find that the new myCourses allowed him to easily combine two sections of his Project Management course into one interface. Trippe also calls the D2L gradebook feature “a real time saver.” Associate Professor of Art and Computer Design Mike Voelkl also liked the gradebook, calling it “very flexible and powerful. You can do just about anything you like to construct a particular grading system for a course. Previous versions of other CMS applications we have tried did not have this kind of flexibility.” Voelkl also responded positively to the quizzing feature, saying that he likes the way it automatically grades quizzes, and that “there is a lot of flexibility in this tool.”

Converting Existing Courses

At another level of importance, the challenge of converting all existing Prometheus courses to the new D2L CMS had to be met in a relatively short period of time, so the Online Learning Department worked feverishly to convert everything over by the following Summer and Fall quarters. The conversion “worked reasonably well,” says Fasse, although it was advised that faculty should “tweak certain aspects” of their newly converted online courses. However, “in retrospect, I think we placed too much emphasis on the conversion process,” Fasse adds. “The power users from the previous version of myCourses were unhappy with the inherent compromises of an automatic conversion, and they were content to rebuild their course anew, themselves, with D2L. The low-end users really did not have that much content to convert, in the first place, and they would have benefited, in the long run, by being supported in a manual conversion.”

Official Launch and Training

The new myCourses was officially launched to the entire RIT campus in the Summer 2005 quarter. By Fall 2005, 42.5 percent of all RIT courses (both online and on-campus) were using some facet of a myCourses feature (an increase of about 5 percent from the previous year). The total number of online learning courses using the new myCourses shot up to 66% from the previous year’s 42%.

To help expedite faculty transition over to the new CMS, more than 125 CMS workshops were scheduled, starting in Spring 2005 up through the Summer and Fall 2005 quarters. Over 50 workshops wound up being cancelled in the Fall, however, because most faculty did not desire or need that level of support. Instead, they went online for some myCourses tutorials that were created in partnership with the RIT Wallace Library staff. The tutorials were also put on a CD-ROM and mailed to faculty, as well as posted on the Online Learning Department website.

Broadening Support to Technically Savvy Faculty

Humbert explains that this early evolution of providing a CMS to all traditional faculty who teach on campus that started in late 2001 with Prometheus and is starting to grow at a significant rate with D2L, has contributed to the “broadening of our world to more technically savvy faculty who want support to do new things.” Additionally, a blended learning pilot program started by the Online Learning Department in the Fall 2003 quarter, brought about more interaction with traditional faculty who teach face-to-face and have not interacted with the Online learning Department in the past.

Adding to this mix is the Online Learning Department’s late 2005 launching of a good number of smaller pilots that explore the adoption of a variety of instructional technologies that faculty and students might have interest in, such as a mobile learning pilot, a Macromedia Breeze pilot, and a peer-to-peer remote tutoring pilot.

Blended Learning

Through the blended learning pilot, the Online Learning Department has supported more than 150 blended course sections in the 2002-03 and 2003-04 academic years. And RIT faculty and staff have produced dozens of workshops, conference presentations, and scholarly publications on the Institute’s experience with blended learning.

A picture of the future of blended learning at RIT, which is a trend occurring at colleges and universities across the nation, shows the Online Learning Department now reaching out to department chairs/heads to further demonstrate the benefits of blended learning to faculty and students, and provide any needed assistance in the development of blended programs and courses. (For complete details of this pilot, please see http://online.rit.edu/Blended/.)

Mobile Learning

The mobile learning pilot reveals some interesting implications and challenges. Online Learning’s Associate Director Leah Perlman explains how today’s digital natives “want course materials in the way it suits them. For example, we are starting to get more requests for streaming video in Real or in Flash. The technologies are coming aligned faster and cheaper; the tools and capabilities are there; and we are investigating moving some our distance course media production into formats where you capture video and convert it into multiple formats.”

Moving to iPod and Streaming Flash Delivery

Online Learning’s Interactive Media Developer Ian Webber, along with RIT’s Electronic Technology Center (ETC), have begun the first experimental forays into this mobile learning project, seeking the most financially viable and effective methods for taking raw video and converting it to both the iPod and streaming Flash delivery modalities.

Another part of the mobile learning project entails giving faculty more options and independence to create video lectures from their offices, homes, or at the Online Learning Department’s special lab, called Studio G, which is equipped with professional audio and video equipment.

Capturing, Transferring, Editing and Converting Multimedia Data at a Reasonable Cost

The challenge is finding the right combination of a FireWire camera and video software (for capturing and editing video) for faculty to use on a PC in a Windows environment, says Webber. In this context, FireWire is a technology that facilitates the transfer of multimedia data from a digital camcorder to a computer faster and more efficiently than the USB standard. “What’s making it a little more difficult is that we are trying to target the faculty equipment at a level that we can scale,” Webber says. “So, for instance, if I give a faculty member a FireWire camera and he or she has a computer with FireWire, they could pretty easily go in with Adobe Premiere, record what they want, export it and be finished. The problem is we are trying to find software that we can get in the $300 to $400 dollar range. There are a couple combinations (of software and hardware) we are looking at to make this a little bit more scalable.”

Captioning on an iPod

Plus, as noted earlier, any video format delivered to students at RIT, must also be captioned. Webber and ETC have test captioned two brief 10 to 15-minute podcasts from a Financial Accounting class. The end result, on a 2.5 inch iPod screen, was “surprisingly clear,” says Perlman. “We tested it (informally) with multiple people over 50 who use reading glasses, and they were able to read it just fine.” Webber and ETC are also looking into ways to possibly streamline the captioning process, which currently requires a two-week turnaround, as it is anticipated that the demand for such castings will rise.

Breezing Through Instructional Technology

The Online Learning Department’s Macromedia Breeze pilot is being managed by Marybeth Martin, instructional technology associate. Martin has been interviewing faculty members who have used Breeze in their courses “to get a feel for their experiences and the lessons they learned. Out of that, we are starting to create a showcase of testimonials as a way for other faculty to learn from their colleagues’ experiences.”

For example, RIT faculty may use Breeze for conducting online office hours; broadcasting their lecture presentations for synchronous viewing, as well as archiving them for viewing at a later time; hosting guest speakers in both online and blended courses; and having students, or groups of students, present assignments remotely.

“Basically we have started to develop best practices and tips,” says Martin, adding that the Online Learning Department will “recommend using Breeze for specific blended or online course activities.” Some examples of early discoveries for effectively facilitating Breeze presentations include:

• Have students post questions prior to a presentation in order to cut down on the number of questions during the actual presentation.
• For guest lectures, have a question moderator organize questions in a separate unseen chat room and then present the most engaging and interesting questions in a public area of the presentation.
• Start out simple. Don’t try to use all the features at once if this is your first time.
• In preparation for live presentations, conduct a dry run with students to confirm that they are able to connect successfully.
• Have a Plan B. Technology does not always work 100% of the time.
• Have an assistant who can help people with potential technical problems as well as answer logistical questions and/or take telephone calls.
• If broadcasting from a classroom to remote learners, the physical location of the instructor in relation to the microphone could cause problems, especially if the instructor likes to move around the classroom space. Consider using a wireless microphone that travels with the instructor in such cases.
• About one week in advance, post any PowerPoint, related assignments, an agenda, and a list of topics to be discussed for students to review in order to be better prepared for the actual presentation.
• Establish chat etiquette and protocols.

Peer-to-Peer Remote Tutoring

Finally, the peer-to-peer remote tutoring pilot, being managed by Instructional Designer Sarah Donaldson, has also shown great promise. Donaldson explains that what started out as a casual comment she made to a colleague about how to increase peer-to-peer tutoring between deaf/hard-of-hearing students and hearing students has turned into yet another highly interesting pilot that takes advantage of Macromedia Breeze technology.

Remote tutoring was offered in two sections of a Fall 2005 College of Computing and Information Sciences face-to-face Introduction to Java Programming course for IT majors. Breeze tutoring sessions, which utilized only text chats and screen sharing features, were scheduled primarily during evening hours, after 9 p.m. Two deaf students, who had taken a series of programming courses, led the tutoring sessions.

A total of 25 deaf and hearing students, out the 80 students who were enrolled in the two sections, participated in what Donaldson refers to as “instant messaging gone mad.” Students would enter into a main chat room and then be directed into one of four break-out rooms, viewable by all who entered the session, that the tutor had divided by topic. So, in essence, the tutor and the students were all conversing simultaneously about a variety of course activities. It was noted that the participating students liked this multiple-communications format because it was a form of instant messaging that they had grown accustomed to in their everyday lives.

The pilot has continued in the two programming sections for the current Winter 2005-06 quarter and has expanded into an on-campus Qualitative Research Methods course offered by the Communications Studies Department in the College of Liberal Arts. Results from the Fall 2005 course are being analyzed to see if there was any correlation between final grades and those who actively participated in the peer-to-peer remote tutoring. “It works for digital natives,” says Donaldson, adding that the positive feedback she has received from participating students has helped to enable the Online Learning Department to continue moving forward with this pilot and possibly add the service to a physics course from the College of Science, so the pilot will show a representative sample from three academically challenging courses from three different RIT colleges.

Increased Support and Training is Key

In the final analysis, the new myCourses roll out, the blended learning initiative, and all of the smaller pilots (two other pilots were not described here, one that focuses on using clickers in the classroom, and another that is related to a home-grown online course evaluation tool) have all contributed to significantly restructuring the entire Online Learning Department. “The key for us is to take all this slowly,” says Humbert. “We are seeing significant growth in the number of faculty who want to use these kinds of technologies. We also recognize that it is critical to provide evidence of successful models to our community, and to ensure institutional endorsement, for the future building of solid training, technical support and maintenance processes.”

www.online.rit.edu