Our math teacher hates block scheduling. He comes into my office and complains on an almost daily basis. The kids don’t have enough time to digest ideas, he says. They don’t have enough time to work through the problems and let the concepts percolate through their understanding. They need smaller chunks of time spread out over the whole year.

The real problem, of course, is that we have been on block scheduling for seven years and he has yet to change or adapt his ways. I continually point out to him that the other high school teachers have embraced the block and want no part of going back to the way things were in a traditional seven period day. I ask him how the other math teachers in the district, especially at Erie and Longmont, feel. What are their concerns and what have they done about it?

What I don’t point out, unless I am particularly tired or irritable, is that I have had it with his complaints. Get over it, I want to say. You’ve got to change the way you do business. Passing his classes has always been a rite of passage for Frederick students in the 20 years I’ve been there, as he has been known for his rigorous, and some would say intimidating, style. More and more of our students are passing on the challenge, however, and the number of students in our math classes has plummeted. In any given semester, he begins with 75 or so students and ends up with less than half that. A couple of years ago, I had more students in any one of my English classes than he had total.

Last year we had a particularly bright senior boy, Alfredo, who dropped out of Trig fairly early in the first semester. His priorities were elsewhere, and many of his teachers talked about his lack of motivation. He certainly wasn’t going to put up with a math teacher who demanded too much of his time.

Alfredo had already been accepted at CSU and knew that he wanted to major in electrical engineering. He also knew that he needed more math in high school to do well. That’s when he found out that the math teacher from Erie was transmitting Trig Topics to Berthoud High School over the newly installed PictureTel compressed videoconferencing system. It wasn’t much work to ensure that the signal also came to Frederick, and so Alfredo became Frederick’s first, and to date only, student to take a course through videoconferencing.

Alfredo was joined on the first day by two other boys who had had similar run-ins with the math teacher, but one of them dropped the class before the second day and the other had such spotty attendance in all of his classes that he did not last until the end of the quarter. Alfredo hung in there all spring long, although his own attendance could be sporadic at times, and he eventually got all of his assignments turned in, passing the class with a B+.

I’d look in on Alfredo periodically, and he’d be spread out across the room, either working out of the text or watching someone else do problems on the Elmo. Whenever I’d ask him what he thought about taking classes through the videoconferencing setup, he’d shrug his shoulders and say, "It’s all right. You just have to get used to it." He didn’t care for being on the monitor, however, and avoided having the camera focused on himself, if at all possible. Towards the end of the semester, he began traveling to Erie to attend a few of the classes face to face.

Alfredo entered CSU this fall and took the math placement tests administered to all incoming freshmen. The three girls who vied for valedictorian status at Frederick last year, and who stuck it out to the bitter end in Trig Topics with our math teacher, also entered CSU and took the tests as well. All of them struggled quite a bit and didn’t do nearly as well as they wanted. Alfredo, however, zipped through all the modules and jumped directly into the higher math offerings at CSU where he appears to have regained his motivation and is doing fairly well.

Suddenly, the videoconferencing lab at Frederick has taken on a whole new dimension. Not from the faculty, mind you, whose lack of interest in the system has been acute if not downright dismissive. The thought of any but the very brightest and most motivated of our students having the self-discipline needed to succeed in such an environment is ludicrous to them. The lack of face-to-face contact with their students strikes them as cold and impersonal. But for some students, the idea of having a choice of teachers for higher mathematics, and maybe even a college course or two, has opened up some new possibilities, and the counselors have received a number of inquiries about taking courses over the system in the spring.

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t quite sure where the videoconferencing lab came from when the district crew began putting in new walls and doors and wiring the old storage closet a bit over a year ago. Nor did anyone else in the building. It just kind of happened.

I had been aware of our school district’s first attempts at installation of videoconferencing labs at Lyons and Skyline high schools in 1991. My wife was the assistant principal at Lyons then, and the stories she told of the lab seemed like a comedy of errors. The schools often lost connection with each other, and the system seem to break down frequently. At one time, the system was down for over a month until diagnostic procedures by VTel, the manufacturer, ran down a burned out board in the CODEC at Lyons. Teachers were thrown into the fray without much training. The foreign language teacher at Skyline, for example, used to continually scold the students at Lyons for any kind of environmental noise that came through the system, establishing a combative atmosphere early in the class. The principal at Lyons, an enthusiastic supporter of videoconferencing from the get-go, decided to lead by example and taught a psychology class that first year. Unfortunately, he also shirked many of his other duties while he wrote lesson plans, and his teaching experience ended with a thud when a janitor at Skyline High School mistakenly tossed the final exams for that course after they had been left out in the cafeteria for the principal to pick up.

And then there was the time that my wife was reprimanding an eighth grade girl in the hallway and ducked into the videoconferencing lab to really chew her out. It was a good thing that the girl’s back was to the monitor, for there on the screen was the image of a boy amusing, uh, make that abusing, himself on camera, carefully avoiding any exposure of his face or other less personal characteristics. Finding and identifying him presented far too many complications to pursue much further.

As a member of the district’s Technology Advisory Committee, I did attend one meeting in which half of the committee traveled to Skyline while the others of us went to Lyons. I found the system to be irritatingly slow, with a quite noticeable delay and echo while I waited for my words to emerge at the far end. I lost track of what I was trying to say and had trouble formulating my thoughts. More experienced users assured me that I would get used to this in time, but the experience was a pretty big turn-off, and I lost interest in videoconferencing until the district crew showed up to install the lab in my own library.

The original push for distance education came from Lyons High School where the principal was feeling the effects of a small school syndrome. Many students, especially many of the more academically talented students, were opting to transfer to the "in-town" high schools in Longmont where they had much more variety and challenge in the course offerings. Others were beginning to take advantage of the recently passed House Bill 1244 in which a Colorado school district must pick up the tuition costs for students taking college courses while still in high school. Some Lyons students took their whole senior year at CU or Front Range. So the principal had the idea that the courses these students needed should come into the building rather than having them travel out.

He experimented first with satellite reception. With a small grant from the Poudre Valley Rural Electrification Association in 1989, a dish was placed outside the school and classes were beamed in from Oklahoma State University. That experience turned out to be too expensive, however, and the district began to explore the possibilities of videoconferencing, installing the labs at Erie and Skyline within two years. Those initial labs ran around $50,000 a piece to install, not to mention the $7,500 a year needed to lease T-1 wire between the two schools. (Donahoo, 1995)

The first year proved to be a disastrous experience from Skyline’s standpoint, and videoconferencing fell into disfavor for a while. The lab was moved to Olde Columbine High School--our district’s alternative high school--for a couple of years until it found a more natural home at Erie High School, a school roughly the same size as Lyons. (Donahoo, 1997a) Soon the business teacher at Lyons began transmitting classes to Erie while one of the math teachers at Erie offered Trig and Calculus back. Other teachers were not so comfortable with the system, however, and felt pressured into teaching with it. At the same time, some students were forcibly recruited to take classes they neither wanted nor signed up for. These experiences, of course, turned out to be a bust.

In the meantime, the school district, in conjunction with the Northern Colorado Board of Cooperative Educational Services (NCBOCES), formed an alliance with a number of school districts scattered across northeastern Colorado as well as with three community colleges, a university, and a smattering of state agencies. Known as the Northeast Alliance of the Colorado Learning Network (nea/CLN), the group began work on a project called the Colorado Information Infrastructure (CII) Project with a grant of $540,673 from the Public Utilities Commission and with $1,398,211 in matching dollars. The avowed purpose of the project was the "expansion and interconnection of five existing distance education networks" to bring distance education opportunities to the isolated areas of the "Colorado outback." (Donahoo and Biekert, 1997)

With this additional grant, the original VTel equipment at Lyons and Erie was replaced by Concorde 4500 systems by PictureTel. Additional labs were installed at Frederick, Berthoud, Estes Park, and Roosevelt high schools clustered around network connections to a newly installed bridge at NCBOCES. In addition, other schools on the eastern plains, including Weldona, Merino, Genoa-Hugo, Briggsdale, and Akron, installed similar videoconferencing systems centered around connections to a bridge at Morgan Community College (MCC) in Ft. Morgan. Although original plans called for microwave transmission between the NCBOCES bridge and the MCC bridge, it quickly became apparent that leasing a T-1 line between the two sites was more feasible. (Donahoo and Biekert, 1997) That line also allowed connection to the Colorado Community College and Occupational Education System (CCCOES) hub with its connections to Red Rocks Community College, the Front Range Community College campuses, and ultimately to the CIVICS (Cooperative Interactive Video in Colorado State government) hub with connections throughout the state. (see appendix A, Northeastern Colorado’s Distance Learning Network)

The deployment of the system has been slow to get off the ground. A legal challenge to the grant held up all purchases while the matter was worked out in court, not to mention the inevitable delays in having T-1 lines installed at each of the schools. (Is there anyone who lives in Colorado who does not curse U. S. West?) In addition, equipment failure, configuration settings, communication problems between bridges, and overall glitches in the technology have contributed numerous headaches for the technicians charged with getting and keeping the system up and running.

Having learned a valuable lesson in the original videoconferencing installation, staff development has been written into the grant. A two day workshop with Virginia Ostendorf, PictureTel’s instructional consultant, was scheduled for two days at Erie High School, but the blizzard of the spring of 1997 snowed out the second day, leaving some of the participants, including me, with the feeling that the instructor’s clothing plays an inordinately vital role in videoconferencing. A second workshop in the summer of 1997, developed by Red Rocks Community College, saw attendance by only two teachers from the school district, myself and the business teacher from Lyons who already taught on the system. It would be no overstatement to say that the impact of videoconferencing has been underwhelming.

If anything, what little interest existed in the system already appears to be waning. Even though all six schools connected to NCBOCES have fully functional labs, only one course is being transmitted this fall, Calculus from Erie to Lyons. None of the other courses that were offered on the schedule last spring attracted enough attention to set the transmission up. Even the original business classes from Lyons back to Erie were canceled when Erie hired a business teacher in order to ensure the installation of a new Windows lab in the building. Of course, much of this lack of interest could have been predicted by looking at each school’s bell schedule. Only Erie and Frederick share a common time frame with four period blocks of 90 minutes each. The other schools have schedules differing widely in times, lengths, and numbers of days.

The schools connected to the MCC hub appear to be making much better use of their facilities. Morgan Community College is fairly aggressive in its marketing of courses by telecommunications, with a background of offering courses through analog networks and local cable systems to the towns of Ft. Morgan, Brush, and Wiggins. Videoconferencing has been an important extension of MCCs market, and they have offered a number of college level credit courses to the schools connected to their hub. It turns out that about half these classes originate from other high schools on the system, particularly from Akron High School, but Morgan Community College still collects tuition money through the provisions of HB 1244 because they grant the credit.

Morgan Community College is also considering the establishment of a fifth year program for students on the videoconferencing system. Red Rocks Community College pioneered this program in Colorado by offering a number of college courses to high school seniors through its CTN hub to Black Hawk, Bailey, and Idaho Springs, Colorado. These seniors agree to take courses for an extra, fifth, year in their high schools, after which they graduate with both a high school diploma and an Associate of Arts degree. Tuition, once again, is paid by the receiving school districts through the provisions of HB 1244.

Obviously, then, the provisions of HB 1244 can represent a sizable chunk of money for any school district in the state of Colorado. St. Vrain, for example, pays about $70,000 a year in 1244 money to various colleges around Longmont, including CU, Front Range, and AIMS. (Lord, 1998) Exploring the connection to Morgan Community College is one possible answer for reducing the size of that commitment while increasing the number of educational opportunities for its students, particularly at the smaller high schools of Erie, Frederick, and Lyons where the variety of courses is drastically reduced.

It was with this background in mind that I chose to observe one of the classes originating from Morgan Community College. Suzanna Spears is the distance education coordinator for MCC, and she welcomed my query for observation of courses on the system. I would be impressed with Corliss Keown, she assured me, one of the real veterans on the staff with four years of telecommunications experience. Corliss teaches Psychology 101 every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 9:00 to 10:00, and I needed to contact her for her approval. I also needed to contact both Mark Schutt, who is in charge of the bridge at NCBOCES, and Ed Robinson, who controls the bridge at MCC, to receive the transmission in my own lab.

Once those contacts were made and transmissions set up, I began observations on Monday, October 5th, and continued through Friday, October 16th, a total of six classes. One of those sessions was devoted to a quiz, and little was said after the first five minutes spent explaining the exam. While Corliss taught with a roomful of students at MCC, the classes were received by two girls at Akron High School, two more at Briggsdale High School, and another one at Buffalo High School in Merino.

I ran across a technical glitch at the very beginning. The transmission that I received on the far-end monitor appeared more as a series of captured images that changed only after five to 10 seconds or so. It made for some bizarre images, catching the instructor with her mouth wide open or with trails of blurred color streaked across the monitor screen. The quality of the audio transmission was fine, however, and I could easily follow what was happening in the class. I also learned later that she complained about the noise from my classroom during that first day even though I had the system muted.

The technicians on both ends of the transmission were baffled by these problems as the network statistics indicated that everything was OK. The problems with the video continued until the third class when I noticed that the delays only occurred when I had the microphone muted. The video transmission returned to normal when I turned the mute off. From then on I sat very quietly and watched fairly good quality compressed video. During the final class, I lost video transmission altogether when the instructor began showing video-clips from a National Geographic Special over the system. Since the other remote sites seemed to receive the video OK, I assume that the problem lay with communication across the two bridges.

The network bridge was configured for voice activation and control. The monitors showing images from the far end automatically jumped to any site where students spoke up or made noise. This resulted in some interesting juxtapositions when loud noises switched the monitors to an empty room or to a startled girl who was suddenly and unexpectedly appearing on the screen. These glimpses around the different sites showed something about the ways the different schools use the system. Merino and Briggsdale both utilize single tables in small rooms, allowing only single students or pairs to take classes this way. Akron, on the other hand, has the equipment set up in a full sized classroom, ready to transmit any of their courses over the system. Based on statistics from last year’s use, they also have far more students taking classes through videoconferencing than anyone else.

Quick glimpses around the MCC classroom also revealed it to be a regular classroom with students seated around the outside of tables arranged in a large square. While I did not see them often, I’d say about 15-20 students were taking the class at MCC. The room was equipped with two different cameras, one trained on the instructor and the other set to show the students around the classroom. The primary camera was set at a slight angle to the instructor, and she had to turn to the corner of the room to address it. Consequently, those of us at the remote sites watched a lot of her in a slight profile.

Shots of the instructor, either in a close-up position at the podium, or pulled back a bit to watch her writing concepts and diagrams on the white board behind her, took up 85-90% of what I observed on the monitor. She did make some use of the Elmo for pointing out passages in the textbook or from different newspaper articles she’d read, but they were generally hard to read, especially when the slightest movement of the paper blurred any image on the screen. During the last class, a video clip ran about 20 minutes, but it did not reach my monitor. I had seen parts of it when the instructor previewed it before class, and it was pretty jumpy and blocky. Occasionally the far-end monitor jumped to a remote site when a student answered a question or when the instructor wanted to point something out about the room the girls were in. The second camera at MCC showed the room there only once during class time, and that for a very short time. I never did really get a sense of the students in the room with the instructor.

This lack of variety in camera shots points out one of the major weaknesses that I saw in the instruction, the lack of interaction either within the class or between the sites. Primarily what I saw was a talking head of the instructor. Most of the time she was either outlining concepts from the textbook, pointing out this passage or explaining that, or she was giving examples and incidents from her own experiences to support those concepts. Often she would say something like, "You can see that this is well-defined in the book," and then go on to read and then elaborate upon the definition. She also spent a lot of time at the white board, writing down an idea from the text, and then turning around to explain it.

The trouble with this approach is that I often had trouble following what she was saying. Granted that my own powers of concentration are waning, and that I was trying to take notes at the same time, but her discussions often seemed long-winded and rambling. A couple of times I noted that I thought she was either punting or that she was very disorganized. She often broke into unrelated ideas, such as distractions or problems, before she finished her exposition of a concept. It seemed that things never quite fit into the agenda she had planned for the day. The quiz I observed was given two class periods later than originally planned, and a group project that she kept alluding to never materialized during the time I observed. A couple of times she said something like, "Oh, we didn’t get around to…" and finished off by saying, "Oh, never mind. Situation normal." Clearly, my presence bothered her at such times, and she apologized for the disorganization and "chaos" (her term) more than once.

This tendency was accentuated by a lack of transitions between concepts and activities as she moved from text to handout, from newspaper articles to text, or from an explanation to talking about an assignment. The start of the class lacked any kind of real signal for the class to begin, often commencing with a question to one of the other sites, "Are you there, yet?", or with a comment like, "OK, we’ll get rolling here one of these days." The first fifteen minutes or so of class could then be taken up with talk about problems, procedures, or with questions about an assignment. Likewise, she often ended class abruptly with a statement like, "OK, that’s it. I’ll see you guys next time," and then begin conversing with someone off camera about a problem or a question. Once she admonished the students at MCC for putting their things away early, reminding them that three or four minutes were left in the class.

In other words, although interaction between instructors and students is one of the highly touted advantages of videoconferencing, little of it occurred. Glimpses of remote sites were infrequent, and the students there were clearly uncomfortable being on-camera. Most of the interactions that took place over the system concerned logistics and assignments, although some of the talk centered on the homecoming activities taking place at a couple of the remote schools. At one point, Corliss was distracted from a point she was trying to make at the white board when she stopped to wonder what was happening at Akron. One of the girls was wearing a pair of bunny slippers and the sun was casting funny shadows on the floor.

But very few interactions concerned the material of the curriculum. Although the instructor occasionally asked questions of the class, she was usually fishing for a particular answer or she answered them herself. She made very little use of wait time, often rushing to fill in the silence with her own voice. Most of the interactions that occurred in the class took place with the MCC students, and it was clear that the she was getting a lot of visual feedback from them. A couple of times, students at MCC gave some pretty decent answers and examples to the instructor’s questions, but I did not see them or any of the other students there.

Occasionally, Corliss made attempts to draw one of the remote sites into discussion, but most of their answers were either very short or they sounded as if they were recited from the text. During the last class that I observed, Corliss announced that she was going to teach from one of the remote sites during the following week, and she referred to a previous time that she had taught at one of the other schools. I would have liked to observe the quality of interaction during those times as well as during the group project that the class did not get around to. She had already decided that the five girls at the three remote sites were to constitute one group, and watching them coordinate their efforts would have been interesting.

Communication problems between the sites were a common topic of class discussion. The faxes to Briggsdale were often unreadable, and one class was interrupted three different times trying to get one fax to go through. Corliss was frustrated enough to complain that, "Faxes are not a wonderful technology. I should just mail it, anyway." The test arrived late at one of the remote sites, and Corliss waited for all the students to finish the test before she began scoring it. That still had not happened by the end of my last observation. The realities of high school life also intruded at times. During one class, both girls at Akron got up and walked away during the middle of a lecture because they were on a half-day schedule and needed to get to their next class. Another time, Corliss tried to spend time talking with one girl at Briggsdale after class without realizing that the girl was already late to her next class. Since Psych meets only on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’m not sure what happens to the students at the remote sites on Tuesday and Thursday.

Lis Lord, our district media coordinator, sat through one class period with me, and Janice Pacheco sat through another. After both occasions, we spent much time discussing and analyzing what we had seen, and I think we were all in agreement that the quality of instruction came nowhere close to justifying the costs and the bother of the videoconferencing system. Lis was surprised because she had previously observed one of Corliss’ classes and thought that she had shown more interaction then. Janice was struck more by the lack of instructional design. While I have certainly sat through a number of similar classes in my own post secondary education, I was struck by how much more the lack of planning and interaction showed up with the videoconferencing system. It certainly exemplified the warning from Jodi Reed and Merry Woodruff that, "While compressed video holds great promise for expanding the classroom experience, it also amplifies poor teaching styles and strategies." (Reed and Woodruff, 1995) Based on what I observed, I would not recommend that any of the students at my school opt for taking classes from Morgan Community College.

Nor would I recommend that the St. Vrain Valley school district continue to pursue connections with MCC. We are paying over $17,000 a year to lease the T-1 line from Longmont to Ft. Morgan, and the grant money used to pay for it and other administrative costs will soon run out. While the connection to the CCCOES hub is made through the Ft. Morgan bridge, it has never been used and is still problematic at best. It also seems that an easier connection could be found to the rest of the state rather than through the circuitous route we’ve now chosen. After all, CU is only 20 miles away from NCBOCES, and it has some of the fastest networking around.

There is also quite a bit of talk of Front Range Community College building a videoconferencing lab at its Longmont campus, a distance of, oh, two or three miles at best. Most of that distance is already traversed with fiber optic lines. The FRCC videoconferencing labs in Westminister and Ft. Collins feed directly into the CCCOES hub, so a connection through them would also seem to offer a more direct route to the central state hubs.

Other questions and problems will continue to dog the CII project, at least on the NCBOCES end, unless a number of compromises and creative solutions can be reached. With at least four different bell schedules in six different schools, finding common times for classes will continue to be a major stumbling block to the sharing of teachers and resources between schools. And freeing up teachers in each of the buildings to teach over the system will pose serious problems for schools already stretched thin with their manpower.

That also brings out what I think may be the most serious flaw with the whole system. I guess one of the things that really bugs me is the fact that nobody has really answered my basic question of why the system was installed at our school. I am not aware of any thorough needs analysis that drove the decisions to install the videoconferencing equipment at any of our schools. I guess it’s a vision thing. I’ve heard a lot of vague notions and grand promises, but the realities of the different schools have always somehow gotten in the way. And now I’ve heard that we’re about to enter a "use it or lose it" phase with the videoconferencing lab, and we really don’t have any notion of how to go about using it to meet our needs yet.

That could be a real shame, for our buildings do have a number of serious needs to be addressed, and compressed video may be one of the answers we’re looking for. Especially as our schools begin to enter an era of Standards Based Education, offering more choice to our students may improve their chances for success in meeting the requirements of the standards, just as it did with Alfredo. Offering more choice to students might also have another benefit by increasing the quality of instruction from teachers who have to compete for students. If more and more of the top notch students opt to take math from the teacher at Erie than from the teacher in our building, then change will certainly take place in the way that math is taught at Frederick. The videoconferencing system offers a lot of potential to our school, but it needs to have a lot of questions answered and a lot of bugs worked out before it will begin to have any kind of impact.
 
 

Donahoo, R. W. (1995). St. vrain valley school district, colorado. In Hakes, B. T., Cochenour, J. J., Rezabek, L. L., & Sachs, S. G. (Eds.), Compressed video for instruction: operations and applications (pp. 326-328). Washington, D. C.: Association for Educational Communications and Technology.

Donahoo, R. (1997a). Distance learning: history of svvsd implementation.

Donahoo, R. W. (1997b). Northeastern colorado’s distance learning network.

Donahoo, R. W., & Biekert, D. (1997). nea/CLN’s colorado information infrastructure project: phase III final report.

Lord, L. (1998). Personal communiction, October 9, 1998.

Reed, J., & Woodruff, M. (1995) Using compressed video for distance learning. The Distance Educator, 1(3), 2, 6-10. [online]. http://www.kn.pacbel.com/wired/vidconf/Using.html [September 18, 1998].