When a student raises their hand during a lecture, the professor who answers the question is usually not 30 kilometres away.
Yet this type of long-distance interaction will be played out daily at U of T come next fall-and it will not be the only technology-inspired changes that students will soon find themselves adjusting to either.
“The fact that it’s a thousand kilometres away actually doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference,” said Dr. David Snadden, the associate dean of the Northern Medical Program.
It has been three years since students first started videoconference lectures at the University of Northern British Columbia’s new Northern Medical Program-a joint program with the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria’s Island Medical Program.
Through a setup involving video screens at either end of the classroom-so that both students and professors see the same content without having to crane their necks-professors deliver their lectures to one room with actual students, and, over an audio and video link, to the remaining two distanced classrooms.
Students with burning questions are able to interrupt a professor 1,000 kilometres away by activating their microphone and having a camera automatically zoom in on them.
A similar setup will go online next fall at UTM, when U of T’s fourth medical academy opens its doors there. With the yearly intake of undergraduate medical students set to grow to 224 from 198 next year, the medical faculty’s current location in the Medical Sciences Building is already too cramped.
Enter videoconferencing, which is expected to take on a role in educating the students in the Undergraduate Medical Education (UME) program at the St. George campus, as well as at UTM, where additional faculty will be hired to broadcast lectures of their own to students at the downtown campus. It will cost $3.7 million to rig up classrooms at St. George and UTM for this purpose.
The co-chair of the planning committee for the expansion of the UME program to Mississauga, Dr. Jay Rosenfield, claimed that the experience will be more interactive than large lecture halls “where you can’t hear people in the back and the lighting’s not good.”
Justin Chan, the president of the medical society at U of T medical school saw some other benefits.
“As medical students, we have a vast amount of information to absorb in four short years. Incorporation of new technologies that facilitate learning makes this challenge a little less daunting.”
“Your gut reaction is this will never be as good as the real thing, but in fact it’s turned out to be at least as good as the real thing,” said Snadden, who also said that students seem to prefer the videoconference lectures due to the high sound and image quality.
Though some students may have an optimistic view on the way technology is being implemented in their classrooms, their opinion is not shared by all the actors at the university. Kenneth Bartlett, director of the office of teaching advancement, has a different-and, he stresses, personal-view on technology’s role in the classroom.
“The technology that I prefer most is the technology of the human brain,” said Bartlett. “When asked if I need A/V equipment, I say, can they hear me, can they see me? Well then, there’s A/V equipment right there.”
There is a human element that is lost, said Bartlett, through allowing technology to “become a crutch that compensates for dynamic classroom involvement.” The human element is something that universities traditionally produce by engaging students in discussion and creating a sense of collegiality, which Bartlett said has contributed to the survivability of the university institution over the ages.
“The University of Toronto does not do distance education, and I don’t think it ever should because it’s not our strength,” Bartlett said. “The most effective way of teaching is to be in a room with live people engaged in discussion about ideas and words that aren’t mediated by technology,”
For Sylvia Young, a third-year UTSC health studies major, the human element is a tangible feeling of encouragement that occurs when being surrounded by students in a lecture hall as opposed to watching recorded lectures provided by the same professor.
“I actually paid more attention going into a class instead of watching it online, because everyone’s around, the professor’s right there…motivating me to learn,” she said.
Despite a student’s best efforts to resist technology’s influence and distractions within a classroom, it may be a futile effort-at least for students with wandering eyes in lecture halls that are lit by lights from the ceiling and the dim glow of a growing number of student-owned laptops.
“I see people playing games in class and it’s kind of distracting for me, like when they sit right in front of me,” said Young.
“I just think having a laptop makes you less focused and less likely to pay attention in class and that you’re missing out on a lot of things.”
And laptop use at UTSC is growing, according to Zoran Piljevic, the assistant manager of informational and instructional technology services at UTSC. The number of wireless connections on UTSC’s network has grown substantially with 170 users last spring, and with 140 just in the first week of this fall term. Piljevic is not surprised, since the price of a laptop has fallen.
For Kenneth Bartlett, however, the key is to treat technology as what it is, a tool.
“It should be seen as something that is ancillary to the basic function of a lecture or seminar,” he says, adding that the best classes have students passing ideas around, rather than just a back-and-forth motion between TA and student.
“That’s what we should be aiming for-a dynamic environment of mutual learning and intellectual growth.”
