HOW YOU SEE IT...

Television that teaches

If you thought eight o’clock classes were tough, try getting out of bed for a lecture at six. That’s when a couple of continuing ed classes are offered this fall, but luckily, UMass brings them to your bedroom (or wherever your TV set may be).

     Springfield’s PBS station WGBY, in collaboration with the division of continuing education, is airing two fourteen-week telecourses this semester plus a weekly public affairs show called UMass in Action. The programming is produced by Academic Instructional Media Services, and includes an engaging, professional-quality, thirty-minute weekly video segment for each class – Poets of New England taught by comparative literature professor William Moebius, and nutritionist Stella Volpe’s Nutrition for a Healthy Lifestyle.

     Besides scrambling to produce thirty-two shows for WGBY this fall, AIMS also creates academic and instructional videos for faculty and staff, and promotional packages for departments and schools. AIMS provides video conferencing services and records special events like the distinguished lecture series, while offering technical support in the classroom. In addition, AIMS maintains Channel 15 on the Housing Services Cable Network and provides academic programming and an informational bulletin board to university dorms.

     But clearly the nugget that AIMS is mining is the distance learning technology that President William Bulger has championed for the UMass system. Indeed, the president’s Collaborative Distance Learning Initiative provided AIMS with equipment for video conferencing that connects classrooms across the system via MITI (Massachusetts Information Turnpike Initiative) and allows students in Dartmouth or Lowell to join in a discussion in Amherst.

     AIMS’ sleek, high-tech studio in the basement of Herter annex is connected by fiber-optic cable to the Video Instructional Program, the distance learning pioneer in Marcus Hall that has been providing academic and instructional video and distance degree programs since 1974. While VIP has the hardware to transmit video signals via satellite to practically anywhere on earth, AIMS has access to the UMass community through UMA-TV15, and the two entities together can take distance learning to virtually any television set, near or far. AIMS director John Stacey says that in the future it’s conceivable for a visiting dignitary from Japan, for example, speaking in Mahar auditorium, to be recorded using AIMS’ digital equipment, then cablecast live to UMass dorms through UMA-TV15 and to Hokkaido University using VIP’s transmission capabilities.

     The series of videos produced by AIMS for Poets of New England takes viewers around the region to visit some of the more important landmarks that represent the writers discussed during class. Producer and director Elizabeth Wilda and cameraman Tom Zimnowski filmed Moebius on location at Poet’s Seat in Greenfield, at the former homes of Rudyard Kipling in southern Vermont and Archibald MacLeish in Conway, and in Old Deerfield where African-American Lucy Terry Prince composed her ballad, “Bars Fight,” in 1746.

     Having watched a segment about Emily Dickinson, Moebius and his class of undergraduates in Comlit 290H, an on-campus version of the WGBY telecourse that’s offered through Commonwealth College, sit around a large conference-style table under the sweltering lights in the AIMS studio and discuss the poet with students of Sheila Ward at Middlesex Community College and Carol Sokolowski at Massasoit Community College. An integral part of this classroom is a large television screen, divided into three pictures that lets students and faculty see who they’re talking to in slightly jerky, pixellated video as cameras switch from student to faculty to a wider view of the classroom. If the students are self-conscious about being recorded during class, it doesn’t show.

     While these students have an opportunity for face-to-face or face-to-camera discussion, the continuing Ed students who enroll in the telecourses on WGBY do not. Instead, a supporting Web site offers an opportunity for online discussion with Moebius and other students.

     Norman Aitken, vice provost for instructional technology, helped create AIMS from the audio visual department in 1996 and funded the studio’s high-tech overhaul under the provost’s strategic plan that called for improved television production facilities for academic programming. Aitken says the goal for the university’s agreement with WGBY is twofold.

     “We’re trying to make entry-level college courses more accessible to the public, and we’d like the content to interest a wider viewing audience, not necessarily just those enrolled in the class,” Aitken says. And, he adds, programs like UMass in Action, which features one UMass personality interviewing another, generate community interest in the university.

     The WGBY telecourses have generated interest among people who don’t have time to get to campus or who live at too great a distance. Twenty-seven students, some from as far away as California and Washington, D.C. (those students who live outside the WGBY viewing area receive course videos via mail), have enrolled in the two sessions this fall and discussions are under way for future telecourses on WGBY.

     For late sleepers a VCR might be a class requirement.