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While many teleconferenced courses are designed to bring a lecture-format course to a remote location, this course was intended to be a true seminar format, with students in two locations having discussions and interacting as if they were in one room. In addition, an objective of the course was to use communications technologies to bring students to the site of their research; in this case, to bring students who are studying border issues at UT Austin to the El Paso-Juarez border via the teleconference and follow-up discussions on Internet with UT El Paso students.
Once the goals of the course are established, the class divides into small-group research teams. Ideally, each research team should include at least one student from Austin and one from El Paso. To see a list of the research groups this semester and find out more about them, visit the Teleseminar Home Page
Members of the group are: At UTEP, Martin Armendariz (UG), Jeff Lambert (G), Esther Peralta (UG), John Taylor (G), and Ingrid Vliet (G); At UT-A, Mary Lynn Rice-Lively (PhD) and Pam Schwartz (G).
Members of the group on the two campuses have worked together to collect and share information, and to share ideas and suggestions for our final products. We have primarily used email to communicate and share ideas in our group. We have also used some teleconference time, and early on in the semester we used a conference style newsgroup on Internet to share ideas. Regular U.S. mail has been used to share materials such as videos and photos. We have chosen to produce separate end products in El Paso and Austin, partly for ease of production and partly because we had different product ideas we wished to pursue.
We have used a variety of tools and methods to document and evaluate the class as it progresses. Our focus has been primarily on qualitative methods. With hindsight, we would undoubtedly do some things differently, but since we were involved in the whole experience as members of the class, our plans and ideas were shaped and altered as the class progressed.
Video: Much of the live video sent from Austin to El Paso and El Paso to Austin as we teleconferenced was recorded and saved, so clips can be used or tapes viewed later. In addition, John has been filming video sometimes during class in El Paso, both when we are meeting separate from Austin, and as we teleconference, to pick up some footage that the teleconference cameras do not. Students have also taken videos of the border, UTEP campus, and other places and events in El Paso and Austin which have been used in class and may be incorporated in our final products.
Surveys: Early on in the semester, a survey designed by Mary Lynn was distributed to gather baseline information about class demographics, background in technology use, information gathering preferences, and individual motivations for taking the course.
Next, a border dialogs survey using Likert scales was developed by Jeff and administered to measure attitudes about technology, border life, learning, and the classroom. This survey may be revised for use in future semesters of the course, with the vision of hindsight to correct some flaws and hone the focus.
Interviews: Individual interviews were conducted with students in both "ends" of the class to get more in-depth information. Mary Lynn conducted some informal interviews and focus groups over coffee in Austin, and later flew to El Paso to meet with a few students there. Martin designed questions and interviewed some of the students in El Paso on video. Martin's interviews were conducted to present the actual students involved in the class. Students were interviewed individually, in pairs and in work groups to show the different views on one topic or certain topics. In addition, John interviewed both professors, one in person and the other over the teleconference link. Segments of John and Martin's interviews were included in the final video project.
Journals: We were all asked to keep journals as part of the class to record our reactions to the technologies and content of the course. We have shared excerpts from our journals in class (on a purely voluntary basis), and some of us found that writing the journals helped us to sort out some thoughts about the course.
Experiences: All of us on the evaluation/documentation team are of course members of the class; our own experiences in the class throughout the semester, along with our more deliberate evaluation methods, will be used in our final recommendations to the professors about what should be kept the same or changed in future semesters of this course.
We chose to write a web page rather than a more traditional term paper in order to share some of our experiences and findings with other people interested in the design or use of teleconferenced courses. Some members in our group (as well as our class as a whole) had never used World Wide Web, or even email, before this course. We all found Internet to be an essential tool for increasing communication between geographically separated class members, and Internet seemed a logical place to put information about the course.
In Austin, Pam created a multimedia product entitled "Electronic Echoes from the Border." She describes it as combining visual and text documentation of our experiences in the teleseminar. It focuses on the border aspect of the course: what borders mean, how they are crossed, and how they were described and experienced in this course.
Mary Lynn has created a web page in Austin describing her work in this course exploring the pedagogy and communication of a networked class. She is also considering using some of the ideas she has gathered from the class this semester for her doctoral dissertation.
Overall Summary of Jeff's Border Dialogs Survey:
(You can also view the detailed survey results)
The UTEP students are not as technologically advanced as the UTA students, but they have the desire to learn and apply their knowledge. Since the UTEP class is comprised of undergraduates and masters level students, there naturally would be a difference between them and the all UTA graduate class, including older Ph.D. students. This is probably why the UTEP students feel intimidated and the UTA students do not. Although teleconferencing is a new learning technology, all students embrace it and feel it is a positive addition to the classroom and learning environment. But still, face-to-face communication is the preferred method of communicating. As with all students, no one wants tests, heavy lectures or strict structure, and hardly any students want their grade dependent on someone else. All students like teams and team work, as long as these teams do not affect their grade. El Paso is a conservative city, and this shows in the views of the UTEP students about the border, whereas UTA students show a more liberal view about the border, which matches the reputation of the University of Texas at Austin.
Although there are inherent differences in the classes and in the Universities, the Border Dialogs seminar was conducted in a manner that met the needs of the majority of students, providing them what they expected and giving them material and information that can be applied to other classes and future learning experiences.
We started off with one room, a comfy meeting space for discussions, and by the end of the course some students started to help Heather build more rooms to represent aspects of the El Paso/Juarez border area. Other MOO users can visit these rooms to learn a little about El Paso and Juarez. Anyone can telnet to the MOO at moo.du.org 8888 and log on as a visitor. Read Heather's page to find out more about the MOO project and how to connect and visit the rooms we created.
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Written by the El Paso Evaluation team: Martin Armendariz, Jeff Lambert, Esther Peralta, John Taylor, & Ingrid Vliet.
Page layout and html by Ingrid Vliet.
