The problems facing higher education these days are pressing, but they are not new. The need to provide access to high quality learning for increasingly broader student populations with limited resources to use to complete the task has faced large public institutions of higher education for decades. One change over those decades, however, is that technological advances have broadened the range of techniques and strategies available to teachers and students to accomplish their educational goals. Thus, nowadays, when the problems of providing access to good quality higher education at an affordable cost are under discussion things like distance learning, self-paced computer instruction, and so on tend to command the attention of people seeking to address these important problems. Sometimes an appreciation of these new technological tools lead people to herald the end of the "university as we know it," with its structured courses, schedules, common meetings, and so on.

Yet the assumption that the university structure is simply outmoded may be a hasty one. "Distance learning" of a kind has been available to human beings for centuries since the development of the printing press. Long before electronic technologies permitted the transmission of sound and images from place to place, people had the option of checking out books, settling down in the "learner centered" environments of their rooms, and pacing themselves to learn whatever they might choose to learn. Yet books did not prevent the contemporary university system from developing, growing, and thriving. More information than any one person could master has long been available to human beings, if not as immediately as on the information superhighway, still quite readily. Universities have thrived because learning is more than information gathering. It requires focus, discipline, and organization. At the most serious and interesting levels, learning is much more than becoming expert at "Trivial Pursuit" or "Jeopardy." It is knowing what facts to seek out and what to do with them once they have been found. At the most important level, what universities are about is not learning information, but about understanding human beings and the universe in which they live.

Now this business of understanding proves to be quite difficult and complex. It is what human beings do when they are acting at their highest level. It requires a grasp of much information, to be sure. But it also requires sorting out that information--deciding how different things relate to one another, and deciding what is important and what not in various contexts. Universities help people master bodies of knowledge by organizing the vast materials available to people through observation, books, articles, films, music, and now electronic technologies. Universities organize the materials into curricula, into courses, into segments of courses, and into individual meeting and lectures. For some subjects this organization is crucial--it makes the difference between learning disconnected stuff and understanding human beings and the universe within which they live. This is at least one reason why the "university as we know it" with its structures, courses and curricula will and ought to continue to exist: the structure is helpful for people seeking to understand the data of human experience and enterprise as well as for people seeking to learn to organize those data themselves, or to continue to learn.

But if the basic tasks and skills involved in developing human minds do not become different in kind with the invention of books or the diffusion of electronic technologies, the presence of such tools certainly creates different, and potentially more effective, methods for human beings to learn. In particular, electronic technologies can make the efforts of students and faculty in some traditional university courses pay off in greater student success in mastering complex information and argument.

Over the years, universities have developed various strategies for coping with the need to teach more students despite having insufficient resources to do so in the most effective classroom settings. One such strategy that is broadly employed is the use of very large lecture classes for especially introductory survey courses taken by very many students. The advantages of these very large lecture sections involve making the expertise of an accomplished faculty member available to many students while holding down faculty costs and keeping faculty teaching loads at a low enough level to permit time for the faculty to continue to develop their expertise and to share learning with a larger audience through research and publication. In some cases a conscious choice has been made to turn to large class sections rather than to turn to part time faculty to teach smaller sections in the belief that students would stand to learn more from the accomplished professor than from the part time faculty. But whatever their advantages or necessity, large lecture sections are not the perfect setting for organizing and explaining information and concepts. Their size often prevents the student from interacting with the faculty member in such a way that the student can have questions answered and issues discussed and the faculty can gauge the level of the students' understanding and tailor class sessions accordingly. The students in larger classes are more anonymous. It is easier for them either to skip class or to pay little attention in class, thus missing key points or arguments and then failing later to connect those arguments to material presented later in the course. Contemporary technology can help address these problems, making the very large lecture class more effective in helping students understand the material presented in the course.

At the University of Texas at El Paso all undergraduates are required to pass a course called "Introduction to Politics." The course is taught by the Political Science faculty in a variety of formats, including very large lectures (sections sometimes exceeding 700 students). Those large classes have generally been considered effective--students readily enroll in them and give them high marks in evaluations. Yet over the years, students in the large class have had high failure rates and an overall average which, although not much different from classes taught in other formats, certainly left room for improvement. An aggressive use of computer technology has improved student accomplishment in this large course, by addressing the problems associated with large lecture sections.

Enhanced Lectures

A good lecture will take difficult material, clarify it to the students, and at the same time make plain why the material is difficult or complex. The material--the information, the arguments, and the concepts--is central. In UTEP's Introduction to Politics course multimedia computer technology has proven to be highly useful in enhancing lecture presentation by helping to make concepts and argument more clear and memorable for the students.

The enhanced lectures are presentations prepared on a personal computer and then projected on a very large screen at the from of the lecture hall using a laptop computer and a video projector. The projector is bright enough that the lights can remain on. The professor can control the presentation either directly from the computer or using a remote control device. The presentations do not replace the professor or the lecture, but while the professor is talking there is always something on the screen to highlight or to help explain or to put in context what the professor is saying. The pesentations serve the role that blackboards and overhead projectors serve, but much more effectively and powerfully.

At the core of the lecture materials is a conventional computer presentation with slides built with headings and brief bullets which appear sequentially as the professor chooses to reveal them. The bullets emphasize topics and provide an organization of points for the students. They also show data, spelling, and so forth. This much alone is very helpful since it permits the lecturer to put more material on the screen than one would ordinarily do with a blackboard, and to control it more easily and thoroughly than one can with transparencies and an overhead projector. It allows the professor to show the steps of an argument, and the student to remember those steps, some of which might seem so minor (or confusing) when they first are stated that with an ordinary lecture the student might not have noted them, thus not having them later to relate to the overall argument. These slides, or most of them, are made available to students who wish to purchase them, bound and with space to add their own notations.

The basic presentation is then made more effective with the use of multimedia materials. Pictures, drawings, and other graphics are used to show points, to makes examples more compelling, or to relate abstract notions to things students are accustomed to seeing. Charts and graphs can be used and animated to accommodate changing data or premises. Computer developed animations are employed as demonstrations and examples. Video clips--from films or TV shows students know, from interviews or historical footage, from custom videos, even from clip media--are used to show things, to emphasize things, to help students understand or remember points, issues, difficulties, and connections. Sounds are used to bring things to students' minds, to punctuate points, and to present things for consideration and explanation.

The effectiveness of such multimedia resources is plain in courses whose purpose is to make a body of factual material clear to students. Thus, for example, a biology instructor would find it beneficial to be able to show an animation of mitosis, or in an American Government course videos of Bull Conner's fire hoses and police dogs could show the unjust treatment of African-Americans in the 1960s South much more completely than an instructor's words alone could do. But the Introduction to Politics course is of a different nature. It is a course that takes original sources and seeks to analyze their argument to develop an understanding of human beings and political life. Its focus is arguments and concepts. It moves from Sophocles' Antigone through materials from Plato and Aristotle to The Federalist Papers and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Here pictures and videos would seem less useful in conveying the material. And in a way that is the case: the basic material of the course cannot be shown in picture form, and to attempt to do so would risk oversimplification of things whose complexity is what the course is all about. This is not the kind of material about which a picture is worth a thousand words. There are no pictures that are equivalent in developing understanding to the words here.

Yet for the conceptual course, the multimedia enhancements are highly effective in helping the students understand. They provide emphasis (students' comments suggest that sound is especially effective here). They offer creative and memorable ways to make examples and demonstrations. These might include things like making animals talk, or combining the sound track from one film with the video from another to make a point well. Often students will mention seemingly minor pictures, sounds, or effects that were used in lecture in their essays as the students explain, and explain well, an argument about some complex point from Aristotle or the American founding, making it clear that the multimedia does help students understand.

Probably what the multimedia presentation helps with most powerfully is in making the connections between arguments. The Introduction to Politics course presents a coherent argument from start to finish. A key to understanding the material is to understand the connections between the parts of the course. While Antigone is analyzed at the beginning, for example, it becomes more clear in light of material discussed in the middle of the course from Plato's Crito, which in turn is more thoroughly understood in light of points covered in the discussion of Aristotle's Politics. The multimedia presentations allow the lecturer and the students to make these connections very effectively. By bringing back a graphic or a sound used at a key point in an earlier argument the lecturer can remind the students of that argument (which the student can review by looking at the bullet from before) and show how it connects to the current material as well as how a conclusion previously reached might need to be revised. In this, color is especially helpful. The presentation for each major topic in the course is prepared on its own background, or set of backgrounds, and using a distinct color scheme. Major points, issues, or conclusions are placed on slides that are distinctive and memorableperhaps even ugly. Then, as the course progresses, those slides can be recalled for the students to emphasize a connection between parts of the course or to show that an argument needs to be reconsidered in light of a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of human beings and the nature of political communities.

There are many measures of the effectiveness of the enhanced lectures in improving student learning and performance. Overall grades go up; student questions in class improve; exam questions can be more complex and demanding; and the professor actually can cover more material over the course of the semester (the enhanced lectures have the effect of adding two to three class meetings to the semester). But perhaps the best indicator of the effectiveness of the computer presentations is this: In the past, the class average would typically be slightly lower on the second exam than on the first. The material is more complex and builds on what was covered on the first exam, so that students who didn't excel on the first would find it difficult to do so on the second. But with the introduction of the enhanced lectures, the class average on all exams increased, but especially on the second exam as compared to the first. Now students had more resources available to them to learn the material, and they use them effectively to do so. A lower than desired exam grade on the first exam gives some the motivation to learn, and the lecture materials give them tools with which to satisfy that ambition.

Video Tapes

After the presentations had been created for enhancing the lectures, another use was quickly found for them. Video tapes were created by the simple process of running through each presentation (with some minor alterations from what was presented in the classroom) on the computer and simultaneously taping it on video tape, while the professor narrated a summary of the material covered by the presentation on the same tape. Through this method a series of review tapes covering the whole course and taking about eight total hours was developed. The tapes were made available to the students to view on campus in two instructional technology labs, and eventually were made available for the students to purchase for themselves.

The review tapes have proven helpful in a number of ways. In a course without a traditional textbook, if a student misses a lecture it is difficult to get the material that was missed. The tapes also provide a useful overview of material that students can use in preparation for examinations. Things whose explanation, importance, or context was not clear to a student in lecture can be clarified through the tapes. While they do not react to student questions and concerns, as an in-person review can do, the tapes do something that a question and answer session might not be able to do: they expose students to material and arguments that the students might not realize are important enough to study and understand. Put another way, the tapes can help students appreciate what it is that they do not know that they should want to know.

About a quarter of the students in the class use the tapes in preparation for the first examination. More than half use them in preparation for the subsequent examinations. Students report that they find the tapes very helpful. As a group, students who use the tapes earn higher grades than the students who do not use the tapes. Interestingly, a significant number of students who do not make use of the tapes earn grades of "A" on the exams. This suggests that many of the very good students who would have excelled before the introduction of the enhanced lectures will continue to do so with usual resources. The new resources are improving the understanding and performance of a large additional group of students who, without the multimedia materials having been available, might have been a grade or two below where they are now. One measure of the importance of the tapes to some students is this: On an exam, two short-answer questions were asked on material of about the same difficulty that had been covered in the same lecture. The material for the second question was intentionally left off of the review tape. Students who did not use the tapes answered both questions correctly at nearly the same rate. But students who used the tapes scored, as a group, about 50% higher on the question that had been covered on the tapes than on the question that had not. Clearly, for this group of students (again, which does not include all of the top students) the tapes are a very important tool for learning the material.

Electronic Text

The final ingredient in the multimedia support for the Introduction to Politics course is an electronic text. The idea behind the video tapes--to have materials available for students to review--is carried further in the electronic text, whose purpose is not only to review the subject matter of the course, but to develop understanding by going into the same depth or even greater depth than the lectures in analyzing course materials. The text began with the simple notion of making the presentation files used in lecture available for the students to review in computer labs on campus. But that would have been of little help without some additional explanation of points or terms from the presentation slides, which is normally accomplished in lecture. Eventually a decision was made to undertake a new project that would not merely add to the lecture presentation slides, but would create a new interactive computer program to assist students in mastering the information, arguments, and concepts.

The electronic text was developed using the resources of the University's Multimedia Teaching and Learning Center, a development lab created precisely to support faculty efforts to improve teaching through the use of computer resources. The work was done by the course professor working with an undergraduate student assigned by the MMTLC. The student was in his first and second years when the work was done, and had successfully completed the Introduction to Politics course in his first semester. The assistance of the student was invaluable, not only to help with the actual computer programming, but to offer advice and suggestions about the content of the program--what needed clarification, elaboration, a different example, and so on.

The electronic text was developed using Asymetrix Multimedia Toolbook. It was divided into "books," each covering a major segment of the course (like Antigone, or Federalist 10.) At the core of each book is text explaining the major points to be gained from the analysis of the material in question. Within that text, various hotwords, buttons, and other devices allow the student to find a definition, hear the pronunciation of a word, explore a topic in more depth (often in greater depth than in lecture), see an example or an analysis of a specific concept or argument, or connect the current material with material covered elsewhere in the course. The examples and explanations make extensive use of drawings, pictures, sounds, animations, and digital video. Sometimes the same images and examples employed in the classroom presentations are used to recall those arguments to the student, and at other times additional examples and new examples and images are used to explore the material discussed in class from a different perspective. Each book contains many quiz questions designed for the student to appreciate his or her level of understanding and, in many cases, to develop understanding by asking an especially complex, difficult, or even ambiguous question. The true/false questions and the multiple choice questions include explanations with all responses as to why they are correct or incorrect (or, perhaps, the circumstances under which they would be correct or incorrect). Open-ended questions give the student the opportunity to formulate and enter a complete response, which the program will then comment upon.

Students open the text by double clicking on an icon in Windows Program Manager. This open a screen where the student sees the course outline as presented on the syllabus. From there the student clicks on the particular part of the course to be studied, thereby opening the book for that segment. The student can return to the course outline at any time to move to a different book. Once in a book, a student can navigate in three ways. The student can work through sequentially, page by page from beginning to end, exploring each page's features and connections along the way. Each book opens to a table of context, listing the major subheadings of the discussion of that material. The student can move directly to any of those subheadings, and then return to the table of contents from any page in the book. Each book includes a list of study topics and questions which is identical to a list included on the course syllabus. A student can navigate the book by turning to those questions, and clicking on any one of them to go to the place in the book where that topic is raised (the program will not provide a direct answer to the study question, but takes the student to the place where he or she can find the answer).

The electronic text has proven to be very helpful to students seeking to learn the course material. It is a better resource that the video tapes for learning the material from a missed lecture because the text is more thorough than the tapes. The text is very flexible, allowing a student to take several hours to study carefully all of the material or to review one or two points on which the student is unclear. It compensates for the inability of a large class to be responsive to the needs and questions of each student, by allowing each student to address those needs and questions with the computer. Finally, although a lecture can be crafted to encourage the students to work actively during the lecture to understand the concepts, the electronic text goes further in permitting, even requiring the student to engage the material actively: to work it through and when it is not clear to find another way to work it through.

The electronic text does what a traditional text does in that it organizes information and argument so that the student can understand a body of knowledge rather than engage in the gathering of random bits of information. In doing that, however, the electronic text offers several possibilities that a traditional text does not. The most obvious of those is the use of multimedia. Used well, sound, animation, and video can make information, concepts, and arguments more readily and thoroughly understood. The electronic text also offers more interactivity with its navigation tools and quiz questions that react to student input. But probably the greatest benefit of the electronic text, at least with conceptual material of the sort covered in this course, comes from hypertext. The electronic text is a powerful tool for making the links between material clear. Throughout the text there are buttons and hotwords that remind the student of material covered at other places in the current book or in another book from another part of the course. Instead of simply mentioning this connection or referring the student to earlier material in a note, the electronic text actually takes the student back to that earlier discussion and allows the student to review that earlier material (with all of its links and effects) without losing track of the context within which the link was important. Furthermore, the electronic text permits the student to see how understanding of new material provides a different perspective on conclusions reached earlier. The study of Plato's Crito, for example, leads the student to revise some preliminary conclusions that may have been reached when analyzing Antigone. The text allows the student to appreciate that point by taking the student back to Antigone and superimposing a paragraph or two explaining the implications of the Crito for Antigone. When the student has spent as much time back in Antigone as the student chooses, the text will then return to the Crito, and the attentive and thoughtful student will continue with an enhanced understanding of the Crito, of Antigone, and of the course material as a whole.

Students who use the electronic text find it the most helpful tool for mastering the material. Their exams reflect that, especially with the links between material that are well made in their essays. Their grades, on average a full grade level higher than the grades of those who do not use the electronic text, also indicate the value of the resource. Students report especially liking the interactivity of the text and the quiz questions that enable them to test their understanding. When asked for criticisms, the students focused on the machines in the campus labs on which they used the text: some thought they were too few and too slow.

Results

Student grades in the Introduction to Politics course have risen with the introduction of each new element: the enhanced lectures, the review tapes, and the electronic text. As a whole, the class average now runs between half a letter grade and a full letter grade higher than it did before the introduction of these tools. Students who use the tapes earn higher grades as a group than students who use neither the tapes nor the electronic text. Students who use the electronic text earn higher grades as a group than students who do not, higher even than students who use the tapes but not the electronic text. And students who use both the tapes and the electronic text earn, on average, the highest grades in the class. A significant number of students who use neither the tapes nor the electronic texts earn "A" grades, a fact which suggests that the multimedia resources are helping students earn high grades who would not have done so without the availability of those resources. This is also indicated by the fact that the percentage of "A'` grades nearly doubles while the percentage of "B" grades also increases with the introduction of the multimedia. Significantly fewer students who use the tapes and/or the electronic text fail the course as compared to the students who take advantage of neither resource.

The data about grades should be taken in the context of the effects the multimedia materials have on the professor. Of course, to be effective, the multimedia materials, like any other books or classroom materials, need to be developed well. The course and its parts must form a coherent whole, and the lectures must be well-coordinated to relate the parts to the whole. In taking that whole and developing enhanced lectures or an electronic text, the professor explores the material and the links within it perhaps more fully, certainly from a different perspective than before. This might make the professor better at explaining the subject matter. Furthermore, the enhanced lectures allow the lecturer to make complex points more clearly, powerfully, and sometimes more quickly than before. This can permit additional class time to be spent on additional material. Better lectures together with the availability of better resources outside the classroom to improve student learning permit the professor to expect more of the students as well. Exams can ask for the demonstration of an understanding of complex information and argument. Simply put, effective use of the technology allows the professor to accomplish more and reasonably to expect the students to accomplish more.

Another sign of the success of the multimedia materials is found in student opinion. Virtually all students claim to find the materials helpful. Ninety-nine percent of the more than four hundred responding to a survey believed that the multimedia materials helped them learn more from the course than they would have learned otherwise. Sixty-nine percent expected to earn a higher grade because of the materials than they would have earned without them. Ninety-eight percent said that, other things being equal, they would take the subsequent course with the multimedia materials rather than without. There are very few negative comments, even when the students are asked to make negative comments (although one student offered to sell the professor a faster laptop computer to speed up classroom presentations!). It might be expected that with the availability preprinted lecture notes, review tapes, and electronic text making the material readily available, students would be able to succeed while spending less effort to do so. But when the students who chose to use the tapes and/or the electronic text were asked to compare the time they spent studying to what they would have spent without the resources, 45 percent reported that they spent more time studying, and only 27 percent reported spending less time.

Universities organize information so that people may develop a more complete understanding of themselves and their surroundings. Curricula, courses, lectures, and books have traditionally been made available to students as tool to help them gain that understanding. Now those tools can be enhanced in ways that make them even more effective for some students in promoting learning. The experience in the Introduction to Politics course at The University of Texas at El Paso shows that when it is done well, multimedia enhancement of lectures and electronic books allows the professor to cover more material more thoroughly and makes the student more likely to study more, learn more, and earn higher grades. When the professor demands much of the students, and provides effective tools for them to use in meeting those demands, the students will use those tools, and the students will learn.

Robert Webking

Associate Professor

Department of Political Science

The University of Texas at El Paso

El Paso, Texas 79968

(915) 747-7982

rwebking@utep.edu

January, 1996