The Electronic Seminar:
Distance Education by Computer Conferencing

by Lowell Roberts

Imagine teaching in an environment where students whisper to
each other while class is in session, then meet privately to
continue the discussion. This may sound familiar, only the
whispers carry across many miles, and the conversations focus
on the assigments, class discussions, or a student's research.
Sometimes the students even include the instructor. In this
environment everything said is recorded, and a challenge to
something said a month ago is not uncommon. Students always
come to class prepared, and they all contribute to the seminar.

I teach in such an environment, although sometimes it doesn't
feel like teaching, more like conversation among colleagues.
Class meets any day, often at odd hours. It is attended by a
business executive, a quadreaplegic, a writer, a traveling
salesman, an out-of-work welder -- a typical assortment of
participants in an electronic seminar who come from Buffalo,
New Haven, St. Louis, the Adirondack Mountains. We meet in
our homes by computer conference.

The Center for Distance Learning of Empire State College, a
unit of the State University of New York, is piloting on-line
study by offering a course in contemporary American diplomacy
entirely through computer communication. The Center ordinarily
teaches by tutored independent study, where students,
following detailed course guides, learn on their own and
through frequent contact with expert tutors. Although guided
independent study at a distance can be a highly successful
learning experience for many students, it cannot provide the
advantages of group interaction. We decided, therefore, to
experiment with the interactive capabilities of the computer,
namely electronic mail and conferencing.

In the three months that the pilot has been online, we have
already concluded that computer conferencing can extend many
of the learning opportunities of the classroom to distance and
independent study. And using these computer utilities does not
jeopardize the intensity and flexibility of studying on one's
own. If anything, the computer appears to enhance independent
study by providing peer stimulation and resources.

The students have accounts on the College's Digital VAX 11/750
that permit access only to a conference called AMERDIPL. The
conference software is CAUCUS version 1.28/VVe developed by
Camber-Roth, Inc. and distributed by Metasystems Design Group,
Inc. Class is conducted through a series of items initiated
by the instructor to which all participants can post responses
until the instructor terminates the discussion. Papers are
submitted by e-mail within the conference, a utility that is
also used for private messages between the instructor and
students and between students.

Evaluation of the Empire State Experience
=========================================

Although our experience is admittedly limited, we know that
course delivery exclusively by computer -- no meetings of any
kind in the traditional sense -- is not only feasible, but an
exciting alternative pedagogy. Since this on-line version of
American Diplomacy was adapted from an existing distance
course, it did not incur major developmental or start-up
costs. However, since distance courses generally require
substantial front-end investment, delivery by conferencing
should not add significantly to the cost of distance
education. And if campus overhead is considered, the
electronic seminar may ultimately be much less expensive than
traditional pedagogy.

We know, too, that the students feel a genuine excitement
about participating in the conferences -- one student spoke
for us all, I think, when he signed off on his response to
another student (who had questioned his interpretation of U.S.
relations with Latin America) with, "Damn, this is fun!"

Compared with the performance of previous classes, the written
work submitted by this class appears, so far, to be superior
both as to breadth of research and quality of analysis. This
was demonstrably true in the case of one assignment which was
identical to that of the previous non-computer class. That
this is the result of instruction by conferencing is certainly
not conclusive, since the students who elected to take the
pilot may be a select group from which superior performance
would be expected in any case. However, students do use the
conference to test out ideas on the class that later appear in
developed form in the papers. They also use the private
message function to raise questions with the instructor and to
discuss their work with their classmates.

The Value of Computer Conferencing for Distance Learning
========================================================

Teaching by conferencing overcomes the most serious
disadvantage of independent and distance learning: it breaks
down the isolation of the student from his peers. It permits
the student to benefit from the shared experience of a group
engaged in the same study and the opportunity to measure his or
her ideas against those of others in the group. This pedagogy
also has advantages over the traditional classroom. The
conference maintains a complete record of all that is said.
This record can be reviewed at any time so that participation
and discussions can be summative, rather than discrete.
Finally, conferencing is asynchronous, so time and distance
deprive no student of access to learning.

Will the electronic seminar replace the traditional classroom?
No. Many of us like to go to class; we find physical contact
with our peers fun and, occassionally, even stimulating. In
addition, without that captive audience, the egos of too many
faculty would suffer serious deprivation. But as the national
student body becomes proportionally more adult and students
increasingly less committed to institutions of education,
colleges and universities are going to have to adopt new
learning environments. The question is will we continue to
maintain the campus classroom as an ideal, if seldom used,
model or will we create environments that incorporate the
advantages of both classroom and non-classroom teaching?

Perhaps the most significant change that computers will bring
to higher education will be the freeing of learning from its
historical contraints of time and space. Already, educational
software can effectively instruct and train, and commercial
networks can provide access to databases that, together, far
exceed the information available in any university library. And
the instruction and information are available when and where
the learner wants them.

If anyone can attend class at home at midnight or at work
during the lunch hour, our traditional definitions of students
and school are no longer really meaningful. With computer
conferencing students no longer need a spatial, temporal point
to exchange ideas and work with teachers. The electronic
seminar frees the academy to meet in each student's own time
and space -- if educational institutions are willing to define
themselves in terms greater than their campuses.

How Electronic Seminars Differ from the Classroom
=================================================

The electronic seminar does differ from the classroom seminar
in a few significant ways. The nuances of non-verbal
communication are, for the most part, lost. As one gets to
know one's classmates, emotion and personality emerge on the
CRT to a surprising degree, but body language is not
transmitted. On the other hand, verbal communication is not
lost; everything that is said can be preserved for as long as
the conferees wish and reviewed by anyone in the conference at
any time. No worthy idea is lost because the instructor
failed to pick up on it at the moment it was expressed.
Equally, misstatements are not forgotten.

Other differences, too, seem to favor the electronic medium.
Conferencing is eqalitarian. Unless the instructor
technically restricts student input, every participant has an
equal opportunity to be heard and to be ignored (scrolled
past), so the value of reasoned argument and careful, concise
exposition are quickly understood. Class cannot be dominated
by the more agressive students. Those who shoot from the hip
or talk just to be noticed tend, I think, to feel pressure to
be more thoughtful, since the record shows that no one is
responding to their inputs. Those whose thoughtfulness or
shyness often exclude them from timely participation in
classroom discussion can set their own time and pace. A
common AMERDIPL reponse includes a phrase like, "I'll be back
after I give this more consideration." The AMERDIPL
experience also indicates that the electronic seminar generates
more interaction among members of the class and a greater
proportion of student participation compared to that of the
instructor.

Although students participating in the AMERDIPL pilot were
screened for comfort and familiarity with computers (only one,
however, was experienced in computer-mediated communication),
our impression is that, after an initial period of caution,
most students will not feel inhibited or anxious about taking
part in electronic discussions.

Implications of the Empire State College Experience
===================================================

Empire State College's experience with the electronic seminar
has been singularly positive, but the AMERDIPL experience has
indicated some aspects and implications of teaching by
conferencing to which replicators should pay careful
attention. For example, the computer is generally used to
aggregate, in some manner, discrete input. Participants in a
conference often approach this application in the same way,
expecting that each individual's contribution will somehow be
synthesized into a coherent whole. The egalitarian nature of
conferencing, however, treats each input discretely, and the
participants must make the linkages that bring coherency to a
discussion. This isn't really different from any group
discussion where each person wants his or her ideas heard
before s/he listens to others. Instructors of electronic
seminars cannot rely on the computer to direct, synthesize
or moderate discussion any more than their classroom
counterparts.

The individual, learner-directed nature of computer mediated
education and individual, undisciplined access to information
through the computer may decrease the shared knowledge of our
society. Arguably, it is the common lore of the culture,
pluralistic though it may be, that makes us a people rather
than a collection of individuals or small groups. I believe
that conferencing, a group learning environment, mitigates
this tendency of other pedagogical applications of the
computer, but conferencing may exacerbate it. Responses by
AMERDIPL students sometimes resemble monologues, rather than
discussion. Since conferencing is asynchronous, entry can be
its own immediate, unchallenged reward.

Developers of electronic seminars must also be sure that the
medium, content and instructional objectives are a pedagogical
fit. After the initial excitement of attending class by
computer, students will not sustain the seminar by themselves
if the subject or the instruction cannot sustain it. In this
regard, again, the electronic seminar is not different from
the classroom seminar.

Finally, we learned from AMERDIPL to keep it simple. Students
who enroll in a teleconferenced course are probably
sufficiently sophisticated computer users that the operating
system need not be simplistic. However, the objectives of an
electronic seminar are not found in the medium but the content.
Even experienced conferees or bulletin board users are rarely
interested in multiple-level command structures or high-level
editing and graphics functions. The conferencing system should
facilitate participation and dialogue. Empire State College
students receive a single sheet of CAUCUS commands and a half
page of instructions about accessing the VAX, no training or
manuals. Problems are addressed by e-mail or a telephone call
to the instructor of conference technician.

Computers have tremendous potential for inclusion -- of the
world, perhaps, through our keyboards. Unfortunately,
computer applications, as if by some natural law, often tend
toward exclusion. Conferences that require mastery of the
arcania of operating systems -- mere bells and whistles in the
context of the subject of teh conference -- will fail. They
will fail because they make the computer the object, rather
than the environment, of the learning. We don't study the
classroom in American Diplomacy.

------
Author's note: This paper is an abridged version of a longer
piece available from Lowell Roberts, Mentor/Coordinator of
Public Affairs Studies, Center for Distance Learning,
SUNY/Empire State College, 28 Union Avenue, Saratoga Springs,
NY 12866. (518-587-2100)