IS461, Systems Simulation, is a senior level CIS elective course for students enrolled in the BA in Information Systems curriculum as well as for students enrolled in the BS and BA in Computer Science curricula. Because systems simulation is a tool which is used in many disciplines, the computer science prerequisites for CIS461 have been kept rather minimal, and consist of both fluency in one higher level language (which is generally fulfilled by students completing a GUR course, such as CIS113 or CIS101) and a working knowledge of the fundamentals of probability and statistics (including continuous probability models which requires a knowledge of differential and integral calculus) - students generally fulfill this latter requirement with MATH333.

The goals of CIS461 are to introduce the student to the probabilistic and statistical methodologies used in discrete event systems simulation, to give the student experience in using systems simulation as a tool in the design and analysis of systems from a variety of contexts, and to expose the student to the design and utilization of special purpose simulation languages for discrete event simulation studies. Systems simulation is, therefore, a very technical, analytical and software-oriented course, as opposed to a discussion oriented course.

Students enrolling in CIS461 are required to purchase two textbooks. One textbook ("Discrete Event Systems Simulation") deals with the probabilistic and statistical methodologies used in discrete event systems simulation. The second textbook ("Getting Started With GPSS/H") focuses on GPSS (General Purpose Simulation System) which is the most widely used special purpose simulation language - the textbook includes a floppy disk containing a student version of GPSS/H, which is a DOS based program.

In the Fall of 1994, as part of the Sloan Foundation grant awarded to NJIT, I offered CIS461 in NJIT's Candid Classroom, where my lectures were videotaped, producing a set of 25 one-hour video tapes containing lectures and content almost equivalent to the course as had been traditionally presented. In the Spring of 1995, this course was offered to Distance Learners, using the Virtual Classroom on EIES2 and the 25 video tapes (which were presented on a New Jersey cable television station, as well as made available on-campus and for purchase and/or loan).

In Fall, 1994, CIS461 was offered with meetings on Wednesday and Friday, and only five students enrolled. One of the students dropped the course at the midpoint of the semester, as he indicated to me that he had obtained a full time job which required him to drop all of his classes which met during the day. In the Spring of 1995, CIS461 was offered as a Distance Learning section, and twenty students enrolled in the course. Within a few weeks, five students withdrew from the course and, of the fifteen students who remained, a perusal of the conferences and completed assignments indicated that fourteen of these fifteen students maintained a more than adequate level of currency and completeness in the class. The one student who was inactive spoke to me - she was a Rutgers student who acknowledged that she had become too active in student activities and could not keep up with her work. Of the fourteen students who were active, I was extremely satisfied with the work of thirteen of these students, all of whom completed most of the assignments, participated in the discussions on a timely basis, and performed reasonably well on the two examinations.

All of the students enrolled in the Distance Learning Section in Spring, 1995, were regular NJIT students who enrolled in this section both because they wished to learn Systems Simulation AND there was no face-to-face traditional section offered. Many of these students had part-time jobs or full time jobs, and presumably welcomed the flexibility inherent in a virtual classroom distance learning section. It is interesting to note that approximately 50% of the students who enrolled in the video+virtual classroom section in Spring 1995 were majoring in a discipline other than computer science or information systems - generally this group included actuarial science and statistics majors and computer engineering majors. While in prior semesters CIS461 has generally attracted a good number of students whose major is not in CIS, far more so than most other CIS electives, it might well be that the significantly high percentage in Spring, 1995 of out-of-department students could be due to the fact that the scheduling of the video+vc section of CIS461 would not conflict with any of the regular courses that these students would be taking within their majors.

Given the small sample size in the Fall, 1994 semester section, any comparisons with the Spring, 1995 sections must be interpreted with great caution. Numerically, the number of students enrolling in the video+vc version (20) was 4 times as great as the number of students enrolled in the traditional section(5). The completion rates, 80% for the face-to-face section versus 75% for the video+vc section, are comparable and generally in line with what I have experienced for this course in prior semesters. In terms of performance, 50% of the students (2 of 4) who successfully completed CIS461 in the Fall semester received A's, but this rather high percentage must be interpreted carefully. These two students had previously completed CIS431 (Database Systems Design and Management) with me and received grades of A in that course, and were at the top of the Database class of about 40 students. Overall, the performance of students in the video+vc section generally matched the performance of students in the regular sections of Systems Simulation which I have taught for over twenty years.

In planning for the virtual classroom section, I carefully considered the options for structuring the course, and decided upon a model whereby there would be distinct conferences for distinct purposes. My feeling was that to place all discussion items in a single conference would create a "hodge-podge" and unfocused view of what we hoped to accomplish in this new mode of course delivery and, further, I wished to separate the very serious material from the more informal material.

From discussions with other individuals who had instructed video+virtual classroom courses, I felt it would be imperative to establish the policies which would encourage and require students to "log on" and partake in the spirit of the virtual classroom. The need to habitualize the students to "log-ons" on a regular basis was clearly spelled out at the start of the semester. Moreover, I encountered the ire of the Distance Learning Division by refusing to provide the students at the beginning off the semester with a complete week-by-week detailed outline of required reading and viewing, as well as the written assignments. My feeling was that if students had available beforehand all of the reading and written assignments, this could discourage them from conforming to the pattern I was seeking to achieve, of log-ins on a regular basis.

As such, at the beginning of the course, I devoted part of a video lecture to an overview of the course contents. In the conference discussions for the course, I indicated that students were to log-in on a regular basis, and in one of the "special" conferences I would be providing the requisite reading assignments from the textbooks(s), which videos were to be seen, the written assignment, and the due date. In retrospect, I feel that this policy is an excellent one for a virtual classroom course, as opposed to an "a priori" establishment of all assignments and due dates.

Four conferences were established for the course, of the form C461.X (i.e., 461.1,461.2,461.3,461.4). As noted previously, each of these four conferences would focus on a particular aspect of the course. In each of these conferences, I, as the instructor, would enter the first several comments in the conference, where I would describe the focus of the particular conference, and an example of the items which I would want the students to enter into the conference. Thus, for the "Introduce Yourself" conference (C461.1), I provided a personal and academic description of myself to serve as a model for the student entries, and, for the "Simulate the Professor" Conference (C461.4) I provided a set of representative questions and answers which again would serve as a model for the students.

An overview of the 4 Conferences is as follows:

a) C461.1 was the "Introduce Yourself" Conference. As part of the first week's assignment, each student was to enter a comment to introduce himself/herself using the given model, describing personal information such as their home town, high school, major at NJIT/Rutgers, computers they have access to and favorite software programs, and anything else they wished to share with their classmates. Students were encouraged to reply (either publicly or privately) to any other student in the conference.

I was pleasantly surprised by the conference entries in this conference (just about all the students entered something in this conference). Some of the conference entries were very touching, such as the student who recently emigrated to the United States with her mother and described how difficult it was to leave all her friends behind and begin a new life in America. Another student described some trepidations in using the EIES2 Conferencing System. In these and other cases, there was clear evidence of classmates who "reached out" and responded to these students with words of encouragement and camaraderie.

b) C461.2 was the "Assignments" Conference, where I would post assignments on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Each assignment consisted of my overview of the topics to be covered, insight and motivation for the material, the appropriate videos which were to be viewed, the sections in our textbook(s) which were "linked" to the videos and were to be read in conjunction with the videos, and the written assignments which were to be submitted before a specified date. As always, students were encouraged to ask questions (either within the conference or in private messages) which they may have regarding the assignment, or comments related to the assignment.

One particular set of comments which comes to mind concerns a particularly challenging programming assignment I gave on a simulation implementation. One of the students, who had superbly completed the prior assignments, entered a comment into the conference politely asking if it would be possible to have an extension beyond the specified due date for a this assignment. This was immediately followed by another comment politely supporting the first request for an extension. After careful consideration, I entered a comment indicating the the requested extension would be granted. Almost immediately, this was followed by several "thank you so much" entries from students who well appreciated the extra time they were being given to do the assignment (this sort of satisfying feedback is not always present in traditional face to face meetings!).

c) C461.3 was the "Administration" conference, devoted to administrative issues related to the presentation of the course. It was the place where I posted announcements related to CIS461, such as the dates of the midterm and final exam and information relating to the structure of these exams.

d) C461.4 was the "Simulate the Professor" Conference. As described to the students in the opening remarks to this conference, preparing the questions for an exam was a difficult task for the college professor, for the questions are the key components of a measurement instrument used to gauge the student's understanding of the material and the insight gained in the course, and yet the questions had to be "fair" in the sense that they would be a "reliable" indicator of student achievement and understanding. As such, each student was required to "simulate the professor" and enter three separate questions for the midterm exam (and subsequently for the final examination). Moreover, in addition to entering their own questions, each student was required to answer three questions posed by other students. Lastly, the student posing the questions was required to evaluate the answers of any and all students who answered these questions. Students would receive a grade for their participation in the "Simulate the Professor" conference which would count towards their final grade at twice the weight of a regular assignment for both the midterm and final exam. To further encourage student participation in this conference, I promised that most of the questions on the midterm exam and the final exam would be based on questions posted by students in these conferences (and I kept my promise here!)

Students were invited, by Distance Learning, to attend an orientation session I held during the first week of the semester. Unfortunately, no students showed up at the designated date and time (several students indicated they had not been notified of the date and time by Distance Learning). Rather than designate an additional specified date and time, I offered to meet individually with any student, at their convenience, on a one-to-one basis, to orient them to the functionality of the EIES2 conferencing system. Approximately one third of the class took advantage of this opportunity, and I met with each of them on a one-to-one basis (in one case, a one-to-two basis) and gave them a one-hour on-line tutorial on EIES2 functionality. Almost all of the students who came were Actuarial Science and Statistics majors with minimal computer experience other than CIS113-114.

The other students in the class (all of whom were either in their junior or senior year) were Computer Science or Computer Engineering majors who had either completed a prior video+vc course or used EIES in some other course, or else were able to sufficiently learn EIES through use of the printed materials or on-line assistance.

During the first week of classes, I checked to see if each enrolled student had logged on to EIES2. If a student was on EIES, I sent that student a warm welcome message, pointed out to the student the appropriate conferences for the class, and requested that the student send me a message indicating that they successfully logged onto EIES2. If a student was not on EIES, then using the class roster and phone numbers provided by the Office of Distance Learning, I telephoned the student to discuss the log-on protocols and whatever else was required. Most students logged on without my calling, and only a small handful required a call.

As mentioned previously, I posted each assignment in the Assignment Conference, with a specified due date. Each assignment was carefully prepared to enhance the student's understanding of crucial technical issues presented in the course. The assignments given were comparable to what would have been offered in a traditional face-to-face section. Students were offered the choice of the following methods for submitting the written assignments: i) in a private message on EIES2 ii) through the U.S. mail (a.k.a. "snail mail") iii) hand delivered to the CIS Department

All assignments were graded and returned to the students with comments. The one or two students who submitted their assignments through the U.S. mail requested that I return them likewise, which I did.

Most students either hand delivered their assignment to me, or submitted them via EIES2 private messages.

One significant adjustment which I had to make was the receipt of the student assignments in a non-batch mode. In traditional classes, with a fixed due date for assignments, the instructor receives the student assignments in one batch, and grades them together in one batch in order to assure consistency of grading. In the video+vc section I offered, with the multiple means of submitting assignments, it was tempting to grade the assignments in a non-batch mode upon receipt of each assignment. Doing this poses some danger, indeed, to the desired consistency and integrity of the grading process. As such, I found it desirable to resist the temptation to immediately grade a received assignment, and instead waited for receipt of the entire "batch" of assignments, which did result in some delay of grading for those who submitting their assignments early (or, in the case where extensions of time were given, to assignments submitted on time).

Several students in the class did seem to have an inkling to supplement the "electronic" form of communication with some face-to-face meetings. While assignments could have been readily submitted by U.S. mail or private messages, several students took the time to make the trip to my office to proudly present to me their completed assignments. I'd venture to guess that these students wanted to personalize the process a bit more than I had originally intended. We did spend some time chatting and I suspect that the individual submission gave these students a bit more of a personal accomplishment than the batch submission in the traditional classroom.

After grading the midterm examination, and in accordance with my feelings that the midterm exam is both a learning experience as well as a measurement instrument, I decided to have an optional face-to-face class with the students, during Wednesday afternoon "club hours," and posted this item in the Administration Conference. It was emphasized that this was optional, and if a student could not attend I would return the graded examination in any way the student requested. Approximately one half of the class was present for this optional meeting, where I returned the examinations and reviewed with the class the answers to each of the questions on the midterm exam.

Subsequent to the review discussion, a few students expressed some concerns with the protocols of the "Simulate The Professor" Conference, which was used to gather potential student questions for the midterm examination, and where students were required to post three potential questions for the examination, answer three questions posed by other students, and grade any answers to their questions. The issue was the timeliness and time constraints - students felt pressured having to grade fellow student answers a few days before the exam, and students felt additionally pressured having to gather the correct(ed) answers of other students just a couple of days before the exam (recall that the exam was based on questions posed in "Simulate The Professor").

Based upon this feedback, I revised the procedures for the "Simulate the Professor" conference for the final examination. Each student was required, as before, to post three questions for the examination, one question per conference comment. However, the student would now be required to answer each question they posed, rather than answering another student's question. While this diminished somewhat the student-to-student interaction, I felt this was necessary given the greater pressures facing students in the week before comprehensive final examinations.

As stated previously, the midterm examination and final examination were mostly based on questions posed (and answered) by students in the "Simulate the Professor" conference, C461.4. Each student was required to post three questions in this conference, relevant to the material covered in the videos and text readings. For the midterm examination, each student was required to answer three questions posed by other students, as well as to "grade" any students who responded to their questions. This policy was modified for the final exam, whereby each student would answer the questions that they posed. I monitored the questions and answers of the students, sometimes prompting the students when I felt their questions were unclear or ambiguous. The cleverness and correctness of the student participation in this activity were evaluated and graded by me, and counted towards the student's grade for the course.

I feel that this interactive, participatory examination creation activity was a significant success, and a particularly valuable learning experience for the students. Many of the questions posed by students were unique, insightful and very clever; having taught this course for over twenty years, I am always looking to enhance the level of questions I present on examinations, and this video+vc course in effect provided me with 15 or so students helping to create some excellent questions (in fact, I intend to modify some of the questions and use them again on examinations in regular sections of the course).

This activity also provided the students with an excellent review for the midterm and final examination. The process of creating clear, unambiguous and non-trivial questions inspired the student to review the material in an insightful manner. After all students had posted their questions, the compendium served as an excellent comprehensive problem-oriented review of the material for the respective examinations.

No discussion of personal satisfaction achieved and accomplishments would be complete without a review of the personal challenges and obstacles which had to be overcome during the past year in both preparing the videos using the presentation graphics software, and doing the on-line interaction with the students. In a nutshell, the overriding obstacle throughout the year was the lack of a personal computer in my office capable of running the Windows-based presentation graphics software and effectively preparing material for the on-line sessions or, in actuality, the broken, unkept promises of the Department of a personal computer in my office for the various activities required for presenting and teaching CIS461 in video+vc mode.

The personal computer in my office was an obsolete, rarely used and snail-slow 286 machine with NO hard drive, 1 meg of RAM, 5.25" floppy drives and an ancient eye-straining EGA graphics monitor. Since the "Candid Classroom" portion of the course would be using the Windows-based Microsoft Powerpoint, I had discussed with the Department Chairman (on several occasions during the 1993-1994 academic year) the minimal computing needs for preparing and presenting the video+vc course, and the Department Chair assured me several times that he would have in my office the requisite computing power by September, 1994, when I would be presenting in the Candid Classroom using Microsoft Powerpoint. (Budgetary concerns were also addressed, but these were to be overcome.)

September, 1994 arrived, with no change in the obsolete and relatively useless personal computer in my office, and while there were promises of something to come, I was doubtful. Fortunately, I had devoted much time during the summer and prior semesters, using my personal computing resources at home, in preparing the bulk of the presentation material for the video portion in the Fall, 1994 semester. While it certainly would have been far more convenient to have a Windows-capable personal computer in my office, I did get by through my home computing resources, and by waiting for the secretaries to go to lunch to use their machines, as well as on occasion using the machine in the Co-Lab.

But what would happen for the Spring semester, when the on-line version was to be offered, and there would be very intense computing needs on almost a daily basis? By mid-to-late November of 1994, with still no change in the personal computer situation in my office, I became distrustful of the (empty) promises of things to come. I will be emphatic and state that I never wish to teach a course unless I know I can do the best possible job. Not having an adequate PC in my office would severely impact my efforts in the Spring. While CIS461 was scheduled to be taught as a video+vc course in Spring, 1995, I was 99% certain by November that I would cancel the video+vc section of CIS461 for Spring, 1995, and defer it to the 1995-1996 academic year when clearly there would be a workstation in my office to meet the intensive daily computing needs of an on-line course. (I had checked the preliminary roster with Mr. Tress, and there were no "true" distance students enrolled, so I could have rescheduled CIS461 for the Spring, 1995 semester on a Saturday or Sunday morning in a traditional face-to-face mode.)

Given the situation described in the preceding paragraph, I fully believed I would be offering the video+vc section of CIS461 in the 1995-1996 academic year, and ceased to prepare for the intended Spring offering. (Unfortunately, I did not prepare the custom "welcome" letter requested by Distance Learning to be sent to video+vc CIS461 students, and this greatly irritated the Distance Learning Division who decided to create their own letter.) For personal reasons, I did not wish to embarrass the CIS Department on this computing situation. During Final Exams week, I again met with the Department Chairman, who said he would see to it that I would have the needed personal computer in my office for the Spring semester. With this faint glimmer of hope, I reconsidered the decision about offering the video+vc version of CIS461 in Spring, 1995.

The Spring semester began, there was a commitment to deliver a video+vc version of CIS461 to twenty enrolled students, and there was another broken promise from the Department. I won't dwell on this issue, but describe how I coped with this challenge.

Given the uselessness of the CIS Department assigned PC in my office, I would be working mostly from home for the video+vc course, where I would have to meet the challenge of minimizing my communication costs. I had previously discussed with Eric Santanen, an MSCS student who had designed OEI (Offline EIES Interface), and I decided that OEI would be my means of implementing the on-line course. (Eric was a student of mine in CIS661, and I had the highest regard for the quality of his work.) I was very excited about the graphical user interface in OEI and, on paper, the capability to easily upload, download, and retrieve items seemed ideal for my needs in the virtual classroom.

OEI was a very lightly tested system - when it worked flawlessly, it was beautiful. Unfortunately, OEI had bugs - some minor, some major. I soon became THE beta tester (and probably the biggest user of OEI besides Eric). To give some examples, one oversight was the inability to disable the "call waiting" feature present in my home phone. Complete uploads and downloads were being lost. A more serious bug arose after several weeks of usage, when some students began to message me and comment that several of my items uploaded to conferences and in my messages did not make sense and there appeared to be missing sentences. I compared the source text to the text that had been uploaded by OEI to the conferences and, lo and behold, words and sentences were being dropped. In all situations, the designer (Eric) and I were in constant communication, and whenever I uncovered a bug Eric was there to correct it. (The unfortunate problem with the dropped text was due to some transmission delays in using Autonet, as I was apparently the first user to go through Autonet rather than directly dialing into EIES. In a relatively short amount of time, Eric was able to correct the situation by using the Kermit protocols.) By the end of the semester, OEI had gone thru about 5 upgraded versions, and it was working relatively smoothly.

Another revelation that resulted from my experience in working in the virtual classroom from home was the need for a dedicated phone line. For many years, my family (consisting of spouse and two teenage daughters) had more than adequate telephone service with our single phone and call waiting feature. However, when I began to use (or "monopolize") the telephone for EIES2 access, and thus disabled the call waiting feature, this became a source of friction in the family. After a week or two, we decided that I would need a dedicated telephone line and we ordered one from our local telephone company (alas, there was a two week waiting list for installation, so my wife and daughters had to endure more of this!)

With great reluctance, I also had to use my office computing environment at NJIT to interact with the virtual classroom. From my office, I would use the EIES2 "Preview" feature to preview my waiting items, and if there was something crucial which had to be answered immediately I would do so, else I would download the items from home where OEI would store them on my hard disk for perusal, reply and/or subsequent retrieval. On some occasions, particularly for hard copy, I would use the computing facilities in the Co-Lab.

During the semester I did ask Distance Learning if they had a personal computer to spare for the semester, and when I learned the CIS Secretarial area had a Pentium-90 (with 32 megabytes of RAM) that was being used by the secretarial staff only for low level word processing and data entry into a DOS database I also asked if I could add a network interface card and bring the machine into my office until the end of the semester, but there was no positive response (though I was able to use the Pentium in the Secretarial area, but there was no connection to EIES). In May, I did bring the issue outside of the Department and did receive a not-too-obsolete 386SX machine with 2 meg of RAM and a hard drive, but it was a little late. As of this writing, as I leave for a vacation, I have been promised by the Department Chair that when I return a SUN Spark workstation will be in my office, and this has been verified by our Director of Computing who said he had instructions to install the machine in my office during the third week in August.

In planning for teaching the on-line version of CIS461, I envisioned the need for some specialized software tools for conducting the class. Clearly there would be significant organizational needs for the information that I was sending and receiving, the grades that would be assigned, and pertinent information related to each individual student in my on-line class. In the Fall, 1994 semester, in assessing these informational organizational and retrieval needs, it became apparent that the functional requirements I envisioned could be satisfied by a PIM (Personal Information Manager). I did a comprehensive review of available Personal Information Managers, ranging from well-known products such as Lotus Organizer, to various shareware offerings, to see if any would satisfy my requirements. After the evaluation, the clear winner was Felippe Kahn's Borland Sidekick for Windows, which I obtained (at no cost to the Sloan grant) and used in the on-line CIS461 course in the Spring. (Subsequent to obtaining Sidekick, there have been two revised versions, Sidekick 2.0 and Sidekick '95, and the product is now in the possession of Starfish Software, a software company founded by CEO Felippe Kahn.)

I have in preparation a paper entitled "Software Tools for the Online Teacher" but here I will quickly summarize my perception of some of the software needs of the on-line teacher, and Sidekick's supportive features.

o Database needs are obvious, and the on-line teacher requires "one click" access to an 'always open' database of students, so when the on-line teacher is responding to a message from a student or wishes to enter a grade for an "electronically" submitted assignment, the course record for the student is "instantaneously" available. A PIM will obviously not have the power and capabilities of a full-fledged relational database (such as Access, Paradox, R-Base, Approach,or Superbase) but, then again, the on-line teacher does not require such power, and a flat file database structure will usually suffice. Sidekick, which has its roots in the company which pioneered microcomputer database management systems (dBase and Paradox and Reflex), has an outstanding data base component with ease-of-use and powerful features for structuring, organizing and retrieving from a database (other PIMs either do not have database features, or present them in a "contact-manager" like fixed format where you have no ability to customize the attributes to your particular application).

o The on-line teacher requires "one click" access to a component which provides a reminder system and calendar system. The on-line teacher does not deal with ONE class of students, but rather with N individual students with whom you are in personal contact. Given the enhanced interaction with individual students, I often found it necessary to issue reminders to myself of things that were promised to students, requests to re-evaluate or mail material to students, honoring a student request for an extension on an assignment, co-ordinating assignments with the schedule of tapes being broadcast over cable TV, etc.

o There is an obvious need to be able to create, store and readily retrieve information that is sent to students. For instance, in evaluating and returning assignments to individual students submitted on-line, there are some obvious general corrections and comments which you would like to send to individual students as well as some comments that are specific to a particular student. I prefer to answer each student individually, and there was a definite need to be able to quickly retrieve a text item which I had previously prepared and integrate it easily into a new item being prepared for another student. Sidekick supports this by allowing you to create items and store them into folder-like areas with customized labels which allow you to easily retrieve and integrate into documents. Sidekick also provides a mail-merge type capability so that each student would think he/she is receiving a completely customized evaluation of their assignment.

Several of the features I have described could be satisfied without having to use a PIM. EIES2, for example, has a gradebook and sophisticated text retrieval and organizing capabilities, but these were unavailable to me with the OEI interface being used. Windows 3.X has accessories for an index file (CARDFILE) and calendars/appointments (CALENDAR), but these are far less sophisticated and not nearly as well integrated as the components in Sidekick. OEI itself did have a reasonably nice filing system for "accepted" messages and conference comments, but the structure was obviously rigid and could not be customized or tailored by the user to fit his/her needs.

The bottom line is that I genuinely enjoyed the entire year's experience in preparing for, and teaching, the Systems Simulation course in a video+vc mode. Yes, there were obstacles to overcome and challenges to be met, and clearly the work involved by the instructor was substantially more than in a traditional face-to-face section, but the satisfaction achieved justified all of this. I look forward to Spring, 1996, when I hope to again offer an on-line section of CIS461.

Before beginning the on-line section, I had some trepidations about students disappearing from my virtual classroom and not adjusting to this new pedagogical style, but for the most part this never occurred, and my students regularly logged onto the system. I found myself developing far more personal contacts with the on-line students, and students were asking more questions (in both messages and conference comments) and often more insightful questions than in the face-to-face sessions, since they had significantly more time to review the material. The inability to effectively work in my office with the obsolete machine was a continually annoying issue I had to deal with, and inhibited me from doing some things I would have liked to have delved into.

Doing the videos in the Candid Classroom was also an enjoyable activity. Reviewing some of the earlier videos, there were places where I would present some material on the blackboard and this was apparently illegible in the videos, so I would hope that I could go back and re-do some of the earlier videos.

1. Prior to committing to do a video+vc course, the Department and Distance Learning Office must insure that the faculty member has the necessary computing resources both in his/her office as well as home for the course to be a success. The home computing environment is the responsibility of the Faculty member, but the Faculty member's office computing environment is the responsibility of the Department (this is also the position of our AAUP Professional Staff Association). Without the appropriate computing environment, the Department should not be allowed to offer the video+vc course, and the faculty member should not be allowed to teach in this mode. (While having the necessary computing environment seems intuitively obvious to those who recognize the need for direct and intense almost daily on-line interaction, this point must be emphasized since in my case it was ignored by the Department.)

2. It would be highly desirable if, on the first day of classes, the on-line teacher proceeded into the "classroom," and found ALL students were entered and familiar with the protocols for communicating in the on-line environment. Some of the initial "first week" start up activities of tracking down students, etc., needs to be smoothed out, and perhaps "off-loaded" more to administrative offices.

3. The EIES2 interface needs to be modernized, somewhat in the spirit of OEI. (I'm told that this is soon to be released with the Internet access?) There should be easy-to-use capabilities to integrate non-text features on-line.

4. PIM-like capabilities need to be integrated for the on-line teacher, either through a separate facility (such as Sidekick) or internally from within the EIES system.

5. I found myself devoting significantly more time to the video+vc version of the course than with the traditional pedagogical mode. Presumably some of this is attributable to the "start-up" activities. Yet with the traditional course you could focus your efforts into the one or two days when the course meets, but with the on-line version you are dealing with the course every day (including weekends!). Perhaps the institution is thereby enhancing faculty productivity, but I would suggest that some studies be done to determine how much more time a faculty member devotes to on-line teaching as opposed to traditional teaching, and perhaps some adjustment would need to be made in equivalencing this to the traditional 3-meeting-hour-a-week course.

Respectfully submitted,

Julian M. Scher, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Computer Science & Associate Chairman for Undergraduate Studies in Computer Science and Information Systems August, 1995

_