A Curriculum in Communication and the Global Workplace:
Advanced Collaboration Tools to Support Multi-University Distributed Learning
August 1, 1998 to March 1, 1999
Noshir S. Contractor, Principal Investigator
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Departments of Speech Communication & Psychology
244 Lincoln Hall, 702 S. Wright Street, Urbana IL 61801
217-333-7780 (w/mobile), 217-244-1598 (fax)
nosh@uiuc.edu
http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu:1000/contractor/
Cynthia Stohl, Co-Principal Investigator
Purdue University
Department of Communication
2114 LAEB
Purdue University
West Lafayette IN 47907
765-494-3315
CStohl@sla.purdue.edu
In Collaboration With:
Professor Peter R. Monge
Annenberg School for Communication
University of Southern California
3502 Watt Way
Los Angeles CA 90089-0281
(213) 740-0921 (w); (213) 740-0014 (f)
Monge@usc.edu
Final Report submitted to:
Learning Technology Seed Grant Program
Committee on Institutional Cooperation
302 E. John Street, Suite 1705
Champaign IL 61820-5698
Abstract of the original proposal
The aims of this project are to (1) advance the use of instructional technology, cooperative learning, and shared instruction in communication studies by developing shared human and digital resources in the emerging area of global organizational communication and (2) to develop a shared video and web-based immersive distributed instructional environment. This proposal requests support for video-conferencing enhancements for a three university (UIUC, Purdue, and University of Southern California) course on Communication in the Global Workplace in the Fall, 1998. This project will leverage, E-Quad, an ongoing program of sophisticated web-based support for a distributed learning community.
In communication studies, the area of globalization is a near-ideal testbed for new distributed learning applications. Instruction in this area necessarily incorporates training in use and application of new communication technologies in the global workplace. Both faculty and students are eager to learn and experiment with new technologies and its role in globalization. Because it is an important and growing area, many departments are extending their undergraduate and graduate curricula to cover its theoretical and research literature. Faculty who teach in this area still form a relatively small and well-integrated community and commonly share instructional materials. This proposal seeks to extend and integrate this nascent area of instruction and research in order to leverage the unique faculty expertise in three leading communication departments at UIUC, Purdue University, and the University of Southern California.
This instructional environment, The Electronic Quad II, (here after referred to as E-Quad II) will leverage the resources and expertise developed in The Electronic Quad (E-Quad) project, funded in 1996-98 by UIUC's Advanced Learning Technologies for Higher Education (ALTHE). The E-Quad II will integrate features available in (i) UIUC's Digital Portfolio - a collaborative multi-media annotation and grading tool (being currently developed with funding from the UIUC Educational Technologies Board), (ii) asynchronous conferencing tools such as WebBoard, supported by UIUC's Sloan Center for Asynchronous Learning Environments (SCALE), (iii) synchronous conferencing tools such as Microsoft NetMeeting, and (iv) Web-based multi-media instructional delivery tools, such as Real Publisher/Presenter. In addition, Equad II will incorporate real time room-based video-conferencing for synchronous class room instruction across the three universities.
E-Quad II will use these enabling technologies for (i) delivery of modularized, interactive, multi-media instructional materials, (ii) secured on-line exams and grading, (iii) the creation of public (within and between the courses at the three universities), semi-private (within work groups), and private information (personal) spaces, (iv) synchronous and asynchronous collaboration within "virtual" work groups, and (v) instructional coordination such as group scheduling calendars, and message boards. Computer server support will be provided by UIUC's Department of Speech Communication. Video-conferencing support will be provided at UIUC using Lucent Technologies' state-of-the-art Definity - a multi-point control bridge unit.
Pedagogical Outcomes
The course (http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu:1000/global/) accomplished all of the activities that were identified in the proposal and summarized in the abstract above. In addition, the course also identified additional features and activities that were incorporated during the course of the semester. The pedagogical motivation for the course was to move from traditional notions of distributed teaching (distance education) to include:
The evolution of these motivations are illustrated in the Figures below.
Cooperative teaching is of special interest when developing curriculum on interdisciplinary topics, such as the "Globalization" focus of this course. The three instructors teaching this course each have primary research and teaching interests in distinct dimensions of globalization: economic and organizational structures (Monge), cultural issues (Stohl), and technological issues (Contractor). The topics covered in the course included the communication implications of globalization for new forms of organizing, labor, human resource management, marketing, change management, managing tensions, language, negotiation, and legal issues. The course readings and discussions on these topics were informed by the three dimensions reflecting the faculty members' interests.
The course web site (http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu:1000/global/) served as a central repository for information that was relevant to all the three courses - which had their own course numbers and even different course titles. In addition, to accommodate requirements of courses offered at USC, the syllabus also included an Academic Integrity Statement provided by USC. The course web-site and the considerable technological support required for the course were very ably provided by a graduate teaching assistant -- Pascal Yammine (at UIUC). In addition, Junho Choi provided local support to students at Purdue. Notwithstanding their official appointments (a 63% appointment for Pascal Yammine and a 1/4 time matching support provided by Purdue for Junho Choi), the two assistants together often invested over 80 hours per week on this class.
To enhance the quality of discussion on each of these topics, we invited fifteen experts (four of whom were from industry) to join the class via video-conferencing. They were:
Prof. Geradine DeSanctis - Duke University
Mr. Bob Beckman - CEO, Beckman Laboratories
Prof. Peter Carnevale - Univ. of Illinois
Rich Westphal, Susan Whitney, Kristen Morton, Carrie Smith - Andersen Consulting
Prof. Larry Smith - Univ. of Hawaii
Prof. Patricia Riley - Annenberg School, Univ. of Southern California
Prof. Joanne Holman - Purdue University
Prof. Alex Inkeles - Hoover Institute, Stanford University
Prof. Geoff Cowan - Annenberg School, Univ. of Southern California
Prof. Jagdish Seth - Emory University
Prof. Braj Kachru - Univ. of Illinois
Prof. Edwin Thumboo - National University of Singapore
In most cases, the guests from academic institutions were not familiar with videoconferencing facilities on their campuses necessitating considerable coordination from our end. Most speakers discussed their presentation with the three faculty members prior to their appearance. Most provided a PowerPoint file that was published on the web site prior to their appearance. While these presentations generated considerable responses and reactions from the students, feedback from the students indicated that inviting guest speakers during the regularly scheduled seminar time encroached on the discussion time among graduate students. Further, there was no effort made to obtain any written intellectual consent form from the presenters. However, the presenters were aware - and uniformly delighted - that their presentations were published. Further they were also aware that all class sessions, including their appearances were videotaped, digitized and linked off the course web site as Real Player files.
There were 45 students in the class. Twelve of these students were from Purdue University (1 Auditing), 14 of these students were from the University of Southern California (2 Auditing), and 19 from the University of Illinois (2 Auditing). One of the students from USC was spending the semester in New York and joined the class from there. Two of the students from UIUC were joining the class from Chicago. Of the 45 students, 33 were Ph.D. students, while 12 were Master’s students. Students in the class had academic backgrounds in business administration, communication, engineering, and library and information science. It was especially noteworthy that in a course dealing with globalization, students from nine countries were represented in the class.
The three faculty members met via audio conference for about 15 hours prior to the start of the course. These meetings were primarily to (i) identify the technologies to be used, (ii) formulate course content (iii) select readings, (iv) set up assignments, and (v) identify guest speakers. During the course of the semester the three faculty members had a weekly 2-hour planning meeting two days prior to each class session. These planning meetings were used to "script" the sequence of discussions, coordinate on presentations by one or more of the faculty members or guest speakers, address issues related to setting up assignments and criteria for evaluation, grading, and making mid-course adjustments in response to feedback from students at the three locations.
The following activities were conducted as part of the course:
Synchronous video conference discussions
Asynchronous projects and communication
While the instructors had considered the challenges in negotiating the differences occasioned by three time zones, one unanticipated challenge was our belated recognition that, unlike Los Angeles and Champaign-Urbana, West Lafayette does not "fall back" an hour in the middle of the semester. This meant that mid-way through the semester, in order to stay in sync, the class at Purdue had to reschedule from 6-9 p.m. to 7-10 p.m. The late hour was of significant concern, especially given the number of female students in the class. This problem could be just as serious for classes in the middle of the day that may, in the middle of a semester, suddenly overlap with a student's other course commitments.
In addition to the challenge of the three time zones, the course also had to deal with the difference in semester calendars at the three schools. USC began its fall semester a week after UIUC and Purdue. This problem is exacerbated for courses offered in the Spring semester where different schools have different spring break schedules. For this course, the classes at UIUC and Purdue met for the first week with the faculty from all three schools, but without the students at USC. This first meeting included an overview of the course, requirements for the course, and introductory statements by the students who were present. The session was videotaped and made available to the students at USC prior to the next class meeting. Further, the discussion of the syllabus was digitized and linked off the course home page. This is an innovation that can be usefully applied even to more traditional single-institution courses to accommodate students who join the class after the first day and/or who have difficulty recalling course requirements during the course of the semester.
To create and sustain communication and knowledge networks among the geographically dispersed students, a student directory was created which included contact information and digitized photos of all the students. This information was password protected to safeguard the privacy of the students.
Technical Outcomes
The anchor technology for this course was a room-based videoconferencing system coordinated by Mr. Tony Suttle and his staff at the University of Illinois. We used a V-Tel System For Video & Audio utilizing 3 ISDN Lines. The conferencing bridge was at Illinois. In addition there were phone ports for students joining the class from New York and Chicago, as well as a guest speaker from Scotland whose video-conferencing connection failed. Concurrent to the video-conference, the class-rooms were also connected via the Internet, and used Microsoft's NetMeeting for sharing real-time applications such as concurrent browsing of web sites, power point presentations, and a collaborative whiteboard. Below are pictures showing the split videoconference screen and the room-based facilities:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Videoconferencing Facility
Purdue University Videoconferencing Facility
In addition to the videoconferencing technology and Netmeeting used to support the real-time class room interactions, the several web-technologies were used to support the activities of the course outside the classroom.
WebBoard technology was used to support asynchronous communication among the students in the class. It served four general functions. First, it was used to broadcast announcements during the course of the week. Second, it was used to post questions and elicit student comments and interaction on the readings prior to class. Third, it was used to continue student comments and discussion on issues raised in class discussions. Fourth, WebBoard was used to support private asynchronous discussions and interactions within each of the virtual groups working on their semester projects. These private group spaces were also used for the three instructors to provide ongoing feedback to each of the virtual groups.
Consistent with the theme of the course, the students were given the opportunity to experience first-hand the challenges and opportunities to work over the course of the semester in a geographically distributed virtual team which had members with common, as well as complementary, interests. The students used a web-based "community-ware" tool IKNOW (Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web, developed at the University of Illinois) to assemble themselves into virtual groups based on interests in project topics and personal preferences. Each virtual group had to meet three criteria. First, each group had to have at least one student from each of the three schools. Second, each group had to have at least one member who had expertise in web authoring. This was necessary since the final outcome of these projects were a web-based multimedia document. The web site offered the groups specific authoring instructions on publishing their web sites. Third, at least three of the 4 members in each group were required to have expressed an interest in the project topic.
To support synchronous interaction among members of the virtual group, students were offered the use of a workstation at each of the three campuses equipped with a video-camera and microphone and the CU-SeeMe software to collaborate in real-time on their projects. CU-SeeMe was used instead of Netmeeting, because of the latter's inability to connect more than two stations via audio and video. Initially, we encouraged students to convene at one of the many public venues available on the web for CU-SeeMe interactions. However, the unanticipated and frequent intrusion of these meetings by outsiders, often with an interest in adult themes, necessitated that we create our own private reflector exclusively for this course. Even after overcoming this problem, the quality, and consequently the utilization, of CU-SeeMe software was not considered satisfactory by many of the groups. The faculty at the three universities offered long distance phone access to these groups.
The students in the class were also offered a link from the course web site to a Web Calendar (help), a free web-based calendaring and scheduling software. This software helped the group members coordinate their schedules, overcome time zone differences, and ensure that multiple groups did not conflict in their plans to use the single video-conferencing workstation at each of the three locations
In addition to the virtual group project, students were also required to prepare, over the course of the semester, three drafts of an individual research paper. The submission, annotation, evaluation and delivery of feedback by each of the three instructors to each of the students was supported by the Virtual Homework Portfolio (VHP), a web-based multiple-annotation collaboration software developed by Professor Varkki George at the University of Illinois. It provided students a streamlined interface to submit their papers as Microsoft Word documents, that were then automatically converted by the VHP into Acrobat PDF files. Faculty used a different VHP interface to access these documents, and comment on them using Acrobat Exchange's "Post it" annotation function. To discriminate between the three instructors, each used different colored "Post It" notes. Finally, the student interface provided students to review and download the annotated PDF file.
Future Enhancements
Based on our experiences, below is a list of functionality we believe will further enhance the distributed and cooperative educational experience.
Re-configurable Groups, or "Virtual Teams"- Groups of people need to be configured and reconfigured "on the fly." The reconfiguration needs to be interactive and under the control of the "conference administrator." This is driven by the need to efficiently form groups interested in different aspects of the same general topic, and from among groups with certain restrictions (e.g. expertise or geographic proximity). We had experience in this course with a Communityware tool called IKNOW (http://iknow.spcomm.uiuc.edu) that allows one to use the Web to create groups with common interests. However, these types of tools must be enhanced to carry the idea further into the real time environment of digital video conferencing.
Group Decision Support Systems- This requirement relates to the brainstorming of ideas. How do you generate, comment on, evaluate, and summarize ideas in an Internet environment? This type of interactive environment is quite different from the traditional classroom environment, where problem solving is led by the instructor as opposed to the interactive group-solving environment we would like to create in the classroom. Multi-modal (audio-video-text-graphics-animation) tools for collecting, collating, integrating, prioritizing, and evaluating discussion ideas will help the quality and quantity of participation by members in this distributed environment. The persistence of data captured by these tools will also help ongoing class discussions to be more cumulative and coherent. Tools akin to those described here have been developed under the category of Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS), and are typically used to augment face-to-face meetings. However, the migration of these tools to Web-based environments is still very limited and rudimentary.
Turn Taking, or "Conversational Traffic Control"- Today it is very difficult to manage who is talking next. In the traditional classroom, management is pre-allocated by the fact that a moderator (instructor) facilitates the dialogue and students need only raise their hand to request recognition. Currently in the distributed environment, anyone can jump into the conversation at any time. How should control passing occur? How is the floor requested and authorized? How is conflict resolved? How does the "conference administrator" manage all of this? This is a major issue for instructors at disparate locations. We found that, rather than students building on one another’s contributions, the discussion sequence was often disjointed. Many students who wished to make a rejoinder to a statement by one of their colleagues were left with the dilemma of either abandoning the idea or risk bringing it up after several statements unconnected to the idea had been made by other students. Features to assist "electronic nods" and the signaling of turn-taking that are available to all participants will reduce the distracting demands on the instructors at multiple locations who must now serve as "conversational traffic/floor-control cops" without any tools to assist them.
The availability of greater bandwidth and higher Quality of Service (QoS) offered by Internet2 technologies makes these goals addressable in the near future. Indeed, these issues are a central component of a proposal titled "Persistent, Reliable, Ubiquitous Video Environments (PRUVE): Enabling Collaborative Educational Applications on the Network" submitted by the CIC to the National Science Foundation (Merri Beth Lavagnino, Principal Investigators) in August, 1999. The two CIC faculty members involved with this Globalization course are listed as senior investigators on this proposal. The third institution (USC) has submitted a letter of intent to participate in this proposal.
Follow up efforts
As noted in the Proposal Abstract at the start of this Final Report, the Fall 1998 course on Globalization was part of, E-Quad, an ongoing multi-university educational project. In the Spring of 1999, we offered a course that focused on the theories and methods that used a social networks perspective to the study of traditional and global organizational forms. The course was co-taught by Contractor (UIUC) and Monge (USC) and was offered via CIC's Common Market Courses and Institutes (CMCI). The course had 15 students from UIUC, 6 students from USC, and eight students from other CIC schools (three from Penn State, two from Purdue, and three from Wisconsin). The Educational Technologies Board provided about $7000 support (recovered from cross-CIC-campus tuition fees) to invest in technological infrastructure to teach the Spring 1999 class largely via the Internet. UIUC's Computer and Communication Services Office (CCSO) offered support by setting up a multi-point audio-video Netmeeting server (using beta software developed by PictureTel). The beta technology proved very unstable, but the class used Netmeeting for sharing files and data analysis programs, and a toll-free Call Me phone conference facility to connect participants via audio. Students also used WebBoard to support asynchronous communication.
In Spring 2000, E-Quad will offer a graduate course titled "Communication technologies and new organizational forms" taught cooperatively by faculty at USC (Janet Fulk), UC-Santa Barbara (Andrew Flanagin) and UIUC (Contractor). The course plans to rely exclusively on Internet technologies and will attempt to negotiate a new structural hurdle -- unlike USC and UIUC, UCSB offers courses on the quarter system.
Pending funding of the CIC proposal to the National Science Foundation, we will use Internet2 technologies to offer a two-semester "virtual" graduate seminar on theory and research of global and network organizations. In Fall 2000, the course titled "Communication in the Global Workplace" will be offered concurrently at UIUC, Purdue, USC, and the University of Pennsylvania. In Spring 2001, the course titled "Organizational Communication Networks" will be offered concurrently at Illinois, Purdue, and USC. In addition to students at the participating sites, both courses will also be available to any student in the CIC through the CIC’s Common Market of Courses and Institutes (CMCI). The two-semester course will be offered again in Fall 2001 and Spring of 2002 with enhanced functionality as well as international educational partners. In addition, we will schedule a "virtual brown-bag" colloquium series to run parallel to the graduate seminar. The registered students will be required to participate in these colloquia, but the colloquia will also be open to the general public. Given the interdisciplinary appeal of "Globalization," having an open colloquium will have a broad-based appeal and reach a significant number of learners.
Products and Presentations
The web site for the course is http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu:1000/global It includes a digital archive of all the required and recommended online readings for the course, digital video of all the class sessions including presentations by guest speakers, auxiliary presentation materials used by faculty members and guest speakers, the multimedia web-based project documents developed by the students working in "virtual groups."
The three faculty members (Contractor, Monge, and Stohl) and the TA (Pascal Yammine) co-authored a multimedia presentation about the course: http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu:1000/contractor/global.ppt or at http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu:1000/contractor/global/sld001.htm. It shows all aspects of the course, including a description of the technologies used and demonstrations of its various features, including real time video segments to illustrate the different technologies. It was, or is scheduled to be, presented at the 11 venues listed below chronologically:
This course was also highlighted as an example of ongoing cross-campus interdisciplinary graduate training in a recently funded 3-year $1.5 million NSF proposal (NSF IIS-9980109) on "Co-evolution of knowledge networks and 21st organizational forms" http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/press/99/pr9950.htm#attachment. The reviews of the proposal specifically identified the benefits of our cross-campus educational effort as an attractive feature of the proposal.
Course Evaluation
The course received high overall evaluation at all three campuses. It was arguably one of the most talked about courses on the three campuses. However there were several specific suggestions that served as the motivation for the enhancements and structural modifications we have identified throughout this report. Specifically, students voiced some frustration over the lack of adequate collaborative technologies outside the classroom setting. Students also expressed a desire to have more time for in-class discussion and debate of critical issues.
Funding
The project requested, and received, $10,000 from CIC's LTI. In addition, UIUC's Department of Speech Communication offered $7,845 as matching funds (in equipment support) and UIUC's Educational Technologies Board provided $6000 (in RA support) for an independent project to develop some of the E-Quad software infrastructure implemented in this course. The Multi-Media instructional Development Center and the School of Liberal Arts at Purdue University offered $11,666 as matching funds. The Annenberg School for Communication at USC, our non-CIC partner, committed $12,500 to meet their computer and communication costs to participate in this course.
The expenses at UIUC were:
The expenses at Purdue were:
The expenses at USC (not funded by LTI) were: