UC Santa Cruz Review Summer/Fall 1995

Intercampus Classroom

--by Barbara McKenna

In the future, distance learning may make it possible for a student at one campus to earn a degree from another campus.

This past winter, fifteen years after UCSC discontinued its religious studies program, seven Santa Cruz students enrolled in a religious studies course led by two of the field's most prominent faculty. Even though their professors taught from classrooms hundreds of miles away, the Santa Cruz students met with them and other students and faculty on a weekly basis through the campus's newly installed videoconferencing facilities. The class, Religion and Violence, is the first videoconfer-encing course taught at UC Santa Cruz--and one of the first within the University of California system. It brought together some 80 students and five faculty from five UC campuses.

Each Wednesday evening during the course, UCSC history of consciousness professor Gary Lease and his students sat across from two television monitors and a camera, which brought them face to face with participants at the university's Davis, Riverside, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles campuses. While Religion and Violence was officially taught by religious studies professors Richard Hecht of UC Santa Barbara and Brian Smith of UC Riverside, students at the other campuses benefited from the participation of a resident faculty member. The course offered weekly lectures, films, and question- and-answer sessions as part of a historical exploration of the "capacity of religion to mobilize and legitimate human destructiveness." Conceived during a meeting of humanities faculty the previous year, the course was made possible through an intercampus videoconferencing network based at UC headquarters in Oakland.

Called "distance learning," this approach is being endorsed by many as a creative and necessary way of making the most out of the university's ever-shrinking resources. Following the success of classes such as Religion and Violence, an increasing number of faculty at UCSC and other UC campuses are signing up to teach videoconferencing courses, drawn by the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues and expand curriculum for their students.

Distance learning is not a new concept so much as a reinvented one. As early as the late 1960s and early 1970s UC offered a simple form of distance learning, using one-way video and one- and two- way audio to transmit some classes. Community colleges began similar broadcasting at about the same time. However, the advent of fiber optics and superfast computers in recent years makes a radically improved approach possible--one in which people hundreds of miles apart can interact almost as if they were in the same room.

The university installed its first videoconferencing facilities at five UC locations in 1992, according to Michael Shannon, manager of Telecommunications Services at UC's Office of the President. Shannon says the original expectation was that the facilities would be used mainly for administrative meetings, but it quickly became evident that the technology was well-suited for educational use. From the outset, then-UC provost and senior vice president for academic affairs Walter Massey endorsed distance learning as a pragmatic and forward-thinking response to diminishing resources. In a March 1994 letter on the final report of UC's Task Force on Intercampus Programs and Distance Learning, Massey noted that, given California's fiscal climate, "preserving and expanding the curriculum through intercampus cooperation is not only an option, it is a necessity."

With support from the Office of the President, all nine UC campuses have now installed videoconferencing facilities. UCSC came online in January through the Religion and Violence class.

Lease sees not only the fiscal necessity of distance learning but the academic advantages. "How else could you bring to bear the fruits of five different faculty from five different campuses--not counting various guest lecturers--working with close to 100 students overall? There is no way to do that on a single campus."

Sharing scattered--and limited--resources is clearly easier with videoconferencing facilities, agrees UCSC history professor Buchanan Sharp. He and fellow UC British historians came to that realization during a 1994 conference; the result was a graduate seminar for students at Irvine, Santa Barbara, Davis, and Riverside offered this past spring. "I think this is a good idea," says Sharp, who helped teach the course even though no UCSC students were enrolled. "We have about twenty British historians in the system covering an incredible range of British history. I found this an exciting opportunity to engage with them and teach graduate students."

Students in the university system can expect to see an increase in videoconferencing course offerings in the future. The Intercampus Programs and Distance Learning Task Force report cites distance learning as an effective way to cope not only with state budget cuts but with the loss of faculty who departed in recent years as a result of the budget-driven early retirement programs. The university has responded by allocating funds to support future distance learning programs on all UC campuses; at UCSC, Chancellor Karl Pister has established a special fund to help faculty offset the costs of using "distance technologies for the purpose of instructional collaboration."

In the future, distance learning may make it possible for a student at one campus to earn a degree from another campus. Some have even suggested that students might eventually earn a UC degree, not specific to any campus. But there are many details to work out. "We are some time away from realizing intercampus degrees," says UCSC Executive Vice Chancellor Michael Tanner, a member of UC's Committee on Intercampus Networking and Information Technology for Academic Programs. "There's a lot of ground to be covered in terms of establishing policies and making administrative arrangements to implement those policies. But it will be well worth the effort in the future." Areas where current policies need to be adapted for videoconferencing classes include registration, financial aid, and course credit.

Nathan Wilson is a junior who enrolled in Religion and Violence. From his perspective, the technology has both benefits and drawbacks for students. "It's hard to have a dialogue between a student and a professor across phone lines," he says. "But some of the people who taught the class were truly brilliant, and to be able to ask them questions was a great experience."

"This was an exceptional course, well illustrative of how this technology can so easily be adapted to produce real benefits," says Lease. In fact, the class was such a success that Lease and several other UC faculty have already started designing their next videoconferencing class in religious studies --Barbara McKenna