Ute Koehler Sartin, a student at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, enrolled in a religious ethics course and discovered that more than half of her classmates lived 3,000 miles away. She wondered whether it would be worthwhile.
Now, two months later, she rarely lets a day pass without checking in with her new community. “Even when I’m not in class I’m thinking about it,” she says. “It’s all-consuming.”
An essay by a classmate, Sue Easton, a student at the University of San Francisco, won Sartin over to the course. In fulfilling a weekly class assignment, Easton had made an audio recording of an experience that had “compelled her to ethical behavior.” Easton described attending a clandestine religious service in a Moscow cemetery, and become so impressed with their commitment to their traditions that she eventually adopted two Russian children.
“I sit here in our computer lab and weep because I can feel your moment,” Sartin wrote to Easton late one Sunday evening. “Your story was another piece in the puzzle for me. Together we have the power to unlock these ultimate mysteries that give our life meaning.”
Those mysteries are unfolding in an experiment that I and a University of San Francisco colleague, Michael Benedict, hope one day will revolutionize college education.
Sartin and Easton are studying together in the Global Ethics Cafe that we created. It’s an Internet classroom that uses audio, video, text and Web sites to try to unite students no matter where they live.
At the moment, the course is focusing on the impact of the global economy on ecology, women and children, and how changing conditions raise new moral challenges for religious communities.
Benedict and I created the cafe in hopes of building an Internet forum for a radio series, “What Does it Mean to be an American?” Our effort to connect listeners from different regions of the country yielded mixed results, however, largely because there was not enough reason for them to keep coming back.
The information contained in Internet offerings usually is not enough to win loyalty to those offerings. To be most effective, those offerings must provide users with a credible virtual environment, one that gives users a sense of community.
In their zeal to build computer and video infrastructures, universities run the risk of neglecting the ways in which technology could help them stay connected with students, whose age, mobility and career fluidity have changed dramatically over the last three decades.
Despite lessons that mass markets have limits, most colleges still seem to be emphasizing broad dissemination of education rather than tailored approaches.
The Open University in Sheffield, Britain, is one of the more innovative and long-standing programs of broadcast education. The school offers open enrollment for students throughout Britain, yet provides no campus for on-site classroom instruction. All instruction is on the air.
The faculty works together by department to craft the content of each course, and then coordinate with professionals to produce multimedia instructional videos. This doesn’t come cheap; the price to produce a course is about $1 million. The hope is that the course will have a shelf life of at least eight years.
The Open University is succeeding, which has as much to do with the peculiarities of the British educational system as with its government underwriting.
Most U.S. universities have not used the Open University’s model. They have turned to other forms of broadcasting courses that use some combination of video conferencing, e-mail and on-line distribution of lectures.
Such classes are generally interactive only in name. Students typically log on-line, visit the Internet site, read text or answer questions, then log off. They chat infrequently with the teacher, even less with other students.
The success of long-distance learning hinges on its capacity to simulate a dynamic campus classroom. Students are not willing to sacrifice that shared experience merely for the convenience of studying at home.
The cafe emphasizes interaction. Each student produces three audio case studies per semester that describe a global ethical dilemma. These mini-documentaries are then placed in the cafe for peer review and response.
Raphael Rivilla, a USF student from the Philippines, had the cafe crowd buzzing about his audio presentation arguing for “the appropriate use of spanking” to discipline children. At the time, students were reviewing Web sites on Chinese family practices and reading texts of Confucian and Taoist teachings.
For the next three weeks, Rivilla engaged in a passionate debate with students from both coasts that reflected a broad range of familial and religious beliefs.
One USF student presented a particularly strong challenge to Rivilla’s ideas, arguing that “abusing a child” in no way encourages social compliance, and may in fact have the opposite effect of socializing violent behavior.
The two students locked intellectual horns for days on the meaning of words such as “discipline,” “abuse” and “violence.”
The stalemate ended when Rivilla went to the audio room in the cafe and heard his adversary describe how, when she was a young girl, her father had terrorized her mother and siblings with beatings.
The edges of each student’s ideology softened.
“We can return time and time again to the cafe to view what others have said, whereas it would be in one ear and out the other, or just forgotten, if mentioned within traditional classrooms,” Rivilla says. “The Internet provides us with a chance to say what we want to say outside of the classroom, and view what others think about what we have to say.”
The interactive essays are the centerpiece of the cafe learning experience. The students write collectively over the course of the semester and are graded on how well they use the resources that the cafe provides and how well they apply their knowledge in open dialogues with their peers, professors and invited guests.
The seminar “tables” are not in e-mail listservs, which usually distribute messages in piecemeal fashion. The cafe tables display the entire interactive essay for the class to share. All the students read everything the professor does, a radical departure from traditional education models.
Learning, thus, is not channeled solely between student and professor.
The standard assignment in a university humanities classroom is the single-author, critical essay, in which students are expected to direct their remarks to a hypothetical audience. This exercise allows the writers to easily dismiss views other than their own. Even the most brilliant critical essay is circumscribed by a world of the author’s making.
Authors of an interactive essay, on the other hand, must deal each day with views other than their own. USF student Claire Farrington believes the process changes the way she learns: “A research paper or an exam I can control, to some degree. But I cannot control how my comments will affect 35 people, each with thoughts, feelings, responses and agendas of their own.”
The results are not always pleasant, as Farrington has discovered on several occasions when she has challenged the ideas of other students. “There are occasional misunderstandings which are exacerbated by the limitations of the medium–no gestures, eye contact or body language.”
The medium lends to understanding in other ways. The members of the cafe most often become acquainted through their written ideas, rather than stereotypes attached to appearances.
Charles Gilmartin, a Korea-born USF student, said he likes that quality of the cafe. “I don’t have to worry so much about whether someone will accept my ideas because of what I look like.
“Oftentimes in our interactive essay we even forget who contributed the ideas to which we are responding. Good ideas have value regardless of the source.”
Several “rooms” will be added to the Global Ethics Cafe later in the year. One project is a virtual classroom connecting USF students to university students in Beijing. The professors involved on both sides of the Pacific hope for an open discussion of religious, ethical, and social issues.
Sweet Briar professor Brett Greider, who spent several months with his students in the cafe, believes it exerts a strong pull on everyone.
“I’m not sure that what we are doing has happened in any class anywhere. Sure, there are teleconferencing networks, but not courses on the Web, not globally.
“If you stay away even a little while, you miss it,” he says. “I went to Arizona for a few days, and finally I logged on a computer and got into our cafe, and everyone was there. I said, `Hi, I’m not home. But I’m here–and I feel like I’m home.’ “
