Course Delivery Over Large Distances
Location: North Slope Borough School District (NSBSD), Barrow, Alaska.
Description
NSBSD is very large, with 7 villages spread over 88.000 square miles. A two-way
video system is installed, accompanied by email and World Wide Web service,
originating in Barrow with systems in the secondary school in each community.
Teachers on special assignment design and deliver courses in Art, Math, and
Science from Barrow. Staff development courses, university credit courses, and
district-wide planning committees and departmental meetings are also conducted
over the system. Eight years of experience in developing and using the system
has resulted in a large body of advice in
Geographic Situation, Applications and Results, The Instruction Model, Lead Teacher Selection, Facilitating Teacher, Delivery, and Scheduling.
Interviewees Quoted Here
District Superintendent Leland Dishman, Distance Instructor Mike Davis, and Distance Instructor Susan Mason.
In the words of the practitioners...
Geographic Situation
Dishman, District Superintendent:
"The North Slope Borough School District (NSBSD) encompasses a
geographical area about the size of Oregon. We cover approximately 88,000
square miles, and have ten schools in seven villages. We depend greatly on our
technology in the North Slope to communicate with our schools and with our
personnel."
Davis, Teacher:
"Barrow is the largest community on the North Slope, with about 4000
people. We have villages ranging in size from about 225 people, to about 700
people. If we look at the size of the district [on a map], from Point Hope [in
the West] to Kaktovic, our most eastern school, the distance is 650
miles."
Applications and Results
Dishman, District Superintendent:
"Videoconferencing has allowed us to offer classes throughout the
district to all of our schools that we could not offer locally within the
school because of lack of expertise in the villages. We have been able to offer
advanced math, and we have been able to offer some wonderful art classes. We
have had networking for the kids and web sites where many of our kids not only
have mastered the use of the web, but also have their own web pages. It has
really opened up an entirely new world to our students in our village schools.
"I think some of the most successful uses of videoconferencing have been in our inservice [activities]. We have approximately 230 certified employees, and we do a great deal of in-servicing. Our special education inservice much of the time is held by compressed video. A lot of our maintenance and operations, new materials, new ideas that need to be disseminated across the entire district, we do by compressed video. Many of our folks who are highly trained technicians deliver actual college level classes by our compressed video. We have interviewed a great deal over this because it saves a great deal of time. From Barrow to Anchorage is almost 1000 miles, and a $600 dollar plane ticket. We can do a whole lot of video teleconferencing with that amount of money.
"It takes two hours to fly to Point Hope to have a face-to-face conference with a principal or with the teachers. I can do it in 30 seconds by compressed video, so the time saving is tremendous. This year we did a great deal of work revising our curriculum. Many of the teachers and curriculum committees held meetings, of course, via compressed video to get input in order to put together the type of curriculum we needed. Bringing people together fast, economically and efficiently has probably been one of the best uses we've made of compressed video."
Davis, Teacher:
"We use compressed video for a variety of things. We deliver
classes to our secondary schools, we deliver teacher in service, we have
departmental meetings, and we've had interviews conducted over compressed
video. Compressed video has been used by the community for a variety of
things."
The Instruction Model
Mason, Teacher:
"The way the North Slope Borough School District has set up
compressed video instruction is that there is an instructor in Barrow and we
work in conjunction with the TV studio to broadcast the classes. On our village
sites we have what we call a teaching partner, the person who facilitates what
goes on in the classroom with the students. We offer semester or yearlong
classes. We may have as many as 7 sites on with us [simultaneously]. The person
in Barrow is the lead instructor and they're responsible for the course
design, lesson plans, and ordering the supplies that students will be using at
the far sites. It's a really complex situation in managing all the pieces
and making sure they all get out to the villages. Part of that is the
communication that must go on between the lead teacher and the teaching
partners and the students, and it's a vital and important component of
successful compressed video instruction."
Davis, Teacher:
"We deliver semester or yearlong course work, so we're
interacting on a regular basis with our students at distance sites. The
teaching model we have found most effective over compressed video is that we
have a cooperating teacher, or teaching partner, depending on how you want to
call them, at our far sites. We've found that teaching partner needs to be
a certified teacher. We've had people who were non-certified who have done
well, but they are the exception rather than the rule. We have had certified
teachers who did not do well as a cooperating teacher as well, but that tends
to be a minority of the number of the people we have. The reason for that is
there is a respect factor by the students in the classroom that goes along with
the classroom teacher. You're seen as having more authority and more
insight in to what's going on. The other thing is that if you're
delivering two or three times a week to your far sites, that means that during
those times, your students are doing something at the site that requires active
participation and active involvement by the cooperating teacher."
Lead Teacher Selection
Davis, Teacher:
"Let me say it this way, if you're not a successful classroom
teacher, and have enthusiasm for your subject and for the students that you
have, you will not be a successful compressed video teacher. Don't plan on
taking a teacher that's not been successful in the classroom and make them
your compressed video teacher because they are filling a different niche. We
liken [compressed video] here to a glass wall, but it is important that you
have enthusiasm as a teacher and extend that enthusiasm through that glass wall
to your students."
Facilitating Teacher
Davis, Teacher:
"I can't stress enough the rapport that you need to have with
the cooperating teacher. It has been our experience that they are the key to
success in compressed video. You can have good delivery to your students and
you can accomplish some things, but if you don't have that cooperating
teacher's cooperation, it is difficult to have a successful class.
That's something you have to work on all year.
"I've had teachers that buy into the way that I deliver, and for me it's very hands on, and they have to be willing to be flexible, and work within building off problems that students see. Teachers have to be comfortable working like that, for them to be successful with working with you. You also have to be sensitive to the teaching styles of the cooperating teachers and to try and adapt with them.
"You'll also have to stress to your cooperating teachers that they have enthusiasm about the class that's being delivered. If you have a cooperating teacher that sits in the back and does their lesson planning while you're delivering instruction, the students get that message loud and clear: 'this is not important.'
"The courses that we've offered without cooperating teachers in the classroom are difficult to manage. You don't have someone supporting the enthusiasm that's being delivered by the lead teacher on-line."
Mason, Teacher:
"One of the things that we have discussed over and over again is
not having a teaching partner in the classroom, just having the students in
there and a compressed video teacher. My feelings are that for secondary
students it is an extremely valuable component. I would almost say a vital one
if you want your compressed video instruction to be as successful as it
possibly can be.
"It is extremely important before the course starts to involve and communicate with the teaching partners, and provide some training for them, first of all, in how to use the equipment. That's very important and that helps everybody get off to a good start. More than that, our focus has always been on the educational side of what we do, and not so much on the technology.
"More importantly, on the educational side of being a teaching partner, the key component in how successful our classes are is that the teaching partner has buy-in for what were doing with our students. [The partner] is an active participant in the classroom and is enthusiastic for what were doing in the classroom. I think all of us in this district agree and have always agreed that nothing will replace the positive, enthusiastic teacher in the classroom."
Delivery
Davis, Teacher:
"Maybe a good way to state how you work with cooperating teacher
is that you're not only planning for your students, and for yourself in
terms of what you're doing, but you're also planning for the compressed
video cooperating teachers that are out there. That means you have to be very
specific about the materials that they need for the class, and how they need to
interact with the students."
Mason, Teacher:
"I attended a national conference where they said planning [for
video instruction] was 5 to 10 times more than the planning for a course that
you would deliver by the traditional method of instruction. I totally agree
with that, especially if you're doing a course like Art that involves a lot
of manipulatives and hands-on activities. I'll run through the things I
have to think about for an art course. First of all, you have to always address
your educational objectives, your goals for what you want the student to learn,
and then design your project. I'm a firm believer, especially being an art
teacher, on project-based learning. I'll design my lesson, and step out the
lesson plan, because I realize that I'm working with people that don't
have background in this subject area, as if I were writing an instruction
manual. This has to be done in advance, because your teaching partner should
get this information at the very latest the Friday of the week before you
intend to do the lesson.
"For the communication that must go on between the lead teacher and the teaching partners at the far sites, we have used the web site this year, which has greatly facilitated the communication process. We are putting our lesson plans and our course objectives on the web site so the students and the staff at any time may access the plans or even assignment sheets. We also link to web resources and other web sites that are useful in our instruction. It has been a wonderful tool in facilitating instruction, and I would highly recommend pairing your compressed video instruction with the web site. Also, email is vital as a way of communicating to your teaching partner and your students. I would say a great part of every day is spent in communicating back and forth with our teaching partners and our students.
"Teaching on compressed video, everything is magnified. If you're not good at planning, it's really magnified that you haven't planned for this lesson because you're working with so many people at so many sites. If you're having a down day, it's even more pronounced that you may not be up for your instruction. I think before you go on the air, you need to take 15 or 20 minutes and get yourself together and psych yourself up for the class because your enthusiasm needs to carry out to the people at the far sites."
Scheduling
Davis, Teacher:
"The model that we've come to for delivering compressed video
is that we don't come on [the system] every day of the week with our
students. During the week you might meet two or three days with your class as a
whole, then you may have a half an hour for each of the sites that are out
there. You might schedule a nine o'clock to meet with [one site] to talk
about something, and then the next half hour of the class period, meet with
[another site], and the next day meet with some of the other classes.
Meanwhile, the other classes are working on an assignment that they have to do.
"In the morning prior to class time, when the compressed video system is
not being used for other things, you can go one-on-one with a staff member who
may have questions. You may also meet with all of your staff of cooperating
teachers in the morning before school, or after school if you have some things
that you want to talk to them about.
"The other scheduling issue that comes up is that we are beaming out to
seven potential schools around our district, and all of them have different
things going on. So, imagine in your course work where you have people going to
basketball games, or they may be going out to some other activity. (In our
case, they may be going out whaling, or doing other subsistence activities.)
However, they don't all have the same basketball schedule, they don't
all have the same activities that happen in their school, and in their
community, so magnify the scheduling issues that you have in your classroom by
how many sites you have. That makes for some difficult planning. You have to be
flexible in your planning, and we found project-based work to allow for this
type of flexibility."