The Cascade Consortium in Washington State
Location: Chelan, Washington.
Background Information
This consortium of five small, rural school districts used a United States
Department of Education Grant to establish a high bandwidth two-way interactive
video network. The system includes a station in each of the five high schools
through which instruction can be both produced and received. The consortium
offers secondary school courses to students, and staff development programming
for teachers and non-certified staff. Community agencies and local businesses
also use the system for staff development purposes, and the hospital offers
free short classes to community residents on health issues.
Courses and Scheduling The Consortium provides elective standard or advanced courses for high school students. The committee of secondary principals selects subjects or topics based on needs and teacher availability. Current offerings include a full year of Spanish III and Calculus, and one semester each of Sociology and Psychology.
The Consortium member schools operate on different schedules, with some having blocks of 90 minutes and others with periods of an hour or less. They have all agreed to start their daily schedule at the same time, and most of the classes are held during the first two class sessions in the morning. Greater scheduling conflicts would arise if video courses were conducted later in the day.
Within a course, a teacher may elect to have a different daily schedule, as in the Spanish III class where video sessions are conducted on Tuesday and Thursday and independent or project work is done off-line on the other three days.
The project staff indicated that daily schedules are far less troublesome than differences in the annual calendars of the five districts. Districts have made no compromises in establishing their calendars. Thus, a holiday or planning day at a remote school might not be a day off for students in the originating school or vice-versa, so there are whole days and sometimes as much as a week where several students might be out of class. This is particularly difficult around Christmas and spring vacations.
Teacher Issues
Selection: Teachers are volunteers.
Incentive: There are no special incentives such as pay or extra planning time. Of three teachers interviewed, the primary rationale for their involvement was that it provided an opportunity for their students. Secondary reasons mentioned by two of them were that it is an interesting challenge for them, and that it provides a chance to teach an advanced course in their field. Part of the rationale for the Sociology teacher is that he thought the teaching of the subject would be enhanced by having students from three different communities, and he wanted to explore that effect.
Class size: In general, the three teachers agree that total course enrollments higher than standard class sizes, say 25-30 students maximum, are not viable and not easier to handle than a regular class of that size. They vary somewhat in their perception of a suitable class size, which appeared to be related to their teaching style and the subject area requirements. One teacher had ten students on one remote site and found discipline to be a problem. In his opinion, five or six on a single remote site would be a maximum. Another had eight students in two remote sites and said it made no difference to him how many of them were remote. As long as the system includes only the current five districts, it is unlikely that the demand will result in an enrollment greater than twenty in Calculus or similar advanced courses.
Training: Teachers were provided three days of training in the summer on hardware and software usage, course design and development, and lesson preparation and delivery.
Support: The consortium staff of two professionals provides technical support and some assistance with pedagogy and teaching technique. About one FTE is available for those purposes, and most of that is provided system-wide, not directly to individual teachers. Each school supports its own teachers with teaching supplies. A class delivered by two-way video is considered a standard part of a teacher load like any face-to-face class, and no extra planning time is provided to the teacher.
Remote site classrooms have no monitor or adult overseer, either aide or certified. In the case of Calculus, delivered from Winthrop, a math teacher in Manson volunteers to provide oversight and assistance with homework questions, etc at that school. In order to keep discipline, a rule has been established that a student is counted absent if they are not visible on the screen, which seems to insure that they are in their seats. This works because the system displays all active classrooms on every screen, so the teacher and every student can see all participating classrooms simultaneously.
Logistics and Communication: Teachers use e-mail, scanning and fax as the primary methods of dealing with submission and return of student homework and products of projects. The local area network is designed to have a "drop box" for each course where students drop work, questions, comments, etc. Interactions with individual students outside of open class time are conducted by phone and e-mail, although one teacher also conducts after-class discussions by video if convenient.
In one case, a teacher was able to arrange a face-to-face class session at the beginning of the course, which included the students from the remote sites as well as local.
Governance A committee of the five superintendents of the member school districts, meeting monthly, directs the Consortium. A half time Director is responsible for planning and day-to-day management. A committee of the five secondary principals of the districts also meets monthly to specify staff development programming and student course selection, and to deal with school schedules and logistics. The overall rationale for the consortium has three major components: staff development, student opportunity, and community involvement.
Technical Design The video system initially was designed for very high bandwidth to assure two-way, multi-site interaction. With just five sites, each site is able to display the other four sites simultaneously on their screen, and individuals on all sites can talk much as they would if they were in the same room because the active microphones are not limited to one site at a time. For example, a teacher might ask a question and get simultaneous responses from two sites.
The initial installation of high bandwidth capabilities was a boon to the communities and the telephone company, because funds from the project enabled the phone company to install capabilities which they can also offer to businesses and homes. Thus, project funds for a specific purpose provided the base for upgrading the whole region's phone service and potential for access to the Internet.
The project is now implementing a gateway to connect the local network to the statewide Washington K-20 system. While that network limits voice interaction to two sites at a time, it does offer the Cascade Consortium schools access to outside experts or individual schools. A number of collaborations such as with NASA are in planning to use the gateway.
During the first year of service, 1999-2000, a calculus course was offered, during which the system exhibited a latency of about five seconds with one school, Winthrop. This means that students at Winthrop experienced a five-second delay in hearing what someone on another site said, while all other students at the other schools were hearing normally. This problem persisted the entire second semester and into the Fall semester of the current year. The symptoms were most problematic in the conversation part of Spanish III where the lag had its greatest effect. The result was that seven of ten remote students dropped that class. The effect on other courses was less severe but troubling.
The director decided to install new software provided by the vendor to fix the problem at the end of October, but the result was that the problem migrated to other sites, and in addition several sites went down completely at points. The telecom company personnel were planning to work on the system on all sites the weekend of November 18-19. During November, teachers and students have been coping by using e-mail, fax and telephone. In calculus, the original plan of preparing for the advanced placement exams has been reduced to one of getting a jump on college math.