My task is to give a 5-10 minute overview that somehow ties together what's happening in research and distance education at the University of Montana - Missoula. My understanding is that you heard something about these topics in separate sessions this morning -- I will try to complement, not duplicate, what I think you have already heard. I won't review all the types of research going on at UM-M, nor will I try to present a catalog of all the distance education programs. Your request was that we try to bring a range faculty with different research and instructional appointments, and we've done our best to do that and to try to tie the two topics together.
The people included here with us from UM-M are:
I'm Ray Ford. I'm the Vice-Chair of the Faculty Senate and a Professor of Computer Science. As a member of a Computer Science Department, I'm right in the middle of a range of research, information technology, and distance education issues. I've been at UM-M since 1990. I grew up in Missouri, attended the Missouri School of Mines, and previously served on faculty at Universitys of Iowa and Kansas, states similar to Montana in many ways, such as their predominately rural character, economies historically dominated by agriculture and natural resource management. Like Montana, these are states that are not particularly friendly places to do basic research in computer science, and where issues such as the practical value of research and the role of distance education are quite important. While at the University of Iowa in 1985 I was involved in setting up a pilot distance education program to deliver specialized high tech coursework from UI to a Rockwell facility in Cedar Rapids which employed about 2,000 technical employees. Though the technology has changed since 1985, most of the critical issues, such as funding, have remained the same. I'm also involved in some of the remote sensing and image processing research you heard about this morning, and I'll elaborate on some of this in a minute.
What I want to do very briefly is to describe my experience on how research, instruction, novel-instruction are all related. First, I'll give (not show) you two video tapes. I can almost hear you thinking "Oh no, not more slick PR from the UM-M public relations machine." In a way I hope you think that, at least that you think these videos are "slick". In fact they were produced not by UM-M professionals but by students working in my lab on behalf of UM researchers. One tape is from the DOE/EPSCOR Project on Petroleum Reservoir Characterization, which is centered at Montana Tech and includes faculty and student participants from Tech, the Bureau of Mines, UM-M, and MSU. The other tape is from Steve Running's "Ecosystem Study/Global Warming" project which I believe you heard about this morning. It includes participants from UM-M, from the Yellow Bay research station, and from Glacier National Park. I hope you have time to look at these two tapes sometime soon. What I want to do next is to explain what I think these tapes show you about the issues we're discussing today.
I'll start with the researcher's perspective. It is very important these days for every researcher to recognize his/her obligation to try to explain to the public what the connection is between research and the public's interest. That is, producing tapes like these, oriented to the general public isn't just good PR -- it an obligation that researchers have to the people whose tax money supports their work. Nowadays this is often explicitly stated within grant programs. Thus, it is essential to put together material like this, whether on tapes or the Internet or whatever. So, the first goal is to give you some material which we think will help you understand what programs like Steve Running's global warming project and the DOE/EPSCOR Petroleum Reservoir Project mean to the citizens of Montana. I'll note that our specific target audience was something like a high school science class -- these have been "tested" on my children and their science classes, but you can judge for yourself how well we meet the target.
Second, I picked these projects because they show how real science gets done, at least in natural resource applications. There is real collaboration between students, faculty, research staff, agency/institute staff, and the private sector -- it's not just a PhD researcher and a couple of grad students tucked away in a lab. As I mentioned before, both of these projects involved students and researchers from several different campuses, organizations, agencies, and the private sector. Both projects are primarily funded by federal grants, but University and private matching funds were also required. The Petroleum Reservoir project is significant in that regard because it received significant state match through Montana's MSTA program. It also includes a specific link to a science education "Human Resources" project at Western. Though the tapes focus specifically on the science involved, they also show some of the diversity in participation.
Third is the role of students. These tapes were produced exclusively by students, not full time professional staff (though some students have since graduated and stayed on to work with us in these areas). This started with my Computer Science students working on computer visualization/animations, and later creating project web sites to house this information for easy dissemination. The next step was to link this to the UM-M School of Fine Arts Media Arts program, which focuses on training new generation of commerial artists, musicians, and writers. With UM-M and DOE/EPSCOR sponsorship, we collaborated to create a summer workshop/internship program that brought together students from the sciences with students from the arts. The internship focused on the techniques used to explain science to the public via media such as videos, CDs, Web sites, etc. The two videos are a direct outgrowth of this effort, being written, recorded, narrated, edited, and produced by students from these workshops. The results may not be "hollywood" but we think they are quite respectable. I'll also note that several of the students have found subsequent employment in Montana doing this type of work commercially. One of our goals was definitely to provide this sort of opportunity, so that our graduates don't have to move to places like Seattle to do interesting media and technology related work.
My final point is to link this all to distance education. Preparing videos and Web sites is a great way to learn about the costs of putting together the kind of presentations which are used in distance education. The non-interactive, polished presentations like videos are very expensive to put together -- a typical estimate is about 100 hours of preparation for 1 hour of delivered material. To put that in context, a typical ratio for traditional classroom work, for an experienced professor working in his/her field of expertise, is 3 : 1. This helps put the cost of creating non-interactive distance education material in context. At the other end of the spectrum is my own experience with distance education, a highly interactive setup using a 2-way live audio/video connection. Ignoring the costs associated with extra students or the A/V setup for the moment, the extra costs for preparation in this case were minimal, say moving the ratio from 3 : 1 to 4 : 1. Most of this extra time was spent figuring out how I could do traditional "chalkboard" and conferencing things so that the results worked for both local and remote students. This was time well spent, in that I think it made me a better teacher in all my classes. In a similar way, my research and my experience producing Web pages and videos for public presentations has given me the capability of doing dramatically better presentations, and also made me much more aware of the costs involved.
With this last point hopefully I've tied this up, so that you can see the linkage between the research and distance education I've talked about. To summarize then, what I think the videos and this discussion illustrate are:
I'd like to stop here, short of discussing specific programs or the detailed financial aspects of distance education, assuming that we can pick this up later in the discussion.