Online classrooms offer new learning experience

“Welcome. You are in the classroom.”

The PowerPoint presentation for today’s Survey of Hip Hop lecture had begun. Classroom banter trickled to a halt — business as usual.

Professor Fernando Orejuela stared out at his 200 students but he saw no one.
Orejuela’s classroom might be more accurately described as, business unusual.

His classroom is not lodged in a stuffy corner somewhere in Ballantine Hall. It is not plugged up with dozens of sweaty, preoccupied students sitting much too close together.

It is a virtual classroom.

Orejuela sits comfortably in his office, from 4 to 5:15 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, to deliver his lectures via Web conference. The students log in, put on their headphones and enter the virtual space where they can see their professor, watch the corresponding slides and hear the MP3s playing different samples of hip-hop music.

“It was an experiment at first, but it seems to work well,” Orejuela said. “Your generation seems to communicate well in this environment.”

Virtual classrooms such as Orejuela’s  are asserting  a — figurative — presence on campus.

Alternative class settings are increasing in both demand and execution — from mild integration, such as the incorporation of interactive blogs — to complete upheaval of the traditional classroom.

“It’s so dispersed,” said Margaret Ricci, instructional technology consultant for IU’s Teaching and Learning Technologies Centers. “Everyone’s doing their own thing. There’s all kinds of stuff, all over campus.”

Ricci became flustered about the number of courses and professors integrating innovative technology such as Web conferences.

“Good luck getting that figure,” she said. “It’s not coordinated at all.”

It may take time to grasp the big picture, she said, because many professors are experimenting with the technology in their own way.

Orejuela, for example, has been teaching his class online since 2006 but it continues to advance technologically.

“It was sort of discovered by accident,” he said. “We discovered through trial and error that we could put up PowerPoints, then we discovered that we could play MP3s.”

Orejuela said the nature of the class was particularly conducive to the new technology. Because it’s a hip hop class, he said, the music played can have has deep, loud bass and potentially offensive lyrics. This could be disruptive to neighboring classes in Ballantine.

More important, he said, was the size of the class. The ability to transform a 200-student lecture hall into a more personal experience became his focus.

“I can talk more to my students in this environment that I ever could in Ballantine Hall,” Orejuela said.

Senior and member of the class, Eric de la Rosa, agreed.

“It feels like a more one-on-one experience,” he said. “In a lecture hall everyone can see you, stare at you. Here, it’s not as scary if you have something to say.”

But completely depending on technology to run a classroom is not seamless. Orejuela said the chat room is where students can comment, and it sometimes gets chaotic. Having two teaching assistants troubleshoot during class time is necessary.

“If they’re talking non-stop, we can keep clearing the chat room. They get the idea quickly and they shut up,” Orejuela said.

The technology itself can also be a problem. Students are instructed to use a landline, instead of wireless internet to download a specific Adobe Flash application to avoid breaks in the music and Orejuela’s voice.

De la Rosa said sometimes students will get booted off or experience other technical problems. But it was usually because they weren’t following the correct procedure.

“If a student decides to open up Facebook, they’ll mess up the lecture on their end. It will mess up the feed,” Orejuela said. “My assistant usually finds out that their doing something else on their computer.”

Both Orejuela and Ricci said the benefits usually outweigh the potential costs, especially for large lectures.

Terry Hutchens, adjunct faculty member of IU-Purdue University Indianapolis, is experimenting with Web conferences for the first time. Hutchens teaches Sports Writing at both IUPUI and IU Bloomington.

Hutchens has taught the course 15 times since 1990 at in Indianapolis, where he lives and works for the Indianapolis Star.

This semester Hutchens is combining two classrooms — one in Indianapolis and one in Bloomington. One day a week he is in Ernie Pyle Hall working face-to-face with his students. His classroom at IUPUI is video-conferenced in. The second day of class, his Bloomington students are projected on the big screen in Indianapolis.

“I can always see the guys lounging on the couch in the back when I’m in Indy,” Hutchens said, smiling.

Hutchens said the biggest advantage of his joint classroom was reaching more students. In the past, Hutchens’ class hovered around five to eight students each semester. Now, he has 22 total — 11 on each campus.

“You’re able to reach more people,” he said.

Orejuela said it would be beneficial for large lectures to try the virtual lecture technology, but anticipates resistance.

“The older faculty are afraid of the technology,” he said. “There’s all this multitasking that has to take place.”

At this point, Ricci said the administration is not pushing professors to add these technologies, though some individual departments are.

Hutchens seemed optimistic about growth in this area.

“I’d like to be able to type on the computer screen so they can see it in Indy too,” he said. “I’m sure there’s a way.”