The New York Times September 3, 1997
AT UCLA, MIXED REACTION
TO WEB-BASED COURSES
By Steven R. Knowlton
When students at the University of California at Los Angeles call up the
World Wide Web home page for a class on 20th-century American literature
this school year, they will have a wealth of choices, including, the professor
hopes, clicking on an audio button to hear an aria from an opera mentioned
in a Willa Cather novel. But students taking another professor's course on
Milton will find a bare-bones Web page, not much more than the course title
and a reading list.
Professor Thomas Wortham, the chairman of the English department who is
planning the more elaborate page, and Jonathan F.S. Post, a former chairman
of the department whose page is being created without his input, are repre-
sentative of the reactions to UCLA's announcement in mid-July that it will
make home pages available for every course in the College of Letters and
Science by Sept. 25, the start of the fall term.
At the very least, that means the university will provide students with a plain-
text syllabus and an online chat room -- a cyberspace spot where students
can talk to one another in some 1,000 courses. At its most elaborate, the
Web pages may use graphics and audio and video snippets to dress up lecture
notes and provide links to take students to other relevant Web sites. Profes-
sors can choose to participate or not in creating and maintaining their class
pages.
Although UCLA is believed to be the first major campus in the country to
require home pages for so many courses, its action represents a growing
trend in higher education to integrate the Web and the more encompassing
Internet into class work.
But while many faculty members are cruising into cyberspace with enthusi-
asm, confident that they can make learning more rewarding, others are more
reluctant to trade in conventional teaching tools for what they and other
critics fear is just the latest fad in higher education.
Wortham said he was looking forward to offering an enhanced Web page. He
could round up the tape players, slide projectors and other academic hard-
ware "and lug them into class," he said, but he acknowledged that "too often
that does not happen."
Post, on the other hand, said he did not mind that the university was putting
his syllabus on the Web because "my syllabus is not my course." But he
added, "The greater concern that most of us would feel is that technology
will be driving the teaching."
He also said he feared that "funding will be going in that direction and away
from the classroom."
Much of the impetus for Web-based learning is financial. Many college ad-
ministrators regard Web pages as effective marketing and recruiting tools.
In May, a new college guide ranking the 100 most-wired campuses was pub-
lished by Yahoo, a popular Internet search service. In that survey, UCLA did
not fare well against many other California campuses because it had relatively
few courses with Web pages.
Wortham said UCLA's decision to build Web pages for all its courses had
been made before the Yahoo ranking and had been driven, in part, by the
need to justify a new computer fee that students are paying this fall.
"The idea was if students could see that the money was being utilized in the
classroom, maybe they would go for it," the professor said.
The fee -- $10 for each humanities course and $14 for each science course --
was discussed in the last academic year, but many students objected, saying
that their courses did not have Web pages and that they should not have to
pay for services they were not receiving.
Web pages are also regarded as weapons with which departments can defend
their own domain and budgets by attracting students to fill courses.
"Departments are increasingly required to pay for themselves," Post said.
"Web pages seem to be a way of making a department appear to be sort of
with it instead of in the dark ages."
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the push toward more Web-based
learning, some educators say, is that computer technology is beginning to
replace, rather than merely enhance, some of what professors do in the class-
room.
Although UCLA is not planning major changes in its teaching strategies,
other colleges and universities are.
The president of Northwestern University, Henry S. Bienen, said he expected
teaching on the Web to soon replace at least some of the lecture components
of basic introductory courses. That would, theoretically at least, free up pro-
fessors to conduct more small-group sessions, he said.
At the University of Oregon, the provost, John T. Moseley, said he was
looking forward to turning the conventional format of three lectures a week
into perhaps a single lecture plus Web lectures and discussions, as well as
other teaching sessions in informal settings. Such changes could come in the
next few years.
"Listening to a lecture is simply not the best way for some people to learn,"
Moseley said.
The Web's biggest fans say the goal is to shift the role of the professor from
that of the sage on the stage to the guide on the side. But many professors
contend that hard evidence of what computers can contribute to knowledge
is sketchy and anecdotal, and that real learning is in danger of being shoul-
dered aside.
Dr. Mary Burgan, general secretary of the American Association of Univer-
sity Professors, a professional association that represents about 45,000 pro-
fessors, cautioned that it took a lot of time on the part of teachers to make
chat rooms on the Web educationally useful.
When Dr. Burgan used such a chat room for a women's studies course she
taught at Indiana University, she said, she found that the discussion could
"spin its wheels" unless she participated in it. "If you are going to use it as
part of a class," she added, "the teacher has to be there."
In addition, many educators say, creating and maintaining Web pages can add
substantially to a professor's time commitment to a course.
At UCLA, faculty members are getting technical support -- mostly computer-
savvy graduate students -- to help them build their Web pages or to do all the
work, if a professor chooses not to get involved. Most professors are using
an off-the-shelf template that computer experts say allows a user to build a
basic Web page in just an hour or two.
For some educators, the question of who owns the contents of a Web page is
just as much a concern as how to create it.
The professors' association has just begun a study of the intellectual property
implications of Internet-based learning.
"What if you filmed an entire course and put it on the Net or on CD-ROM,
and then you leave the institution," Dr. Burgan said. "Who owns that
course?"
To many professors, the issue goes beyond academic freedom to the question
of how best to give students what they need, instead of what they want.
One such professor is Dr. C. Robert Phillips III, who teaches the classics at
Lehigh University and who uses the Internet himself but will not use it in his
classes.
"It plays so much to students' video-based culture that I decided not to do
it," Phillips said. "Encouraging a TV generation to watch more TV is not my
fundamental view of a college. Unless there is the day when everything is
digitized, students are still going to have to use books.
