Special Report: Distance Education  

The Virtual College
A California college explores a host of new delivery methods, attempting to create an environment where students may never have to set foot on campus.

  By Marla Fisher

You’re walking around a college campus, but this one’s not built of bricks and mortar. It exists only in the virtual world, where an avatar representing you, the student, can walk around, interact with people, even visit faculty members during office hours.

That’s only one of the projects being designed by California’s Coastline Community College, which specializes in distance learning and develops learning tools that train many thousands of students each year who have never set foot on its real campuses in Southern California.

Designers and technicians at the college’s new technology center are currently working on several state-of-the-art projects that will teach students remotely in ways they’ve never been able to study before.

“Humans learn better when they’re set in a realistic environment relevant to their real needs,” says Robert Nash, director of instructional design and faculty support at the college.

The projects include:

• Arabic Village, a virtual world that teaches the Arabic language. Avatars controlled by the students can walk around streets that look like real Middle East settings, talk to locals and practice their skills. Afterward, their teacher gets a printout of how well they succeeded.
• A project called OLLI that will teach English to 50,000 middle-schoolers in China. Designers are using manga cartoon animation to create interactive characters that will delight the students and encourage their English usage.
• A virtual campus that replicates the real campus of Coastline, including the ability to interact with live people “behind” their screen depictions.

 A project near and dear to the heart of Ted Boehler, a former marine biologist who’s now the college’s dean for innovation and learning technology, is a virtual undersea world, where marine biology students can practice their skills without actually getting wet.

 For three decades, the college has developed instructional programming to be used via videotapes and other traditional media, and licensed its products to colleges around the United States in subjects such as sociology, biology, anthropology, psychology and personal finance.

Coastline also has contracts to provide instructional services to U.S. military personnel around the world.

“I did an estimate and I think we’ve served more than 1 million students,” Boehler says.

With the rise of the Internet and the use of more electronic devices such as personal digital assistants and MP3 players, Coastline has been continually innovating to find new delivery methods for its teaching tools.

 With 25,000 military students, Coastline sends its instructional programs out via Army laptops and backpacks, and also onto ships at sea.

For the Coast Guard, Coastline even furnishes PDAs for the students, since traditional computers are too large and the ships don’t have enough space.

 For the computer tool to learn Arabic, students can navigate with either a keyboard or a mouse, and walk through a 3D virtual world that simulates a village in the Middle East. A Coastline designer even went to the Middle East and took photos for the designers to use when creating their simulations, so that it would have the ring of authenticity. It is driven by a game engine similar to those used by games like the World of Warcraft.

Students control an avatar who walks around the village. Using a microphone, the students speak Arabic to various characters, such as shopkeepers. They can change the speed of the characters and keep track of their progress.

If they speak clearly enough, the shopkeeper will respond. Students can set the level of accuracy, so the shopkeeper, for example, will answer you if you speak only partially correct. For more advanced students, they can set the level so they must be extremely accurate or the characters will not respond. At the conclusion, the device will generate an automatic report to the instructor showing how well the student did.

For the virtual marine biology lab, students “turn into scuba divers” when they enter the system and go underwater. While under, their scuba diver can pick up a slate that is attached to real up-to-the-minute data from the Internet.

OLLI came about as a result of a partnership between the U.S. and China in advance of the Beijing Olympics. Each country agreed to develop and produce a learning tool for the other’s language. Coastline is in charge of developing the English version.

 On a recent afternoon, storyboard depictions of the manga characters were taped up around the design lab. College employees went to China and did field tests to determine what would motivate students there. The answer: Manga and fantasy. Designers hope a strong storyline for the series will keep students moving through the instructional course.

“Think of a TV series, where each lesson is one episode in the series,” Nash says.

Designer and project manager Tim Nign says that the main thrust of the project is not only to “teach Chinese kids English, but to get them involved with it.”

While the Chinese government has put a priority on development of English skills among its students, there aren’t enough proficient English instructors to serve in outlying areas.

The story is told through comic book style panels. If a student moves his mouse over the text bubble, he can hear audio. If she leaves her cursor over the text, she will hear a translation of the word. Throughout the story, interactive screens will encourage students to stay interested. For example, a student could click on a piece of paper a character is reading, and the paper will turn into an interactive learning game.

The goal is to create 24 episodes of the series, though the actual playtime has not yet been determined. The teaching system will be likely produced on CD-roms or DVDs, depending on its size.

The virtual college is still in its early stages, where student avatars come into the student center and can type in text to ask questions of the receptionist. They can also pick up literature off a brochure rack that would turn into a real life-size document to read if they click on it.

Ultimately, college officials hope to make it possible for students to have a complete interactive experience without ever actually visiting the college in real life.

“We would like to have an environment where every faculty member would have office hours,” says Dan Jones, executive dean of the office of instructional systems development.

The real-life college has five small campuses in southern California, with some 400 employees. Its research and development department employs 25 people.

Course designers work in teams with faculty members and technology experts to develop the programs. The first step is to determine the outcomes, what the course hopes to achieve, and then work backwards.

About 10 of the costliest, high-end courses that can cost up to $1 million are in development right now.

 “The next challenge is to take all this content and put it on handheld devices,” Boehler says.

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