As the population in the United States has shifted from rural to urban centers, the resultant shift in resources has created a disparity between the opportunities afforded K - 12 students living in rural areas.
There just isn't as much money for K - 12 school programs in rural areas as there is in urban centers. Students, often, have to be transported long distances making their educational experience more time intensive --time intensive but not necessarily time productive.
Noting that these problems exist in our community, the administration of College of the Redwoods -- along with the help of Humboldt County Schools and the Private Industry Council -- decided to offer college level courses to outlying high schools.
The technology exists in our "computer age" to teach classes to students in distant places. Many people are familiar with the Internet. The Internet is a fine method of disseminating information. It provides fine opportunities for "E - mail" communication, and has been used as a good adjunct for mixed media distance learning. The greatest problem with the Internet is that the person interested in getting the information has to be self motivated. High school students don't tend to be self motivated.
Most television cable systems offer educational programming, often offering college classes. This method of offering distance learning has many advantages, until one looks at the rural community. Many rural communities don't have a connection to a cable system. Noting that this type of system would only satisfy part of the distance learning needs of Humboldt county, the administration of CR looked into ways to augment television classroom teaching.
What was decided on was a mixed group of communications media. For our urban centers, a cable system was found to be the best combination of resource/service options. For one outlying school, A.T. & T provided a "Picaso" video phone. This unit transmitted any media presented material along with the lecture given by the instructor to the students -- In fact we used two phone lines, one for video and one for audio as a compromise solution based solely on the reliability of the phone communications and the resources available for the project. With the two remaining outlying high schools, a decision was made to try a computer system that offers full motion video, audio, and application sharing between the center at College of the Redwoods and the outlying school.
There were essentially two business software/hardware packages that would meet the needs of the project. Pro-Share, developed by Intel, needed ISDN phone lines to operate efficiently and was limited, to some extent, due to a "dependency" on its own applications (this package could interact with other applications but the results weren't always acceptable. Share Vision, developed by Creative Labs, was able to work over regular phone lines, it had "full motion" video coupled with interactive audio. Share Vision was able to give a satisfactory result when it was used as a media for sharing applications, and it wasn't too expensive -- around $1500 per package. Both of these systems need a relatively high end computer -- a 486 or better with 4 meg. of RAM. This, however didn't prove to be a problem. One high school had a computer that would fill these needs; CR was able to secure a "loaner" computer for the other school. For a variety of reasons College of the Redwoods choose to use the Share Vision product.
How does our program work ? The system works like most classroom's, students receive instruction through lecture and audio visual presentations. The classes are arranged with a "facilitator" in each room to supervise the students. The Instructor discusses the day's information with the students, the audio visual presentations are given through application sharing using Microsoft's Power Point software, and interaction between the students and instructor is carried out on speaker phones. To create a "feeling" of being in one classroom teleconferencing has been set up between several of the high schools.
There have been problems, but none that can't be overcome. We have had the problem of computer "crashes" both at our local site and at the remote school. (We maintain a library of video tapes of the current classes being offered to accommodate this potential situation. Weather can also degrade our system, remember we are using regular phone lines. When the phone system degrades our video tends to be "jerky" and the transmission of data from shared applications can become maddeningly slow. We have also experienced problems connecting between phone companies.