SEPTEMBER 17, 1998-vol30n4:Ellison: making the future happen

VOLUME 30, NUMBER 4 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1998

Ellison: making the future happen
Everything's online in this pioneering professor's courses

By RON CHURCHILL
Reporter Staff

ohn Ellison saw the future coming, and he's making it happen.

The associate professor in the School of Information and Library Studies is a pioneer in UB's distance learning program, and there's no question that he's keeping the pace with modern technology.

Ellison currently is teaching all of his courses over the Internet. And he's not just teaching. From registration, to class discussion, to final exams, to course evaluations: it's all online. And students from as far away as Germany, Italy and Poland have caught onto Ellison's niche.

Ellison runs his courses starting at a single Internet page located on the UB system. It looks like a regular home page, but "Everything goes out of that. From that, students can go to the Web chat, to the Web bulletin board, they can access the courses. Everything is online: 100 percent."

There are links for registration, links to online resources and countless other options.

UB first began the distance learning program when the university developed its first special classroom in the early 1990s. Using state-of-the-art technology, lectures could be delivered to students from UB at two separate locations, both about 100 miles from campus.

Students could be seen by the professor, the students could see their classmates in the classroom with the professor.

But the current technology wave began when Ellison, who earned his doctorate at Ohio State University and has been a faculty member at UB since 1971, was asked to chair a Distance Learning Committee in the Fall 1995 semester. One of the purposes was to explore the methods and problems associated with distance learning.

A few months later, on the first day of class in the Spring 1996 semester, Ellison offered students in his Academic and Research Libraries class the option of taking the course over the Internet via a listserv-a type of exclusive cyberspace discussion group-or coming to campus.

He was ready and willing to teach the class on campus, but "the second day of the course when I entered the classroom, I was alone," Ellison said. All 24 students had elected to use the Internet method. It was the first distance learning course at UB that did not require students and teachers to be in the same place at a specific time. Thus, the first asynchronous Internet course was launched at UB," Ellison said.

When Ellison joined the Distance Learning Committee in 1995, "They raised all types of questions, but nobody was doing anything. So I felt like I had to do something so I could answer the questions."

"You can't find the answers sitting in your office, scratching your head," Ellison said. "You can't just answer questions in a vacuum without trying it yourself. So I tried it.

"At that time, the department hadn't even issued me a computer. I did everything from my home."

Nearly three years later, Ellison is teaching his library-sciences courses, and even a UB 101 class, over the Internet. Some of his approximately 75 students who want to study the management, marketing and public-relations aspects of library science, come from California, Illinois and Alaska. Those students pay regular, out-of-state tuition. "I've only had one student who never finished a course-out of several hundred," he noted.

Recently, Ellison has been transferring videotape-related to a library merchandising class-onto CD-ROMS "so the students can actually follow along" by watching the video clips on their home computers.

After his initial 1995 investigation, Ellison found that one of the problems with the specially equipped distance learning classrooms built by the university is that they require synchronization. The students, the professor and technological support staff have to be at specific places at specific times.

The "asynchronous" Internet method, despite its continuing challenges, is, in Ellison's opinion, the answer for distance learning. "If the students are working during the week... they're still involved in the class."

Additionally, even though Ellison is physically farther from the students because he teaches the classes from his home, he's noted that they "feel closer to me than to professors in classrooms.

"I am readily available. They put a message up and they get a response. They don't have wait for office hours," he said.

"The Internet is the answer," Ellison says. "The Internet can reach anybody, anywhere, at any time."

His method is far from easy. "I've had tremendous problems." For example, "You wake up in the morning and you have 923 messages. What the heck do you do with that?"

Also, "You have to type the lectures," complete with analogies and examples, he said. "That takes a tremendous amount of time, initially. And I'm still really in the initial stage.

"You have to really delineate what it is that you want. The preparation has to be detailed and complete.

"And testing and course evaluations-these are new things that have never been done." One of the solutions to "assure that the student is not using other resourses" during testing, Ellison said, is to "set a very rigid time-frame."

"If they don't have (the answers) in on time, they start losing points. That prevents them from looking things up or checking their notes or talking with other peop-le," he said.