We on the Berkeley campus are becoming increasingly conscious of the imperative to make good use of existing and emerging technological advances. In an effort to consolidate and enhance the effectiveness of our efforts in this regard, the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost created a new position, reporting directly to her: the Faculty Assistant for Educational Development and Technology. Professor Alice Agogino (Mechanical Engineering) was named to this post in spring 1999 and began her work in the summer of 1999. She has already submitted a comprehensive proposal for a new Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology. In future iterations of this report we will provide updates on this and other initiatives sponsored by her office.

In last year’s report we provided a comprehensive list of the campus offices that provide resources and services related to instructional technology. This year we will provide a selective list of new activities for 1998-99.

The Classroom Technologies grants continue to support a wide range of teaching innovations. In 1998-99, these grants totaled $61,207. A sample of the many new projects that were funded would include the introduction of audio-visual materials into undergraduate Rhetoric courses; an interactive multi-media project in an upper-division course in City and Regional Planning; and the creation of web-based exercises for upper-division Chinese language courses.

A significant classroom technology project has been made possible thanks to the President’s Chair in Undergraduate Education. Professor Ruth Tringham (Anthropology) was chosen for this honor in 1998. She has already implemented several technology-related initiatives in connection with this Chair, including the revamping of her course on the Archaeology of Architecture, on which we will report in detail next year, because she taught it in fall 1999. She also contributed a significant portion of her Chair funds to enhance the Class of 1960 Multimedia Authoring Laboratory for Teaching in Anthropology (MACTIA). The aim of the center is to provide workstations and software support to enable multi-media technology to be integrated into regular anthropology courses. In spring 1999 Tringham established a server for MACTIA which houses a database of images that Anthropology faculty members have created for their teaching and their research. This image database is being made available to faculty and students for their courses and multimedia authoring productions. Eventually it will be available for wider distribution over the Web.

Probably the most significant new development in instructional technology on the Berkeley campus is the Berkeley Internet Broadcasting System (BIBS). Beginning in fall 1998, the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center (under the direction of Computer Science Professor Lawrence A. Rowe) began webcasting selected courses, including at least two heavily subscribed lower-division science courses. The webcasts feature two video streams–- one focused on the speaker and the other on the presentation material (for example the blackboard, transparencies, computer output, etc.)–--and one audio stream. Webcasting allows students to view lectures from a remote location in real time, or to review lectures any time, using on-demand replay.

A preliminary assessment of the pilot semester of this experiment, conducted by Dr. Diane Harley, Executive Director at BMRC, suggests that it was a success. Students in Astronomy 10 (the most popular physical-science breadth course on campus) and Chemistry 1A (a required gateway course for students majoring in most of the scientific disciplines) especially appreciated the ability to review difficult portions of the lecture over and over, until they reached comprehension. Many of them reviewed the lectures in groups rather than alone, which meant that they were working collaboratively on understanding the material. And student surveys indicated that the students who used BIBS did not take fewer notes (as critics of the new technology had feared); rather they used BIBS to refine and reinforce the notes they took. Although all of these student responses suggest that the technology helped the students learn the material better, the current evaluation instrument does not allow us to compare the students who used BIBS with the students who did not, in terms of learning outcomes. What we do know is that the webcasts were used extensively (up to 100 students at a time were logged in to BIBS at various points during the semester), and that several students have said that they will choose webcast courses in the future, if given the option.

Here is a quick overview of student use of BIBS in these two courses, as reflected in the end-of-term survey:

Chemistry 1A:

Enrollment	1150
Survey responses	671	58.3%
Used BIBS	527	78.5%
Did not use BIBS	144	21.5%
Used BIBS >10 times	140	26.6%
Used BIBS <10 times	387	73.4%

Astronomy 10:

Enrollment	650
Survey Responses	433	66.6%
Used BIBS	228	52.7%
Did not use BIBS	205	47.3%
Used >10 times	61	26.8%
Used <10 times	167	73.2%

An additional benefit of the technology is that it provides access to the lectures to students who are ill or disabled. On the other hand, the ability to watch the lectures at one’s convenience may also lead to an increase in absenteeism. At least one professor felt that students were more likely to skip class once his lectures were available through BIBS. However, since it’s not feasible to take attendance in large lecture classes, we have no accurate figures on the effects of BIBS on attendance. And with the prospect of a significant growth in our student body over the coming years, it’s quite probable that we will come to embrace a technology that enables us to reach more students than can fit within the walls of our classrooms or the confines of the class schedule.

A perhaps unanticipated benefit of BIBS may materialize in the area of faculty development. We already know that people who are not enrolled in these classes are watching them on BIBS: a number of Chemistry 1A students, for example, admitted on their surveys that they were unofficially auditing Astronomy 10 thanks to BIBS! (The interested reader can see the archived lectures at http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/bibs.) Professor Alex Filippenko, who teaches Astronomy 10, and Professor Alex Pines, who teaches Chemistry 1A, are both recipients of the campus’ Distinguished Teaching Award; in fact, each is an extraordinarily gifted teacher. Once awareness of BIBS becomes more widespread on campus, it would not be surprising if some of their colleagues were to take this opportunity to observe and learn from their teaching strategies.

The Berkeley Multimedia Research Center has continued the experiment in subsequent semesters, and intends to refine its evaluation of student use of the new technology. BMRC is also working to improve the technology available to allow remote students to interact with the class. Professor Rowe and his colleagues are engaged in research that requires continuous experimentation with classroom and production infrastructure to improve quality and reduce costs. We will cover future developments in this realm in future iterations of this report.

A later section of this report will deal with opportunities for undergraduates to participate directly in the research activities of the campus. A few of the new classroom technology projects for 1998-99 have undergraduate research implications. For instance, a new course in the Linguistics Department, "Experimental Phonetics," was designed to give interested students direct experience in the laboratory study of speech. In the Phonology Laboratory the students can perform physiological studies (on air pressures, air flows, and vocal cord vibration) with the electroglottograph; acoustic studies, using a variety of speech analysis programs; and perceptual studies. Another example comes from East Asian Languages, where students in an advanced Chinese class learned how to use the Koryo Buddhist Canon CD ROM. The CD ROM enabled them to identify fragments of ancient Buddhist texts from the internet database of the British Library. They then registered their identifications on the International Duhuang Project page with their name and institution for other scholars to see, thereby adding to the base of current knowledge in this field. One final example–a comparative study of software tools for teaching logic, probability and statistical inference in Philosophy classes–will be covered in the section on undergraduate research, below.

In addition to all these technological innovations affecting what goes on inside the classroom, we have also accomplished two noteworthy technological goals in indirect support of the teaching mission. Beginning in spring 1999, each and every course offered at Berkeley has a skeleton webpage, containing the name of the course, the course and section number, the instructor’s name and email address, the class meeting time and location, the course control number, a link to the course description in the Course Approval System, a link to up-to-date enrollment information, and links to the college or school webpage, the department’s web page, and the instructor’s webpage, if one exists. The expectation is that the information contained in the skeleton webpages will be supplemented by information in the instructors’ webpages. Considering that we offer approximately 6,000 courses each semester, this is a major accomplishment. We can also report that all 240 of our general assignment classrooms are now connected to the internet. Many have data projectors and screens, and faculty members teaching in classrooms without installed equipment have access to portable projectors.