By
Benjamin Kim
Arizona Daily Wildcat
4 new channels featuring educational programming added to residence hall cable service
Sparked by a disabled student's request to bring a course to his dorm room, four new television channels were launched this month on UA's Residence Life cable television systems.
"We wanted to tap into the dorm television to bring other things that are specific to the university," said Joe Chitwood, assistant general manager for KUAT's Multimedia Unit.
UA courses, Anthropology 310 - Culture and the Individual - and History 381B - History of Muslim Societies - are currently being telecast over the new channels.
Some Pima Community College courses are also telecasted, along with other educational programming and public broadcasting, Chitwood said.
The channels began feeding into to the residence halls on Jan. 1., Chitwood said. The additional programming is broadcast over channels 75 and 76 on the Residence Life cable system.
Even before residence halls began receiving the telecasts, the programming was broadcast on channels 41 through 48 on Peoples' Choice Television and Channel 76 on Cox Cable, Chitwood said.
Chitwood said, like any other tool, the course telecasts could be abused, and students may feel less motivated to go to class.
"But that's where the professor comes in," he said. "Professors have classroom and attendance requirements which students may still have to meet."
Richard Thompson, an associate professor in anthropology, has been teaching Anthropology 310 since 1977, and his course has been telecast for about nine years total on local cable systems.
"It always seemed to have worked well over the years," said Thompson, who has had potential students as well as people from the general public admit to watching his class on television.
He said he has not had any problems with attendance or noticed any difference in the amount of students attending his lectures.
"If students do well taking a class through TV, then that's the way we should do it," he said.
As long as students are learning the material, Thompson said he believes telecasting courses could only help.
"It might not be the best thing for courses that require hands-on learning, such as labs, but it can have a positive effect on a lecture course taught by a professor with experience in telecasting," he said.
In September 1999, a wheelchair-bound student living in a residence hall was taking a course through a non-UA affiliated television program, said David Butler, who was the student affairs ombudsman at the Office of the Vice President for Campus Life at the time.
Realizing that students living in the residence halls do not get course telecasts, Butler said he began pushing for the necessary funding of about $15,000. Temporarily, a tape was made of the student's course and given to him.
The student, Michael Bucheleres, graduated in December.
The UA Provost's Office and the Department of Residence Life split the cost, and Butler said he received approval for funding in January 2000. A year later, the residence halls now receive the extra channels.
"It's a great collaborative effort, started at the request of a student, which enabled us to better serve our students," Butler said. "He did not approach me with the idea of a permanent fix, but through his request we were able to change something."
Chitwood said that he would like to telecast more classes each semester.
"But we want to make sure we can deliver what we say we can deliver," he said. "I'd like to see quite a few more classes being fed into the dorm. We want to do more undergraduate kinds of things."
Currently, the university lacks the number of rooms equipped to telecast courses to include more courses immediately, Chitwood said.
"Eventually we'd like to (have) as much live broadcasts as possible," Chitwood said. "It gives professors options of how they want to use this technology. I could see this expanding to different colleges and different information sources."
Benjamin Kim can be reached at Benjamin.Kim@wildcat.arizona.edu.
