Photo Illustration by David Harden and Jon Helgason/ARIZONA DAILY WILDCAT Mechanical engineering senior Scott Page and mechanical engineering junior Zac Smith work on a solar car in the Electrical and Computer Engineering building as mechanical engineering graduate student Colin O'Conner follows their progress on a computer at another location.

Lectures to decrease in importance as Internet courses play a more prominent role

The lecture hall, a place where hundreds of students gather daily to scribble notes as they stare at a professor, is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

As new teaching methods are tried and trends in education begin to change, university officials say more courses will be offered outside of the lecture hall.

A University of Arizona alumnus visiting the university 10 years from now will notice these modern changes on campus - including the use of more online courses and advanced technology where instructors teach students to teach themselves.

Listening, not lecturing

"Learner-centered education" is the new catch phrase at universities across the country. The concept is simple: A university's purpose is to teach students.

Making the professor, not the student, the center of attention in a classroom is not the most effective academic philosophy, said Tom Willard, vice president for undergraduate administration.

But when 200 pairs of eyes are fixated on an instructor in the front of a lecture hall, that passive learning is exactly what happens. Willard suggested that classes in which students discover the material for themselves, with the instructor as a facilitator, would help them retain much more of the information.

The Arizona Board of Regents recently tried an experiment to illustrate how this "learner-centered education" works in a classroom setting, Willard said.

A professor handed the regents a map of Arizona and asked them to predict the location of the next earthquake. The professor gave them hints about how to predict the next quake using geographical clues on the map. The regents came up with an answer - demonstrating that they could learn the information themselves, instead of absorbing it through lecture.

"(The professor) is not the sage on the stage up front," Willard said. "It's more about (being) the guide on the side."

The Socratic method - teaching by asking questions and receiving student response - has been around for many years, as the term indicates. But 10 years from now, professors may be sitting with their students in large lectures halls, as students use laptops, palm pilots and other types of technology to work through questions projected on the screen and exchange answers, said student regent Matthew Meaker, a non-voting regent and law student.

Virtual university

Students are already beginning to head home to their PCs for class instead of to a lecture hall.

Between fall 2001 and the end of this summer, 1,150 UA students in 92 different courses will log on or tune in for "distance learning," which comes online, in the mail, on television and even via satellite, said Marsha Ham, program development specialist for UA's Extended University.

Since 1972, when the College of Engineering and Mines taped courses and sent them to Hughes and IBM, the number of students taking courses off campus has been growing. Recently, more and more students have been taking winter and summer courses online.

The online courses can be as simple as text-based web pages, or as complex as web streamed courses, with audio and visual that can be accessed using a password and accompanying chat rooms, message boards and social areas, Ham said.

Professionals off-campus are signing up for online courses too. Raytheon, Texas Instruments, IBM and Honeywell receive courses for their employees, in-house, by subscribing to courses transmitted via cable television, Ham said.

The Arizona Board of Regents is starting an online university where any student in the Arizona university system would be able to take classes online at other universities, and people in rural areas could take courses without moving to campus. So far, the only students who can get a degree without visiting campus are engineering graduate students working on a Master's degree.

The obvious downside to online coursework is that subjects like dance, music and performing arts cannot be effectively taught outside the classroom.

"Not every course can or should be offered online," said Bill Neumann, a management information systems lecturer.

In fact, online courses can be up to 25 percent more expensive to deliver than regular lectures, due to the time it takes to upload large amounts of information, Neumann said. But Neumann and others have said the point of distance education is not to replace on-campus learning, but to supplement it.

Case in point

Professionals looking to make a career change don't always have the time to head back to campus for more training.

When alternative medicine guru Dr. Andrew Weil, who is also a UA medical professor, gave talks throughout the country, doctors told him they wanted to study his methods, but could not afford to leave their practices, said Sue South, specialist of curriculum and education program development at the Program for Integrative Medicine.

Weil, who directs the program, set up an online integrative medicine program two years ago, at the request of doctors outside Tucson.

"When we initially started the idea of a distance learning program, we had 350 people on a list who'd expressed interest," South said.

The program runs year-round for two years, and physicians come to Tucson for training three times during those years. The course operates online and via videos, CDs and books in the mail. The tuition for two years is $25,000.

Altogether, 90 people enrolled in the program between this year and last year. Physicians from Japan, Puerto Rico, Canada and Peru are among those enrolled.

"(The program) is spreading different types of education to people who wouldn't normally have access to different types of education," Short said.