Middle Eastern Studies
Project assessment and dissemination:
3 January, 2000
The following report concerns International Studies 200, "The Middle East and the West," taught by Bahram Tavakolian during the Fall Semester, 1999. A second course, "Gender and the Family in South Asia" will be taught, as part of the same proposal, by Meena Khandelwal during the Spring Semester, 2000.
1. How were project goals (as defined in the proposal) met, or modified and met, and if not, why were they not met?
We followed the original plans for "The Middle East and the West" as closely as we could, but there were some unexpected logistical and technical difficulties related to this first effort. I believe that the second course to be taught (by Meena Khandelwal) in association with this project can benefit from our experiences and be executed more successfully.
First of all, our course would definitely have been more successful if there had been more than one Kenyon student in it. We did not set up plans for remote collaboration until May, well after Kenyon students had already completed their fall registration plans. As a result, even at the start of the fall semester, it was not certain that there would be any Kenyon students in the seminar at all. As it turned out, one student signed up for the course, along with six students at Denison, and we began the remote collaboration during the second week of the semester. Unfortunately, by then, the Kenyon student was already more than a week behind in the reading assignments, and she did not have access to many of the required books until I mailed some of them to her from the Denison bookstore and copied articles for her from our reserve collection.
I regret that, without anyone else with her in the remote classroom at Kenyon, and dependent upon the television screen for contact with her Denison counterparts, our Kenyon student could not participate as fully as I had hoped in our seminar discussions. Of course, part of the problem was simply getting accustomed to using the cameras, one of which was not functioning properly during the initial part of the semester (and I later compounded the problem by breaking a connecting wire). Being behind in the reading and not always being able to place a voice with a face on the t.v. monitor, our Kenyon student could not easily jump into discussions the way that other students would do and she was also unable to turn to a Kenyon counterpart to help catch anything she had missed. In addition, the Kenyon student was never able to see the videos that I had placed on reserve at the Learning Resources Center for Denison students, and she also experienced some health problems, personal losses (deaths among friends and family), and schedule conflicts (while studying for senior comprehensives) during the semester. She made a valiant effort to stay on track, and she completed the course satisfactorily; however, in the remote classroom she was regrettably oftentimes more of a bystander than a full participant.
I tried to deal with this problem by giving more attention to moving the camera around, and occasionally calling on our Kenyon student for her resonse to the issues we were discussing. In addition I asked each student to make three short presentations during the semester so that the camera could be focused for longer periods on individual students on a regular basis. But I cannot claim that we had more than two or three discussions during the semester that fully involved all eight of us.
Also, lack of transportation from Gambier to Granville and Columbus made it difficult for our Kenyon student to participate in two of the three social gatherings we had during the semester to see contemporary films ("Children of Heaven" and "Three Kings") on the Middle East. Fortunately, Rita Kipp brought our Kenyon student to Denison for a Goodspeed Lecture by Professor Nazif Shahrani (Indiana University) in November, and our Kenyon student also made a special effort to join our class in person and to meet her Denison classmates during Kenyon's fall break.
My major disappointment with this initial experience is that, although we were able to follow the syllabus and to engage in examinations of all the issues we had planned to discuss, the course was not enhanced by remote collaboration. Indeed, in our Kenyon student's experience, it may have often been little more than a directed study rather than a seminar. I tried to make up for the lack of contact with her during class time through regular e-mailings, but I generally felt that we were ignoring her far too frequently during our seminar meetings.
Furthermore, our technical difficulties included a brief power outage, a break in visual connection one time, along with the camera problems I mentioned before. While these were not overwhelming problems in themselves, I think that they sometimes became my preoccupations, leaving me less attentive than I should have been to seminar dynamics.
2. What was learned about teaching and learning with technology?
At least given my experience, I believe that the instructor/seminar leader should not be the person handling the cameras. I was never at ease trying to do three things at once: to keep the seminar discussions on track, to try to make it possible for Suzanne to stay connected to what we were talking about in the Denison classroom, and to have her contributions be incorporated into our discussions. Using the Fax printer, e-mail, etc. eased some of the problems, and I was very pleased with how slide projections and blackboard content could be picked up by the cameras. Nevertheless, the use of technology did not enhance the seminar in any way beyond my normal usage of audio, video and e-mail, whether in terms of the equipment we had available or its ability to connect us to Kenyon. Quite the contrary, I held off from making as much use of handouts, board content, slides, videos, etc. because of the time problems we would encounter in making sure that they were simultaneously accessible in both classrooms.
Again, I feel that the second effort in the prospective course for the spring, can benefit from our experiences by (a) using a student assistant to monitor the camera, and (b) having more materials -- including videos -- already prepared and available for the (anticipated) four students who will be in the remote classroom at Kenyon. There will still necessarily be less spontaneity in the seminar discussions because of the greater amount of planning and preparation needed to make smooth connections between the students in the two classrooms. But at least greater involvement of both groups of students can be facilitated with these modifications.
3. What was learned about collaborative processes (at all levels - individual, departmental, institutional)?
We should definitely begin the collaboratation earlier than I was able to do and to make sure to have at least a few students in each classroom. One of my reasons for wanting to teach a remote collaboration course was to benefit from the different interests and backgrounds of students from two different campuses and a variety of majors. This was only a very limited possibility given the small enrollment, especially on the Kenyon end of things. In order to deal with this situation the courses should be well advertised on both campuses at the time that students are doing their course planning for the following semester. In addition, course books, reserve readings, videos, etc. should be equally available on both campuses.
4. What improvements would be made to this project if it were to be repeated?
I have already indicated some of the things I would do differently, and I have recommended that Meena Khandelwal consider these modifications for her own course in the coming semester. I am not satisfied with the experience I had and am not presently inclined to want to teach such a course again in the near future. Without a better balance of students on the two campuses, and being able to avoid having our attention be divereted by technological glitches, I do not see much of an advantage available through either the collaborative or the technical aspects of the program.
5. List ways in which information about this project has been disseminated. It is the responsibility of all project proposers to see that information about their projects is disseminated in any of a variety of ways - through public presentations in the workshops of this Program, through seminars and conference presentations, through written papers and articles, etc.
I will be glad to participate in a workshop to answer questions and to help future project proposers to develop their course/program proposals. I can help them anticipate some of the problems I encountered, but I have gained no special insights from my experience and have no plans at this time for disseminating information in any other formal ways.
Bahram Tavakolian, Denison University