Austin, Texas
May 18-20, 1994
Jack M. Wilson
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
The "Teaching Physics as a Second Language" project is restructuring the institution of the university classroom and giving students and faculty a glimpse of what a future university will look like. The university of the future will have "no more lectures, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks." Lectures will be reduced in emphasis. There will be a more cooperative learning environment involving a team approach, the teacher as mentor, multimedia and hands-on workshops and electronic collaboration. Texts will be supplemented with or supplanted by interactive online texts giving access to databases, full-motion video, live links to experts and to the global network. The classroom environment will be improved to accommodate a diversity of learning styles, interesting preparations, development of cooperative and team skills. The professor will become more important in the new classroom. Emphasis will be placed on bringing professional research tools to the student and in actively involving students in a research model of learning. The university will become a more exciting place to teach and learn.
With the goal of designing an efficient, high-quality method of teaching courses with large enrollments, a task force at Rensselaer arrived at a studio course model for a 750-student courses in physics, calculus, and chemistry. The workshop sections of these courses involve classes of 64 students paired at multimedia workstations built into a studio-in-the-round classroom. Students can swivel their chairs to either face the instructor or face the workstation. The instructor gives students a problem; the students can go off to work on the problem on their own or in teams; the class then reconvenes for everyone to share solutions, with lots of discussion. The idea behind the classroom is to develop the integration of tools, modeling programs, access to databases, video, interactive text and access to powerful communication tools.
CUPLE (Comprehensive Unified Physics Learning Environment) is a work in progress, an interactive "text" developed at Rensselaer for teaching physics. It incorporates full-motion video clips, mathematical representations, numerical exercises, problem solving tools, symbolic math manipulations and textual resources, ranging from grade-school to graduate student level, to illustrate basic principles of physics. CUPLE resources are mounted on an IBM ES9000 mainframe and are delivered over ISDN lines to remote labs and classrooms. The virtual classrooms of the future will need access to reliable networks with high bandwidths to transport full-motion video and other multimedia resources.
New technologies available for teaching have huge implications for libraries and universities. The important questions are how these technologies will be applied and whether educators will use them wisely and not as "video games." Libraries have a role to play in guiding the wise use of these resources.