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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 16. 12th July 1973

Electronic U

page break

Electronic U.

Electronic U header

Drawing of a mechanical brain

[unclear: more] than 1,300 fully enrolled residents of the [unclear: mmunity] college district now sit in their homes [unclear: d] study introductory psychology, consumer [unclear: onomics,] or physical geography via the district's [unclear: vn] open-circuit UHF television channel, the Communiversity". Each half-hour course is rented three times a day, with the students reiving additional help by phone calls to the [unclear: urse] "facilitator." As part of the registration [unclear: e] they are also entitled to texts, the course [unclear: llabus,] and as many face-to-face meetings [unclear: th] the facilitator as they feel they need. Their [unclear: ly] contact with the campus otherwise is to [unclear: ow] up for midterms and finals. In September [unclear: ie] station plans to add credit courses in [unclear: anthropology] and sociology.

Golden West has been pioneering in the tech[unclear: cal] approach to education ever since it opened [unclear: 1966]. Along with its sister institution, [unclear: range] Coast College, it has deliberately attempted to design its programme around hardware, [unclear: officials] of the Coast Community College District operate on the principles that community [unclear: college] students differ from the traditional [unclear: college] population in their learning styles and in [unclear: eir] need for individual assistance and that [unclear: aditional] classroom methods alone cannot fill [unclear: re] bill. "We have to provide help for people [unclear: ho] prefer to walk straight over the hills as [unclear: well] those who prefer to walk around them" is the [unclear: ay] Hayden Williams, Golden West's director [unclear: learning] resources, explains the philosophy. Recent times have shown that people do not [unclear: earn] just from books and lectures, but in myriad [unclear: ther] ways as well."

The Golden West approach goes beyond nuts [unclear: nd] bolts. Integral to the system are individualised [unclear: written] contracts, in which student and [unclear: instruction] define the course objectives and agree on what will be learned during the term. Golden [unclear: Vest] also has pioneered with self-guiding counsel's [unclear: g] materials, issued to each freshman on admission. By carefully leading the student through [unclear: e] most commonly asked questions about educational and vocational requirements via prorammed "branching" techniques, it relieves some [unclear: f] the burden on the typically hard-pressed community college counsellor.

"In the fifties", says Bernard J. Luskin, the [unclear: District's] energetic, young vice-chancellor for [unclear: ducstional] development, "we made many [unclear: adances] in our ability to communicate and to [unclear: ranimit] information. In the sixties we learned [unclear: bout] human behaviour and how people learn.

In the seventies the college's task is to bring these together into new educational delivery systems suitable for highly sophisticated learners. If we don't do it, we'll be obsolesced. Other forms will emerge and do the job instead."

Coast district officials are at pains to prove that their approach does just that. "Everything is specifically and deliberately designed according to established principles of learning," says Dudley Boyce, president of Golden West. Adds Williams, a botanist who taught the audio-tutorial ' biology course in its early days "We keep our eye on the educational ball. We continually evaluate whether we're meeting our educational objectives. Audio-tutorial has failed in other places because people got so fascinated with the trappings they forgot about the substance. It's like a cafeteria — what counts is not the shininess of the trays but the quality of the food."

Boyce points out that few methods are used at Golden West are truly revolutionary or even unique. Audio-tutorial, for instance, was started at Purdue and is used in limited form by other community colleges. The contract system dates back to the Dalton Plan of the 1800s and was revived in this century by Oakland Community College in Michigan. What distinguishes Golden West is the way all these pieces have been brought together.

A college built on hardware has quite a different atmosphere from the traditional ivied campus. Even the physical plant is strikingly unconventional. Golden West's ocher-and-amber poured-concrete buildings are designed on the modular principles of Le Corbusier, so that everything, even the distance between buildings, is in four-foot multiples and presumably interchangeable. What would pass for the library on another campus is called the media centre. Here, instead of book stacks, is found a honeycomb of study carrels, with students listening to tape players, watching TV monitors, viewing filmstrips, and occasionally reading books. Instead of checking out books, librarians pass out audio and video tapes and thread film projectors.

In addition to the biology"At Lab" there are three other audio-tutorial facilities at Golden West — a 36-unit room used for anatomy and physiology a 40-unit setup for freshman English, and a 90-unit room for geology, chemistry, and the physical sciences. But the two most striking buildings are called Forum One and Forum Two. More than 300 students can be assembled at a time in each one to hear a lecture augmented by a dazzling display of electronics. Standing before the class at a console, the instructor (with the assistance of a backstage technician— can cue in splitscreen projection, random-access slide carrousels, and a rear-screen video projector A closedcircuit colour TV hookup allows zoom close-ups of a lab demonstration and, Williams says, "gives the student in the back row a better view of a dissection than even someone at the instructor's elbow would get." A speaker-phone allows the lecturer to dial an off-campus expert and then broadcast his voice to the class, phones can be plugged in anywhere in the Forum to allow students to ask questions in return.

After large-group instruction the class is broken apart into 20-student sections to discuss the material. The large-group-small-group method is primarily used for basic courses in sociology, anthropology, zoology, and other natural sciences. Faculty members get double classroom credit for lecturing in the Forum.

Teaching at Golden West calls for a vastly different kind of faculty member. Norman Rich, chairman of the mathematics and science division says he still put academic qualifications first in interviewing applicants but ranks "certain personal considerations" a close second. Translated, this means the new teacher must be willing to "think technology" and be familiar with Skinnerian techniques of fractionated learning. He must also be highly flexible, since the district's avowed policy is one of "continuous transformation of the educational process in direct response to the needs of the students and the community."

Teachers design most of their own classroom "software" materials, with the aid of a printing plant that turns out 6,000,000 sheets a year and a full staff of artists, lay out men, designers, and electronic technicians. "It's like a professor preparing his own lecture notes," Hayden Williams says, "if you use somebody else's tapes, it just doesn't ring right." To sweeten this demand, the district has set aside $60,000 to finance faculty members who wish to develop new programmes or study different ways of teaching and learning. More than 20 such grants were awarded last year.

The traditional faculty structure also has been discarded at Golden West. There are no professional ranks; everyone is designated "instructor".

There is also more of a team approach to teaching. In "At Biology" for example, Mikelson is assigned as "anchorman". He charts the course objectives, records the tapes, and presides over the weekly large-group orientation session, which outlines the week's work. Each of the other instructors in the department handles one to three groups of 20 students, following the objectives Mikelson has laid down. On the third level are the "instructional associates", who answer student questions during lab hours. The budget calls for them to be para professionals or graduate students from nearby Long Beach State. Because of the teacher surplus in California however, the jobs are filled by people with master's degrees and teaching certificates. Around Golden West, they are known as "academic braceros." And for all the demands made on them, most faculty members profess to enjoy teaching at Golden West — although its acknowledged that those who don't like it leave quickly.

The Golden West approach is also rewarding for taxpayers. Despite the heavy capital outlay for instructional equipment, its district now ranks fifty-fourth among 68 community college districts in California in instructional costs per student. Last year the figure was $758.84 per student compared with the statewide average of $900—$1000. Williams points out that the heavy load of teaching responsibility assigned to machines allows Golden West a student-faculty ratio of 36 to 1. "When people ask me, 'how can you afford it? I say 'if we tried to do the same kind of intense individual instruction with faculty, our costs would go through the roof.' This is a case of getting more with less."

But do students actually learn under Golden West's methods? Aren't they turned off by talking to computers and dehumanised by listening to impersonal cassettes? Like disaffected faculty who turn their badges quickly, students who don't like the Golden West approach don't stay around to talk about it. But Golden West officials insist that their computers and tapes, far from being impersonal, provide much more individual attention than a student could get on a conventional campus, where he is lucky to see an instructor alone for a few minutes once a semester.

President Boyce proudly notes that in introductory biology before audio-tutorial was introduced, 44 per cent of the students dropped out without completing the course, 18 percent got F's, and only 8 percent A's. Today the attrition rate is down to 22 per cent. 20 per cent of the students get A's, and only 8 percent fail. For further evidence, Boyce says that Golden West graduates who go on to third- and fourth year study at state universities hold their own or surpass students who have spent their first two years there.

"Students who go on from our district to four-year institutions come back crushed," Luskin says. "They're staggered by the change from a flexible method to a very dogmatic one. All of a sudden they're in a set-up where education is thought of as four walls, thirty stools, and a talking face.

"I've heard our methods spoken of as impersonal and dehumanised — but never by anyone in the Coast district. We know here that you can't replace a teacher with a machine, but you can replace machine-like teaching."