CSU pushes for 24-hr CPUs

Editor's note: This is the last of a three-part series about education at SF State in the '90s.

Love them or loathe them, but good luck trying to get through college today without them.

Computers are now considered such a valuable educational tool that the California State University chancellor's office wants all students to have 24-hour access to computers by the year 2000.

"By the year 2000, assignments using computers will be the norm," said Gail Whitaker, associate vice-president of academic programs at SF State and chair of President Robert A. Corrigan's task force for student access to computer resources.

The task force was created to help devise a plan on how to implement this summer's mandate by the Chancellor's office.

As part of a pilot project to meet the goal, incoming freshman at CSU's Sonoma and Humboldt campuses were required to have their own computers this term.

At Sonoma State, financial assistance for students unable to purchase a computer was offered in the form of discounts from vendors, loans from credit unions and vouchers that allowed students to obtain a computer while working to pay for the cost -- essentially an interest-free loan, said Mark Resmer, director of information technology at Sonoma State.

For the most needy, he said, a pool of 70 donated computers was made available, to be checked out year-by-year.

But the experiences of smaller schools with more affluent student populations, like Sonoma and Humboldt, do not necessarily translate to SF State, Whitaker said.

"We want our students to have the same access," she said. "Our students are commuters, diverse, and of limited means. How can we provide that access without imposing an undue burden?"

Steps toward meeting the Chancellor's goal at the pilot universities will also include the introduction of a student technology fee of $36 a term for all students.

"Our students are buying into this in a really large-scale way," Resmer said. As an urban campus, Resmer said, SF State will have to develop its own model.

Whitaker questioned the effectiveness of keeping computer labs open for 24 hours on a commuter campus, and outlined other options for reaching the goal, similar to those being employed at Sonoma.

"We've been looking at what the university can provide, at what we can get from outside sources," she said.

There are three students on the task force, and Whitaker said it is hoping for as much student input as possible.

"Requiring students to own computers is one extreme end of the range of possibilities," she said.

Gerold Eisman, chair of SF State's computer science department, expressed reservations about the Chancellor's mandate.

"Twenty-four hour access in and of itself is just a buzzword, really. That's a little dangerous. It makes it sound like every student has to have a computer 24 hours a day, a laboratory 24 hours a day. We need to think about it a little bit."

Eisman estimates that about 25 percent of coursework can be offered online. Using that number, and allowing for two hours of study outside of class for every hour spent in class, an estimate of the time students will need to spend online can be made.

"You plan your access relative to what you've developed, and not just say, 'We're just going to put computers in the students' hands 24 hours a day and see what happens.' I think we'll eventually get there, but I don't see any reason to just get there and then try to work backwards and try to see what we're going to do with it," he said.

"The biggest problem, of course, is the expense to students. For many of our students, the price of a computer -- even an inexpensive one -- is a hardship, a real burden. And to get something that's going to be useful for them for the four years of their education is even harder to do," said Eisman.

Another revolution in computing may turn buying an expensive, state-of-the-art computer into a gamble, according to Richard Montgomery, access coordinator for the library's media and computing resources. Central servers making software and memory storage available online to users using stripped-down terminals that cost as little as $400 could be as close as two years away, he said.

Until then, he offered this advice to those considering buying a computer: "Decide what it is you want to do, decide which software does it best, and then buy the hardware that is the best value for the money that will support (the software)."

In the meantime, lines at SF State's computer labs stretch into the hallways at peak hours. Busy signals are the norm for the 16,400 students, faculty and administrators with email accounts who try to log on through the 174 available modem hookups.

"We know the labs are full. We know off-campus access is a tremendous problem," said John True, director of computing services at SF State. "Those are national problems."

The university spent $14.3 million on information technology -- on people, hardware, software and maintenance -- last year, and the budget for academic computing technology has grown by $1 million over the last two years.

Two students waiting for computers to become available in the computing services lab in ADM 104 last week had contrasting views about how that money should be spent.

"Get more computers or more modems," said Dennis Dowling, an art major. Dowling said he uses the lab because it is faster to log in to his email account through the lab's network connection than to take his chances with busy signals dialing up from his computer at home.

Jenny Humphries, a broadcast and electronic communication arts major, said she would rather see the money spent for more classes and faculty than on computers. "As far as the current system, it's pretty high-tech, I don't have any complaints," she said.

But measuring SF State's ability to provide students with the education they will need to succeed in the 21st century involves more than just totaling up the dollars spent or counting the number of computers on campus -- as of June, the university owned 3,671, up 30 percent from the 2,812 on hand three years ago.

Other indicators include the training made available to students and faculty who use those machines, and the amount and quality of the software and network infrastructure provided.

At the BSS computing lab in HSS 383, the two biggest questions are, "Where did I save my file?" and "Where did my print go?" said journalism major Phred Lender, who has been a lab aid for four semesters. The level of sophistication varies greatly among the lab's users, he said.

"A lot of people just get thrown in here by their professors. They can't tell the difference between a Mac and a PC," Lender said.

The Academic Senate has considered making computer skills a general education requirement, Eisman said. But because technology is changing so rapidly, he said, defining what those skills are is difficult, and the idea has never gotten past the committee level.

But students aren't the only ones who need help learning to use computers, according to Lender. Many professors also lack a thorough grounding in the software they expect their students to use.

Next spring, SF State will begin spending $2.4 million in state lottery funds to purchase computers for all of the university's tenure and tenure-track faculty members, regardless of their fields.

Vicky Casella, director of the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching, helps instructors learn how to use computers for everything from enhancing lectures to burning their own CD-ROMS.

"It's not enough to put computers on every faculty member's desk," she said. "It has to be coupled with training, otherwise it's just a doorstop."

When it was first offered last spring, about 200 teachers representing every college in the university signed up for the center's ongoing multimedia classes. Using high-end Power Macintoshes and powerful "cross-platform" software -- ensuring that skills learned are transferable to IBM compatible machines -- teachers learned how to build presentations that put the university's six multimedia carts to work in their classrooms.

Each cart is equipped with a multimedia computer capable of processing digitized sound and video. In addition, a video cassette recorder, laser disc player, sound mixer and projector enable ideas to be presented in large classrooms in many formats.

The multimedia presentations are intended to enhance rather than supplant traditional lectures. "Just to have another visual helps (students) to take better notes," Casella said.

With the explosion of information available over the Internet, she said, the role of teacher will change. They will become facilitators rather than a single source of information to students. But unless students are guided in how to use information, "It's just trivia they plug into their brain," she said.

Lugging multimedia carts from classroom to classroom might sound downright primitive to those who envision computers doing away with the classroom altogether. That won't happen soon, according to Eisman. Signals important to human communication, such as facial expressions and non-verbal cues, are lost when conducting "virtual" classes via the Internet, he said.

Eisman does not doubt that information and technical skills can be delivered online.

"But the real question is, can quality education -- the kind that involves interaction between students and faculty, and even amongst students themselves -- can that be done electronically?" he asked.

"Whether or not we can answer that question, it's happening anyway," he said.

He has seen English composition and oral communication classes on the net. And next term, SF State's downtown extended learning campus will offer a multimedia class through the World Wide Web -- a subject Eisman said is well-suited to online instruction.

But instead of trying to put classes online in their entirety, Eisman would like to see only the content suitable for online delivery pulled from each course -- about 25 percent of the course-load, he said -- and use the time freed up to allow professors more one-on-one contact with students in class.

"Is it going to ruin education? Is it going to save education? We'll probably look back in a few years and we won't have that debate. But we'll be doing a lot of restructuring of curriculum around what does work," Eisman said.

In math-intensive departments where heavy computer usage is to be expected, computers are being used in unexpected ways.

Meteorology students are taking weather data that pours off the Internet, interpreting it with graphics software, and making it available to web surfers worldwide, said meteorology professor David Dempsey.

And chemistry students are studying three-dimensional images of molecular structures, and the distribution of electrons as predicted by quantum mechanics -- images, chemistry professor Sergio Aragon said, which are too complex to draw on chalkboards.

The computing power required to run the demanding graphics software does not come cheap. A National Science Foundation grant of $50,000 allowed the meteorology department to purchase five Sun workstations. The chemistry department needed a $100,000 NSF grant and a price break from Hewlett-Packard to buy 10 workstations.

The NSF funds a consortium in Boulder, Colorado that develops meteorology software for SF State and other universities across the country. "It's a fantastic deal," said Dempsey. "It's revolutionized the way we teach meteorology."

The chemistry department uses state-of-the-art molecular modeling software for $1,000 a year per machine -- 10 percent of the cost of ownership, Aragon said.

At neighboring Stanford, he said, undergraduates don't have access to software dedicated specifically to chemistry. "We are at the forefront in terms of utilizing advanced computer technology in instruction," Aragon said.

Of the 60 advanced workstations in the university's inventory, 47 are found in the College of Science and Engineering. According to Dean James Kelley, no more than a third of his college's equipment is purchased with state funds. The $600,000 equipment budget provided by the state this year pales in comparison to grant funding, which has been about $3 million a year, and could be as high as $4 million this year, Kelley said.

That money is as vital as ever.

"Compared to a couple years ago, we've come light-years," said Dempsey. "On the other hand, it's never enough. You can always use faster machines and more support."

That's a statement few of the campus' computer lab managers would dispute. At their final meeting of the year last Thursday, the topics ranged from details such as the MO of a pesky new virus stalking the labs and chronic furniture disappearances to policy issues such as disabled student access and maintenance contracts.

The lab managers are intimately familiar with the repercussions every technology decision can have and the need to share information and coordinate plans. At the meeting, some of the managers reported that their departments are planning to use some of the money earmarked for purchasing faculty computers to improve their already overtaxed network infrastructure, so the new computers don't bring the system to a screeching halt.

A three-member team of experts from Penn State University, the University of Michigan and UCLA spent three days at SF State last week interviewing administrators, faculty and students in an effort to assess results of technology decisions made so far.

"They're going to tell us how we're doing in terms of information technology, and where we need to put additional resources," said True.

An assessment by Moss Bay Consultant Group has recommended $17 million in infrastructure upgrades for voice and data communications, True said.

The aging VAX system will retire over Christmas at the age of six, and the class accounts and assembly language compilers residing there will be moved to a new Sun Unix server to be known as Libra. Libra will join the Orion, Taurus, Pluto and Apollo servers, each capable of handling 128 logins, bringing the Internet cluster's capacity up to 640 concurrent logins. Libra is also a first step toward gender equity among the Internet servers, True said.

"You have to give these computers a name, so we chose celestial bodies, trying to be politically correct," True said. "Then it was brought to our attention that the names of the servers were male.

"The next server that we brought in to replace the VAX was going to be named Gemini. We don't know if that's male or female -- but we've changed it to Libra. And after Libra, the next login server will be Diana, and Virgo after that. So we're trying."

The president's task force for student access to computer resources will meet next on Dec. 19, from 8:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. in ADM 452.

[ Golden Gater Online December 12, 1995 ]

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