Happiness Is Your Own Carrel

A coed slides into a plastic chair in a soft green three--sided cubicle, consults a mimeographed list, flips a switch, sees a red light blink, dials 1-2-2, pulls on earphones. Into the headset flows the voice of her political science professor, then Adlai Stevenson on the meaning of democracy, finally a discussion of freedom by New York University's Sidney Hook--and thus ends Lecture 1, Second Semester, Political Science 113.

An electronic approach to teaching at M.I.T.? A far-out experiment at Goddard? Not at all. This is 15-year-old Oklahoma Christian College, a theologically conservative, Churches of Christ-run school, which, though academically obscure, has just opened the nation's first wholly electronic learning center. Each of Oklahoma Christian's 652 students has his own study carrel, tied to a computer that connects him in seconds to one of 46 tape playback machines. The system can transmit as many as 136 programs at once.

The Mood to Study. The 4-ft. by 31-ft. cubicles-"large enough for one student but too small for two," wryly explains Dean of Instruction Stafford North--are housed in a $1,000,000 three-story brick building that also contains a 40,000-book library and a core of faculty offices. This clustering of books, teachers, tapes and solitude is designed, says North, to put students "in a mood to study." So far, two-thirds of the freshman and one-third of the sophomore lectures are on tape.

To keep the kids alert while listening, a workbook goes with each taped lecture, requiring responses to what the lecturer is saying. A student follows a weekly schedule of tapes, but can roughly pick his own times between 7 a.m. and 10:45 p.m. for listening, can review a lecture as needed.

Teacher Turns Tutor. The obvious advantage to the financially pressed college is that a relatively small number of teachers can handle many students. Some of the teachers concede that their taped lectures cover more ground and are sharper than their live talks. An art teacher sat down to tape his regular 50-minute class lecture, discovered that, without interruptions and digressions, he was talked out in 20 minutes. Assistant English Professor Elizabeth Ross agrees that she is "much more conscientious" about a taped lecture, finds that the time she gains lets her be "more a tutor than a lecturer now."

Oklahoma Christian's students, many of them products of Oklahoma City's public schools, do not, as yet, find the process boring, and joke that after they graduate they may go back and throw their arms gratefully around that lil ol computer. Whether a professor is really as palatable out of a can as when swallowed live is of interest to those concerned with the growing teacher shortage. To find out, the U.S. Office of Education is spending $70,000 on a two-year evaluation of electronic teaching at Oklahoma Christian.

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