The Viability of Video

One answer to soaring college enrollment and the surging cost of professors is to put the prof in front of a television camera and simultaneously pipe him into numerous classrooms. Better yet, just record his performance on videotape, use it repeatedly, and free the teacher to do something else--possibly even to talk with students. Today more and more colleges are finding that not only is a taped professor as informative as a live one, but he seldom turns sour and never grows weary of talking.

The use of televised lectures and demonstrations, either live or on tape, has firmly established itself at many big public universities as the key to more efficient scheduling. Last year 28,000 of Ohio State's 41,000 students took some of their work, mostly math and biology, by television. Michigan State carried 27 courses a term over a TV network that linked 137 classrooms and 300 monitors, required a 20-page log to itemize the offerings. The University of Minnesota reaches 30,000 of its students a year through 50 televised courses, mostly on tape. Colorado State University is using TV in 73 courses this year, transmits some 25,000 student-hours of instruction weekly. The Berkeley campus of the University of California has a library of 330 reels of taped teaching, can feed any of them into 28 classrooms at once.

Telltale Tube. When videotape became economically practical a few years ago, some schools rushed to put entire courses into a can. Most have since found that students and faculty alike grow bored with so much impersonality. The common practice now is to use tape as a teaching aid--perhaps a 25-minute lecture on the central ideas presented in a classroom period or a graphic demonstration of key points, freeing the rest of the time for discussion. In an experiment at San Jose State College, half of the 1,200 students enrolled in a U.S. history course no longer meet in a vast auditorium; instead, they can sit in their dorms or in comfortable seminar rooms to catch the taped lectures at their convenience, then meet in small groups to discuss the topic with a live professor. After putting some of his lectures on tape, Wisconsin Zoologist Donald H. Bucklin reports that he has time to see many more students for consultation in his of fice. Botanist Walter B. Welch of Southern Illinois University, who found that taping lectures was "one of the hardest jobs I ever did," says he covers much more ground in the tightly organized tapings.

The taping process tends to sharpen a professor's delivery. Pauses and diversions that seem natural in a live setting glare painfully from a TV tube. So do a professor's platform idiosyncrasies--a nervous cough or twitch of the head. After watching themselves on tape, professors "learn what even their best friends won't tell them," notes Donley Feddersen, director of telecommunications at Indiana. They usually then work to improve their delivery. For some, there is little hope. "If you have a really bad professor, he is going to be worse on television," says the University of Wisconsin's TV Station Manager Steve Markstrom.

One of videotape's biggest advantages is that a costly or difficult laboratory demonstration can be done once, or erased and repeated until it is perfected, then magnified so that any student near a TV screen can see it clearly-- an advantage previously limited to students nearest the professor's podium. Thus Colorado State uses 200 tapes in 23 of its anatomy courses. Students on many campuses can check out a tape and view it in a personal study carrel in order to catch a lecture they missed or review it for an exam.

Preserve in Perpetuity. The durability of tape raises the possibility of recording the nation's best teachers to make them available on any campus. "We now have the capability," says the U.S. Office of Education's James Conner, "to preserve our teachers in perpetuity"--although the constant scholarly need for new interpretations of new research makes that a debatable necessity. In practice, each university likes to think that it can teach as well as the next, and little such exchange is going on. Stanford's Mechanical Engineering Professor Peter Bulkeley doubts that many schools really want to "buy their physics from M.I.T. and their theology from Union Theological Seminary." Another hindrance to exchange is the proliferation of incompatible television systems--a tape produced at one school may not fit the equipment of another. Despite such obstacles, Berkeley is finding off-campus use for its videotapes of Physicist Edward Teller's introductory course. Plans to link campuses by television are proceeding in several regions, including California, New York and Indiana.

The biggest handicap to wider use of TV is a residual prejudice against the tape techniques among students and faculty. Many professors hate to change their way of doing things, claim they can teach better in a live exchange with students, although Wisconsin Associate Geology Professor Louis Maher contends that "when you have 200 students in one group, you tend to lecture to the walls anyway." Extensive use of tape is likely to force professors to specialize more: one may become the stirring lecturer, another a skilled lab-type demonstrator, another an inspiring seminar leader. After years of academic pressure to get into college, many students resent being asked to sit in front of what they consider "an idiot box"--even if a genius is on the screen.

Despite such resistance, proof of videotape's viability shows up in almost every study of its effectiveness. After 400 experiments comparing TV instruction with conventional teaching at Penn State, researchers found that the grey screen conveys information at least as effectively as a live professor.

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