McGill Professor Ralph Harris champions a revolution in distance learning technology
By Mark Shainblum
Previously unpublished article written in 1999
It’s a feat worthy of Houdini. In January 2000, Professor Ralph Harris will begin teaching the same course in Extractive Metallurgy to two different groups of university students, simultaneously.
There is nothing particularly dramatic or exceptional about his two classes. In fact, they are relatively small, no more than 20 students in the first group and a grand total of five in the second. What’s really startling is the distance between them. The first class is being given at Montreal’s McGill University, Harris’ home base for the last 20 years. The second is thousands of kilometres away, at the Salt Lake City campus of the University of Utah.
“The University of Utah’s instructor is on sabbatical, and they’re stuck,” explains Dr. Harris. “My course fits their slot. I’m the adjunct professor for their course -- and perhaps in Chile, Poland and Japan too -- from January to May of 2000.”
Though it sounds like the plot of a cheesy science fiction novel, there are no cloning vats or teleportation devices in this story. The technology behind Ralph Harris’ miracle is as prosaic as a computer screen and a web browser, and yet as mind-boggling as anything dreamed up by the likes of Isaac Asimov or William Gibson.
A 20-year veteran of McGill’s Department of Metallurgical Engineering, Dr. Harris has been a key proponent of Internet distance learning at McGill, and more importantly, he has championed a particular suite of technologies which allow instructors and students to interact in real-time on-screen, and in audio and video over the Internet.
It all started two-and-a-half years ago, when Dr. Harris began exploring basic web-based instruction while teaching a course in Engineering Economy at McGill. His initial plan was to facilitate the teaching of large classes in a single university setting. “The idea was that there would be an improved and more intimate connection between instructors and students by virtue of e-mail discussions and web-page authoring,” he says. It succeeded dramatically, although not entirely in expected ways. Writing web pages for students to consult is a completely different process than writing a syllabus and lecture notes, Dr. Harris claims.
“You’ve got one-on-one communication with students when you’re writing a web page. It’s very different from authoring a lecture,” He explains. “The text changes from the impersonal to the personal. Because you know the students are going to be reading this material, you author it, you re-write and re-write again so that it isn’t so much a scientific document as a set of instructions. This makes the course clearer and easier to follow, which was a very powerful discovery.”
Following the Engineering Economy course – where Web-based materials were clearly an adjunct to traditional classroom lecturing -- Dr. Harris decided to reverse the equation. In his next Extractive Metallurgy course, he transformed the Web into the classroom and made traditional lecturing the adjunct. This dramatically changed the classroom dynamic. “The classroom moved from the delivery level to a much more interactive environment,” he explains. “We did stuff we wouldn’t normally be able to do during class time. Field trips, for example. The website became the place where (students) got information, developed their understanding, did some applications and exercises, while in the classroom they started doing analysis and even some synthesis of the material.”
Convinced of the merits of web-based learning, Dr. Harris co-founded the McGill Learning Network, an ad hoc group of McGill educators who “aggressively promote” a software package called LearningSpace, which works in tandem with IBM’s Lotus Notes. This fostered what Dr. Harris describes as a “healthy tension” between the McGill-based backers of WebCT, a simpler courseware tool which Dr. Harris calls “a Buick product,” and the champions of the Lotus Notes/LearningSpace combination, which he says is more like a Cadillac, “but with the associated price.” Nevertheless, the Learning Network was able to convince McGill to set up a Lotus Notes server and begin testing LearningSpace.
The results of a pilot LearningSpace course offered to the Metallurgical Society were disappointing, Dr. Harris admits, “because the students couldn’t get into it. There were insufficient real-time or synchronous resources to help them get through the initial learning curve.” This prompted them to add DataBeam to the mix, a third Lotus Notes add-on component which provides what Dr. Harris describes as “synchronous, multi-point, web netmeeting. This means that up to 20 people can be simultaneously connected via audio, video and whiteboard and a whole bunch of pedagogical tools online. It was obvious right from the start that this is what LearningSpace needed.”
It’s when Dr. Harris migrated his Extractive Metallurgy course to LearningSpace that things started to get interesting. Pascal Larouche, one of his graduate students, toured a group of smelters across North and South America and Japan and casually demonstrated the LearningSpace course over the Internet. Reaction from the industry was immediate, and positive, Dr. Harris says. “The enthusiasm was enormous. All these smelters became interested in the content of the course. They often employed engineers who were not metallurgists in their sales and marketing groups, and my course would give them the background they needed in those industries. Suddenly we had a distance market for the course.”
Paul Quenau is a Colorado-based mining industry consultant and an Adjunct Professor at the Colorado School of Mines. He was sufficiently impressed by a demonstration of the technology at an Arizona trade show that he recommended a review of the system to his department at the Colorado School of Mines
Though he admits that he is not an expert in distance learning, Quenau says Professor Harris' distance learning system “appears to be very applicable to a corporate setting.”
Dr. Roberto Parra, an instructor at the Department of Metallurgical Engineering at Chile’s Universidad de Concepción is extremely enthusiastic about the project, particularly in regards to its potential impact in Latin America. “Professor Harris has produced a project which will undoubtedly have a major impact on metallurgical engineering activities in South America,” says Dr. Parra. “This platform responds to real-world needs for introductory education in a growing industrial sector which is becoming day-by-day more important to Latin America. The main attraction of this project is the ability to reach locations where it is extremely difficult produce continuing education courses.”
The McGill Learning Network is still clearly in development. Harris is particularly excited about his new collaboration with Dr. Jeremy Cooperstock of the McGill Centre for Intelligent Machines. Dr. Cooperstock is the primary developer of McGill’s Intelligent Classroom Project, which, when combined with LearningSpace, adds yet another layer of functionality to the technology. “In particular, (Cooperstock’s technologies) give you the ability to capture the class and play it back on video through your web browser,” says Harris. Dr. Cooperstock, Dr. Harris and Professor Laura Winer of McGill’s Department of Education received funding to build enhancements to Cooperstock’s classroom capture tool, “in particular giving a student the ability to interrupt the classroom he’s watching asynchronously and put a question into that class, even if it’s being broadcast all over the world. You now have a lecture that’s being annotated asynchronously. There’s nothing comparable to this in existence.”
Cooperstock arrived at McGill two years ago and began an ambitious project to develop an electronic classroom and “revamp the way education works here. Somebody said I should talk to Ralph because he had some complementary ideas and we would hit it off. We immediately saw the potential for working together.”
“I think Professor Harris’ contribution is less bringing the technology into play as the entire pedagogical effort,” says Cooperstock. “He is marrying a compelling sense of presentation style with the technology in a manner that is effective.”