Submitted to the 2003 SLA LMD paper competition, will appear in a special international issue of "Science and Technology Libraries."
Grete Pasch, Director
New Media/Recursos Digitales
Universidad Francisco Marroquín
6 Calle Final Zona 10, Guatemala City
Guatemala - gpasch@ufm.edu.gt
- www.newmedia.ufm.edu.gt
The Universidad Francisco Marroquín (UFM) is a private university that was founded in Guatemala City in 1971. Current enrollment is 2,500 full time students. Degrees are granted in business administration (undergraduate and MBA programs), economics, law, political science, architecture, social sciences, education, medicine, and dentistry.
Fifteen years ago, the UFM moved to a new campus built among wooded hills that isolate it from the hustle and bustle of the big city and that provide a beautiful setting for reflection and study. Once settled on the new campus, the UFM administration started an aggressive plan for creating adequate information services.
Given that resources are limited, the strategy followed for information services investment is one of "cautious but decisive" adoption. This works as follows: a technology or service is researched, tried on a small scale, experimented with, and if results are encouraging, adopted campus-wide. This was how the network infrastructure was built, how the library systems blossomed, and how today we are working on creating an archive of educational resources that concentrates heavily on digital video and its uses for supporting our educational mission.
The Library: a Key Player in Technology Innovation
Since the UFM was founded, the library has played a crucial role in supporting our educational mission and in testing and introducing key technologies. The library occupies a 3,500m2 building that currently houses 80,000 books and over 800 periodicals, plus a collection of maps, video tapes, and rare books. It is one of only a handful of libraries in the country that offer open-shelf access to any person (UFM member or not) who needs to use the collection. This building was the first one on campus (and in 1993 one of the first in Guatemala) to be wired with Cat5 cabling. Other firsts included CD-ROM stations for database searching, a touchscreen for user information, and a home-grown barcode controlled system for photocopy self-service that is in use since 1993.
The integrated library system is a good example of cautious but decisive innovation. Instead of buying an expensive, imported system, we decided to design our own (Pasch & Arias, 1995.) The first version of the system, called "Infolib," was launched in 1993. It was so successful, that it has been further developed into a commercial product called "GLIFOS", which is fully web-enabled and XML-based application marketed by glifos.com. Glifos is currently installed in over 40 libraries in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Panamá, and México. One of the key features of Glifos is that it allows for copy cataloging using Dublin Core, MARC, or any other parseable webpage structure, including controlled fields that can be automatically translated from other languages into Spanish for faster inclusion into local catalogs.
Building a Campus Wide IT Infrastructure
In 1996, universities were among the first Guatemalan institutions that benefitted from government approval to connect to the Internet (Pasch & Valdés, 1996). On October 9, 1996, Mr. Juan Carlos López was hired to manage the first 64Kbps connection to the UFM campus. His office was housed in the library building, and remains there to this day, but its functions have expanded significantly. Today, this Centro de Operaciones de Internet (COI)-- that is, the Internet Operations Center-- manages all IT infrastructure projects at the UFM. Slowly, all buildings were wired and interconnected via fiber-optic lines, bringing email access to all. Today, the campus uses two E1 lines for Internet and network-based phone services. Wireless access covers most public and teaching areas. Computer labs offer over 200 machines for student use, staff uses an additional 200. The University funds a two-year credit line for all students and faculty who wish to buy their own laptops.
The COI is still run by Juan Carlos López and his team of 3 FTEs, who obviously have their hands full 24/7. Current tech projects include installing ceiling-mounted projectors, screens, and speakers in all classrooms. They also manage the UFM website and its associated teaching portal, which are used by UFM professors as well as several local high schools (thus the need for 32 adequately firewalled servers.)
The Temptation of eLearning
In 1997, Clayton Christensen published "The Innovator's Dilemma", where he introduced the concept of disruptive vs. sustaining technologies. Disruptive technologies, says Christensen, are those that bring a significant change in common practice, but that do so in a way that is not immediately noticed by the mainstream. These technologies are typically smaller or cheaper or more convenient, but they underperform the established products (Christensen, 1997).
What is disturbing about disruptive technologies is that they create new markets, which expand until the established markets are destroyed. Graduate schools of management, and classroom and campus-based instruction are seen by Christensen as established technologies for teaching, while corporate universities and "distance education, typically enabled by the Internet," are potentially disruptive technologies (p. xxv).
By the late 1990s, the UFM enjoyed the IT infrastructure and the level of user expertise that would have been fertile ground for the fiery eLearning enthusiasm that was sweeping the higher education community. Universities were funding huge programs for creating and offering eLearning or web-based distance education. Most of these efforts failed miserably (Hafner, 2002), with the latest casualty being Fathom.com, an online provider of courses for self-directed learners. In an email to registered members (dated February 26, 2003), the Fathom consortium announced it would be closing by the end of March, 2003, less than three years after it was launched with much expectation by a consortium of fourteen highly respected institutions that included Columbia University, the London School of Economics, the British Library, and the University of Chicago. And endeavors that were succeeding, such as the University of Phoenix, required a large upfront investment in marketing and support.
What saved the UFM from following this risky path was the "cautious" approach. During the year 2000, it was decided that dedicating resources to offer online degrees was not advised, since there was no way to test the feasibility of such endeavors on a small scale. But the challenge of the Internet to education was clear, and the UFM needed to start building the necessary expertise. Innovative as the library had been, it did not have the capability or the culture to experiment with new technologies. And the COI certainly had its hands full maintaining the IT infrastructure. Giancarlo Ibárgüen, the Secretary General of the UFM, was and is a fan of Christensen, and he applied one of the key ideas for managing disruptive technologies: spinning off an independent group to experiment with the application of new technologies for Internet enabling teaching (Christensen, p.217). Thus was born the New Media department.
New Media at the UFM
I accepted the challenge of creating this new department. In early 2001, I drafted our mission statement as follows: to assist our faculty members, researchers, and students in the use, creation, and management of digital resources that complement their academic work. But what would this entail at the practical level? MartinWeller, senior lecturer at the Open University, argues that if the Internet is used as a sustaining technology in education, it will fail to be all it can be (Weller, 2001). I knew that we could digitize documents, create websites, and open chatrooms to build online courses. But I also knew from my own experience (Pasch & Stewart, 2002) that there was a better way to deliver course materials: streaming video.
The idea is simple. Instead of writing texts that become the central content of a course, we would videotape a lecturer in his own environment, doing what he does best: teaching in a classroom, in front of students. Then we would edit and index the video, post it online, and make it fulfill two objectives: serve as material for potential online courses, and preserve the best that the UFM has to offer, which is the teaching value of our Faculty members.
To achieve a technically superior product on a reasonable budget, we carefully chose our production equipment (two miniDV cameras, Premiere and Vegas Video software, free tools from Real Networks and Microsoft to deliver streaming video) and we tested the idea. We started by recording and indexing lectures. Then, during the Fall of 2001, we taped a full semester course in logic, taught by Armando de la Torre, one of our most esteemed professors.
From January to May 2002, the first group of 28 students took this course online, using the indexed videos as the main course materials. We provided full technical support and face to face sessions with the professor in case they had questions. We also compared this group with a second group of students taking the same materials in a classroom setting. Both groups had comparable learning styles, IQ, and personality traits; and grades showed no significant differences. At the end of the semester, the video-based group showed a higher level of satisfaction with the course, while the classroom group still was very skeptical about the possibility of online learning.
The video-based group was especially pleased that they were more in control of the class. They could pause and replay the video as often as they wanted. They could choose not to watch the video on a particular day. They could skip ahead and check out future lectures. They could listen and watch or just listen. They could watch the video individually or in a group. In the words of Jonathon Levy, vice-president at Harvard Business Online: "disintermediation means the student is driving", and for sure, we need to be aware as to how this can have a potentially "disruptive" effect.
Our cautious approach worked for us once again. We had found a practical way to create online materials that could be used to create courses, and that were also valuable reference sources. Since then, we have built three additional full semester courses using video, and we have produced dozens of conferences using the same principles. Our next step was to decisively adopt this concept, and we are doing this by developing the technical strategies described next.
Rich Media Strategies
Glifos.com has developed a video player for us that allows us to combine video with a video index, transcriptions, references to websites, windows for notes, credits, images such as powerpoint slides, and almost any other material that we can think of to enrich the video experience (Figure 1).
The technical strategies that we are following include:
But will rich media disrupt our traditional educational model? Again, it might. Lectures on video tape are sustaining technologies, and are very boring, because there is no interaction (with streaming videos, students can chat with each other while watching the video...), no personalization (we can personalize websites, why not videos...?) and no context: you simply watch from beginning to end, but with our enriched model we can provide a wealth of "paratextual" information that makes the experience more pleasant.
And as producing video and indexing it becomes more common for students and faculty, I believe we can expect video portfolios to start appearing, and with this, an expansion of our current "library catalog" into a digital repository of local knowledge. Sounds exciting - even if I can not quite put my finger on what it will all be like, I know that we are building the foundations for our future information resources.
Lessons learned
Two years later, the UFM administration is pleased with the results of our New Media experiments. We have over 100 hours of fully indexed video freely accessible on the newmedia.ufm.edu.gt website. We have produced full featured DVDs of conferences and graduation ceremonies. We have taught and evaluated the results of online courses using rich media. And we have done all this on a modest budget, with 2 FTEs and 3 part time personnel.
The administrative strategies that have been successful in implementing the New Media department include creating a separate department, with a separate budget, and a culture where technology can be tested and ideas can thrive. We do not create our own content, instead, we support departments who wish to develop certain materials. We do make suggestions about courses and conferences that should be recorded and prepared for reuse. Preserving locally produced information and facilitating access to it is one of our main objectives, and since we seek a benefit from the investment in producing media, reusing this information and distributing it as widely as possible is very important. Long-term thinking for preservation and value of the materials is also important, as is integration of all information resources into a central search location, which for now, we envision will be the library catalog.
The cautious but decisive approach has
enabled the UFM to experiment with technologies and services and to invest
wisely without falling into costly fads. Pondering the impact of
disruptive technologies is also having a deeper impact, by forcing us to
consider how and if education must change as the result of applying new
information technologies and services.
Arias, Rodrigo and Grete Pasch. 1999. "InfoLib para Web: un sistema de bibliotecas basado en Internet e intranets," IX Coloquio de Automatización de Bibliotecas, Universidad de Colima, México. Available at: www.glifos.com/colima1999.html. Accessed on February 26, 2003.
Baessa, Yetilú and Javier Fernández. 2002. "Comparación de dos Modalidades de Enseñanza del curso de Lógica y Retórica en la Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala." Available at: www.newmedia.ufm.edu.gt/logica/baessafernandez.pdf
Christensen, Clayton M. 1997. The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies cause Great Firms to Fail. Revised and updated edition. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Hafner, Katie. 2002. "Lessons Learned at Dot-Com U.," The New York Times, May 2, 2002. Available from www.nytimes.com.
Levy, Jonathon D. 2001? Fusion Education: the Convergence of Virtual Universities. Available at: www.admin.uio.no/sfa/univett/konferanser/evuforum/Levy.ppt. Accessed on February 26, 2003
Pasch, Grete and Rodrigo Arias. 1995. "Sistemas 'a la medida' : Desarrollo de InfoLib, un sistema integrado cliente/servidor para bibliotecas," VII Coloquio de Automatización de Bibliotecas, Universidad de Colima, México. Available at: www.glifos.com/colima1995.html. Accessed on February 26, 2003
Pasch, Grete and Carmen Valdés. 1996. "The Dawn of the Internet Era in Guatemala." In: Information Technology for Competitiveness in Latin America and the Caribbean. IFIP 9.4 Conference, Brazil, 1997. Available at: www.nortropic.com/la/ifip.htm. Accessed on February 24, 2003
Pasch, Grete and Quinn Stewart. 2002. "Using the Internet to Teach the Internet: An opportunistic Approach," The Electronic Library, v.20, no.5: 401-412. Available at: www.gslis.utexas.edu/~gpasch/tel/pasch_stewart.html
Weller, Martin J. 2001. Why the Internet is a significant educational technology. Presented at EDINEB Conference, June 19 - 22, 2001, Nice, France. Available at: iet.open.ac.uk/pp/m.j.weller/pub/nice.doc Accessed on February 24, 2003