UNIVERSITY'S INTERACTIVE TV MOVES LEARNING OUT OF CLASS

Out of sound, out of sight is the axiom in Dr. Joe Low's managerial communication class at Southeast Missouri State University.

The veteran speech professor only sees his students on the television monitors when they speak up. That is because the system is voice activated.

The Wednesday night class is one of four evening classes Southeast Missouri State University is offering for the first time via interactive television. The other classes are earth science, mathematics and industrial technology education.

Two of the classes, including Low's, are being offered to students at both Poplar Bluff and Malden. The other two are offered just to the Malden site.

Students at Southeast take the classes as well. Seated in the interactive television classroom, they view their fellow students in Malden and Poplar Bluff via monitors.

Interactive television is new to Southeast this fall. Low and the other three faculty members who use the high-tech classroom are feeling their way with this new technology of teaching.

"It is very difficult to reach students at a distance when you are used to face-to-face interaction," said Low after teaching his first interactive TV class last week.

"You have a second set of functions to perform when you are your own stage manager."

But Low expects to become more comfortable with the technology. "It's a new world. It's exciting. I am learning by doing it."

The classes are taught in the school's interactive television (ITV) classroom in Room 210 of the Scully Building.

Thanks to cameras, microphones, monitors and phone lines, the classroom has been extended to students at the Bootheel Education Center in Malden and the University of Missouri Extension Telecommunications Center in Poplar Bluff.

Next year, students at Mineral Area Community College at Park Hills will be tied into the system and, in two years, Southeast hopes to bring the system to public schools in the region.

The university's second ITV classroom will be housed in the new College of Business building, scheduled to open next fall.

"This is the future of higher education. Boundaries are going to disappear," said Dr. Sheila Caskey, dean of the School of Graduate Studies and Extended Learning at Southeast.

A vocal proponent of interactive television, Caskey said schools no longer have to rely on campus-based education.

"We have people out in the rural areas who cannot come to the university," she said.

The extended classroom is made possible through Southwestern Bell Telephone's interactive service, which allows the high-speed, simultaneous, two-way transmission of voice, video, data and graphics over a single telephone line.

About $150,000 was spent to convert the conventional, Scully Building classroom into a high-tech one.

It will cost about $6,000 a semester to rent the phone lines.

Inside the ITV classroom at Southeast, the professor controls the remote classrooms with a computerized touch pad, allowing students at the distant sites to take part in class discussions and ask questions.

There is a camera in the Malden classroom and another at the Poplar Bluff site. A student in each classroom controls the cameras with touch pads similar to the one used by the teacher.

The students at the off-campus sites can see and hear their professors and classmates at Southeast via television monitors and speakers.

Southeast's ITV classroom has four television monitors. The two in the front of the room allow students to see their classmates at the remote locations. The two at the rear allow the professor to see the students in Malden and Poplar Bluff.

Graphics can also be transmitted via a special overhead camera.

A daily courier service transports homework assignments and library materials between the three sites. Students also can transmit written work via fax machines.

For now, the professors are limited in their movements. They can stand behind a special podium in a corner of the room or use the marker board.

But a camera is on order that has an infrared beam, which keeps it focused on the teacher as he moves around the room wearing a portable microphone.

Caskey said it will allow for more natural teaching. "We want it to be technology blind. We don't want them noticing the technology."

But for now, students and professors can't help but notice the technology.

Low can't see his whole class at any one time. The students in Malden appear on the screen when someone at that site speaks out. The same holds true of the remote site at Poplar Bluff.

Students in the Scully classroom didn't know at first whether to look at their distant classmates on the monitor or at Low.

"At first, it was a real distraction," said Andrew Engle, a junior majoring in computer science.

But he said he got used to it during the first of the weekly three-hour classes.

Toni Howe, a junior elementary education major from Malden, is enrolled in two ITV classes this fall through the Bootheel Education Center.

She said it takes some adjustment. "You're used to nodding your head when the teacher asks if you understand something. Now, you have to say, `yes.'"

But Howe said the ITV classes are convenient. "It allows me to take more classes locally and I don't have to drive," she said.