The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated September 21, 2001

http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i04/04a03101.htm

Chapel Hill Seeks Best Role for Students' Laptops
Requirement yields savings, but educational gains are evolving and hard
to measure

By FLORENCE OLSEN

Chapel Hill, N.C.

Forty freshmen lift their new laptops when an instructor asks them to
locate two small openings, or jacks, on the computers. She warns the
class that last
year about 800 students -- nearly a third of the freshman class --
plugged their modem cables into the spot where the network cables were
supposed to go.
After that mistake, 800 laptops had to be repaired.

"So I want to be reeeeally clear," the instructor cautions. "Silver,
bigger -- network jack. Black, smaller -- modem jack."

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is conducting the laptop
orientation for freshmen for the second year in a row. Last fall, UNC
became the
first top-level public university in the nation to require all freshmen
to buy their own laptops just as they buy textbooks. "My sense is that a
lot of
people are looking at Chapel Hill to see how it goes," says Rick
Peterson, the director of information technology for the university's
College of Arts
and Sciences.

The pedagogical value of mandatory laptops is still being debated here,
as it is on many other campuses. After observing the first freshman class
using
laptops, some administrators and faculty members say they can't prove it,
but they think that students had a better educational experience because
of the
requirement. The students, however, were asked only infrequently to use
their laptops during class, because it takes commitment and time for
faculty members
to create electronic course content, Mr. Peterson says.

But administrators also freely concede that a chief rationale for the
requirement was to reduce Chapel Hill's spending on information
technology. In its
first year, the requirement helped to reduce the university's
technical-support costs. But in a few more years, administrators say,
they will be able to
spend less on fixed assets such as computers in classrooms, laboratories,
and dormitories because all students will own laptops.

"I guarantee you this will cost less than doing it the old way -- it
doesn't make financial sense to do it the old way," says Marian G. Moore,
the vice
chancellor for information technology.

Starting Small

Dozens of small colleges, most of them private institutions, have made
laptops a mandatory part of undergraduate education. Only recently have
large public
universities begun requiring their freshmen to buy or lease laptop or
desktop computers. This fall, for the first time, the University of
California at
Davis is requiring every entering undergraduate to have a laptop or
desktop computer that meets the university's minimum specifications. In
fall 2002,
all freshmen at the University of Wisconsin-Stout will be required to buy
or lease a laptop. Most administrators admit that they can't measure the
real
value of such programs, apart from their potential impact on an
institution's bottom line.

"People need to go into these kinds of programs thinking of them and
characterizing them as bold experiments," says Richard N. Katz, a vice
president of
Educause, the academic-technology consortium.

Chapel Hill's laptop requirement is at the heart of a technology program
called the Carolina Computing Initiative. It started about four years ago
with
a special technology allocation of $4.5-million from the North Carolina
Legislature. In 2000, the first full year of the program, the university
put $2.3-million
into a grant fund that provided new IBM laptops, at no cost, to 1,003
freshmen who received the grants as part of their financial-aid packages.
"That is
not an expensive program," Ms. Moore says. The rest of the members of the
class of 3,400 paid for their laptops outright or received low-interest
loans
through the university to buy them. Last year, the university also spent
more than $2-million for new desktop or laptop computers for
arts-and-sciences
faculty and staff members and graduate students with teaching
responsibilities.

Securing a Good Deal

In 1998, as part of the technology program, the university awarded what
Ms. Moore says was an aggressively negotiated contract to the IBM
Corporation for
business-grade desktop and laptop computers. "IBM averaged about $800
lower than the [four] other major manufacturers that bid on the
contract," she says.
The four-year contract has two renewal options, with each option
providing a two-year extension of the contract. This fall, each freshman
who bought either
of two laptop models from IBM got a ThinkPad with an Intel Pentium III
processor, 128 megabytes of memory, and a 20-gigabyte hard disk.

Laptop prices under the IBM contract, through which 95 percent of
freshmen bought their computers last year, are not allowed to increase
from year to year.
This fall, freshmen were offered laptop models priced at $2,424 and
$3,262, respectively -- roughly the price of in-state tuition this fall.
The price
includes Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional and Microsoft Office 2000
Pro, a security cable, a four-year warranty for parts and labor, and
insurance coverage
for four years. The insurance, from Safeware, of Columbus, Ohio, has a
$250 deductible. This year, students also can buy a Cisco Systems
wireless laptop
card for $150, or check one out from the university.

Controlling Costs

Ms. Moore believes that, by the fall of 2003, the university will be able
to spend less on technology for teaching and learning, because of the
combined
savings from the laptop program and the use of wireless networks on the
campus. While freshmen and sophomores carry laptops around campus,
juniors and
seniors have not been affected by the mandate. But in 2003, when all
Chapel Hill undergraduates will own their own laptops, Ms. Moore says
she'll be able
to close some computer labs on campus. "That's the only way you can gain
the reduction in spending on one side to offset the grant program on the
other."
Controlling technology costs is a priority, Ms. Moore says, given the
large expenses that the university is facing in the next five to seven
years, when
many current faculty members will retire. If the college can't control
information-technology spending, she says, it won't have the money it
needs for
salaries and start-up packages to attract the best new faculty members.

Ms. Moore expects Chapel Hill's $30-million budget for information
technology to be cut by the Legislature again this fiscal year, as it has
been for two
years in a row. Ms. Moore has told faculty members she will not cut money
from the laptop program. "I'm going to protect this program," she says,
by making
cuts elsewhere in the information-technology budget.

'Here to Stay'

Todd W. Taylor, an assistant professor of English, says he's willing to
invest time in developing laptop software for the freshman writing
program only
because he is confident that "laptops are here to stay at UNC." For two
years, he, a colleague, and a full-time staff programmer have been
designing and
writing a software program that "helps us teach writing the way we want
to teach it," he says.

The software, called Facet, uses file-sharing, archiving, and
network-security technologies to teach students how to write drafts and
revise their work
in response to their professor and peers. Developing such a program for
the writing curriculum represents "a lot of investment," Mr. Taylor says.
He believes
the laptop program is a success, even though many courses have not yet
been revised to make use of laptops in the classroom.

Some of the courses may never require laptops, according to
administrators and faculty members here. Laptops are being used
extensively to teach freshman
chemistry, a course taken by nearly half of the first-year students.

Students attach boxes with electronic probes to laptops to speed up their
collection and analysis of experimental data. But in other courses, and
even in
freshman writing, laptops are not being used in all sections -- and with
good reason, Mr. Taylor says. "If you force things, if you expand too
rapidly,
you're headed for catastrophe."

Many of last year's freshmen, who were subject to the new laptop mandate,
had thought they would be using the computers in most, if not all, of
their classes.
But it was an unrealistic expectation, says Mr. Peterson, the
arts-and-sciences technology director. Articles that appeared last year
in the student newspaper,
The Daily Tar Heel, questioned whether having every freshman buy a laptop
was wise, because most professors didn't require their use during class.
Ms.
Moore was often singled out for criticism for her role in the laptop
program. In January, Ashley Stephenson, a Daily Tar Heel columnist, wrote
that "Moore
is treating the [Carolina Computing Initiative] like an irresponsible
college dude with a cocker spaniel puppy," and went on to write that "if
the CCI
is not about 'taking laptops to class,' then someone tell me why we
rewired classrooms and made students pony up the dough." Other articles
questioned
whether the goals of the effort were being fulfilled.

"We could probably do a better job of managing their expectations," Mr.
Peterson says. "My argument to the students was that you just need to be
patient
-- you're not going to hand out nearly 4,000 laptops and all of a sudden
have 1,500 sections of classes using them." The university has since
hired a public-relations
director for the College of Arts and Sciences, who will bring "a little
more professional method of communicating with people," Mr. Peterson
says, especially
on matters such as the laptop requirement.

Letting Professors Decide

Ms. Moore professes little concern about how quickly faculty members find
a role for laptops in class. "I don't want to get into whether you should
use
computers in the classroom -- that's up to the faculty," she says. Ten
minutes is generally as long as Mr. Taylor says he wishes to have
students using
their laptops in his English classes, which last 50 minutes. "On some
days it might be all 50 minutes," he adds, "and other days, none at all."

Some Chapel Hill students like classes to be the way they've always been.
"There's something to be said for the traditional classroom setting,"
says Justin
C. Young, the student-body president. But outside the classroom, he says,
using a laptop to participate in a class discussion on the Web, for
instance,
"is a very beneficial thing." Faculty members have set up nearly 500
online discussion forums.

Surprisingly, even some of the strongest proponents of the laptop
requirement say that its greatest benefits for teaching and learning come
outside the
classroom, where a laptop gives students 24-7 access to the campus
network and the Internet. After all, Ms. Moore says, students are in
classes "only a
very small part of the time" they are on any college campus.

This fall, the university will use its laptop-computing infrastructure to
experiment with a new kind of textbook, or "media book," Ms. Moore says.
Her office
is financing two faculty proposals to develop interactive-media books for
laptop computers. Unlike traditional textbooks, media books may contain
hypertext
links, audio and video clips, computer simulations, and the means to
graph data that students enter. At Chapel Hill, one media book will be
designed to
teach basic cell and molecular biology using examples from the study of
cardiovascular disease and cancer. The other book will be about three
19th-century
artists and how the world around them influenced their art. "We'd be
making a huge mistake if we didn't try to push the edge of the envelope"
with such
projects, she says.

In 1998, shortly after Ms. Moore arrived at Chapel Hill, the campus had
220 seats in computerized classrooms -- for 15,000 undergraduates. But
even those
few classrooms were underused, she says, because faculty members were
supposed to reserve them weeks in advance, and few were able to plan far
enough ahead
to do that. But more to the point, she says, the university could not
continue to pay for building such classrooms and replacing the computers
in them
every three or four years. One computerized classroom in Greenlaw Hall,
where freshman writing classes are held, cost $150,000 and took six
months to complete.

This year, every room in Greenlaw became a computerized classroom after
the university spent $15,000 and two days installing wireless-access
points to connect
student and faculty laptops to the campus network and the Internet.

The number of laptops lost or partially or totally damaged in the first
year of the program was not unusual, according to the university's
administrators.
They say that 106 out of 3,400 students reported laptop losses, thefts,
or accidents. In addition, IBM had to send a special team of technicians
to the
campus to replace the damaged network connectors at no charge. The
program operates with about 50 spare laptops for distribution and sale,
and 40 additional
spares for the computer helpdesk.

Before Chapel Hill introduced the laptop program, freshmen could bring to
college any computer they wanted. But many of those computers couldn't
even be
connected to the campus network because students were bringing machines
that lacked slots for network cards.

The Mac Loyalists

While UNC's laptop program has its share of critics on campus, some of
the criticism has come from students and faculty members who thought the
university
should not be dictating a "Wintel" platform and brushing aside the
critics' preference for Macintosh computers. But the benefits of having
to provide technical
support for only one type of hardware won the day. James P. Gogan,
director of networking, says the laptop requirement has reduced the
technical-support
costs of dealing with "47 different brands of computers when the students
come in."

While the role of laptops in undergraduate classrooms is evolving, most
students, faculty members, and administrators now see information
technology as
a necessary part of teaching and learning. "I don't think there's anyone
who disagrees with the statement that university students need technology
to support
their educational experience," Ms. Moore says.

"The question is, How do you do that without bankrupting your university?
We think we're buildng a program that can do that," she says.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Page: A31

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2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education


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