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 Front page | Career Network | Search | Site map | Help Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List. To join or leave the list, send a message to [log in to unmask] In the body of the message, simply type "subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations. VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List. To join or leave the list, send a message to [log in to unmask] In the body of the message, simply type "subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations. VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html