NODAL DELIVERY EDUCATION: REMOVING DISTANCE FROM DISTANCE EDUCATION WHILE ACCELERATING AND ENHANCING THE LEARNING PROCESS

Due to the challenges for students traveling across vast geographical distances to attend the Civil Engineering Tech (CET) program at Gateway Technical College in Wisconsin, USA, a new method of delivery was developed with various wired classroom “Nodes” located at different geographical campuses.

The delivery process developed was called NODAL.

NODAL is an advanced, brain-based accelerated delivery method taught across a video-over-IP medium. A classroom is located with live students at one location, and NODAL students simultaneously participate from specific NODAL classrooms. Teachers can share screens, print to remote classrooms, and take over remote computers showing students how to do something as if they were standing physically right behind them. Teachers can observe the students remotely via the webcam as if they were sitting live in class.

NODAL success in the CET program has allowed the program to expand beyond the traditional boundaries of Gateway’s geographical area. Last year Blackhawk Technical College entered into an agreement to open a CET Nodal lab for their students.

The success has also prompted the Electrical Engineering Tech and Mechanical Design programs at Gateway to morph into NODAL programs this year and Information Technology programs next year.

The goal of NODAL is to provide students the feeling of being part of the classroom while separated geographically. Webcams and headsets provide in-class participation. However, NODAL is far more than just webcams and headsets.

One key to NODAL is the concept of PREPS (pre-recorded video lectures in camtasia and/or Learning Objects developed in flash). These expand the classroom environment beyond the spatial constraints of time and geography. Students can work at their own pace, developing the basis of the class lecture prior to coming to class. There are also Prep Quizzes that the students must take anytime prior to the start of class. These automatically graded quizzes in Blackboard allow the instructor to quickly view the general level of understanding of the base concepts prior to class and orient the lecture accordingly. This process allows for an accelerated learning environment, and also an increase in comprehension during the “in-class” portion of the learning process.

A virtual reality world called Second Life is used sometimes to help visualize concepts.

Guest speakers can now be from anywhere in the world instead of just those located geographically close to the campus.

Many projects are now multi-office designs in today’s Engineering profession. The NODAL method allows for students to interact across geographical distances, similar in nature to how they will probably have to interact at their jobs.

Test results to date have shown no significant difference between students participating at the base classroom or from a NODAL classroom.

Instructors are able to teach from anywhere. Classes have even been taught while an instructor was located in Poland and the students located in Wisconsin.

We look forward to sharing all the details of this exciting new distance delivery method with the conference.