Colorado State University Libraries Archives & Special Collections University Archive
Transcription of Albert Powell Interview, 2019 April 17
Item Metadata
Collection: CSU Sesquicentennial Collection (USES)
Creator: Powell, Albert, interviewee; Boring, Frank (Documentary film producer), interviewer Title: Albert Powell interview
Date: 2019 April 17
File Name: USES_001_Powell_Albert_access.mp4 Date Transcribed: April 2021
Editor: Helen Baer
Transcription Platform: Rev.com
BEGIN TRANSCRIPTION Al Powell:
My name is Albert Powell, I'm a junior. I was born in 1950, in Ames, Iowa. Frank:
And your early childhood, into your high school and eventually into college, what were the things that you felt you were interested in? What were the types of things that you wanted to pursue?
Al Powell:
Well, I was born in 1950, and that was a very different time in America. My family was one of the first to get a black and white TV set, so I grew up watching westerns on television, and I remember having a Superman cape, and a pair of blue long johns, and jumping off dirt piles in the backyard. There was, at one point, where we lived in Ames, Iowa, a wooded area behind our house, and we used to go run around in there and explore, and it seemed to us like we were getting deep into the forest, and in fact we were probably 50 yards from our backyard, but it still was great. And really, I was just focused on being a kid.
Al Powell:
So later, I went ... we moved from Ames to Missouri, lived for a year in Kansas City, moved back, and in 1960, my dad got a job teaching at Washington State University. I remember, I looked at a map of the US, and about the only state further state than Iowa was Washington. I thought we were moving to the arctic, but we moved when I was 10, and bought a place that was about three miles out of town. It was a wonderful setting. We had about four acres, and I went through the end of grade school and high school in Washington, and then went to college in the same town.
Frank:
Given your future, and the interest that you had, where'd that begin, in terms of what you turned out to be in your career, and you've had multiple careers, but where's that begin? Was it in high school you started getting into radio and TV?
Al Powell:
Like a lot of kids, I was kind of figuring out the things that interested me, and just by happenstance, my mom was selling radio time for a local radio station. So, in the year in between high school and college. That summer I was actually on air at a local country station, and because there was an opportunity, the disc jockey left, and my mom was working there. She said, my son can do that, so I stepped in, and in fact I could do that. The first year that I went to college, I was in political science because I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, and for some reason I thought you had to be ... had to have a political science degree. Bored me to tears. It was awful, which may be a reflection on some long dead faculty member, and probably is a reflection on me, but I turned around, and the next thing it was like, hey, I'm already on the air.
Al Powell:
I'm already on radio, and I think I can do this. Now, it happens that my alma mater, Washington State, has one of the best broadcast programs on the west coast, so I went into that program, and really enjoyed being particularly in radio, doing live air work, running radio programs. One of the most
interesting parts is I was on the air running the campus radio station, which was a 5,000 watter, the night our stadium burned. There was a big fire, and I found out about it. I had stations from Seattle calling me, asking for information, so my first jobs out of college were in commercial radio, and that's ... but the way I got in there was the opportunity was there, I got on the air, and that very quickly became the most attractive path.
Frank:
And what did you end up graduating ... Speaker 3:
I'm going to give this to you in case you-Al Powell:
Thank you. Speaker 3:
And you can set it down. Al Powell:
If I talk more briefly, maybe it won't build up. Frank:
So, what did you end up with a degree in? Al Powell:
My bachelor's is in broadcasting, and I was out of school for about four or five years, moved to Denver, moved back to the Spokane area, and radio just really wasn't moving down the road where I wanted to be, so I ended up back in Pullman, my hometown, and started to work on a master's degree, so I earned a master's in adult ed, and in fact took a faculty position producing radio and television programs for the college of agriculture at that university, right after I finished my degree, so that's what got me into university work, and that was 38 years ago now.
Frank:
And then you went on to get a PhD. Al Powell:
I did. Now, in 1985, I moved from Washington to Texas. There was a unit in agricultural communications at Texas A&M, was looking for a unit supervisor, and I took that position. I was there for 13 years, and in the process decided, you know, I've been in this university gig for, at that time, it was about seven years. I like this, I like the setting, I like the people, I like the campus atmosphere, so if I want to make it a career, I better get the badge and join the club. So I decided to work on the PhD, and a mere 10 years later I finished the PhD, and that was in 97.
Frank:
How did you hear about the opportunity at CSU, and walk us through the Texas A&M to CSU. Al Powell:
Well, they're ... every land grant university, of which Colorado State is one, has a college of agriculture. That's why they were created, agricultural and mechanical arts. So also, most of those units, not all, have communications departments specifically oriented towards agriculture, okay, so there's a network there. And they have professional organizations, and there was a gentleman at Colorado State, his name was Jack Dallas, interestingly enough, because I lived in Texas, but Jack was a great guy. And he was the only person from CSU I'd ever met, but at one point he said hey, there's a position opening up, not with us in extension in agriculture, but in continuing ed at Colorado State. I think you'd be good in it, so why don't you apply for it. I'd never even heard of Colorado State University, but I thought why not. At that point, I was quite thoroughly ready to find a new opportunity. Texas is a fascinating state, but Texas A&M is an institution with its own ways and pride and practices, and I had enjoyed those long enough.
Al Powell:
So, I found the position, I interviewed for the position here at Colorado State, and when I applied, my wife, who had been a county extension agent with Washington State, found an opening for a regional director of extension at Colorado State. And I said, you ought to apply for that. And she said, I don't really know that I'm qualified. I was a county agent for five years in Washington. I said, if you don't ask, you don't get. So, give it a try. Well, I interviewed, and I got the position. The day that we were going to come up, or twos days before we were going to come up and house hunt, she got a phone call saying we'd like to interview you for the position as regional director. And so, all we needed ... and we want to do that Monday, so all we did was just extend her return flight so she could stick around and interview, and I'll be a son of a gun, we both were hired. So we said, this must be meant to happen, and that was 20, almost 21 years ago now.
What was your first impression of, let's start at Fort Collins, because you're going to be living here, and then CSU.
Al Powell:
We had no idea what a cool place Fort Collins was, absolutely no clue. We knew that we wanted to move out of Texas, that the environment in central Texas, very hot during the summer, and very humid, and there are other factors, including that for many places in the US, Texas is a cross cultural experience. And it was for us, coming out of the Pacific Northwest. So we really liked the atmosphere, we liked the climate. The climate here is very much like it was where we both grew up in eastern Washington. And we liked the foothills, we liked the terrain, so we very quickly found a lot of things that we liked, and the downtown of Fort Collins, of course, was an immediate attraction for us. It's a place that everybody enjoys, and my hometown has not had the resurgence of downtown. That's all right, we can ... Speaker 3:
Don't worry about it. Al Powell:
Yeah, we can pick that up wherever you'd like. I'll just back up and ... One thing that was particularly attractive to us is the Fort Collins downtown. Everybody loves downtown here, and it's what my
hometown would like to be, and what I'd like it to be, but that rebuild and resurgence has not happened in my hometown, and Fort Collins is wonderful in that regard, so we were fortunate when we found a nice home that's near a lake on the northeast corner of town. And just settled in, brought two kids with us, ages nine and 10, and it was a wonderful time for them to move, and for us to move.
Frank:
So, what was CSU, what attracted you to CSU? Al Powell:
CSU had a couple of things going for it that I really liked. One of them was, it had a media center, and not every university has a media center, and today's CSU doesn't either, but that was something that was very attractive to me, because I knew that I could work with that, and a media guy, so I knew that that would be positive. But the biggie, for me, was CSU wanted somebody in continuing education, with what I call a four word job assignment, get more courses online. And for the first five, six years that I was here, that was my job. And I was the first person at Colorado State to ever have the specific assignment of getting courses online. This was for continuing education at CSU. And clearly in 98, when I came here, that was where things were starting to go. CSU still had correspondence courses, and they were heavily invested in shipping videotapes around. In face, continuing ed started using videotape in 1967, if I'm correct, and this is a period when videotape was reels this big, that wide.
Al Powell:
The format was called quad, and it played on big machines half the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, called Ampex AVR-1. Now, if you understand serial numbers and model numbers, that tells you something about how early those machines were. But they would record lectures on quad, and ship these to a few places around the country that could afford the playback equipment. Hewlett Packard was a heavy player at that time, which makes sense, they were making a lot of money, and they stared in engineering. That's where continuing ed started their videotape distribution. Now, over the years,
videotape evolved to where when I got here in 98, they were using VHS format. And in one of the two TV studios at CSU ... And one of the two TV studios at CSU had been repurposed into a big videotape duplication area, so they were shipping VHS tapes all over, not only the nation, but actually especially to military students that were in other areas. So that was state of the art stuff in about 1998.
Frank:
So, let's get an idea of what was on those videotapes, why were they being shipped all over the place? Al Powell:
Videotape, at that time, was heavily oriented towards engineering, and similar kinds of lectures, because that's really where ... that's where that piece of continuing education got its start. And we had a lot of military clients and students at that time, heavily in the officer corps, because at that point they were getting into the generation of military where advanced degrees were desirable or required in order to advance through the ranks. So, they had correspondence study, and they kind of partnered
correspondence study with videotape, but they really hadn't gotten online. So in 98, the first three online courses were available that fall of 98. I got here in June, and the first three courses had been setup, and they went online then. So my job was to get something else online, and I talked to anybody and everybody that I could talk to.
Al Powell:
And at that point we had no instructional design support, and continuing ed, which is what I was working for, and that is an enterprise under state law, not really part of the state funded portion of education, they really didn't have their own production facility or anything else. So moving online was pretty much an exercise of, gee, we'd love to have an online course, how about you do that? Here's the course platform, this is what we call it, I'll get you a login, call and ask me if you have any questions. If you get hung up, I'll help you work out the details. Aside from that, play with it, see what you can do with it. And really, I did cheerleading for the first few years, because there was no support, there was no instructional design, and faculty were really on their own in terms of building an online course. They had to figure out what that meant, and then I remember telling a lot of people, when you build your first online course, that'll be course 1.0.
Al Powell:
And the first semester you offer it, by the end of that semester, you'll be at course 1.3 or 1.4, because you'll make changes as the semester goes along, and you find things that are working, and things that are not working. Now, by the time you get to course 3.0 or 4.0, you're going to have a pretty good course, but just cut yourself some slack and realize that your first attempts are not going to be polished. They'll work, because students can overcome problems, and you can too, but you're going to have to work with your students, and just be aware, you need to keep improving this course, so that it gets better and becomes a good experience for students.
Frank:
Where were you ... sure. Speaker 3:
Al Powell:
How's it sounding, Brian? Speaker 4:
Sounds awesome. Al Powell:
Good. Speaker 3:
The light just changed outside, so we need to make a quick little-Al Powell:
Light shifting? Speaker 4: Yeah. Al Powell:
Yeah, I saw the gestures, but figured you'd sort it out. Speaker 3:
Still out of frame, [inaudible 00:16:47]? Speaker 4:
Yeah. Al Powell:
How we doing, Frank? Frank:
Oh yeah, very good. Al Powell:
Was that the kind of thing-Frank:
Yeah, I'm going to get back to where you were located, and I want to know about ... because right now it sounds like you're the only person doing it, and there's one other person you're talking to, so what I'm going to ask you next is, where was your office, did you have a staff, et
cetera-Al Powell:
Frank:
I will, at some point, ask for clarification about what online actually is, was at that time, because now when you say online, it's a whole different meaning.
Al Powell:
Right. I'm using it in the sense of the way the course is delivered, rather than in terms of the name of the unit at CSU.
Frank:
Yeah, but I know enough about what you've done to be able to follow it. What I need to do is get you to talk about it as if I have no clue what you're trying talking about. But right now what I want to focus on, because you got right into the details of the classes, would be online class, but I want to now talk about where were you
located-Al Powell: Back up. Frank:
Yeah. So, Al, your arrival for your new job, where were you located? Al Powell:
In 98, when I got here, the continuing ed unit was housed in Spruce Hall, which is a really interesting building. It was built in the late 80s, and at this point it's one of the three oldest buildings on campus. It's on the northeast corner of the campus. I got here in 98, and of course there was a big flood in 97, that building was not heavily impacted, but the lowest floor was, so there ... and there had been some remodeling that went on. In 1994 that building was essentially tripled in size. They did a remodel and expanded it to the north. That caused a great controversy, because in order to fund the expansion, the university swept the accumulated cash accounts of all of the colleges that had been working with continuing education. I'm not sure whether this was entirely voluntary.
Al Powell:
I'm pretty sure it wasn't voluntary on the parts of the colleges, but the bad guy image fell on continuing education, and it really harmed the relationship of continuing ed, with a lot of the colleges, and even to this day I hear an occasional rumble of somebody talking about that, but of course, as we know, it wasn't continuing education that gave the approval to expand a building and triple its size, that approval came from higher up, but it happened. So there was still some residual hard feeling from that, but we were at the point where clearly we were in a building, it had been remodeled, it was a nice place to be working. I was on the corner of campus, which actually was nice, because we didn't have parking problems in that area at that time.
Al Powell:
So, it was time to move courses out of the correspondence mode, and the videotape mode, and move them into this thing called online course delivery, and that was what really I came in for, because I think I had the PhD, so I could speak with faculty and with deans and others on a fairly equal basis, and also because I had a varied media background. I had worked with a large scale video teleconferencing
network in Texas. I'd produced a number of national satellite teleconferences, and hosted them. I'd been working in radio and TV for many years, and in video production, so all of these media kind of come together in an online environment, and it has aspects of all of those. And I think that's really why online is unique. I know of no other medium that combines audio, video, live interaction, correspondence, and linking, all of those things come together in one platform, and that's very powerful.
Frank:
So, give us an idea, you're now in Spruce, did you have a staff? Who was working with you? Al Powell:
At that point, I had a staff of me, and I shared an admin assistant with the director of the unit, and aside from that, it was pretty much get out there and get them. There's a television commercial right now where the baseball coach talks to a kid, and tells him all about his new satellite arrangement, and the kid says, how does that help me, as they're standing at first base. And he goes, I don't know, tell you the truth, not sure why I told you all of that. Go out and get them, sport. Well, that was my operating mode for the first couple of years was, go out and get them sport, and so I did. I remember having one conversation in a transportation van at Denver International Airport, riding from parking to the airport terminal, and I found out the guy sitting across from me, in the van, was a faculty member at CSU. Al Powell:
So I immediately engaged him in the discussion about getting his course online, and gave him a business card, while we're riding in the van going to the airport. That's the mode I was in for the first few years. If you're interested in teaching an online course, or if I can get you interested in teaching an online course, I'm going to do it. Now, along with that, we had a website. And in fact, the website was fairly dated when I came in, and I'm not a web designer, but I could do better, so I redesigned the website. And once I'd redesigned it, I thought, well, this is cool, we're going to do online courses, but we have three, not much. Was it Dorothy Parker who said about Oakland, there's no there there? A famous author said something like ... well at that point, there was no there there.
Al Powell:
There was no inventory in our websites, so what I did was I went out and started contacting people that were teaching non-credit courses online, about everything from running an airline booking system, to Microsoft training, to a very nice gentleman that had a course in starting an import business. And I signed him up. We just made a business agreement, and they got X amount per student, and we got Y amount per student because I wanted inventory on that website. And at that point, I didn't care whether it was credit or non-credit, but the thing that I was very aware of, and became very aware of, is that I didn't have to get anybody's approval for non-credit courses. There's a very stringent process, and it's very lengthy, by which you get the approval to teach an online course at CSU, but there's no approval for non-credit courses. So, I went out and signed up a bunch of non-credit courses, and those relationships lasted for eight or nine years, until we had a shift in philosophy about how we wanted to handle the non-credit side.
Frank:
We're operating almost in the back of you. You arrived there, you're working by yourself, you have somebody that's in the same office with you, and you're going out to do all this. Where did the orders come from? Where's the concept or the philosophy of what you're doing?
Al Powell:
What we wanted to start with, when we started going online. Frank:
Now who's we? Al Powell:
What continuing ed wanted to start with, at the time that it started offering courses online, was the goal was to start working towards degrees. Now degrees are a substantial lift, because an undergraduate degree is normally 120 hours. Well, at three hours per course, it takes a lot of courses to build 120 hours. So we started by getting courses where we could, and I remember that some of those early course, for instance, came out of economics. I talked to the department head in economics, and I said, you have a bunch of grad students, don't you? Yeah, and a number of them teach courses. I said, they probably get paid out of your department budget, right? Yeah. Okay, well how about, why don't we think about building those courses as online courses, because for every student you enroll, you're going to get a revenue stream.
Al Powell:
And I think that you can probably get enough students in those courses to pay the salary of your graduate student, so it won't come out of your department budget anymore. Well, that was a very well received idea. So they said, yeah, let's do that. Now, I've got to admit, those first econ courses, and this goes back, we're probably talking 2004, 2005, they were probably pretty bad, because there was no quality control at that time, and in fact quality control is still a big deal when it comes to working with a faculty member. But regardless, the ... we got the courses going, we got students signed up, and that started rolling. And now we have a degree, and it didn't take all that long to create degrees, but here's something that we did strategically early.
Al Powell:
There's a lot of psych 101 and soc 101 and math 101 and that kind of stuff out there, and the community college system in Colorado teaches those well, so we tried to stay out of the lower division, the 100, 200 courses, and build the 300, 400 course. That way we could take students that were coming out of a two year degree, plug them into a four year degree, and just teach the second half of the degree. Now, instead of having to build 120 hours of courses, we only have to build 60 hours of courses. So we tried to target the upper division courses, and get a toehold where we could get one course, then two courses, then three courses. And another intermediate stepping stone that continuing ed discovered was called a certificate.
Al Powell:
So we had maybe a cluster of three or four courses, that all related to something, and statistics has done very well with this at the graduate level, where you get a certificate in applied statistics. Well, maybe applied statistics isn't a degree, but if you're a chip designer, there are a lot of statistical things that go into chip design, so that becomes a certificate that helps you advance in your job, if you're in the chip design industry. Something I should mention is that continuing ed was heavy in graduate level courses in general. Now, there's another reason for that. Number one, they fit the client group that we had in the military, because that group in general was looking for graduate level engineering, or things related to that.
Al Powell:
Number two, a graduate degree is going to be 30 to 36 hours of coursework. So again, now you're talking about, in manufacturing terms, you don't have to build as much product. 10 courses at three hours each and you have a degree at the graduate level. So we, to this day, are still heavy in graduate courses. We can build them faster. We have a big client group out there of baby boomers and others, who have that bachelor's, but in today's world a graduate degree becomes a real asset, so continuing ed is looking for a way to get those people out there that need the next step, and that step, for many people, is a graduate degree.
Frank:
Coming from a background as you have, I think you'll appreciate this next question. Try to give us as detailed as possible, the evolution of, keeping in mind, we have a lot of B roll dating back a long ways, the evolution of the physical part of online education when you first started there, to where it is today. In other words, when I sit down to get onto a website and see [inaudible 00:29:24] to go to online, I put in my information, boom, I'm there. How did it start, how did it get to where it is now? So the computer is on my phone, when you started, what was online physically? What was online, what was the physical, actual experience for a student to go online, to where it is now?
Al Powell:
In 1998, when I started, the computing was basically desktop. Laptops were starting to be a factor. Tablets were not at that point. And so, a student taking an online course would be at a desktop
computer, which means they're probably not traveling, they're not in a hotel, they're not in a Starbucks, as they would be today, because laptops and portable devices have proliferated, but at that time you were probably either in an office, or at home, one of the two. And when you enrolled, you would enroll through the university's normal processes. And part of the pioneering stuff that was going on around online study at that point, was recognizing the continuing ed under Colorado state law was an
enterprise, so it's not part of the main university's enrollment systems, counseling systems, registration systems. It's a side entry into that structure.
Al Powell:
So we had to do a lot of coaching students who would find us online, and find a course they were interested in, but we had to help them get registered with the university. And every year we made that a little more transparent. Every year we made our process more integrated with the university, because they were also recognizing, yeah, we need to make this work. We need to make it possible for students not to have to go over so many jumps in order to get in the door. So, let's say you're in, you get
registered, and you pay. Now you have a course platform, and boy, I don't even remember the name of it. We've changed about platforms about three times, but you would have a portal, you'd have a login, and then your course would come up, and if you were enrolled in more than one course, you'd see those courses listed, click on it, go in.
Al Powell:
And at that time, probably most of those courses looked a lot like a textbook online. A lot of text, very text heavy, some photos, and some of the instructors did a much better job of helping students visualize what they were talking about. I remember a gentleman named Bob Woodmancy, who now lives in Estes Park, had a course in ecology, and he traveled all over the state, and he took pictures of the scenes and the forbes and the structures and the localities that he was talking about, really helped his students
visualize what was going on. That was a really good example of how to help students, maybe who were in New Jersey, visualize the ecology of 7,000 feet in Colorado, which is where his course was based. So that was early stuff, and some people did a better job of it than others. And I remember, at that time, we'd gone online, but we were still heavily dependent on recording lectures and shipping them around on videotape.
Al Powell:
So if you were a student at Colorado State in an online course, you'd enroll, and then you'd contact the CSU bookstore, and you'd order a set of books, and any other study materials. That would also get you enrolled in a weekly subscription to the course recordings, so you'd get a VHS tape every week. And obviously the timeline stretched for courses that were going overseas to people at military bases, although that post service is actually pretty quick. So by, I'm going to say by 2004 or 2005, we had moved to the point where some of the resources that were in courses were being put on CD. Bandwidth still wasn't where it needed to be in order to send large photos across the internet for most students, and after 2005, we'd gotten into DVD right around that time, and we were shipping DVDs instead of VHS tape, which is obviously less expensive too, based on size.
Al Powell:
But online then, in the late aughts, as you might say, was getting to the point where bandwidth was there, and the ability of students to download high resolution images, and lots of them was there, so at that point video also moved online. That's somewhere in that range of 2005, to about 2008, was when it became practical to start really moving video across the internet to students, even if they were, at that point, on a laptop, in a Starbucks, in a hotel or traveling.
Frank: Is that ... Speaker 3:
We opened the door, so there's some people [inaudible 00:34:45] Frank:
All right. [inaudible 00:34:49] that particular. Speaker 3:
Could you hear and of that? Speaker 4:
Oh yeah. Al Powell:
What do you think. You want to re ... Frank:
Speaker 3:
I personally don't think it'll be a bid deal. Frank:
Okay, because he just described from point A to point Z, this whole online [inaudible 00:35:17] Speaker 3:
We could go it again, but I personally think that's not usually-Al Powell:
First time's usually the best anyway. So, how was that for a two minute evolution. Frank:
That's what I was looking for. The part that really is clear to me, and I think can be used in the documentary, is the fact that the students today are so used to this, they don't really understand the complexity of how it evolved through the VHS's and all that.
Al Powell:
I can tell, I have a story about that, if you'd like, okay. So one of my favorite stories about the evolution of online delivery, happened in VetMed. We have a course in histology ... I'll try that again. One of my favorite stories about the evolution of online delivery, comes out of veterinary medicine. We have an online course in histology, which is tissues, okay, and believe it or not, one of the biggest client groups for that course is actually a dental school in the upper Midwest, because tissues are tissues, but the
instructor had a ton of high resolution images. And we're talking 2001, 20002, when the internet could not deliver large files at all, and we're just barely getting into the ability to move still images, and she said, well geez, I'm close to having this course online, but I have a problem, and that is that I have all these high resolution images, I can't send them down the internet, and her first step was to put them on a CD, and setup her online course so that each link in the course would pull up an image off the CD. Al Powell:
Then when you ordered your books, you got the CD from the bookstore along with the books. Well, that's nice, but it's a pain to do all that linking and pull out individual images on the CD, but the key is this. She realized one day, that although she had a lab full of students looking into microscopes, looking at tissue samples, she said wait a minute, I'm not teaching microscopy, I'm teaching histology. If I give them the images, I don't need the microscopes. So what had become a problem, in fact, was not a problem, because it wasn't what she was even teaching. She got rid of the microscope, she gave the students all the images on a DVD, or CD, and bingo, you have a full online course, with full deliverability of all of the images, even though they're coming off a disc, because you don't need the microscopes. And today, there's no microscope lab, because they don't need it anymore. They give the students the images, the students study the images, that's what the class is about.
Frank:
So what were some of the early challenges that you had? You said you had to actually go around and talk ... meet with professors, and try to convince them to be involved in this online course. What were some of those challenges?
Al Powell:
One of the biggest challenges with developing online courses is simply the shift in belief set. Faculty, even today, are not trained in how to build, or visualize, or create, or teach an online course. We're not passed that hump yet. Even younger faculty, that have just finished advanced degrees, might have ... some of them have taken an online course, and that's helpful, but in fact you're asking somebody to build something that they've not experienced. And in fact, a lot of people are still getting over the idea that an online course cannot be as good as a face to face course. Well, I think I finally understand Marshall McLuhan, when he said the medium is the message. An online course is a medium, and it's a different medium than face to face, and face to face is a medium, and faculty have learned how to do it, and they do it on the job.
Al Powell:
And online course can achieve the same goals, the same objectives. It's a different experience. It's a different medium, therefore the process that students go through in learning, is different, but you get the same outcomes. And helping faculty to understand that, and letting them get a comfort level with that, is really one of the key factors in them deciding that they're going to build an online course. And until they decide they want to do it, nobody can tell them to do it. That's one thing about a research university. As they say, you can tell faculty, but you can't tell them much. And if they don't want to play, they're not going to play.
Al Powell:
So we have more than one incentive for faculty to play, but probably one of the biggest, aside from the chance to outreach and reach students and help students that you can't get to any other way, is the fact that, since we are an enterprise in continuing ed, we generate money, and that money comes back to the department, and it comes back to the teacher. And let's face it, all of us are human, and all of us like making more money. So that is a powerful incentive, and it's an advantage, I think, in terms of how we're structured.
Frank:
What is the fundamental difference between a student taking an online course, and a student sitting in a classroom with a professor?
Al Powell:
There's some interesting differences between a student sitting in a classroom and taking an online course, and some of them are not intuitive, but one of the interesting things about being in a face to face classroom is, that's a one time event. You get one shot at it. Words are said once. Things are drawn on a white board once, but in an online course, if you have a video, you can rewind it. If you have a lecture, you can rewind it, and rehear it. You can go back into that content in an online course as many times as you want. You can review, you can learn, you can ask questions, and a well developed online course has an active discussion board. I don't get this concept. Help me with it. And other students can help you with it, and the faculty can help you with it. So it's a very different experience, because an online course is normally more of a solitary or an individual event.
Al Powell:
I mean, it's you interacting with a device, whereas a face to face course, you're in a social setting, which actually for younger students is frequently very helpful. None of us discount the value of the
enculturation that happens at a university, but not everybody can have that experience. Most of us like being with a group of people doing things, and how many of us go to the gym and workout if we don't have a workout buddy, somebody who's expecting us to be there. Well, I have a class at 3:00 every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, okay, I need to be there for that class. So that's an expectation that is built in, and if you're on a resident campus, presumably you're available. If you're an online student, you maybe be traveling Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 3:00.
Al Powell:
So, how do you make that student ... how do you create access? You shift the time. You move the course online, now the student doesn't have to be there at 3:00, they can be there at 7:00 that night. They can interact with the content, they can ask a question, and they can get an answer on that the next day. So you start time shifting the experiences when you're an online student. When you're an online student, you start time shifting the experience, and you're no longer having to work synchronously. I think it's actually a disadvantage for the online courses that are built synchronously, because not every student is available when that course is happening, especially across time zones.
Frank: Today-Al Powell:
How was that retake? Was that okay? Frank:
Today you operate out of the Clark Building. What was the shift from Spruce to ... was it Spruce to Clark, or did you go somewhere else first?
Al Powell:
There was a sequence of events relative to continuing education's location, okay, and in 2009, I believe it was, or 2008, the university started a new initiative and decided that they wanted to use the Spruce Building for that initiative, which had to do with recruiting international students. So CSU, at that time, CSU continuing education, was told you need to find another building. And the building that was the best fit is on Drake Street, just west of the veterinary hospital. And that building had to be considerably remodeled, which took about a year. At that point, CSU continuing education moved down there, so we're off campus, but we're approximate to campus, and we're three quarters of a mile away. We enlarged the building and added a couple of classroom to it, in I think probably 2011, 2012, somewhere right in that ballpark, but by about 2014, or 2013, we had outgrown the addition.
Al Powell:
And we had a unit of four people, myself, and three other folks, that we were in a separate office area, and frankly they really wanted that area. And they made a deal to move us into the Clark building. This was after the office of instructional services, which was the media center, had been dissolved in 2008, and so some of the offices in that building had been shifting around from one use to another. So we got three offices in that building, in the basement of Clark, which was right next to the only part of
instructional services that was left, which was classroom support. So really, it was a space move that moved us there. So, we were already in Clark, the continuing ed, we called it the Learning Technology Unit, had four people in the Clark Building. And in 2014, the manager of the classroom support unit
wanted to retire, and he actually wanted to retire and come back halftime. And he is extremely capable, and he's the guy who actually does most of the audio visual design.
Al Powell:
So they approached me and said, look, you're supervising this unit that's doing all the learning technology, lecture capture, stuff like that, for continuing ed, which by that time had the name CSU Online, and would you be interested in taking over the manager position of classroom support on a split appointment? So, we talked about it a little bit, and I said, yeah, I can do that. And that's worked out reasonably well.
Frank:
So what is classroom support? Al Powell:
So, classroom, support at Colorado State University is, I like to call it the ruminant of instructional services. When instructional services was dissolved in 2008, the video production unit went to university relations, photography went also, I think, to university relations. There were some other portions that just basically moved into, TILT I think picked up one or two people, and some point in that process they realized, hey, somebody's got to keep the classrooms working. Got a lot of those things, maybe
somebody should keep the lights on. So they had a group of eight people at that time, who were involved with designing new classrooms, ordering equipment when a building was going up, and then installing it and maintaining it afterwards. At that time, we had, in 2008, from 2008 to 2014, we had in the range of 150 to 170 general assignment classrooms, which were available to all departments and units in the university. And classroom support is tasked with keeping those classrooms up to date, functional, and operational.
Frank:
So once you moved into the Clark Building, I'm setting you up, once you moved into the Clark Building, did you discover something other than your regular job, and your regular things that you are responsible for? Did you happen to find anything interesting there?
Al Powell:
I'll give you a two part answer on this, because one part may be helpful to you. I started my work in video, using videotape, and I've been acutely aware for my 38 year higher ed career, that videotape has a use by date, and at some point the oxide essentially falls off the tape, and what you have left is a strip of plastic with nothing on it. It's always concerned me that much of our visual history, from somewhere in the 80s, to the early 2000s, is all on oxide based take, and that tape has an expiration date, and it's bothered me for years that it's been sitting there, and nobody's been making an effort to transfer it to another medium that's more long lasting, and less vulnerable to temperature fluctuations, and storage conditions, that kind of thing, so that's been a matter of concern for a long time.
Al Powell:
Part two. When I became the supervisor of the classroom support unit, I realized that over my head, in the core of the Clark Building, were thousands and thousands of videotapes. There was one inch, reel to reel videotape. There was three quarter inch videotape. There was Betacam. There was Beta SP. There was Beta Digital. And there was DV cam, and some other stuff, so multiple generations of oxide on plastic
film sitting there, fortunately in relatively climate controlled conditions, but some of that stuff was 20 years past the date that it should have been transferred to another medium, so I had been concerned for years about what was going to happen to all these tape holdings that had the visual motion history of Colorado State University on them. We have film from the 30s that we can look at, but there are a lot of universities, that 20 years from now, are going to be looking for a motion image from 1985, and they're not going to have it, because the oxide will have fallen off the tape, and nobody saved it. Colorado State University is not going to be in that position.
Al Powell:
Today, the situation is a little different than it was even a year ago. One reason for that is that we have new directors with both the academic computing and networking services, which is where classroom support reports, and with CSU continuing education, which today is called CSU Online. The name, or essentially the marketing name of continuing ed, has evolved from continuing education, to CSU Online Plus, and then that was change to CSU Online a couple of years ago, but with two new directors to report to. At this point we're really focusing on the future, and planning where is it we need to be a year from now, three years from now five years from now. I call that the Wayne Gretzky planning phase. Gretzky's famous comment ... Waiting for the door? I'll back up.
Speaker 3:
She's not paying attention, she's on her phone. [inaudible 00:52:09] Al Powell:
Sorry about that. Frank:
Are we on? Speaker 3: Yeah. Frank:
Oh, okay. Let's start at the beginning. Al Powell:
Okay, so today the situation for me in classroom support is interesting, because we have new directors, both with academic computing and network services, which is the parent unit of classroom support, and at CSU Online, which has gone through an evolution in naming, from Continuing Education, to CSU Online Plus, to CSU Online, but those are the two units I report to, so when you have new directors on both sides, things change, and we're very much in a planning process of where we go from here. Where do we need to be a year from now, three years from now, five years from now, which such things as the technology we're putting in the classroom, how long do we leave, for instance, VGA laptop inputs on lecterns. They're becoming very rare. Are we making a good judgment about the lecture capture system we're using? There are a number of them out there, they all cost money, they all have pluses and minuses, and where are faculty going with what they're teaching.
Al Powell:
And on a more prosaic level, what does classroom support need to be able to do to keep the lights on and keep it running, keep things running, five years from now? We have, today, 184 classrooms that are general assignment, and that's the primary job of classroom support, to deal with those classrooms, but there are 200 plus more classrooms that are controlled by departments, and we are called upon to work with those on an hourly charge basis. I have three and a half staff, three and a half people to keep the entire campus running. Now, it's pretty clear it's time for more staff, but how much more, doing what, and where should our emphasis go in the future? At the same time, the most complex classrooms we have, are the ones that are doing lecture capture, and lecture capture has become increasingly popular over the last few years.
Al Powell:
It's the process, really, of just recording a lecture in a classroom, but it makes the classroom technology more complex, because, for instance, I really prefer that faculty not write on a physical whiteboard when they're doing lecture capture, because pointing a camera at that whiteboard gives you a crappy piece of video. It doesn't look good. We have some really nice electronic panels, touchscreens they can write on. And when they write on those, the image's captured electronically, it's beautiful, it's nice, it's easy for students to read. Some faculty use them, some faculty don't, but it's another piece of technology we've added, so it's more maintenance, there's a replacement cycle for it. Every five to six years we know we have to put a new one of those in. And over the last 10 years, we've gone from about three rooms to, today, about 50 lecture capture rooms. Again, same staffing level, or less staff over that period, but we've added technology.
Al Powell:
So this is a really nice opportunity, today, to look at where are we, and where do we need to be. I call it the Wayne Gretzky moment, where you skate not to where the puck is, but to where the puck is going to be, and I think that's really important for universities. As they evolve their technology, they also have to evolve their support structure, and their staffing, and the software, and increasingly look at ways to do things, without having human beings run back and forth across campus to get feet in a classroom. We do a tremendous amount right now, with remote control over the network. We can take any room that is a lecture capture room. We have software that will allow us, from any PC, anywhere on the network at CSU, to actually be able to turn the lights on and off in the room, or to do anything that's on the touch panel in that room, we can do it remotely.
Al Powell:
We can run the cameras, we can start and stop the ... we can change devices from a laptop to a desktop to a document camera. All of that is stuff that we've figured out how to do in the last 10 years. And it's critical, it's critical. If you're going to be able to help faculty that have a problem in a classroom, you can't always take 10 minutes to run a human being over there, when you have 10 minute breaks between classes, it just doesn't work. That's my own little rant, isn't it?
Frank:
I have a few more questions for you, the more ... the larger stroke. Let's start with, you've been here for 21 years, you have a very good understanding of what goes on in a classroom. You've seen the evolution of the technology. You've faced the challenges, overcome a lot of the challenges. Why would a parent or student consider coming to CSU today?
Al Powell:
I think there are a lot of people that are asking the question about, why would you want to come to a campus today? What are the advantages, what are the disadvantages? And the answer, I think, is different for a traditional aged student and a non-traditional aged student. Now, those traditional aged students are coming out of high school, they're coming into a college environment, and I firmly believe that there's a huge socialization advantage to putting a young person into a new place, with peers of a similar age. Let's face it, most of us are not anywhere near a finished product at age 18 or 19, and sometimes it's a victory just to keep us alive until we can mature a little bit. Well, a college campus provides a place where people can go and become the person they're going to be.
Al Powell:
When you're in high school, there are expectations around you. You know people, they've known you. Perhaps in big cities, with huge high schools, not so much, but you're a known quantity. You go to a college campus, and that's the next stage of your life. There's a huge advantage and value to the experience of being on a college campus, making your own decisions, being responsible for going to classes, being responsibly for studying. This is a socialization process that generations and generations of people in many nations have taken part in, and I think it's a good process, and I think it's a valuable process. So that's your traditional aged student, okay? If you're a not traditional aged students, starts maybe 25, something like that, 25 up, in continuing ed, our typical student would be a single parent female, early 30s, fully employed, and wanting a graduate degree, or wanting study beyond the bachelor's level.
Al Powell:
Well, that person is not going to move to a college campus and live on crackers and peanut butter for two or three years, while they try to finish out a degree, not going to happen. And the thing about distance education in general, okay, and this is not just continuing ed, but the whole practice of distance ed is they have an option. And this option did not exist in most places 25 years ago. You can go online, you can study, you can get a certificate. You can get a degree. You can do industry based study to get a certification in something that's relevant to your career path, and so the advantage of being able to not go to a university campus, but still have an educational path, that's the reason that distance education is exploding. Yeah, I hear it.
Speaker 3:
[inaudible 01:00:19] Al Powell:
We definitely need in on this food. Speaker 4:
We missed the memo. Al Powell:
Go Cam. I knew this would happen. Speaker 3:
[inaudible 01:00:44] Al Powell:
These guys don't know it, but I'm also a past president of the alumni association at Washington State, so I've got a pretty good handle of what goes on in an alumni center. The one at Washington State is a converted 1930s cow barn, and it is a showplace. Now how can you have a better alumni center for a land grant university, than a huge, two story, converted cow barn, with a recessed, flat tiled fire pit, and it's great. Okay, so let's back up. You want me to do the whole piece on non traditional aged students again?
Frank:
How much did we get? Speaker 3:
Up to the point, I mean, it's good. Al Powell:
Yeah, I can probably give you a cut here, think about where to pick it up. Frank:
The ones that I think really turned out well was non traditional, was single parent. Al Powell:
It's a good summation. Okay, so I'll pick it up after that. So when you're dealing with a non traditional aged student, who is probably fully employed, may have a family, and is trying to study at the same time they're working 40 hours a week, that's where online and distance education comes in. And distance education anymore, kind of means online, because that's the medium where all of the other media, audio, video, pictures, texts, have met. And that person has the ability to work during the day, take care of their family, time shift, study at nights, on weekends, deal with assignments, and this is an option that didn't exist 25 years ago, other than correspondence study. So now, with online, you also gain the ability, unlike correspondence, to intersect with another human being. You can ask questions online, you can talk to other students in the class, you can interact with the instructor. That's unique to the immediacy of the online platform.
Frank: Very good. Speaker 3:
[inaudible 01:02:43] Al Powell:
I gave you a stop at the end of that sound, but I think my voice covered that sound. Frank:
So, why CSU? Speaker 3:
[inaudible 01:02:59] Al Powell:
That's all right, you can clarify a little bit, why CSU in terms of continuing ed, or in terms of why I'm here,
or-Frank:
Yeah, why should a parent bring ... Al Powell:
Oh, okay. Okay, I have a good answer for that. It's even repeatable in public. Frank:
Go ahead. Al Powell:
So, if I ask the question, why Colorado State, I got a couple of stories. The first story is one that applies to more than one university. I've been at three major land grant universities, in Washington, Texas, and Colorado, and within a year of the time that I started at that university, at every place, somebody walked up to me and essentially said, you know, I went to that other public university, the big name one in the state, and they didn't have time for me, and I came to you guys, the land grant, and your response was, what do you need, and how can we help. That's the land grant university ethos in one phrase. And Colorado State University has that, they have that thing. This is a quality institution.
Al Powell:
I like the character of Colorado State. Now I like the character of land grant universities in general, I've made my career in them, but there's something about the fact that land grants know their job is not just to educate people, their job is to educate the whole state. They have extension. They're operating at every country of the state. They feel a responsibility to every county in the state. They feel a
responsibility to reach out and find a way for every person in that state to contact the university, Colorado State in this case, and get something from the university. We're here to benefit the state, not just the students who are on campus, and that matters to me.
Speaker 3: That's awesome. Al Powell: How's that? Speaker 3: That was great.
Speaker 4:
You're a professional broadcaster. Al Powell:
I was telling Frank, I used to work with a guy who was an AG economist, but he was also the athletic rep to the NCAA for Washington State, and I'd interview him, and he'd give me an answer, and then say, do you need it shorter, do you need 20 seconds, do you need 30 seconds. He was really good. I've always admired that.
Frank:
I've got one more. You're about to retire. Give me a review, if you will, or reminisce, what was your experience at CSU, now that you're about to leave?
Al Powell:
It's been an interesting almost 21 years at Colorado State University. When I came in, we had our first three online courses, and my job was to build online courses. Today, Colorado State University Online, is roughly a 40 million dollar operation. That's not bad for a little over 20 years. The base that we built has grown well, it's had some fantastic people running it. We've moved from basically correspondence study plus VHS tape, to online delivery, to video on demand, to web conferencing, to lecture capture, to students having a real chance to access the university. And the interesting thing is, that every medium has kind of built on the one in front of it, and I've reflected on the fact that the only medium that I know of, that's ever fallen out of use, is film strips.
Al Powell:
Radio is still here, television is still here, text is still here, audio and video and radio and television are still here. Now we have online, and it combines a lot of those features, but it's still a distinct medium. I've gotten to play in all of them, and if I tell you what I love the most, I still love doing live radio, with no safety net, better than anything, because I like talking. But I feel really good when we produce a nice piece of media, that helps people learn an idea, or learn a concept, and be able to do something they couldn't do before. So, I've watched the media shift all from analog, to all to digital, essentially, and it's funny that if you don't look for the difference, in many ways you can't tell.
Speaker 3: Great. Speaker 4:
That was so awesome. Speaker 3:
[crosstalk 01:07:39] That's fine. Frank:
I think we got it. Speaker 3:
You can hear a little bit, but it's not ... you're focused on what he said. Speaker 4:
Wow, yeah. Frank:
That was fabulous. Al Powell:
Thank you. Speaker 3:
Room tone. You want a room tone? [crosstalk 01:07:51] Al Powell:
Yeah, we can do one. I'm a victim of circumstance. Speaker 3:
All right, do a room tone. Al Powell:
I mean, if you want to do anything else I'm here, so ... Speaker 3:
Do a room tone. Al Powell:
I put my phone on do not disturb until 10:30, so it was probably my phone, because it's 10:35. Speaker 3:
I thought it was mine, so. Frank:
Ah, I knew this was going to be good.
