In the fall of 2003, Dr. Bruce Robertson was supposed to teach his Principles of Marketing course to 300 SF State students in a rented movie theater at the Stonestown Mall.

Everything was set for the class to begin, but one week before the start of class Robertson found out that the contract to use the only room near campus big enough to accommodate his class had been cancelled.

So, in one week, he and staffers from an administrative department then called Center for the Enhancement of Teaching huddled in a “hurried conference” to design a new classroom, a hybrid online/offline course that took away physical space limitations and blew off conventional pedagogical wisdom, Robertson said.

Now, four years later, Robertson teaches the same course to 1,350 students without breaking a sweat. Registered students across more than 40 majors are invited to sit in a 150-seat auditorium to watch him lecture, though most don’t. The lecture is captured by a camera and archived through iLearn, SF State's primary Learning Management System. Students can access them and other learning activities whenever they want.

“As far as we know there is no limit,” he said. “There is unlimited capacity for this class and you don’t have to be in a classroom at any time so it’s kind of a student’s dream.”

Leaders of Academic Technology, the administrative department in charge of overseeing the integration of technology into teaching and learning, all have understood the limitations that come with traditional classrooms and teaching tools.

“There is a blurring between what is a classroom and what is virtual and it has led to this,” said Dr. Maggie Beers, the new director of Academic Technology.

When new technologies began to be integrated in the teaching and learning process in the late ’90s, the changes were being enacted under the supervision of the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching. By 2005, the project was split into two, Beers said. A center for Teaching and Faculty Development was founded to deal with the “holistic, human side of teaching,” she said, and to accommodate the expanding future, the Academic Technology unit was created by merging the online teaching department with the audiovisual section. Today, it has grown to employ 40 staffers and 50 student assistants who are constantly shaping and assisting the changes.

Their work has enhanced 150 classrooms throughout SF State with stations to project lesson plans and lecture outlines from their laptops. They linked classroom TVs to a database so instructors can call up videos and have them wired up to their classrooms, using landline telephones as remote controls. They replaced the Blackboard online teaching tool with iLearn, a free, open-source program that could, they say, one day free up teachers and students of the burden of restricting to time and space.

Together, they have done everything necessary to “support the integration of technology into teaching and learning at SF State, in both the physical and virtual environment,” Beers told the Academic Senate on September 11. After two months on the job, she gave the policymaking board an overview of what the Academic Technology has accomplished and what it aims to do.

SF state has put itself in an enviable place within the state, becoming a leader in the academic technology change, according to Kevin Kelly, the online teaching and learning coordinator for Academic Technology.

Kelly estimates that 20,000 to 25,000 SF State students use iLearn; he believes it to be the largest student faction using the open source software in the United States, although British students are using it by the hundreds of thousands.

There’s another blackboard they are rethinking. Burke Hall 210 and 223 are two state of the art experimental classrooms in which wall-to-wall “smartboards” have been introduced, Beers said. The boards capture what students and faculty write and save it in digital format that is easily sent to students.

Changes have not been made blindly. In fall 2002, a faction of the CSU’s Academic Technology Planning Committee asked at least 100 students, instructors and staffers at each of seven campuses about their thoughts, ideas and worries regarding the use of technologies in classroom.

An aggregate of their answers, published in a March 2003 ATPC report, revealed that teachers saw few incentives in return for the time and energy it would take to change their curriculum to include the new tools.

‘‘Innovations in teaching, when it comes to tenure, are often not counted enough,” Beers said.

Students in the focus group also doubted that if they were to leap into a new computer-based era of instructor there would not be enough adequate computer labs and ‘smart’ classrooms or nearly enough tech support.

Beers’ presentation to the Academic Senate was one step in the creation of a concrete vision plan for Information Technology and AT. They are looking to make more drastic changes then have ever been made. The instant messaging feature of iLearn has enabled some teachers to expand office hours to times when they are not physically in their offices, Kelly said.

In order to give more teachers the incentive to follow suit, Beers is working within the Academic Senate to develop online policies that might, for example, enable instructors to count virtual office hours with their required meeting time with students.

The heads of SF State’s Academic Technology program are in a race to get a large slice of a pot of money the state has allocated to the modernizing efforts. This year, Cal State is spending $30 million, next year $60 million and $90 million the year after on Academic Technology.

In spring 2006, the Library took a leap forward with its Media Access Center by making laptops available for students to borrow free of charge. The center’s 50 PCs can now be checked out for four hours at a time with only an SF State ID—and a warning that lost laptops can cost up to $2,000 to replace.

With Robertson’s course, the designers also took the opportunity to rethink the way testing in online courses had always been done and targeted a well-known issue with it—that it invites students to keep an open book by the computer and cheat.

Eschewing bulky exams Robertson now administers 10-question tests in each of the 13 weeks of instruction, diluting the worth of each test. Additionally, he helped write a program that picks the 10 questions at random from a pool of 100 for each student, keeping them their toes.

The architects of the Academic Technology movement have also been careful to enact change only when it makes sense for the purpose of education.

“Our main mandate,” Kelly said, “is to serve students.”

“The technology makes it happen but the question is: does it pedagogically make sense?” Robertson said. It works for Principles of Marketing because it’s a class with a broad reach of uses but even the fan of Academic Technology realizes its limits.

“For classes that introduce concepts and theories, [the online/offline hybrid model] might be a good approach,” he said. “But, let’s face it, it is not the best way to teach students. It’s not the hands-on education where you mentor each student but it really is a cost-effective way to reach a lot of students.”

With the hybrid teaching method, there is no issue with instructors breaking school rules by over-enrolling classes. The CSU guidelines only say that conditions in the online course “can be no worse” than traditional classes—and the responses have been very good, Robertson said.

Relying on technology to educate the masses is not a low-risk enterprise, Robertson learned in spring 2003 when the computers that administer the final exams broke down in the final week of school. He found himself with 600 students suddenly switching to pen and paper.

But, when it works, the limitations are few. “There is no reason,” he said, that international students can’t take his hybrid course from China.