Genre theory, engineering education, and circumventing internet bandwidth problems

A growing body of empirical research has implied that media seem to make little difference in education. In contrast, in the article "Distance Education Horror Stories Worthy of Halloween", David Hailey et al. (2001) argue that Internet-based education can be dangerous to the point that it can "sometimes threaten a teacher\´s career". Although this might seem troublesome for researchers who maintain that media makes no difference, we believe that it points to a different issue. The problems we found stem from genre rather than media choices. The point in this paper is that while media choices may matter little, genre choices are critical-substituting an essay for a lecture or an instruction set for a demonstration can have pedagogical consequences that can improve or disrupt learning. We further argue that the key to effectively converting traditional instruction to digital instruction is to have access to sufficient bandwidth. While it is possible in some cases to stream sound and video over the Internet, resolution is low and results are unpredictable. Distributing removable hard drives, however, permits an alternative. External drives, ranging from 10 GB to 150 GB, make it possible to provide students with all 48 hours of "chalk talk" typically found in a 16 week course in 640×480 or higher resolution video, plus additional hours of demonstration video, 3-D game technologies, 3-D animation, interactive testing, and record keeping. In this environment, the Internet is used for interactive communication and for file transfer, while the drives are used for distributing high bandwidth content. We have tested new educational processes employing these technologies at Utah State University and the University of Texas at Tyler and have found them to effectively solve the most important problems engineering educators face when attempting to teach over a distance.