Any given course, depending on its intellectual, scientific, and pedagogical needs, is permitted to vary this mix. Thus, surface mail and fax will only be used as a backup. Courses will have their own web site which gives students access to the syllabus, on-line lectures, assignments, topic chat rooms, lecture schedule, links to readings and resources, and links to videos, compact disks, audio tapes. Lectures presented on two way desk top video will be digitally recorded and made available to students via electronic means. Portions of the online lectures may be edited and retained for use in subsequent offerings of the course.
Instructors are free to deliver their courses in many different ways.
For example, an instructor could present some portion of the contact hours in a lecture format and use the two way desk top video as a form of seminar discussion to go over the materials or set key concepts in place and apply them. Or, the instructor may intersperse live two-way desk top video with video or audio cassette presentations of their own lecture material. Chat rooms can be used to establish a discussion group in which one person per week is given an assignment to report on and the rest of the class then comments on the presentation, or used as a free flowing mechanism to discuss course material and case studies. Project Assessment and its Future VCBE classes will be assessed by comparing students in VCBE with students at the Pullman campus taking courses in the traditional manner. Multivariate statistical analysis will be used to control for differences in measures not due to course pedagogy.