Using Technology to Team Teach across Institutions: The Circle Project

The Consortium Interactive Research on Collaborative Learning Environments (or CIRCLE) project, was designed to examine how the distance among remote universities can be bridged electronically and how this bridge can be used to develop truly collaborative learning with shared, distributed student and faculty responsibilities. Although the problem of “distance learning” based on the model of instructional television has been well-studied, the problem of collaborative distance learning, based on a design team model, poses new technological and psychological issues. The CIRCLE project was designed to develop a model of four-way instructional collaboration. A course offering across the four institutions suggests that although the students' learning is enhanced by exposure to multiple experts, teaching through technology does impose constraints on the learning environment that make it more difficult to acquire that expertise.