"Distance learning," says Rick Falk, is what happens to students beyond the third row in a large lecture hall. On the other hand, his online Biology 10 class provides a front-row experience for each and every student, Falk says. Working through the Web and e-mail interactions, his 200 students create one-on-one relationships with him, the teaching assistants and fellow classmates. Just as important, because the students are induced by the class structure to be active learners, they get more out of it than if they were sitting beyond that third row, anonymously scribbling notes. That is the hypothesis that Falk, a teacher for 32 years, and a group of Web-savvy professors are testing in 10 courses with the help of a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Biochemistry professor Harry Matthews, who is principal investigator for the grant, says it will allow UC Davis to discover whether Web-based classes are a key to educating the Tidal Wave II students over the next decade. It should also answer whether online instruction is more cost-effective than constructing new classroom buildings or -- as a third alternative -- doing neither and having students take a longer time to graduate. Two psychologists, Barbara Sommer of the Teaching Resources Center and Curt Acredolo from the human and community development department, will evaluate the qualitative and quantitative differences that students and instructors experience in the two modes. "My motivation is simply intellectual curiosity: is online education better teaching?" admits Sommer. Michael Maher, a professor of management, and Ian Blake, an analyst in the Planning and Budget Office, are examining the differences in institutional costs. The question of how students use the on-line materials in the learning process will be studied by Michael Gertz, a professor from computer science. Matthews' job has been to find faculty members willing to be guinea pigs. He will provide them the human and technological resources needed to convert 10 weeks of lectures into an online course. Matthews, who chairs the campus Academic Computing Coordinating Council, also will lead the work of publishing the results of the Mellon study. Falk, an old hand at using the Web for teaching, is lending his class -- the only Academic Senate-approved World Wide Web virtual lecture course in the curriculum -- to be used by Sommer and Acredolo to develop their evaluation tools this spring. A Web transformation Over the next two years, a handful of heavily impacted classes will be transformed into Web-based classes. Students will have a choice of going to the classroom, staying home and logging on at their leisure, or combining both experiences. Participating instructors and their classes include Falk with Bio 10; Gerry Russell with an introductory class in food science and technology; Dick Walters with a beginning computer science course; political scientist Geoffrey Wandesford-Smith with an environmental law course; anthropologist Sandy Harcourt with an evolutionary biology course; and Emilio Laca, of agronomy and range science, with a basic computer course that serves as a survey course for the entire College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Two kinds of institutional expenses -- time and money -- will be examined in the study. The instructors participating in the study next fall will be asked to keep daily track of their time working on Web teaching, the traditional classroom preparation and miscellaneous teaching duties that are necessary in any mode. Maher and Blake will analyze this parameter as well as the differences in costs among bricks and mortar; software, hardware and wiring; and a longer time to degree. Sommer and Acredolo will create a baseline by gathering the student evaluations of the traditional large lecture classes such as Harcourt's Anthropology 15, a class about evolutionary biology of the human life cycle. Harcourt's students will be asked what they think of the instructor, the teaching assistants, the extent of their learning and the control they have over their learning. In addition, Acredolo and Sommer will ask Harcourt for his measurements of successful teaching and apply them against the traditional lecture class and, eventually, the new Web-based class. "What we assess will be what the instructor wants us to assess," Sommer said. Harcourt has high expectations for boosting his students' learning through a Web-based program. "When I stand up in class, they have me talking to them for three hours a week, and they get from me only what I give them in the lectures and what's in the textbooks," he says. "I hope that an interesting Web site will encourage them to explore on their own, spend more time on the course and get more out of it." Database is key Knowing that many professors shy away from Web-based instruction because of an insecurity about the technology as well as a lack of time, Matthews came up with a solution: deconstruct lectures into components such as text documents, graphics including Microsoft PowerPoint files, self-test questions, and other media and services. He stores the components in a database and uses another software program to reconstruct the learning experience in the form of interactive Web pages. "Instead of building hundreds or thousands of Web pages for a course, the database allows you to build a dozen templates that are used to build Web pages on demand using the information stored in the database," Matthews says. "The environment can be rich because many different types of media can be mixed at will. This approach is also the only practical way to build a course Web site that can be maintained and developed incrementally." He believes that Web teaching can address the issue of quality, but instructors need to exploit the strengths of the computer and Internet. "The richness concept is critical to those of us who are interested in quality in education, not just access at any price. We know, for example, that videotaped lectures on their own are a second-rate solution. We knew that 20 years ago with TV -- why should it be any different now that the computer gives us smaller, jerkier, video?" Matthews says. Computer advantages The computer has many advantages, such as showing the time-sequences in a process, emitting sound or depicting a three-dimensional structure that rotates. Students can stretch beyond what's available in a lecture or textbook by taking linked side trips to more detailed explanations -- and they can do it in their own time. Falk believes one of the biggest advantages in using the Web is better communication. Online Listserv discussions can be more lively and stimulating than those in a classroom, and the format offers a structure for the instructor and students to talk about what is being learned. "The students view e-mail as an anonymous endeavor, but in fact, it isn't," he says. He has found that female students, in particular, blossom online. In the past it has been typical for Falk to communicate with a core of 20 students in his 200-student Biology 10 -- the 10 most interested and 10 most in danger of flunking. Since he started his fully online course three years ago, Falk communicates back and forth by e-mail with each student several times a quarter regarding their online participation. "We will see, increasingly, more undergraduate teaching through distance learning," Falk predicts. "It costs $350 million to build a UC campus. With Tidal Wave II, we'll need a campus a year and California State University will have to build two campuses a year to keep up. That's just not in the cards."