Wisdom & Wizardry: Celebrating the Pioneers of Online Education1
Edited by Linda Harasim
Murray Turoff, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor, Computer and Information Science
New Jersey Institute of Technology
University Heights – Room 4106 GITC
Newark, NJ USA 07102
Email: murray@vc.njit.edu
Web Site: http://www,njit.edu/CCCC/
Education
B. A., Mathematics and Physics, University of California at Berkley
Ph.D., Physics, Brandies University
Appointments & Positions
Distinguished Professor, Computer & Information Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Professor of Management, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Member of the Faculty, Rutgers Graduate School of Management
Program Director, CIS concentration in Ph.D. Management Rutgers Graduate School of
Management
Program Director, Master’s and Ph.D. in Information Systems, Rutgers Graduate School of
Management
Professional and Research Areas
Information Systems, Computer Mediated Communications Systems, Delphi Design, Policy
Analysis, Planning Methodologies, Interface Design, Systems Evaluation, Technological
Forecasting & Assessment, Collaborative Systems and Group Decision Support systems, Office
Automation, Management Information Systems, Social Impacts of Computer & Information
Systems, Management of Information Systems
Notable Major Accomplishments
For over three decades, Turoff has researched the use of computers to aid and facilitate human
communications. Credited as “the father of conferencing”, he designed the first computer conferencing
system while working in the executive offices of the President of the United States in 1970.
The Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) has a long and rich history dating back to 1974
when Dr. Murray Turoff first came to NJIT from the President’s Office of Emergency Preparedness
(OEP). There he had developed the first computer conferencing system, EMISARY, for crisis
management and strategic planning. He brought to NJIT the dream of developing and evaluating
Computer Mediated Communication technology to facilitate group decisions so that groups might act
with their collective intelligence instead of the lowest common denominator. EIES was developed at
NJIT’s Computer Conferencing and Communication Center (CCCC), where the current EIES work
continues. With funding from the National Science Foundation, the original EIES utility was online in
1976.
In 1994, Turoff, along with Starr Roxanne Hiltz, received the “Pioneer Award” from the Electronic
Frontier Foundation for their “significant and influential contributions to computer-based
communications and to the empowerment of individuals in using computers”.
1 Turoff,
M. (1999). The Question Determines the Answer! An Historical Perspective. In L. Harasim (Ed.), Wisdom &
Wizardry: Celebrating the Pioneers of Online Education (pp 37-41). Vancouver, Canada: The Telelearning Network of
Centres of Excellence Commemorative Booklet.
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Murray Turoff – His Story in His Own Words
The Question Determines the Answer! An Historical Perspective
Today critics ask whether the distance student is being mistreated because he or she does not
have the same learning opportunities as the student in the face-to-face class. I prefer to ask
whether we are not mistreating the face-to-face student when we don’t provide the same group
communications technology that we provide to the distance student! When you get into the area
of distance education by the same path I did, this is an obvious and meaningful question to ask
and to answer.
In the early 1970’s, the research group I direct at NJIT started an R&D program in the area of
Computer Mediated Communications, conceived as the use of computers to facilitate group
communications by tailoring the communication structure and protocol to fit the nature of both the
application and the group. Our first effort, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was
dedicated to the study of scientific communications and the working of “invisible colleges” or
research communities. We also were looking at decision support applications and the use of the
technology to facilitate project groups developing software. In 1976, we went online across the
nation with the first version of EIES, the Electronic Information Exchange System. We were using
Telenet as well as Arpanet and grew our user population to many hundreds of professional users
in a short space of time. By the mid eighties, we had a few thousand users on one system.
Because we had the technology in operation, a few of us who were involved with the research
decided to use it to improve communications with our face-to-face classes. Much to our
amazement, we found that the technology allowed is to have insightful, reflective and fascinating
discussions with our classes that had never been possible in the face-to-face classroom. We
were teaching technical courses in the areas of Computer Science and Information Systems.
There was always so much to cover in lectures that very little discussion time was available.
Furthermore, it was always the same small percentage of the class that spoke up. Even though
these are technical courses, there is a great deal of pragmatic content in many of the upper
division and graduate courses that deal with design tradeoffs. We found that when every student
had a chance to reflect on their views and to compose their thoughts, the resulting discussions
were fairly equally distributed.
Given the opportunity a number of us began to try some innovations. For example, in a number of
my courses, I began to give assignments that required that they share their work with the class as
a whole, and quickly discovered that showing their work to their fellow students was a far greater
motivation to do good work than having to show their work just to their professor. Also, I tried a
number of times to have the student rank order the quality of the other students’ work and found
that the rank orders done by the students were fairly consistent with my actual grading. This is
still an area which deserves some formal experimentation. I also began to note that the exposure
to each other’s work greatly reduced the number of complaints about individual grading. NJIT is
largely a commuting college with a large number of students from blue collar families and also a
large number of foreign students. Both groups have a great deal of concern with grades as a
college education in a technical field is their ticket to a better life. Today it is common practice for
most of my design assignments to encourage the students to critique each others projects and I
allow a period of time after such critiques where the students may finalize their design before I
actually determine a final grade.
There are a great many methods of collaboration, which are based upon individual activities
rather than team projects. My favorite is the exam composition assignment which I do a few
weeks before a real midterm or final. Each student must suggest a question that could be on the
exam and they have a past year exam as a guide to the type of questions I use. After supplying a
question, they must find a question that has not yet been answered and then answer it. Finally,
the person creating the question must grade it. I only step in if the original question has too much
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ambiguity or is not reasonable in its degree of difficulty and if there is something wrong with the
student’s attempt to grade the answer. I promise to use two of these questions on the exam. In
this collaboration exercise, the students have carefully studied some 30 or so questions that are
usually on the tough side and one can almost, but not quite, ask if the exam becomes the
exercise of secondary importance.
We had quite a bit of ability to tailor communications in the early version of EIES since it had
been built as a CMC system designed to experiment with alternative communication structures.
One common brainstorming exercise requires everyone to write down their suggestions before
they are all put up on a blackboard. This was implemented as a question answer facility which
required the individual student to answer the discussion question before being able to see the
other entries of the students until they had responded. Those who had answered could then start
discussing each others responses. While we implemented a great number of features to tailor
what we coined in the mid 80’s to be the “Virtual Classroom™”, this one feature has proven to be
the most useful for all types of courses. It is ironic that with the hundreds of systems that have
been implemented recently to deliver remote education, none of them bothered to review the past
sufficiently to realize how useful such a feature is for a learning community and put it in their
system. About all that current systems offer is a discussion thread and even some of them restrict
a person to be able to only view one contribution at a time which makes it cognitively impossible
to generate or understand the sort of complex discussions one would hope to see occurring in a
learning community. Only a few, for example, offer the use of anonymity or pen names.
It is amusing that now that the use of group communications technology for distance education
has become popular, not only has the NJIT trademark been violated repeatedly but there have
even been articles written in such places as the Chronicle of Higher Education implying that NJIT
had no right to trademark such a popular concept. It was the first institution to develop software
tailored to teaching and learning through CMC and then to commit to delivering college credit
courses through group communications, and there is no doubt of that historical fact. Consider that
when we started our field trial experiments with real students, there were faculty at NJIT and
other involved institutions who tried to forbid the experiment because they feared it would mistreat
students and lower educational standards. It was a brave decision in the mid 80’s for NJIT to not
only allow us to proceed, but to encourage our efforts with substantial matches for our research
grants and contracts.
Considering some of the positions taken recently in the press by some academics, this negativity
has not changed much in the past 15 years. When I had the unique opportunity to build the first
group communication system in 1969, a lot of people said using the computer for group
communications was cold and impersonal and would never succeed in replacing face-to-face
group meetings. Today the same exact thing is being said about learning networks relative to
face-to-face classes. However, today it will become a matter of economic survival for those
universities who listen to the nay sayers and choose to ignore what is taking place. The revolution
in learning that is taking place has become sufficiently entrenched by demand from students for
this option, that it can no longer be stopped.
I will concede that probably the majority of the courses offered on the web today are automations
of the correspondence course with materials on the Web and electronic mail between a grader
and the student being the only form of communications. I will even agree that this form of
education is going to be significantly inferior to the classroom except for the occasional student
that is a highly talented self learner. However, we are beginning to see student consumerism and
those distance students who have experienced collaboratively oriented classes are unwilling to
go back to the correspondence course if they have the option. Also, the regular students, which
are the majority of those taking the collaborative distance courses, perceive no lack of quality
over face-to-face.
In the early 80’s, we became so enamored with what we had accomplished with face-to-face
classes that we sought funds to conduct some formal evaluation studies that would prove what
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we felt in our hearts about the tremendous increase in learning that was occurring with our
students. We observed the phenomena of learning communities and groups that functioned very
much like law school study groups but now could be formed by groups that could never meet
outside of class because of work and family commitments. We had a very disappointing two or
three years which were particularly difficult for my coworker, Roxanne Hiltz, who wanted to be
able to do the sort of evaluation studies she felt were specifically needed to counter the reactions
we were getting from all sides.
Basically no one would believe that anything was needed to improve the face-to-face class and
that the way the witchdoctor educated the tribe around the campfire every night was still the best
we could do. Well maybe the blackboard was a slight technical innovation to replace drawing
things in the dirt. What was ironic was that we finally found a source of funds for conducting
meaningful evaluation studies but what the sponsor was interested in was distance education.
Our effort became one of a number of that were comparing different distance forms of delivery.
However, NJIT had no real college credit distance program in the mid 80’s but only a training
program, so we had the fortunate circumstance to be able to use regular students who normally
take face-to-face classes. We both agreed that this was a tougher test for comparative evaluation
studies than taking students used to correspondence courses, where anything with better
communications than the post office would be likely considered a vast improvement.
There is a long history in the computer field that some of the most successful systems were
designed when a technical oriented designer works together with a social scientist. The JOSS
system at RAND and the Culler-Freid System at UC in the early days were such examples. What
is not understood by those who have not lived through such a joint undertaking is that the
participants start to reverse roles. In working with Roxanne, I learned how difficult and challenging
it is to try to prove anything where the behavior of humans is involved. It takes all the talent of
those in the “hard” sciences and then some to accomplish this. In the natural sciences the apple
always falls down so that experiments are a lot easier to do. In the social sciences some subjects
may decide to juggle the apples rather than allow them to fall. Laws of human nature have to be
far more complex than those of physical nature to explain a situation of equal complexity.
Over the years the relative roles of designer and evaluator have become confused and each
strives to master the other’s area. As a consequence of the resulting synergies I have come to
realize that the design of a group communication system is the task of designing a social system.
There is no application where there is truer than that of learning. The ultimate goal of future
learning systems will be to raise the ability to design the social structure to a level where it can be
placed in the hands of the instructor. Trying to arrive at the primitive structures for group
communications so that future instructors can have the tools they need to facilitate the process is
still a worthy future challenge.
It is a fact today that distance education delivered with a decent group communications systems
by an instructor using collaborative learning methodologies can in fact provide a college
education as good and maybe even better than can be obtained in a face-to-face class. The
evidence for this in our early studies is being confirmed with massive amounts of data emerging
from many large university institutions taking this approach in their delivery mode. It is amusing
that there are a lot of very vocal academics that are highly critical of what is happening but who
refuse to distinguish the different modes of delivery for distance education and who besides
denying the existence of the evidence on collaborative learning want to claim that all face-to-face
classes, even with 1000 students in a large lecture hall, have got to be better. The scientific
process of evidence has disappeared from the public debate that these individuals are fostering.
What is almost laughable are those that insist there is a lack of emotional and social content
necessary to motivating students. I think these critics should be forced to sit through “You have
mail!” if they refuse to look at the evidence or even to observe what happens in a real
collaborative class.
However, and here is a very important punch line that emerges from this historical perspective:
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Face-to-face classes can be improved greatly by the introduction of group
communications as an integral part of the class.
In fact, the distance students and the face-to-face student can be in the same Virtual
Classroom™ and the only difference becomes the method by which the lectures are delivered.
Most real and important discussion occurs on line and distance and face-to-face students do the
same assignments, meet the same deadlines and work in integrated collaborative groups. They
make friends and form networks that will last their lifetime.
So my hope for the future is that there will no longer be any need to even recognize a difference
between these two types of students, but rather students could decide when they want a course
distance or a face-to-face one, according to their individual schedules and times. Until this can be
brought about, it is not the distance education student who is suffering but rather the traditional
student!
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