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Wayne Carlson

Posted: February 5, 2004

By Sally Hritz

Wayne Carlson is the chair of the department of Industrial, Interior and Visual Communication Design, but he retains a teaching connection with his students through a winter quarter graduate level course. Over the years he has evolved the course, A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation, from a standard lecture/classroom format to fully online mode. The progression happened because the course's subject matter and supporting materials required an appropriate medium for storing and viewing and the content lent itself to the latest digital technologies. But he also credits TELR with providing the extra resources needed to develop the course for web delivery.

While the professor's curriculum vitae reveals an emphasis on the math and sciences, it also affirms his need for artistic expression. His chosen medium is pixels, so he has comfortably combined the dual interests into the specialty of computer graphics and emerging technology in the arts. He's not only chair of his department but a professor of design technology and holds concurrent appointments in the departments of Art, Art Education and Computer and Information Science and at Ohio State's highly regarded Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD).

When he started his course five years ago, he stored the animation and graphics on videotapes, but soon found that medium "impossible" because of the large number of cassettes involved. The second year, he tried editing the material to a single stream of video running 8.5 hours, but the drawback was that students were not able to review the clips outside the classroom. By the third year, with the help of a TELR technology grant, Carlson hired a graduate student who digitized the video and moved it to DVD format. In the fourth year, he experimented with an online request format by placing the DVDs into a RAM drive environment for easier access.

Last year, he took the plunge into a fully online course by securing the help of a student assistant through the TELR Internship Program and moving the content to the WebCT course management environment. While he encountered a learning curve using the WebCT software, he said TELR personnel, including courseware specialist Tom Stone were an "immense help." He also secured another TELR technology grant for the development of learning objects, which he characterized as the heart of the course's current 26 modules, and made them fully accessible online, streamed from the WebCT server.

Carlson said he is "enamored of the web as a distribution medium" but was not fully prepared for the amount of time it took him to write and organize the material for online delivery. But now that he has most of the material online, he will be able to easily edit and update the digital content. He appreciates that "the material really lends itself to online presentation, and students can review it as much as needed," yet he regards this year's approach as an experiment. He will not stay with the entirely online format if he feels it isn't working. The class met in person only on the first day of the quarter, which he feels was necessary and important as a point of departure. He was pleased that the students started an active discussion group at the face-to-face session, which they are continuing solely online. This year he is also asking students to share a preliminary draft of their required research studies on computer animation with the rest of the class. "A research paper is influenced and impacted by what other students are doing," he noted. Class members can critique each other's works in the WebCT environment.

The course serves nearly as many diverse purposes as the 16 students enrolled. Many will become computer animators working in an art department, he said, and need to know the history and development of the software over the last 25 years. A few are design students interested in online presentation rather than material itself. Two CIS students want to write computer graphics software as a technical career track. A dance student is researching the encoding of human motion from a computer animation perspective, and one film student is studying the computer animation clips as short film subjects.

The final point Carlson made about the advantages of his online course is related to his association with ACM SIGGRAPH, the national computer graphics organization. He and other members of a "pioneers" subgroup are putting together an oral history of computer animation, and he said his course has made him the "point person" in completing the endeavor. "The modules from the learning objects grant are developing a framework for organizing the oral history," he said. "This particular course could end up being the definitive history of computer animation. There are no boundaries. Someone who wants to teach a course elsewhere can use our course and does not have to reinvent it. Anyone doing computer-aided design can pull in these modules and have a fairly concise history independent of their course. Or those interested only in animation or vice versa can access the material. It reaches beyond the university."