Maintaining Choice: Electronic University Education and Dive

3.2 distance learning

distance learning, where students do not attend a campus to study, dates back to pitman in the eighteenth century (lockmiller, 1996; pouloudi, et al., 1999). not withstanding pouloudi et al.’s point that distance learning should not be distant, it is literally distant in that students are geographically, and perhaps temporally, distributed and it is almost inevitably psychologically distant in that both the quality and quantity of staff-student interaction is less than when education is done synchronously, face-to-face. this is one of the primary reasons used to explain the high student dropout rate in distance education, compared with traditional education. for example, moore and thompson (1997) identified 'satisfaction with communication with the tutor' as the main factor that accounted for the difference between continuing and withdrawn distance learners. cuskelly, danaher and purnell (1997) found that students who had dropped out of distance courses felt isolated from their institution and from their peers and had little opportunity for direct contact with relevant others. these students claimed that they had not developed a sense of belonging to the institution and that extra forms of communication were needed both to maintain motivation and to develop collegiality with other students. the motivating influence of lecturers and other students was also shown by taylor (1998) to be a key factor in the successful implementation of asynchronous electronic seminar discussions.

learning is a collaborative experience and, according to norman (1998), distance learning activities need to be guided by principled models of interaction. all people are excellent, heuristic psychologists in that by both genetic predisposition and from birth they live in an intensely social world of real time interactions with other people. perhaps the primary lesson to be appreciated of the research done in computer supported cooperative work (cscw) over the last decade is that people’s social skills do not readily transfer to the use of groupware, whether synchronous or asynchronous.

when groupware is used synchronously, it is of narrow bandwidth. the bandwidth concept is itself a complex one in that it covers many types of difference from the real world as perceived directly by people. while not irrelevant, it is certainly not merely something to do with screen resolution and channel synchronisation, although both need to be considerably improved in current groupware. it is not that people cannot adapt to narrow bandwidth communication, but that it is an adaptation. evidence for this comes from many years of studying people’s behaviour using telephones, where generally a restricted vocabulary, style, syntax, etc. is used and even those who are expert telephone users still generally prefer face-to-face interactions where they are possible. early research investigating the social psychology of telecommunications by short, williams and christie (1976) found that: (i) the perceived social presence of a media was correlated with its level of social influence; and (ii) that some tasks were more sensitive to the medium of communication than others. on a similar theme, rutter (1984) related perceived psychological distance of media to differences in style, content and outcome of interaction. he found that fewer social cues resulted in a more depersonalised and task-oriented discussion content, a less spontaneous style, and a less successful outcome. these research findings can be directly related to distance education as they suggest that academics (as the main source of influence in the learning experience) may be more or less influential depending on the media and type of learning task.

while asynchronous groupware, such as email and bulletin boards, is not an ideal, total replacement for face-to-face interaction between staff and students, it can certainly augment the teaching and learning process. on the positive side, email allows flexible communication and time for critical reflection. another benefit is that email allows some individuals to be more 'vocal' than they would otherwise be face-to-face (taylor, 1998). one limitation of asynchronous communication is that it relies on skills that need to be especially developed; a simple example is how dissatisfied most people are with using telephone answering machines. more obviously, very few people really master the art of writing, for any media or audience. email, for example, has different conventions from other written media and suffers different problems, such as flaming (sharples, 1993). in addition, in comparison with speech, writing is very slow and, perhaps because it is not ephemeral like speech, requiresfar more care, even in its most casual usage, particularly to people who are unknown to the author (pemberton and shurville, 2000).

to do distance learning well, it is therefore necessary to have an understanding of both computer-mediated communication and modern learning theories. matravers (1999), describes the evolution of learning theories from the 1950s, based on a skinnerian behavourist model, through the cognitive theories of the 1960s, to the more recent constructivist and socio-constructivist theories which ground learning in its complete, rich environments of both acquisition and usage. needless to say, most academics have little or no understanding of such theories and their practical, pedagogic consequences. nor do most academics involved in face-to-face teaching really need to understand these theories as their expert social skills are already in place and highly practised since birth.

distance learning materials are extremely expensive to prepare in comparison with the time and effort undertaken by academic staff in traditional, campus based universities. kaye (1993) provides an example of a single ou unit requiring: 3,000 pages of printed material; 16 half hour television programmes; 9 hours of audio recordings; and 12 diskettes of software. the preparation of such materials for an ou unit typically takes a team between 18 and 36 months to prepare in a tightly managed process. even with all this effort, the ou does not provide complete distance learning degree programmes. instead, students are supported by a network of tutors who they see and speak with by phone on a regular basis and in many programmes there are also summer schools that students attend.

3.3 distributed staff

most current proposals for developing e-universities involve the collaboration of a number of universities and, commonly, some collaboration with relevant industries. at present, academics involved in these developments are thus within a university environment and get the benefits of daily, intellectually rich contacts with their colleagues within their own institution. during this development stage, the many, well known problems of geographically and temporally distributed collaborative working will have to be faced (mitchell, 1998). in the future, if an e-university is successful, the issue will arise as to where staff who only work for the e-university will be based.

the current state of cscw is that there are a large number of problems recognised and that most of these are not solved with currently available groupware. indeed, few are solved by commercially available groupware such as lotus notes (lloyd and whitehead, 1996) and the groupware research platforms tend to focus on solving only some difficulties. many of the problems in cscw are not technological, but as identified earlier (section 3.2) are social-psychological and are far from fully understood. mahar, et al. (2000), for example, illustrate well the difficulty of collaborative working in just one area, that of architectural design, and even though they are using sophisticated virtual design studios, this groupware fails to support fully the management of the distributed collaborative work. thus even during e-university development, the distribution of those working on it is likely to add an overhead, at least causing inefficiency and perhaps a loss of quality, if not a complete failure to deliver.

quite separate from the potential, negative effects of one or a very few global, e-universities on students, is the effect on academics. only a very few academics will be involved in the preparation of an e-university’s distance learning materials, but as noted above, an e-university will still require many staff to act in a range of tutorial capacities, dealing with students on a one-to-one or small group basis. this army of academic staff will inevitably be de-skilled as they lose their involvement in the preparation of teaching materials (cuban, 1994; helm, 1997). they are likely to suffer de-skilling of several sorts: first, with respect to some aspects of teaching students and second, with respect to their own intellectual development. examples of how teaching and research can synergistically combine (e.g. as in section 2.2) will be less frequent, if not entirely absent where academics do not take primary responsibility for what they teach as they are far less likely to be critical. the long-term consequence of this is again likely to lead to a diminution in diversity within the very people responsible for progressing the development of human knowledge.

apart from the effects of standardisation itself, another negative aspect to e-universities is that there will be a loss of flexibility in teaching. most academics in traditional universities up-date their lecture material regularly, if not always annually. in contrast, the ou tends to work on a cycle of some five years for course revision. e-universities are likely to have even higher course development costs so they may work on a cycle that is even longer. in many, if not most, areas of academe, even five years is a long time in comparison to current rates of progress.

those who are promoting the e-university concept do not seem to have looked to the future where staff who work for a successful one might work full time for it and thus not be part of a traditional, campus based university. where would such staff work and what administrative support, if any, would be provided? one problem, of many, is that if academics work from home then they will be isolated. while this may suit some people, they are probably in a minority; gans (1994) goes as far to say that face-to-face social interaction is actually necessary for one's physical and mental health and happiness. even though many academics are intellectually aggressive, and in some cases personally so as well, many would argue that, at least the former, is a necessary requirement of first class academic work. the often-heated arguments between academics is a socratic method of working on problems. there are, of course, many more positive types of interaction between academic staff who see each other regularly, both formally and in all sorts of informal encounters. particularly as academic work becomes more interdisciplinary, such face-to-face interactions between colleagues become not only important for the synergy that is created, but also becomes more unpredictable. for example, a computer scientist working on advanced, intelligent agent networks might conceivably “bump into” an entomologist working on ant colonies and realise that, perhaps, ant behaviour provides a suitable metaphor of how artificial agents might be deployed and how they might communicate between themselves and with their source. such chance encounters will be rarer, if they happen at all, if staff are isolated.

4. electronic lectures

this paper argues: (a) that even if developed successfully, complete, global e-universities are some considerable way in the future; and (b) that traditional, campus based universities are desirable and will survive. the latter view, however, recognises that there is still a pedagogic role for using the new computer technologies, albeit in a more cautious manner than proposed by the e-universities’ supporters.

at present, most educational uses of the technology have centred on the use of the world wide web (w3) and resemble w3 sites used for advertising and e-commerce. the w3 is basically a hypertext system in which multimedia documents can be read in a non-linear way by the user following pre-set hyperlinks. given that students can be directed to the appropriate w3 documents, then, apart from issues of document distribution, the main advantage of this usage must lie in exploiting the non-linear properties of hypertext. n.b. there are other advantages to using computer technology for teaching, such as using animated graphics and virtual reality to facilitate visualisation, but these sorts of application augment the presentation of material to students, rather than replacing them, i.e. they are effectiveness rather than efficiency promoters. the difference between hypertext systems and cal/i systems that have an ai component such as a knowledge based system (kbs) is one of functional allocation, i.e. what tasks are done by the user and by the computer. diaper and beer (1990) suggest that both hypertext and kbs based approaches can be formally modelled using graph theory and the difference is whether link traversal is initiated by human or machine. the problem with hypertext systems is that, even before the invention of the w3, it was demonstrated that undirected browsing of educational material presented as hypertext was less effective than when students are guided through the material (e.g. hammond and allinson, 1989).

diaper (2000a) proposes that his e-lecture approach can provide a means to guide students through educational material that is weakly structured as hypertext, i.e. where the material is primarily linear, but where additional material can be accessed in a non-linear fashion by students. an e-lecture is based on a traditional lecture and may even use video clips taken from lectures actually delivered to students. once produced, students “attend” an e-lecture by viewing it on a computer. e-lectures can be delivered by cd-rom, dvd, intranet or the w3, although the current size of digital video files makes network transmission expensive; this situation is expected to improve within a few years.

e-lectures are intended to replace traditional lectures while leaving the other teaching approaches, such as seminars, tutorials and practicals, still in place. thus, the lecturer is able to use motivational techniques during these other contact times, thereby limiting the opportunity for students to become disillusioned and dropout, which is a prevalent problem with distance learning (section 3.2). e-lectures have an advantage, even in the universities of the wealthy nations, in that they do not require the use of large lecture theatres, which are an expensive resource and which, with the recent expansions in student numbers, have been under severe pressure in many universities.

diaper’s design of e-lectures is one that is easy for most academics to follow without any great understanding of either computer technology or modern learning theories (section 3.2). the aim is that they can be prepared by existing lecturing staff with little additional effort over what they currently have to do when preparing their lectures. it is also intended that, once an initial e-lecture is produced, it will be easy to subsequently up-date so that e-lectures can remain far more timely than traditionally prepared distance learning materials. it can be expected that lecturers will start by preparing e-lectures on topics in which they are particularly expert.

the goal for a few years time is that there will be developed large numbers of e-lectures, by many different academics. diaper proposes that these could be held in repositories managed by professionals such as publishers, professional societies or by new companies. this would facilitate consistency, allow quality assurance and would not require users to search the anarchic w3 for them.

to prepare a unit in a degree programme for delivery to students, academics will be able to choose a set of e-lectures from an e-lecture repository that suits the requirements of their programme and the needs of their students. this approach thus retains the flexibility of the current situation where each lecturer prepares their own lecturing materials while removing the considerable cost of actually doing the preparation and presentation. the approach should also improve overall quality as nearly all lecturing staff at times give undergraduate lectures on topics which they are not entirely expert. in the less well resourced parts of the world (section 2), this improvement in quality may be considerable. academics will still have control over what lecture material is presented to their students and will continue to engage with their students in tutorials, seminars and so forth. initially, e-lectures can be introduced piecemeal, replacing just a few lectures until there is sufficient choice in the repositories. there is no reason, of course, why e-lectures may not also be adopted for distance learning programmes and by any future e-universities.

4.1 preparing an e-lecture

the first e-lecture prepared at bournemouth university was not for students but for the delegates at the is2000 conference in japan, which the second author could not attend (diaper, 2000a). presented as if the author was present at the conference, the e-lecture lasts about 23 minutes and is entirely linear, i.e. its potential hypertext links to associated documents, more extended commentaries, and so forth were not enabled.

the e-lecture was delivered to japan on cd-rom and the necessary files occupied only a third of the cd’s capacity (214mbytes out of a standard capacity of 650mbytes). the presentation environment was microsoft powerpoint which is probably the most widely used software for preparing lecturing materials, whether as over head projection (ohp) foils, 35mm slides, or for projection from a computer. once processed through powerpoint’s “pack and go” facility (under the “file” menu), the e-lecture will run on most pcs under either the windows or nt operating systems; there are still, at present, some difficulties with porting it to the mac platform. some pcs do have difficulty with the transmission rate between cd-rom and ram, but these run-time problems disappear if the files are loaded into the pc’s hard disc first. importantly, the powerpoint reader is freeware and can be loaded over the w3. whether powerpoint is the ideal delivery software vehicle is not clear and will depend on further research on other options, the development of the e-lecture market, and the development of new software facilities that are anticipated over the next few years. developing an initial e-lecture in powerpoint, however, does demonstrate the feasibility of the e-lecture concept. figure 1 shows an ohp foil from the is2000 e-lecture.