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with communication with the tutor‘ as the main factor that accounted for the difference between continuing and withdrawn distance learners.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.