Maintaining Choice: Electronic University Education and Dive
Abstract
Distance education courses are costly to prepare. Future e-universities will only be able to recoup their costs by enrolling very large numbers of students. Consequently, they
will have to be global institutions. This will lead to a massive reduction in the range of content and style of course materials on offer to students. The negative effects of
this could include intellectual conformity, cultural imperialism and the de-skilling of most academic lecturing staff who will be reduced to supervising students on courses
prepared by others.
An alternative to the monolithic e-university of the future is the development of a global market in electronic course materials at the topic level. Electronic lectures provide
a low cost entry to such a market for practising academics. Using a style developed at Bournemouth University, e-lectures are easy to prepare from existing lecture materials.
Traditional university lecturing is a relatively formal pedagogic mechanism so e-lectures do not require a full understanding of current learning theories, which are essential
for the successful development of the more interactive aspects of university education at a distance such as online seminar discussions.
It is envisaged that academic lecturing staff of the future will be able to construct a course unit’s lectures from a wide range of cheaply available e-lectures prepared by
experts on each topic in the unit. Apart from academic staff thus maintaining control over the content and style of their units, e-lectures may be used in traditional, campus-
based universities as well as in any future, virtual ones. Additionally, the development of a global e-lecture market can be gradual, with lecturers replacing their own
materials with e-lecture ones piecemeal, thus allowing both staff and students to adjust to this novel, albeit still familiar, mode of delivery.
Keywords: Distance Learning, Electronic Universities, Electronic Lectures.
1 Introduction
Using the United Kingdom (U.K.) as an example, the state of universities is introduced (section 2) and their approach to teaching and learning (section 2.1) and, in particular,
the role of lectures is discussed (section 2.1.1). Section 2.1.2 introduces and provides an example of how teaching and research can synergistically support each other.
Section 3 introduces issues of electronic teaching and learning and considers current proposals for electronic universities (section 3.1). Distance learning is addressed
(section 3.2) and some of the possible effects of academic staff being distributed are considered (section 3.3).
Section 4 introduces the concept of electronic lectures and their use in universities. The technical issues discovered in preparing an example e-lecture are described (section
4.1).
2 Universities
Overall, not only are universities extremely complex organisations, but the work of academic staff is highly varied. Hailes and Hazemi (1998), for example, identify twenty
different, major classes of activity undertaken by most academic staff. In addition, academics’ style of working is also divers, even within the same subject area and while
there is much advice and debate, there is little consensus on good practice, even if poor practice can be identified. Furthermore, many academics are ‘odd’ people in that they
are some of the most able in their field yet are usually extremely poorly paid in comparison to those who work in industry and commerce. Fairly obviously, many academics are
prepared to sacrifice financial rewards for those that are less tangible. Whether such incentives will pertain in an e-university should at least be debated.
The U.K., and many similar countries, have enjoyed a massive expansion in higher education student numbers recently. The U.K.’s Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), for
example, suggest that over the last 35 years of the second Christian Millennium (1965-2000 A.D.), the number of students in higher education in the U.K. has increased by 450%
(approximately 400, 000 to 1,800,000 students) and even in the last decade the figure is 150% (1990: 1,200,000; 2000: 1,800,000 students). On the other hand, the unit of
resource per student has decreased over the same decade by 40% (1990: ￡7,500 p.a.; 2000: ￡4,500 p.a. – prices adjusted to those of 2000). This recent expansion in student
numbers and decrease in spending per student has been primarily financed by increasing the load on academic staff as spending on U.K. higher education has increased over the
last decade by only 120% (1990: ￡4,500,000,000 p.a.; 2000: ￡5,500,000,000 pa). The U.K. Government, and the major parties in opposition are no different, continues to flaunt
its plans for further increasing student numbers and its continued parsimony is evident from its refusal to publish spending figures more than one year in advance, even though a
U.K. degree takes at least three years to complete.
The U.K. is a very wealthy country in comparison to the majority around the World. Those countries without such wealth and political stability struggle to provide any form of
adequate higher education. They do not have the physical or financial resources and, generally, they do not have the quality of staff enjoyed by the wealthy nations, and not
only cannot recruit them but often lose staff in a “brain drain”. Furthermore, even when their most able students attend universities in the wealthy countries, the problem is
with their, understandable, reluctance to return to their native country after completion of their studies, given their subsequent employability.
2.1 Teaching and Learning in Universities
While universities around the World possess a diverse heritage and are organised in a number of different ways, they do have similarities. Undergraduate courses take a number of
years and students take a number of units each year; over the years units progress in terms of their level of difficulty, both of the material they contain and how the students
are expected to be able to apply the material. In a traditional, campus based university, students attend lectures and following the model that they are “reading a degree”
they are expected to augment what is presented in lectures with background work. Typically in the U.K., for example, students are expected to undertake two to six hours of
relevant reading for each lecture hour. What they read may or may not be set by the lecturer. It has become increasingly common in the last century for students to be required
to attend seminars, tutorials and practical classes, and many degrees have a continuous assessment element, based on such non-lecture activities, that contributes to the
students’ final degree mark. Lectures, however, continue to remain a distinctive feature of university education, although their pedagogic effectiveness has been questioned
(e.g. Ramsden, 1992).
2.1.1 Lectures
On the plus side, lectures are efficient in that they can be delivered to large numbers of students, in some cases several hundred, and this guarantees that all students are
provided with the same learning experience. On the down side, however, the quality of this “learning experience” is moot. Students in lectures are supposedly required to do a
number of tasks in parallel, such as listening and comprehending the material, taking notes, and, ideally, asking questions. Furthermore, they are usually required to do this
for nearly an hour, which is probably at least twice their optimal attention span. Thus lectures are probably not a good method of imparting factual material to students, i.e.
where they are supposed to learn explicit, sometimes detailed, things. Lectures may, however, be a good means of providing students with appropriate perspectives on their
reading, and a skilled lecturer is able to interact with their audience and, importantly, motivate students.
Particularly with large numbers of students, lectures are a relatively formal pedagogic delivery mechanism. Certainly in the U.K., the quality of lectures has generally improved
over the last decade, in part because of the national Government’s requirements for internal and external Quality Assurance (QA) of teaching. Courses and their units must be
explicitly documented, often in a standard format and at a level of detail unknown only ten years ago, at least in the U.K.’s older universities. Gone are the days, and
probably a good thing too, when a lecturer would simply arrive at a lecture theatre and deliver a 50 minute lecture almost extempore. Today, most lectures are carefully prepared
in advance and lecturers are strongly encouraged to use a variety of styles and media to facilitate communication to their students in lectures. This, of course, reduces their
efficiency in that the preparation time far exceeds the delivery time. While preparation times vary enormously, in informal discussions with colleagues we find that preparing a
new unit in an Information Technology degree takes somewhere between 200 and 600 hours to prepare and deliver, and where delivery to students is perhaps, at most, only a quarter
of this time.
In 1992 in the U.K., the number of universities was doubled by allowing its polytechnics to call themselves, and become, universities. While ostensibly this change would remove
the “binary divide” between these two types of institution, the difference between the old and new universities still exists nearly a decade later. One difference is in the
amount of time academic staff spend with students. The most common measure used is “contact hours”, that is, the time staff officially spend in face-to-face contact with
students. In the old universities a lecturer might be involved in a little more than 100 contact hours per year. In contrast, even today, in a new U.K. university staff are
commonly expected to engage in 15 or more contact hours per week. Given this difference, and the preparation times that each official contact hour requires, it is hardly
surprising that many new university academic staff can find little time, even with excessive over-time, to do little more than teach students and fulfil their increasing
bureaucratic burdens.
2.2 Teaching and Research
There are certainly academics, perhaps more commonly amongst those who grew up in the days before university student numbers were expanded, who object to the term “higher
education” unless it is recognised that such education must, vitally, involve the academic staff. That is, universities as “centres of learning” are first about the staff
learning and that this is what fundamentally differentiates them from schools and colleges. Furthermore, most such learning, because the staff are usually world experts in their
own specialisation, is research. In the U.K., for example, HESA statistics for the primary function of 131,000 academic staff in 1998-9, shows that more than 60% are involved in
both research and teaching and less than 10% do no research.
It is an extremely common argument within universities that research activities by staff improves the quality of undergraduate teaching, particularly for students in the later
stages of their degree programme. Explicit examples of such support, however, are few. The next paragraph describes such an example, where there is a cycle of teaching
facilitating research and then the research improving the teaching.
The second author, in the Autumn of 1998, agreed to give some lectures to final year undergraduates, to cover for a colleague taking Sabbatical leave at the beginning of the
next year. The topic of the lectures, Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), was one that the author had not looked at for more than a decade. Having examined a number of
text books suitable for undergraduate reading, one was selected as a core piece and the lectures were preparedbased on it (Patching, 1990); the students were to be required to
read at least two of the chapters. Preparing the lecture foils in December, it became clear to the author that there were a number of methodological weaknesses that could be
addressed by employing his current research on a new “simplified” logic. This led to him writing a paper by mid-January for submission to the British HCI Group annual
conference (Diaper, 2000b). N.B. Since 1985 this conference has published an internationally respected Proceedings that are fully refereed and which have a 70% rejection rate.
To support the research, which involved applying the new logic in a new application area, the author prepared and gave a research seminar in his university. The work was well
received by colleagues and an edited form of the seminar was then delivered to students on two different degree programs in February as the basis for group discussion.
The point of the above example is to illustrate that teaching and research can synergistically combine. The students not only got the traditional, text-book view but were also
exposed to state-of-the-art research that questioned aspects of the traditional approach. Encouraging students not to simply accept what they read is itself an important lesson.
The research almost certainly would not have been done had the author not been required to revisit the SSM topic area.
3 Electronic Teaching and Learning
Given the financial figures provided in section 2, it is easy to understand why there is now a search for increasing the efficiency of higher education as the traditional
university systems have been stretched to, or beyond, their limit. Indeed, only by nearly all academics working tens of hours of unpaid over-time each week can the current
number of students be supported. Undoubtedly students already have less contact with academic staff than their forebears and potential efficiencies by improved management of
academic staff is highly disputable. Indeed, many academics would claim that there has been an enormous increase in the bureaucracy that has been imposed on them, with only
modest, if any, benefits to students.
Mayes and Fowler (1999) say that the “enthusiasm” of “those with a vested interest” such as “policy makers” should be treated with caution as they see electronic education
as improving efficiency rather than effectiveness (Diaper, 2000a). Similarly, Shneiderman (1998) suggests that “The hot winds of hyperpromises and the cold front of angry
skeptics are clouding the judgement of administrators, faculty members and national planners.” At the eye of this storm, and described in the next sections, are two classes of
problem, one theoretical and the other financial.
3.1 E-universities
The Open University (OU) is by far the U.K.’s largest university in terms of student numbers. This is an essential requirement for distance learning institutions so that the
enormous cost of preparing adequate materials can be met. A U.K. e-university was proposed by the Secretary for State for Education, David Blunkett, in February, 2000 and
initial “Set-up costs are estimated at ￡200 million over two years” (Times Higher Education Supplement (THES), 18/02/2000), although this figure has apparently been revised
down after problems encountered with implementing this e-university during the year (e.g. THES, 13/10/2000). Even revised, the sum for just setting up an e-university is
enormous in comparison to most other U.K. universities, few of which have total annual turn-overs of more than ￡50 million. This e-university, if it ever comes into existence,
will also have operating costs, of course.
Even taking into account the size of the entire global economy, the cost of setting up and running e-universities in the future will be so high that only a very few of them can
have any chance of success. Undoubtedly there is a market for one, and perhaps half a dozen, e-universities because there are students who cannot be serviced by anything except
distance learning. One, or a few, e-universities can be successful because their costs can be recouped by an economy of scale, that is, by enrolling a large number of students.
This will require a very large number of staff to be involved in some tutorial manner with these students as no-one has suggested higher education sans a human staff element;
certainly not just by the unsupported printed word and Computer Aided Learning/Instruction (CAL/I) systems appear to require an Artificial Intelligence (AI) far beyond our
current capabilities. Indeed, it has been suggested that there are serious doubts that such CAL/I systems can ever be adequately implemented (Bierman et al., 1992) for degree
level education.
One major disadvantage of having very large e-universities is that they will enforce a standardisation of content and style of delivery on degree programmes. While the materials
are likely to be of a high quality, in many areas of academe the what and how of teaching is highly controversial. Even in a relatively simple area such as teaching computer
programming, for example, there is continuous controversy over the general approach that should be adopted. For example, at the extreme end there are the highly respected but
rarely attempted proposals of Bornat (1987) who suggests that first year students should be taught how to write plans, but not in any programming language. Nardi’s (1993)
approach to end-user computer programming is quite different and equally controversial. Additionally, many would argue that programming should no longer be taught in isolation
from a software engineering environment, which may be supported by Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools. Of course, the choice of a first programming language is a
perennial one in university computer science departments. An e-university will have to choose their approach, and whatever they choose will not satisfy many academics for many,
good reasons. Furthermore, the programming example is a simple one and many university degree topics are far more controversial with respect to what should be taught in what
manner.
There is also a concern that the what and how of teaching adopted by a global e-university will be more determined by what it is easiest to deliver as distance education, rather
than what is best for students irrespective of delivery style. Furthermore, many people are opposed to cultural globalisation, sometimes loosely called the McDonaldisation of
the World, and it does not follow that what might be an optimal approach, even if it could be identified, in one culture will be optimal in others.
Another problem with a global, standardised e-university degree course is that it will reduce the diversity of how people learn and subsequently think about a topic. The
development of human knowledge, in any field, is an intensely creative process and surely must be facilitated by the variety of ways different people think about a subject area
(Baggen, et al., 1999). Progress will inevitably be impeded, if not bought to stagnation, by reducing the diversity of ways people approach subjects.
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