Delivering Learning on the Net

The Why, What and How of Online Education

Martin Weller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9781138166455
• eBook ISBN: 9781135726195
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

As online education becomes more familiar, so the reality of using it in teaching and learning has moved beyond the realm of the specialist. Pedagogy and best practice Delivering Learning on the Net explores the reality of online education today. Martin Weller chaired the groundbreaking Open University course You, Your computer and the Net, which is now the largest for-credit online course in Europe. Based on this and his experiences elsewhere, the book is a comprehensive resource grounded in practical reality as well as in research. Key issues covered include: *the Net and its relation to education; *developing and implementing online courses; *the key issues surrounding online education. Teachers, trainers, technologists, administrators and decision-makers working in higher and further education will all find much of value in this book.

Chapter 1
Why the Net is significant

Introduction

The way in which any institution, company or individual views the Net will have a significant effect on the manner in which they employ it and the sort of tasks for which they feel it is best suited. In this and the following two chapters I wish to address some of the common views about the Internet in education, and stress why I believe the shift to online delivery represents a significant change in educational practice. You may not agree, but it is important to think about how you view the Net and its role in education before embarking upon issues of online delivery. Nearly all of these issues will flow from this underlying viewpoint, so it is worth making it explicit to yourself and others.

This chapter begins with an account of a large-scale Web course I have worked on, which will be used as an example throughout the book. The promise of educational technology and some of the disappointment surrounding this is then discussed. Many educators rightly approach the Net with a degree of scepticism, thinking they have heard all of these claims before for technologies which are now either obsolete or peripheral. The remainder of this chapter outlines the reasons why we should view the Net as a significant educational technology.

You, your computer and the Net

First, let me start with a brief tale of a course I was heavily involved with. I will return to this throughout the book as a source of examples. The course in question is called ‘You, Your Computer and the Net’, but it will be referred to by its course code, T171, for simplicity. The course was developed at the United Kingdom Open University (OU). For those who are unfamiliar with the OU, it is a solely distance education university, with over 150,000 students studying part-time annually. Founded in 1969, the OU has developed a distance learning approach based predominantly around the use of specifically authored printed units. Students are allocated to part-time tutors (or Associate Faculty) who offer support through regular face to face tutorials, detailed feedback on assignments, and contact via telephone, e-mail or letter.

In 1997 a group of us at the OU had an idea to create an introductory course on computers and the Internet. Those involved were enthusiastic, some might say evangelical, about the Internet and its possibilities in education. The OU had been using the Internet for a variety of tasks on a number of different courses. Its main use was for computer mediated communication (CMC), which allowed students to communicate with each other, their tutor and staff at the OU. Some courses had begun using the Web in addition to the printed course units, video, multi-media CD ROMs and so forth which go to make up a typical OU course. The Web was a convenient way to offer some material that changed rapidly or would incur cost to distribute, for example student notices and current journal papers.

OU material is produced to a very high standard, and has a deserved reputation for the quality of its print, audio/visual and multi-media material. Such quality comes at a price, however, and within the OU this is reflected in terms of long production cycles, and a large administrative overhead. Typical OU courses take around three years to produce, and usually run for eight years (although they may be updated during this period). This poses something of a problem when working in a rapidly changing field such as computing and IT. The usual response to this is to work at an abstract level: the way computers operate does not change much even if the software we use on them does.

However, we wanted to create a course which had a resonance with the everyday world in which students lived and worked. The course should appeal to a broad range of students and bring them into the culture of computers and the Internet. Such a course needed to be topical, and to feel current to students. A Web based course offered a means of achieving this. An early and fundamental decision was made to make the Web absolutely central to the course. It was not an addition to the usual course components—the Web site effectively was the course. This liberated us in a number of ways. First, the OU did not have systems in place to deal with such a course, and so to an extent we could operate outside the normal practice, which removed many of the administrative constraints. Second, through the use of design templates the authors could produce material which was near to the finished article fairly rapidly. This meant we could review and alter it easily. A small, enthusiastic and—importantly—flexible team gathered around the course. There was some scepticism outside of this team regarding the course and whether it would gain any students or tutors willing to work in this manner.

The course was produced in a year along with the requisite tutorial strategy and the technical infrastructure. It was piloted in 1999 with 900 students and 50 tutors; soon students were clamouring to sign on. In 2000 the course was presented twice to meet student demand and there were some 12,000 students registered. This number had to be limited in order to cope with finding the 600 tutors needed to support that number of students. Many of these students and tutors were new to the OU and had signed up specifically because of this course. T171 led to university-wide changes in strategy, student support, organizational structure and course development.

As I have said, I will return to T171 throughout the book, but for now it offers a good demonstration of both the demand for such courses and the impact they can have upon an institution.

Educational technology: promise unfulfilled

I have on my shelf a book whose very title says more about the excessive optimism surrounding new technologies than I can ever express. It is called CD-ROM—the New Papyrus (Lambert and Ropiequet, 1986). Such hype is typical for new technologies, and in no area is it seen more keenly than in education. In their proclamations of wonder regarding any new technology, educators often resemble the character Bingo Little in P G Wodehouse. He fell in love, seemingly at random, and each time declared it to be the real thing, and when it was pointed out that this was not the first such occurrence, would deplore the thought that those previous infatuations could be compared to the depth of feeling this time.

There is still no clear evidence that educational technology improves student learning. Tom Russell’s (1999) by now famous The No Significant Difference Phenomenon compiled all the studies that compared modes of delivery: for example, distance versus classroom, and online versus face to face. The overwhelming conclusion was that the mode of delivery made no difference to student performance, so it is the content and not the medium that seems to be important. However, there are also studies which demonstrate an improved performance using some educational technologies (and indeed the No Significant Difference Web site now has a less well populated Significant Difference counterpart). As a colleague once commented, this is a case of good news, bad news. The good news is there is no significant difference. The bad news is—there is no significant difference. So if you are a distance educator it undermines any criticism that face to face education is somehow better. However, if you have just invested heavily in new educational technology it might also suggest that there is little gain to be made from this. It should be pointed out that a number of people (eg Phipps and Merisotis, 1999) dispute Russell’s findings, arguing that the papers gathered are questionable and thus any conclusions drawn from them are equally inconclusive. Let us, for now, pass over the debate about the impact of technology upon learning achievement. It is the impact upon teaching practice where educational technology seems to have been much less significant than the investment, discussion and optimism surrounding it would warrant. The reasons are varied: for instance, a focus on buying hardware rather than integration, and a lack of training for teachers, undoubtedly contribute to this.

Despite the promise of new technologies, and the excitement that accompanies them, the bulk of educational practice has remained largely unchanged. The face to face lecture is still by far the dominant form of teaching. While computers and various computer based tools may be used to supplement traditional teaching, this can be seen as an extension of the laboratory based classroom. So why, despite a great deal of investment and many innovative, beneficial implementations, is teaching at all levels much the same as it was hundreds of years ago? Is it because the face to face lecture is really the best way of teaching?

Pronouncement of the death of the traditional lecture always seems to be a consequence of a new technology, and yet it persists stubbornly. Personally, I have a lot of time for the lecture. When done well it really is an engaging and inspiring experience. So why are so many people seemingly anxious for its demise? The truth is that it is all too often far from an engaging or inspiring experience. We have all sat through lectures that seemed to have no direction, and resembled an unconnected series of words from which you could fathom no meaning. The repeatability and quality assurance of a lecture is difficult to ensure. Technology is seen as a means of improving productivity, efficiency and reliability. There are also other factors that often combine, making the need for investment in educational technology seem unavoidable. I shall look at these in more detail later, where the motivations for adopting an online approach are examined.

In this chapter I want to look at some previous educational technologies, and analyse why these failed to have the impact on education once predicted, and why the Net will have a more significant impact. The two previous technologies I will use by way of example are broadcast media and multi-media CD ROM.

Broadcast media and CD ROM

The advent of radio, and later television, saw much interest in their use as educational technologies. The term ‘University of the Airwaves’ began to be used in the 1920s, and in 1951 the Pennsylvania ‘University of the Air’ began broadcasting lectures. When the OU was first conceived in the 1960s, it was described in similar terms. However, very early on, the OU realized that simply broadcasting lectures did not make for an effective educational experience. Instead it developed an approach to distance learning based primarily around specifically written printed materials, supported by face to face tutorials, summer schools and home experiment kits. The television and radio components formed one element of this overall package, but far from its most significant one. Most audio/visual material tends to act as a supplement to traditional print materials, which are carefully constructed to be unambiguous, complete and understandable (attributes which cannot always be ascribed to a lecture).

While it is true that audio/visual material can greatly enhance the learning experience, it has failed to become the primary delivery method for distance education material. Merely watching or listening to the lecture at a distance does not make for a rewarding educational experience, for a number of reasons relating to the nature of the face to face lecture. First, watching a broadcast or a video of a lecture is a very passive activity. When attending a lecture one is participating in an experience, often in a subtle manner, since it is not the explicit interaction that may be found in a smaller tutorial session. The lecturer may react to the audience, changing what he or she intended to say, relaxing after a joke gets a good response, or going over an explanation again when encountering a sea of blank faces. The members of the audience also have a connection with each other, and will see how others are reacting to the lecture. None of these subtle interactions occur with the broadcast lecture.

Second, the lecture does not occur in isolation. There is often informal discussion afterwards in coffee bars and corridors. Lastly, the lecture is a one to many relationship, whereas watching a lecture at a distance is a one to one connection. The manner of speaking is thus inappropriate: after all, one would not speak to a single student in a tutorial in the same style as giving a lecture. The overall result of this is that the student whose education is merely watching lectures at a distance is not, and does not feel, a participant in the educational experience. In their book Situated Learning (1991) Lave and Wenger propose the notion of legitimate peripheral participation as a means of learning. The idea here is that people learn in a social context by partaking in activities which are legitimate: that is, meaningful to the community, although not central. I would suggest that merely watching broadcast lectures is not a legitimate activity in the context of the learning experience. The student does not engage with the material or with the learning community.

In the late 1980s the rise of the personal computer and CD ROMs saw a growth in the use of multi-media computer based training (CBT) or computer assisted learning (CAL) packages, which seemed to offer a solution to some of the problems educators faced both at a distance and on campus. These problems included student motivation, supply and use of laboratory equipment, the explanation of complex processes and coping with the rise in student numbers. Multimedia CD ROMs allowed manufacturers to provide engaging, attractive software, which could incorporate simulations, audio, video (to a limited extent) and animations, as well as straightforward text and images. Through the use of interactive simulations, students could see the effects of different parameters on complex processes, which could make the implications of dry mathematical equations come alive for engineers, say. Or the complexities of Joyce’s Ulysses could be brought to life and explained with sub-explanations of the numerous references, video clips of Dublin, audio of Joyce speaking, and so on. And it was all in one neat package: there was no need to stop reading the printed unit, dig out the tape recorder for the audiocassette, or watch the video. In addition, the CD could be made available to all students, so some of the tutorial time could be replaced by CD use.

It still sounds ideal, and there are many good educational CDs in circulation, but it is true to say that their use has not quite had the impact upon education across all sectors that was originally envisaged. Most schools will have a collection of CDs, but often they remain unused or only partially incorporated into lessons. In higher education they have been used successfully in a number of distance education courses, but again their role has largely been that of supplement to the core material. They have rarely become the course itself. On campus their role is largely one of reference material, housed in the library. Again it is rare for their content to be integrated deeply into a series of lectures. In the next section some of the reasons behind this lack of uptake will be examined by way of comparison with the Net.

Why the Net is different

Since I have painted a gloomy picture regarding the impact of educational technology up to this point, why should you assume the use of the Net will be any different? The simple answer is that you should not. It could be, but equally if it is not implemented carefully it will struggle to reach its potential. There are a number of mitigating factors in favour of the Net in education, however, which indicate that its place as an educational technology may be more significant than those mentioned above. I will examine these five factors now.

1
Social acceptance

The first factor in the Net’s favour is that, in terms of everyday usage, it has already reached a greater penetration in society than most other educational technologies (with the exception of broadcast technologies). Its profile is high and it is the subject of huge financial investment from major corporations who are keen to make the Net central to their strategy. So it is not going to go away, and increasingly it is a medium through which many people perform everyday functions, such as booking their holidays, buying their groceries, contacting their children at college and diagnosing medical ailments. It does not need to be the case that everyone does everything through the Net, but as De Kare-Silver (1998) points out, a small shift, say of 15 per cent, of customers is enough to have a major impact on many businesses. So, as with undecided voters in marginal electoral seats, their influence can go far beyond their actual numbers.

De Kare-Silver calculates that by averaging all the predictions of when the Internet will be an accepted mainstream technology for Western society as a whole, one should estimate that 2005 will be the point of major acceptance. This means that by this time a large percentage of the population will be performing a significant proportion of their daily activities (shopping, communicating, leisure activities, etc) via the Internet. It would perhaps be foolish to assume that in such a climate people will not expect to have their education via the same means.

So whereas CD ROMs offered a convenient and often attractive means of providing educational software, they were doing so largely in the context of a society with ambivalence towards the technology. Apart from games and occasionally consulting a CD encyclopaedia, the CD ROM did not have a large impact upon the daily lives of many people. This is not true of the Net, which is transforming almost every aspect of commerce and services. One is not struggling to convince an audience of the potential of the technology, but operating in an environment that is in a process of rapid take-up. This is a key factor, that much of the drive for use of the Net in education is coming from the ‘market’. It is not a technology in which educators alone see the benefit, but rather one where the students themselves have a great deal of experience and enthusiasm for its use. This factor will become increasingly important as the ‘Net generation’ enters higher education or training.

2
Educator proximity

One might argue that a favourable market might also be said of radio or television, but these have failed to impact upon traditional educational methods. This is true and this brings us to the next key advantage the Net has in being a significant educational technology, that of educator proximity to the finished product. The first aspect of this is one of cost. CDs are expensive to produce, although still achievable, whereas television programmes are beyond the reach of most universities. The production and airtime costs all but rule them out, except where special arrangements exist (suc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Why the Net is significant
• 2. Exploring some of the e-learning myths
• 3. Lessons from e-commerce
• 4. Motivations for adopting the Net
• 5. Pedagogies for online teaching
• 6. Communication
• 7. New working methods
• 8. Assessment
• 9. Technology and media
• 10. A framework for classifying online courses
• 11. Birth of the new
• References
• Index