Maintaining Choice: Electronic University Education and
Diversity (下)
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and withdrawn distance learners.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. The se 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.
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 ) 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
(. as in section ) 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. . 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, . 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, . 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 (. 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, . 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 ). 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 ). 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.
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, . 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
