In "Networking Australia's Future” (1994)
an expert group reporting to the Minister, Department of Employment,
Education and Training, stated
"the availability of training, information
and support for teachers will be a key factor in determining whether
the new services will be used to their full potential. Teachers
will need to be proficient in the use of the basic technologies
... They will also need to be comfortable with new styles of teaching.
Initial teacher training and continuing professional development
of teachers should take these matters into account ...” (page
38)
In the same year a survey was conducted at Monash
University's Gippsland campus to identify the occupational needs
of staff who teach and support distance students. 50% of academic
respondents made training in new technologies their first priority.
There were also responses in the additional categories of computing
skills and email which, if included in `new technologies', would
bring the percentage of academic respondents prioritising 'new
technologies' to 82%
Intending online teachers first need an authentic online learning
experience and practice
Induction programs for teaching faculty usually concentrate
on classroom survival skills, such as making content decisions
and the structuring of content, voice projection in large lecture
theatres and the use of the overhead projector. In other words,
in induction programs we see the main concern as being one for
the product and the paraphernalia associated with teaching. Programs
of half-day or day-long modules in new technologies, when presented
as product training, are exercises to update initial survival
skills training.
The needs - of both staff and institutions - which
drive survival skills and product training are very different
to those underpinning professional development programs
for teachers in higher education. The difference between the purposes
of initial skills training for tertiary teachers and the purposes
of their ongoing professional formation is best understood by
considering the shift from being self-centred as a teacher, to
being student-centred. This shift is outlined in Kugel's (1993)
"Five Ages of a Lecturer". He identifies five distinct
stages in the progress of teachers in higher education who are
not in professional development programs. Only if the teacher
gets to Kugel's Stage 4 is the 'un-tutored' transition made from
concentrating on what she or he is doing to the students,
to focussing on student learning.
The purpose of academic professional development
programs is to accelerate the teacher's progress through such
developmental stages and to have the teacher focus on the student
learning experience from the outset. It is argued by staff developers
in higher education (see for example, Ramsden, 1992) that it is
only through understanding the student's experience of learning
that teachers will be able to devise learning activities to enhance
that experience and encourage lifelong learning.
For most of us, our own formal university learning
experience is now very far removed from how our own students will
experience it over the next ten years or so. If, then, we are
to understand their experience, we ought first to re-skill
ourselves as learners in the new environments.
Obviously the re-skilling cannot be achieved by remaining
in a traditional classroom - though an initial orientation session
in an environment we know and are comfortable with will give us
an accelerated start. Neither can teachers achieve their re-skilling
as 'independent' learners. The learning experience in the new
environments will be an interdependent activity.
What do we mean by the 'new environments'?
In survival skills training for classroom and
lecture hall, modules in the use of the overhead projector are
now being re-worked as, and sometimes replaced by, modules in
the use of presentation software such as Powerpoint. On-campus
computer laboratories are being booked instead of tutorial rooms
so that undergraduates can type at each other instead of talk
with each other.
New tools in old settings, however, do not make 'new
learning environments'. I would suggest teachers are moving into
'new learning environments':
- when they set out to select Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) and implement their use in ways that are appropriate
to their students' learning needs and circumstances:
- when they do this with some awareness of how
the shifting contexts of massification and globalisation
of higher education are impacting what they do;
- when they self-consciously make efforts to re-organise,
and to some extent 'systematise' the way they manage their own
academic workload, and when they select and learn how to use appropriate
ICT to support those efforts.
Massification and globalisation
Evans' contribution (1997) to the 1996 ODLAA
Workshop (Open and Distance Learning Association of Australasia)
is a key reading to understanding 'massification and globalisation'.
It signposts the literature discussing the these two trends.
A characteristic of both trends is the emergence
and growth of mega-universities. In the table on the following
page are data presented by Daniels (1995) in his thesis discussing
the implications of new technologies for large distance teaching
universities - a few simple numbers which give instant meaning
to the terms 'massification' and 'globalisation'. It is a merge
of his Tables 3.1 and 3.2, (p.16) In this merge Daniels' data
have beenleft out relating to proportion of budget from fees and
grant, the annual intake figure, and the number of graduates per
year.
Daniels states that the purpose of his study is "to
suggest how large distance teaching universities (the mega-universities)
could use technology, especially the emerging combination of communications
and information technologies (the knowledge media) to retain and
enhance their competitive advantage". His definition of a
mega-university is that it has at least 100,000 enrolled students.
He acknowledges that by 1996 there could have been one or two
more join the group.
Country/University
|
Students in degree programs
| Budget $US million
| Unit cost (7)
| Full-time academic staff
| Part-time academic staff
| Total academic staff
(f-t equiv)
|
| CHINA - China TV University System (CTVU) |
530,000 (1) |
1.2 (3) |
40 |
18,000 |
13,000
|
43,000 |
| FRANCE - Centre National d'Enseignement a Distance (CNED)
|
184,000 (1) |
113 (1)
|
50 |
1,800 |
3,000
|
3,000 |
| INDIA - Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU)
|
242,000 (1) |
10 (2)
|
35 |
216 |
12,800
|
1,000 |
| INDONESIA - Universitas Terbuka
(UT) |
353,000 (2) |
2.5 (5) |
15 |
791 |
N/O
|
1,492 |
| KOREA - Korea National open University (KNOU)
|
196,000 (2) |
48 (1)
|
10 |
174 |
2,649
|
678 |
| SOUTH AFRICA - University of South Africa (UNISA)
|
130,000 (2) |
128 |
50 |
1,348 |
1,964
|
3,437 |
| SPAIN - Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (UNED)
|
110,000 (1) |
(6) |
40 |
700 |
N/O
|
N/O |
| THAILAND - Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University (STOU)
|
300,000 (2) |
32 |
30 |
429 |
4,000
|
2,136 |
| TURKEY - Anadolu University
(AU) |
567,000 (2)
|
15 (4) |
10 |
579
|
680 |
498 (8) |
| UNITED KINGDOM - The Open University (UKOU)
|
150,000 (2) |
300 |
50 |
815 |
7,376
|
3,312 |
N/O= not obtained
(1) 1994 figure
(2) 1995 figure
(3) Central (CCRTVU) unit only)
(4) 771 billion Turkish lira
|
(5) 1990 figures (NIME-UNESCO, 1994) 18,000 m Rp In 1993/94
(6) 8,000m Pesetas (1990)
(7) Unit cost per student as percentage of average for other universities
in the country
(8) In Open Education Faculty only (f-t academic staff figure is for whole
university)
|
His implied thesis - though it is nowhere stated
as I have constructed it here - is that "technological developments
have reduced " (p. 11) which means that "as many conventional
universities become 'dual-mode' institutions and offer some courses
through distance education, the mega-universities will need to
understand what special strengths they bring to the form of education
that they have pioneered" (p.12) and learn how to exploit
those special strengths if they are to maintain their competitive
advantage.
Daniels urges caution in using the data for comparative purposes
and stresses that the data is hard to obtain for some institutions.
He warns that the aggregate figures he presents for budgets and
for numbers of students and staff have not necessarily been calculated
on a consistent basis, and that like is not necessarily being
compared with like. "A mega-university may resemble certain
institutions outside the group more than it resembles other
mega-universities".
Monash is the biggest university in Australia in terms of students
numbers. Data which gives readers an understanding of its size
compared with the mega-universities is also quite difficult to
extricate from the aggregations available. The following has been
provided by the Statistical Services section of the Financial
Services Division of Monash University.
| 1996 | budget total $AUS 482.7m, which, at an exchange rate of .79 is
equivalent to
| $US 381.4m |
| 1996 | full-time and part-time academic staff engaged in both teaching and
research
| 1,800 |
| 1996 | full-time equivalent academic staff engaged in both teaching and
research
| 1,635 |
| 1997 | total number of students on degree programs (including distance
students)
| 41,543 |
| 1997 | total number of distance education students in degree programs
| 6,032 |
Monash, then, is an example of a dual-mode institution
(over 20 years of operating a Distance Education Centre), where
it is very evident that economies of scale are not a pre-requisite
for engaging in distance education . One glaring conclusion from
the data Daniels selects to present is that the competitive advantage
to date of some mega-universities may have been built not only
on 'economies of scale' but also on a wide-scale exploitation
of part-time academic staff . From the Monash data it is very
evident this 'trend' in human resourcing has yet to impact its
organisational style.
Lessons learned in a new environment
There are a number of papers describing the 'new'
learning environment which was developed by the NetFace team and
implemented by distance teachers at Monash between 1992 and 1996,
(see for example Wood, 1995a). In plain text NetFace gave distance
students and their teachers the same computer-mediated communications
functions for online education as can now be accessed through
web pages - email, news, computer conferencing, electronic assignment
submission and plain text web browsing (using Lynx).
To prepare faculty to teach in the new environment, a number of
virtual seminars and online workshop activities were conducted
- first by email distribution lists (reported in Wood, 1993) then
by the computer-conferencing function of NetFace (reported in
Wood, 1995b; Wood & Rahman,1995). These activities were developed
by first searching for an understanding of how to proceed with
the design of online education from the literature reviewed by
Wells (1992), then by following the guidance offered primarily
in Harasim (1991) on the design of online learning activities,
and in Mason (1991) on the analysis and evaluation of online learning.
Low continuation rates
Mason (1994) makes the observation: "Two hundred
students using a system optionally ... may be necessary to make
a conference viable” (p. 56) The data on the next page, relating
to the workshops conducted by the author at Monash, show that
it is indeed difficult to maintain the involvement of those who
are participating voluntarily, especially where there is neither
accredition to motivate their persistence nor fees paid to motivate
getting 'value for money'. The special seminar organised for Open
Learning Psychology tutors, with 15 'demonstrating competency'
out of 16 making a start , stands out as a 'success'. These were
casual staff who were paid for the time they devoted to the seminar.
International involvement
To achieve a critical mass of participants making
a start, participation in the following virtual seminar and the
two workshops was opened to `guests' from other universities.
Participants arrived from many
Participation in online Working Bees, Seminars and Workshops,
presented 1993-1996
| Level of
involvement in online workshop activities running over 3 weeks or
more
| Email lists
93/94
| OL
Psych
Special
94
| Virtual Seminar
Series
94/95
| Workshop
Winter 95
| Workshop
95/96
| TOTALS
|
| Registered interest |
98 | 23
| 44
(61)
| 45
(29)
| 24
(36)
| 234
(126)
|
| Made a contribution |
31 | 16
| 19
(16)
| 28
(11)
| 15
(20)
| 109
(47)
|
| Showed `competency' |
9 | 15
| 9
(6)
| 17
(5)
| 5
(12)
| 55
(23)
|
| Showed `mastery' in conferencing and
group management or assignment submission and marking
| N/A |
N/A
| N/A | 7
(1)
| 3
(6)
| 10
(7)
|
Note: Figures in bold indicate registrants/participants
of Monash University,
Figures in parentheses indicate additional
registrants/participants
from other universities
Total number of participants 360
Monash: 47% of registrants got started
51% of starters showed competency
24% of registrants showed competency
Other universities: 37% of registrants got started
50% of starters showed competency
18% of registrants showed competencycountries
in Europe, North America and Asia as well as from New Zealand
and other universities in Australia. It is clear from the data
on the previous page that their involvement contributed significantly
to the continuation of the activities. By 1996, with the ubiquitous
use of Netscape, NetFace was already being viewed as a 'period
piece' and interest in taking part in professional development
activities mediated by NetFace had plummeted. However most of
the lessons learned from the NetFace project can be applied to
the latest generation of `new environments' - the World Wide Web.
There are, of course, any number of 'how-to' guides
for online teachers. The work of Harasim (1991) has already been
instanced in this paper. What is probably the first comprehensive
guide to web-based instruction has now appeared (Khan,1997). For
reasons to do with 'scaleability', discussed in the Mason primer
(1994), it is doubtful that the guidance most of them offer can
be applied outside the discipline and context from which they
derive within appropriate timeframes and at reasonable cost.
The choice of web conferencing product to support a web-based
workshop
Whichever product we opt for today, there will be
ones offering a more comprehensive range of functions tomorrow.
There are, however, product-independent principles and characteristics
of online education emerging. These principles and characteristics,
together with those underpinning all good teaching practice, ought
to drive the structure and process of a web-based workshop, not
the functionality of the products we use as vehicles.
Foremost amongst the emerging 'principles' of online education
is that the asynchronous interaction needs to be punctuated with
short bursts of synchronous interaction or, at the very least,
synchronous events such as deadlines for submission of group work.
Harasim (1993) indicates "use of real time communication
media, such as synchronous conferencing, phone calls, or face-to-face
meetings (when possible) were found to be valuable adjuncts to
the planning and coordinating tasks of [online] group projects”
and that she requires work to be contributed to computer conferences
on a weekly basis. Frequency of these synchronous events will
obviously depend on the requirements of the team skills being
developed and the activities designed for the student groups.
The product chosen for the next Monash web-based workshop is INTERACTION.
In its 'forums' and 'chat' it supports both asynchronous and synchronous
'conferencing' and is made available free of charge to educational
institutions. Who is the web-based workshop
for?
It is for teachers in tertiary institutions of less
than 50,000 students who are intending to start teaching online
at least some of the time to some of their students. It assumes
they are responsible for teaching classes of up to 200 or so.
In the mega-universities responsibility for teaching
is generally shared amongst subject matter experts, instructional
designers, media specialists, tutor-counsellors and markers. The
work is apportioned out and orchestrated by middle managers of
teaching processes. It is assumed that those who in choose to
take part in the workshop, will be both resisting the de-skilling
of tertiary teaching that could ensue from such a fragmentation
of the teaching process in their own institution, and will be
re-affirming that ownership of and responsibility for the diversity
of scholarly activity known as teaching ought to remain with teaching
academics - whether in real or virtual universities.
How will it be organised?
Most learners need a 'safe' learning environment.
They need to start off from points they are likely to relate to
from their own past experience. So we start off, in Exercise 1,
with the participant's experience of being a learner.
We will continue with content that can be central to our study,
whatever technology we use to mediate it and whatever the subject
discipline of participants. Topics to be covered include students
as learners, generic skills, independent v. interdependent learning,
assessment, and evaluation. Activities are offered as electives
where they seem to be more appropriate to some disciplines than
others.
In these electives there should be something for everyone - business
studies and media studies (a role play) economics, politics, social
studies (a learning game) science, technology, engineering, law,
medicine (problem-based learning).
One aspect of feeling 'safe' in a learning environment
is the assurance that only those who are contributing to the work
will have access to the work. So the workshop will be passworded.
Participants will now be required to submit a first
exercise together with their enrollment because, in the past,
high drop-out between registering an interest and making a start
have wasted too many university resources (including the printing
of workbooks and readings, and staff time). This first exercise
can be completed from the information already available on web
pages. From these preview pages it should be quite clear what
will be expected of participants during the workshop. Access details
and password will be sent to participants as soon as their enrollment
and first exercise has been received.
What outcomes are expected?
As participants meet the objectives of the workshop,
they will build a portfolio of work that they might include in
the teaching portfolio they are developing for tenure/promotion
applications.
In Marton, Hounsell, Entwistle (eds.) (1996), a collection relating
to 'traditional' learners, and in the slimmer works from Morgan
(1993) and Evans (1994) relating to 'distance' learners, we have
the experience of learners set in theoretical frameworks which
further our understanding of their learning styles and approaches.
There are now a number of small studies of the experiences of
online learners (see for example,in the three volumes of the Berge
& Collins (eds.) (1995) collection). They generally report
one study of a very small group of students in one particular
setting, studying a single subject during a single semester. The
students, more often than not, are education students, or English
writing or literature students. All these studies report the student
experience by third parties - the 'outside observers' - and there
are as yet few theoretical frameworks, if any, which further our
understanding of online learning styles and approaches.
During the web-based workshop participants will keep diaries of
their own experience of learning through the workshop so that
they might critique some of their online experience against the
'traditional' and the 'distance' experience reported in the recommended
readings. Groups might then get together as 'critical colleagues'
to generate comparative studies. The studies can either be cross-disciplinary
within institutions, or they can be inter-varsity - even international
- within the same teaching disciplines. (Wells (1992) and Soby
(1994), amongst others, have pointed to the need for cross-disciplinary
and comparative studies. We still do not have any - perhaps because,
for all the rhetoric about computer-mediated communications being
good for collaborative learning, we are still not good at it!)
Particularly important for making sense of our online learning
experience will be logs of time spent. Only by quantifying our
experience - however crudely - will we be able to usefully critique
Daniels' suggestion (1996) that economies of scale are no longer
a pre-requisite for entry to distance education.References
Berge, Z. & Collins, M. (eds.) (1995) Computer
Mediated Communication and the Online Classroom, Vols I-III,
Hampton Press, N.J.
Broadband Services Expert Group (1994) Networking
Australia's Future: The Final Report to the Minister, AGPS,
Canberra
Daniels, J. S. (1995) "The Mega-Universities
and the Knowledge Media: implications of new technologies for
large distance teaching universities", A Thesis in the Department
of Education at Concordia University, Montreal
Evans, T. (1994) Understanding Learners in Open
and Distance Education, Kogan Page, London
Evans, T. (1997) Spatial Mortality and Virtual
Pedagogies: Constructing and Managing Technologies for Teachers
and Learners, ODLAA Papers, No. 3 as the Proceedings of the
1996 ODLAA National Workshop, Perth, WA, pp. 3 - 7
Khan, B. (ed.) (1997) Web-based Instruction,
Educational Technology Publications, N.J.
Kugel, P. (1993) "The Five Ages of a Lecturer”
selected from 'How Professors Develop as Teachers', Studies
in Higher Education, 18 (3), pp. 313-328 for Teaching
and Education News, 6 (5), November 1996, p.11
Harasim, L. (1991) 'Teaching by Computer Conferencing'
in Miller, A. J. (ed.) Applications of Computer Conferencing
to Teacher Education and Human Resource Development (Proceedings
from an International Symposium on Computer Conferencing at the
Ohio State University), Columbus, Ohio, June 1991, pp.25-33
Harasim, L (1993) 'Collaborating in Cyberspace: Using
Computer Conferences as a Group Learning Environment', in Interactive
Learning Environments, 3 (2) pp. 119-130
Mason, R. (1991) 'Analysing Computer Conferencing
Interactions' in Computers in Adult Education and Training,
2 (3) pp. 161-173
Mason, R. (1994) Using Communications Media in
Open and Flexible Learning, Kogan Page, London
Morgan, A. (1993) Improving Your Student's Learning,
Kogan Page, London
Morton, F., Hounsel, D. & Entwistle, N. (eds.)
(1996) The Experience of Learning, (2nd. ed.)
Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh
Ramsden, Paul (1992) Learning to teach in Higher
Education, Routledge, London, pp. 109-119
Soby, M. (1994) "re: What can CMC *not*?",
a posting to The Distance Education Online Symposium, Pennsylvania
State University, USA, 10 November
Wells, R. (1992) Computer-mediated communication for distance
education: an international review of design, teaching and institutional
issues, The American Center for the Study of Distance Education,
University Park, Pennsylvania
Wood, J. A. (1993) "The professional development
of teachers as facilitators of computer mediated collaborative
learning" in Distance Education Futures: Selected papers
from the 11th Biennial Forum of the Australian and South Pacific
External Studies Association, University of South Australia,
Adelaide
Wood, J. A., (1995) "Work in progress at the
'virtual' Monash: the development of online learning across the
University and beyond" in Active Learning, 1 (2),
University of Oxford, pp. 13 - 18
Wood, J. A., (1995) "The virtual Monash: the
development of a learner-centred online campus", Proceedings
of the 11th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning:
Teaching Strategies for Distance Learning, University of Madison-Wisconsin,
pp. 217 - 224
Wood, J. A. & Rahman, S. M. (1995) "Towards
a quantitative understanding of online teachers' workloads",
Proceedings of the 12th Biennial Forum of the Open and Distance
Learning Association of Australia: Crossing Frontiers, Vanuatu,
pp. 316 - 319
The "Teaching and Learning in New Environments” web-based
workshop can be previewed at:
http://www-mugc.cc.monash.edu.au/~jean/workshop/preview.htm
Jean Wood
Monash University Gippsland, Australia