If e-Learning is the Answer, what was the Problem?
L. Naber. Email: larissa@naber.at
M. Köhle. Email: monika@ifs.tuwien.ac.at
Institute for Software Engineering and Interactive Systems, Vienna University
of Technology, Favoritenstr. 11/188, A-1040 Vienna, Austria
Abstract:
Universities trapped between rising student numbers an decreasing budget
are turning to e-learning as the one-stop solution, giving little concern
for student or teacher needs.
In a first step to a user-centred e-learning environment we studied students
motivation for not attending lectures.
We found that most reasons for not attending pertained to lecturer (lack
of rhetoric, pedagogic, organisational skills), but the main reason was
whether enough other study material was available.
In spite of the rather harsh criticism of their lecturers, the students
are not bend upon replacing their lecturers by an ITS, but rather wish for
a highly interactive ``question and answer'' type of ``non-lecture''.
Keywords: usability, e-learning, lectures, student motivation,
hypertext, authoring tools, process, study materials
In the last years Austrian universities got trapped between an increasing
number of students and an ever tighter budget. In addition, industry pressures
the universities to ``produce'' more market ready students in less time,
thus forcing them to teach more topics in a reduced time frame.
Some subjects are virtually overrun, while others have to battle for students.
As the student number proofs to be one of the more efficient guarantors for
university income, the faculties naturally try to attract as many students
as possible, even at the expense of educational quality.
With the reintroduction of study fees beginning with the winter term 2001,
the universities will be forced to reconsider the position of students in
the new light of "paying customer". Moreover they have to face an ever increasing
number of working students, who do not fit the typical student profile.
Not surprisingly universities have recently been looking for alternative
ways of information transfer to replace the classical lecture. Without much
consideration for teacher or student needs the universities see e-learning
as the solution of choice, although there seems to be no clear understanding
what e-learning is to comprise.
It is about time to separate effect from cause, to ascertain the real problem,
to ask an inconvenient question:
``If e-learning is the answer, what was the problem?"
When we look at lectures at Austrian universities we find some that are
so overrun that students will actually fight for a place in the lecture hall.
On the other hand we see lectures where only about 3 to 4 % of the students
enrolled actually visit the lecture.
Obviously neither situation is well suited for passing on information.
In the first case the lecture is reduced to the true meaning of the word1: the lecturer passes information
to his students by reading the information in question aloud. A lecture hall
packed with a thousand students perched on every flat (or not so flat) surface
surely is not a place to inspire a lively discussion of the latest development
in this or that scientific field. In the second case one might argue that
it is a waste of resources to even hold a lecture that is visited by only
3% of the students.
Along the lines of Tsichritzis[Tsic99], we believe
that university teaching in the ``post xerox age" should concentrate less
on information transfer, but on aiding the student in the process of knowledge
acquisition.
In a web-based survey we asked students why they skipped lectures. In
one-to-one interviews we asked about their experiences with e-learning and
their views about various features of e-learning systems. The results of
these studies are presented in this paper.
Linking the e in e-learning to electrical aided learning,
we can say, that electronic media have a long standing in education. Unfortunately
the production of electronic media tends to be expensive and the existing
authoring systems focus mostly on training 2 or K12 education, rather than on university
education.
In recent years adaptive hypertext systems have been a focus of research.
These systems are able to adapt to their users and hold high promises for
use in e-learning systems. Some of these have actually been used in information
science lectures. But again, the application was more of a training situation
(teaching programming languages mostly) and was solely used by their creators.
An e-learning system for university use should reflect the academic nature
of the contents to be taught as well as the limited budget most universities
are facing. It also must take into account that most university teachers
are neither trained in information science nor pedagogy. Thus the system
must provide a very easy to use authoring system and a process to guide the
lecturer towards thqe creation of a usable educational hypertext system.
In lifting the burden of basic information transfer from the lecture, the
lecturer is free for more useful activities like discussions or explanations
of difficult subjects. Quality learning materials and productive lectures
will strengthen the position of the universities.
Before the Internet reached every day life, classification of (technology
based) learning aids was simple: you could either divide the systems on the
time scale, or on a place scale. The time scale saw a division between
synchronous (lectures, TV/radio broadcast, telephone communication,
...) and asynchronous (video bands, audio discs, CBT, ...). The place scale
divided between tele-media that were accessible over a distance (TV/radio
broadcasts, telephone communication, ...) and local media which had to be
transfered beforehand (CBT, video tapes, audio discs, ...).
The Internet has changed all this. This is the one medium to bridge synchronous
and asynchronous media, to be used at a distance, or saved for later local
reference, to allow one-to-one or many-to-many communications.
E-learning is often associated with WBT (Web Based Training). This is
rather misleading, as the web or WWW is only a small (but growing)
part of the Internet. Reducing e-learning to WBT would leave out a large
number of useful Internet services especially in the communication and broadcasting
field.
As pointed out above, the Internet is pushing into every day life and thus
is beginning to replace long-standing technologies. Web-sites are replacing
information brochures and whole business workflows have been transfered to
the Internet.
In reflection of these transitions you can define stages of e-learning
systems:
- Stage 0: Classical distance learning
- In this stage e-learning mimics classical distance learning: scripts,
lecture notes, ...are offered for download on a web-site or sent by e-mail.
- Stage 0.5: Powerpoint/video casts
- In this stage e-learning is used to breach the synchronous transmission
barrier: a slide show (or even a video) of the lecture is put on the web.
- Stage 1: Hypertext systems
- In this stage, the hypertext and multimedia capabilities of the
medium are put to use. However, due to the lack of easy to handle authoring
tools for educational hypertext, not all capabilities are realized. Most
of these systems are generated by a conversion from a word processing
or DTP application.
- Stage 2: Interactive systems
- In this stage, the multimedial hypertext system is augmented by
interaction (self-test, group discussions, ... ). The integration of interaction
usually requires more knowledge of the WWW environment.
- Stage 3: Adaptive systems
- In this stage, the system adapts to the student's knowledge, interests,
and progress and will involve the student in the generation of new content.
The first two stages (0 and 0.5) do not fully qualify for e-learning - they
simply represent a switch to a more modern transport medium, without taking
advantage of its features.
Stage 1 systems are often referred to as ``bookware", or ``electronic page
turning" (see [Jone98]). The online material mimics
the linear structure of the lecture note it was converted from. Even when
created completely from scratch these systems resemble rather books, and make
little use of the hypertext features. Stages two and three qualify for the
term e-learning, however the amount of time spent in creating these systems
and supporting their users is often underestimated as found in an empirical
study of ten north-American e-learning projects[Mitc01].
One of the leading arguments against e-learning lies in the e itself:
new - electronic - media require new means, and little is still known about
structuring hypertext. Even though hypertext has been researched since the
1950s it became popular only at about 1995, with the rise of the web. As
book publishing has gone a long way since Gutenberg, we will require some
time to adapt to hypertext publishing. Many of todays hypertext lecture notes
cannot deny their print origins - the structure is completely linear, organised
in separate subsequent chapters. Only the transport medium has been changed,
the power of the new medium has not been released.
Also, e-learning involves computers, which adds an additional dimension
to the whole problem: to learn with a computer, you'll first have to learn
about computers (compare [Wats01]):
There is a distinct difference between teaching with computers,
and teaching about computers. Due to the generally bad usability of ``teaching
with computers'' there arises an artificially created need of having first
to teach about computers before the actual goal (teaching something using
computers) can be tackled. So the difference between means and subject of
teaching became increasingly blurred.
In their article The Frontier of Web-based Instruction[Mitc01] Mitchell, Dipetta and Kerr compare the evolution
of e-learning to the exploration of Americas wild west, complete with Lone
Rangers, Greenhorns and Band Wagons. E-Learning is
driven by Lone Rangers, interested individuals with the necessary
technical and educational knowledge. The occasional Greenhorn, an
interested person without the necessary knowledge either evolves to a
Lone Ranger or has to wait for the Band Wagon, e.g. the department
organising a large scale e-learning venture.
Despite recent advances, moving into technologically mediated
instruction and course delivery remains akin to exploring uncharted territory
...Adventure stories are still being written"
Although everbody likes a little adventure now and then, many of the adventurous
experiments are at the students' expenses. Even web-based courses designed
by experienced Lone Rangers can fail, a Greenhorns first
foray into web-based courses can easily proof disastrous for the students[Mont00].
Classical arguments in favour of e-learning/web-based learning/computer aided
instruction include
- time independency (asynchronous learning)
- up-to-date material ;-)
- possibility to evolve
- collaboration
- highly interactive
- adaptive
- easier access for handicapped students
As these arguments are well known, we will refrain from expatiating them
further.
As part of the requirement analysis for a university specific e-learning environment,
we made a survey of lecture attendance among students and interviewed them
about their ideas about an e-learning environment. The survey was done via
the web, the interviews were done on a one-to-one basis.
The web survey was prompted by the radically different percentages in lecture
attendance among the different fields of study. A quick survey among friends
and colleagues found that asking `Why do you attend the lecture' is a rather
moot question, not likely to elicit some meaningful response.
So in the actual survey we asked `Why did you avoid certain lectures'.
Obviously students tend to have rather strong thoughts about lectures they
did not attend, which lodges them into memory.
The participants were selected to be representative for the average Austrian
student, (different universities, programs, gender, age, social and cultural
background, progress in their studies, full-time/part-time).
68 students filled in the questionnaire, 9 were willing to further give
an interview.
The questionnaire focused on
- compulsory courses, examinable (no elective courses)
- without compulsory attendance
- which stressed the lecture aspect - transfer of mostly theoretic content
(not labs, workshops, seminars ...)
- which were attended less than 30% of the time
Concerning the field of study we settled for a distinction between technical
/ natural science studies (``technical'') and arts / humanities (``non-technical'')
as we aere unlikely to find a sufficient number of participants to do an evaluation
based on the field of study.
Furthermore we decided to distinguish between undergraduate and graduate
students.
We asked about the estimated number of skipped lectures
- less than 20 %
- 20 - 40 %
- 40 - 60 %
- 60 - 80 %
- more than 80 %
and settled for an attendance rate of < 40% as ``few'' and > 40% as
``many''
Then we asked for reasons for not attending a lecture. These reasons we
divided into 6 groups:
- lecturer (L)
- time (T)
- contents (C)
- personal learning style (S)
- handicaps (H)
- free-form entry of other reasons (F)
At last we asked to name the main reason, the group that is most likely to
cause non-attendance.
The questionnaire was based on several hypotheses which we will document in
this section.
Students avoid a lecture if lecture notes are provided.
Many lectures are a waste of time: the lecturer lacks rhetoric or pedagogic
skills and little is to be gleaned from actually attending the lecture. If
study material is available, the lecture is likely to be skipped. ``Materials
are available'' was the overall most named reason for avoiding a lecture.
It made first or second place in all different categories (undergraduate/graduate,
many/few or technical/nontechnical. ``Materials are available'' also was the
overall main reason for avoiding a lecture.
Students avoid a lecture if the lecturer lacks rhetoric, pedagogical or organisational
skills.
Even though ``Materials are available'' made first place, 3 of the six reasons
in the category lecturer made it into the top five. However nobody
claimed the lecturer as the main reason to skip lectures.
Those who attended few (less than 40%) lectures are likely to prefer learning
alone / from books.
Students who do not profit from listening to lecturers are not likely to attend
any. Students who attended few lectures were the only ones to claim ``personal
learning style'' as the main reason for their absence.
Technical students tend to avoid lectures
Technical students are assumed to be autodidacts and to prefer learning from
books. 60% of the technical students attended few (less than 40%) lectures.
The ratio is reversed for non-technical students, whereas undergraduate or
graduate has no effect on the number of lectures attended. Also compare next
subsection.
Undergraduates are more inclined to attend lectures
Undergraduates were assumed ``to do as they are told''. The ratio for few
(less than 40%) to many (more than 40%) is roughly 50:50 (as it is globally).
In fact undergraduates are even less enthusiastic than graduates: nearly 30%
attended less than 20% of the lectures. Also compare the previous subsection.
The questionnaire contained contained 20 questions arranged in six groups.
After listing the respective questions for each group, we give an evaluation
of the responses for the group. For a graphical comparison of the reasons
see figures 1 and 2.
The Group Lecturer comprised 6 reasons pertaining to the rhetoric,
presentation and pedagogic skills of the lecturer.
- L1
- lectures too fast
- L2
- follows the word lecture to the extreme and reads the book
out loud
- L3
- lacks rhetoric skills
- L4
- lacks planning/organisational skills
- L5
- can't get to the point
- L6
- doesn't interact with students (questions, discussions)
Although the single most named reason for not attending was ``materials are
available'' the sum of complaints about the lecturer made up for nearly 40%
of all complaints. However, no group claimed the lecturer as the main reason.
Technical students are less tolerant regarding the quality of a lecture as
their non-technical colleagues, the same goes for undergraduates compared
to graduate students.
This group contained the following reasons:
- T1
- lecture interferes with other lectures
- T2
- lecture is a single event in certain time frame
- T3
- long commuting necessary
- T4
- lecture interferes with job
- T5
- lecture interferes with private life
The time group is dominated by ``Lectures interfere with other lectures''.
Interference with job or private life came up nearly even, but not so pronounced
as interference with other lecture. Reasons T2 and T3 were hardly named.
Time was the most named main reason for the group graduate
students. This does not surprise as the number of lecture collisions
grows with every term. Time also was the most named reason for the groups
``non-technical'' and ``graduate'' students.
This group contained the following reasons:
- C1
- Enough material is available (lecture notes, books, etc.)
- C2
- Content is not relevant for the exam
- C3
- Topic of the lecture and content of the lecture have nothing in common
``Enough material is available'' utterly dominated this section. The availability
of study material obviously is crucial to lecture attendance. No matter how
inconvenient or annoying a lecture: if there's no material available it will
be attended. The content group made it main reason in the overall group, as
well as in technical students, undergraduates and those who attended many
lectures.
This group contained the following reasons:
- S1
- I'm an autodidact, I prefer learning on my own
- S2
- I prefer learning in small groups together with other students
- S3
- Listening to a lecture doesn't help, I prefer learning from written
material.
The learning style group was dominated by reason S1 (autodidact), backed by
S3 (learning from books). Learning style was nominated as the main reason
by those who attended few lectures (jointly with time).
This group contained the following reasons:
- h2
- I can't follow the lecture (hearing, seeing, ...)
- H2
- It's to difficult to get to the university
- H3
- It's not possible to access the lecture hall (lack of elevators, ramps,
...)
The sample was too small a number to allow for a statistic of the main problems
for handicapped students. As e-learning is often positioned as a benefit for
handicapped students, their specific requirements will be canvassed in further
interviews.
However, more than 10% of the students claimed to be ``unable to follow
the lecture'' due to the lecturer being too muted, bad/small writing, etc.
...
The free-form entry brought hardly anything new. Most students just put emphasis
on one of the other reasons. Several remarked that lectures before 11am should
be banned because of cruelty to students. However, three students claimed
to be unchallenged and bored by the lecturer who took to long to explain
or repeated introductory material.
Figure 1:
The six most frequent reasons for not attending
a lecture - the remaining 14 reasons occurred in less than 25% of the
responses.
C1 ...Material available,
L2 ...only reads the notes,
T1 ... interferes with other lectures,
S1 ...autodidact,
L3 ...rhetoric skills,
L4 ...organisational skills.
The upperleft image shows the overall frequency, the other sub-images
contrast the antagonistic pairs.
|
|
Figure 2:
The main reasons for not attending a lecture according
to the four groups: Lecturer, Time, Content, Learning Style (noone chose
handicapped). The upperleft image shows the overall frequency, the other
sub-images contrast the antagonistic pairs.
|
We interviewed nine students on their feelings about e-learning. The interviews
focused on their experiences with e-learning (classical distance learning,
CAI, WBT, ...), their proposed uses of such study aids and the features such
a system must/should/could provide.
The feature part of the interview was devided into two sections: First
we asked the students about the features they would like to see (which gave
some features, commonly found in e-learning applications, that had been found
useful), the we described some features we intend to implement in our learning
environment.
All of students had previous experience with computer mediated learning3. Although the experience
vastly differed, eight of the nine kept an open mind about the subject.
One student (a computer science undergraduate) claimed to have no interested
at all in e-learning. He argued that after spending much time behind a computer
for practical work, he did not want to use a computer to learn the theoretic
aspects as well. Still he was all in favour for a well organised lecture site
as download spot for the lecture notes, as a preview for the lecture's contents
and a spot to discuss the topic in question with other students. He conceded
that information transfer by a lecture is anachronistic and believes that
more lecture time should be given up to discussion and question and answersessions.
Several of the interview partners discarded features as
- full text search
- bookmarks
- hypertext(!)
When asked why they turned down these features, the replied that their experience
showed that these never worked anyway, and thus they were probably a complete
waste of time to implement4.
This shows deep concern for the effort the lecturer undertakes in creating
e-learning systems. It also shows, that hypertext navigation is tricky. Many
of todays hypertext authoring tools focus too much on graphical design aspects,
without lifting the burden of hypertext structuring and provision of navigational
aids from the author.
Of course everybody was in favour of working and usable full text search
and hypertext. Bookmarks, obviously should be augmented by some more intelligent
history mechanism: the system should be able to produce files vaguely described
as " I know, I saw it when I was reading about xy" or "I know, I read it two
weeks ago"
This highlights another common computer usage problem: as pointed out by
Shackelford[Shac90] users a so brainwashed by the myth
of the ``smart computer'' that they will blame themselves if they encounter
stupidity on the softwares part. Instead of questioning the design of the
software they assume that nothing can be done about it.
Several of the students observed that their use of learning material changes
according to the ``learning phase''.
- Phase 1 - reconnoitring:
- Before deciding on a lecture, or exam to take the students want a
detailed overview of the topics covered. Some students refer to is as the
``90 minutes notes''. Many lectures fail in providing support for this stage.
- Phase 2 - learning the basics:
- After having decided to take the exam most students read through
the material available (and try to solve the exercises). In this stage many
students try to focus on the main points. Many lecture notes do not differentiate
between essential, nice to know and stuff you might
be interested in. Support is generally there, but it could be improved
from the student's point of view.
- Phase 3 - exam preparation:
- Most students make custom notes of the topics they need to study further.
Most classic material provide no support for this stage, all excerption
is done by hand. Although these excerpts can be of great pedagogical value,
they can not be efficiently integrated with classical materials.
- Phase 4 - reference:
- Lecture notes should not be worthless after the exam. Human memory
being as it is, it is often necessary to return to previous ``haunts'',
to look up what has been forgotten. While some books come with a somewhat
decent index, most lecture notes do without, so information retrieval can
be quite tedious.
Nearly all students were in favour of discussion groups. Obviously one of
the reasons to attend lectures is to stay in touch with colleagues. The virtual
meeting room is even more popular with commuting students.
The possibility to annotate the material was also well received.
Another must have feature was the possibility to rearrange the material
to ones own liking and the generation of ``sub notes'' which might serve as
an additional, direct path to a special topic.
Everybody wanted an intelligent print feature: material is frequently read
while in transit, in the park, etc.
A feature to use the online version on an mobile device was mostly discarded5.
The presented study is a first step towards a user-centred e-learning
environment. Its main idea is to produce usable and highly functional educational
materials. This goal can only be reached by ensuring that the teacher has
an equally usable tool for generation of the very same materials plus a strong,
reliable process to tide him through the difficulties of educational hypertext
construction.
As Shackelford pointed out in 1990 [Shac90]:
[...]the great majority of effort has been devoted to bypassing
the teacher. We estimate that in excess in 99% of educational software
development has focused on products for use by students.
As we follow a usability engineering approach the e-learning environment
- naturally - is to aid the two most involved groups - students and university
lecturers - in the process of information transfer and knowledge generation.
Starting the requirements analysis with the students, we studied their
motivation for lecture non-attendance, as well as their ideas for a usable
learning environment. We found that most reasons for not attending pertained
to lecturer (lack of rhetoric, pedagogic, organisational skills), but the
main reason was whether enough other study material was available.
In spite of the rather harsh criticism of their lecturers, the students
are not bend upon replacing their lecturers by an ITS, but rather wish for
a highly interactive ``question and answer'' type of ``non-lecture''. More
student-lecturer communication was established a major ``pro e-learning''
factor in study by Schell[Sche01]
As the next step we started to interview lecturers on their expectations
towards such an environment.
Upon conclusion we will build a proof of concept prototype to present to
the users.
-
- Mitc01
- Mitchell C., Dipetta T. and Kerr J.: The Frontier of Web-based Instruction.
Education and Information Technologies 6:2, 105-121, 2001. Kluwer.
- Shac90
- Shackelford R.: Educational Computing: Myths versus Methods. Why Computers
Haven't Helped and What We Can Do About It. ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society,
Proceedings of the Conference on Computers and the Quality of Life.
August 1990, Volume 20 Issue 3.
- Wats01
- Watson D.: Pedagogy before Technology: Re-thinking the Relationship
between ICT and Teaching. Education and Information Technologies 6:4, 251-266,
2001. Kluwer.
- Sche01
- Schell G.: Student Perceptions of Web-based Course Quality and Benefit.
Education and Information Technologies 6:2, 95-104, 2001. Kluwer.
- Tsic99
- Dennis Tsichritzis: Reengineering the University. CACM June 1999,
Volume 42, Issue 6.
- Jone98
- V. Jones, H.J. Jo: Interactive Multimedia based on Learning Theories
to Enhance Tertiary Education, Conference proceedings ICCMA'98, Australia
- Mont00
- W. J. Montelpare, A. Williams: Web-baseeed learning: Challenges
in using the Internet in the undergraduate curriculum, Education and Information
Technologies 5:2, 2000, 85-101
Footnotes
- ... word1
- Middle English, act of reading, from Late Latin lectura, from Latin
lectus, past participle of legere, a discourse given before an audience
or class especially for instruction
- ... training2
- training for business purposes, languages, ... subjects which generally
do require more learning and less understanding
- ... learning3
- Previous experience was not a prerequisite for the interview
- ... implement4
- students seem to care about the efforts their lecturers have to undertake
to produce usable e-learning
- ... discarded5
- nobody thought these devices ripe for such a task, but about half
conceded that that would be an interesting option once the devices reach
a certain maturity
