Towards Using WWW for Teaching and Learning

Introduction

Background

Traditional forms of distance education course delivery rely on paper based exchange of information and invariably suffer from an extreme paucity of dialogue. On the other hand, telecommunications-based education (Debreceny, Ellis & Chua, 1995) makes use of both existing and new technologies for a variety of options in course delivery which maximise dialogue, interaction and interactivity.

Web-based courseware

The first Southern Cross University (SCU) unit to be found on WWW, ED 730 Futures Studies is accredited in two awards at postgraduate level and is conducted entirely electronically. Materials were prepared by scanning and optical character recognition for text and graphics. Small audio and video bites were also incorporated to personalise the materials as well as providing variety in the use of media.

Course materials are password protected and only accessible to enrolled students from a computer networked via telephone and modem. Once connected, students can browse, save or print the online course materials, search associated links within the Futures field and participate in an email discussion list with students, peers, colleagues, academics and subject specialists.

Access to this electronic discussion list can be gained by email or from SCU's homepage using a graphic interface browser such as Netscape, with its capabilities for hyperlinks and archives searchable by subject, date or author.

A key feature of web-based materials is the ease with which they can be updated. This dynamic feature also lends itself to collaborative authorship whereby students' work and feedback can be incorporated into subsequent iterations of the study resources.

Features

The poster session will demonstrate SCU's move towards using WWW for teaching and learning. Key features of ED730 to be highlighted are:

• accredited towards two Masters level awards: MEd(T&D) and MOD&T

• delivered via WWW with password secure access to core course materials

• increase in level of dialogue and interaction via Futures Coffee Shop discussion list with hypertext archive

• rapid input and feedback mechanism

• components of multimedia

• direct access to subject specialists

• assessed electronically

• mutual learning partnership of students and teachers.

The future of Futures Studies

The next unit in the Futures Studies series is planned to include synchronous components of dialogue such as Internet Relay Chat and desktop videoconferencing technologies e.g. CUSeeMe.

References

Debreceny, R, Ellis, A & Chua, K, 1995 `The Integration of Networked Learning Delivery - From Strategy to Implementation' in Maurer, H (ed) Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia Charlottesville, Va: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education

Acknowledgements

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