Managing Online Learning

Russell Pennell, Centre for Interactive Multimedia in Teaching, University of Western Sydney Nepean, PO Box 10, Kingswood, NSW 2747 Phone: +61 2 678 7605 Fax: +61 2 678 7600 Email: r.pennell@nepean.uws.edu.au Home Page: Russell Pennell [HREF1]

Keywords: WorldWideWeb, interface, education, management

Introduction

The increased use of educational technology is only a minor aspect of the redesign of courses for flexible delivery, but the technology can be a source of considerable stress both for staff and for students. As more teachers make use of the Web for delivery of courses and for interaction with students, the careful choice of software tools can reduce this stress by providing interfaces that are easy to drive, thus reducing the cognitive overhead for staff and for students. The still-developing WEST educational management system provides a simple consistent interface to many of the communication and interaction tasks teachers need to carry out in constructing and managing courses that make use of the Web.

Changing the Location of Learning

Over the next few years many of us will benefit from and also be burdened by the need for learning to extend beyond the physical location of the University and also beyond the early years of life. The most predictable outcome of this change is that our teaching will increasingly make use of the Internet, the vast and continually growing web of networked computers that can be accessed by students both from their homes and from the University. We will have to learn many new skills to maintain our competency as educators.

Most University staff enjoy learning, but the methods of learning they mastered (from face-to-face discussions to solitary burrowing through the stacks of a library) may not be as comfortably available to our students in our joint future. As our society moves from universal secondary education to universal tertiary education we will increasingly be subject to pressures designed to influence us to make the University experience more accessible, allowing busy people to fit it in to their working day when they see fit. We will lessen the disruption to students' lives by reducing the need for them to travel to the central University site in order to engage with the University experience. We will do this in part by providing learning interactions through a variety of electronic communications. Universities who fail to make such a concession to their students' needs will undoubtedly lose students to one of the developing Virtual Universities [HREF2].

Flexible Learning and Teaching

Introducing flexible teaching involves a lot more than merely converting lecture notes into Web pages. On the visual level the differing characteristics of the media require quite different formatting of textual material. On the organisational level, breaking the lock-step of classroom sessions and mass concurrent teaching will require much greater flexibility on the part of the bureaucracy, as exemplified in the negative by the current insistence of many institutions on students' personal attendance for re-enrolment. Considerable anguish may be caused for lecturers who will need to rewrite much of their teaching material if they are to avoid high dropout rates and take advantage of the increased opportunities for their students to experience the realia of a subject. (Rowntree, 1985) The loss of face-to-face behavioural, gestural and tonal cues may give rise to many misunderstandings and will require particular attention in our educational designs.

Andrews and Bowser (1995) have pointed out the tendency many teachers have to imitate existing familiar teaching situations and strategies when delivering instruction via new technologies, and the problems this approach causes in the successful adoption of the new technologies. Besides raising the need for staff development in the use of new teaching media, they point out that two of the 'missing' components in conventional distance education are student/instructor interaction and class collaboration. Retaining the immediacy of these learning interactions will not be accidental. New communication technologies now allow us provide much more of these than in conventional distance education, but the design task is not trivial even for single-user interactive media. (Sims (1995) [HREF 3]). Learning from a well-made Open Learning package may be like having a good human coach or tutor, but the skills involved in preparing that package are quite different from those required to deliver a useful lecture.

Beyond these issues, however, many operational difficulties arise in our use of such educational communication technologies, as we have experienced in the adoption of earlier technologies in face-to-face teaching. The use of video-projection from a computer to replace the use of static overheads does not dispose of the need to prepare a certain amount of static overhead material as a backstop in case the video-projection system fails. For differing reasons, this doubled preparation will be repeated as we introduce more flexible methods into our teaching. Both the face-to-face or audio-taped lecture and the Web page need to be prepared if we are to provide increased flexibility rather than merely a substitution of delivery media.

While in an Ideal University there would be sufficient support staff to relieve the lecturer of the technological aspects of this task, experience suggests that the present dearth of such support staff will continue, a lack both in absolute numbers and specifically of those who are sensitive to and have some allegiance to the needs of teaching as opposed to the needs of machines. I expect that teaching staff will have to bear at least part of the preparation burden, just as many now prepare their own teaching aids such as overheads. The temptation for many will be the direct conversion of existing material for electronic presentation. This will create a (small?) market for conversion software, able to ease the task for relatively non-technical teaching staff, as programs such as Powerpoint have done over the last few years. In the short term many electronic lectures will be created, driven by the pressures of time and lack of support and justified as being at least partial steps along the way to providing more flexible learning conditions.

Situated Learning

Learning activities that lack social interaction usually fail to evoke emotional involvement from learners and thus deny the learners engagement with the culture of the "community of practice" (Lave and Wegner, 1990). Most classroom learning activities involve knowledge which is abstract and out of context, is unsituated. Problem-based learning approaches tend to reduce these effects and well-made multimedia interactives can restore some context to the learning, but teaching that interposes current communication technology between the learner and the teacher risks engaging the student with the wrong "community of practice". The technologically-aware lecturer needs to be sensitive to the danger of having students apprenticed to technology rather than their chosen discipline.

Reduction of Personal Contact

In contrast to the pressure towards "remote-control" teaching will be our desire to maintain the personal contacts that we see as necessary and valuable in understanding and guiding our students. Mass teaching has reduced this contact and the use of educational technology can sometimes lead to further depersonalisation. Teachers seek to ameliorate this depersonalisation by, for example, trying to make the mass lecture a two-way communication: standing at the front of the theatre while showing slides: setting aside times when they are available for personal discussions in their office.

The increased use of technology dictated by our move to greater flexibility needs to be leavened where possible by increased interactions between student, teacher and learning community. We should try to avoid techniques and technologies which isolate learners from one another, seeking rather to identify tools which, because of their ease of use, are more likely to used both by students and staff.

Internet Communication

In the broad educational context, the use of Internet software is likely to increase as a channel for communication between learner and teacher. A partial list of desired communications includes:

#	Communication	Typical tools
1	free-form text messages between lecturer and individual students and vice-versa	email software, Eudora
2	messages from lecturer to entire class	mailing list software
3	delivery of learning materials and assignments to student when, where and as they need them	Telnet, Fetch or Gopher session, or a Web page with links to download files to the student's own machine
4	response by student to short structured questions to allow lecturers and students to assess learning achieved	forms-based Web pages backed with CGI scripting to extract results
5	text-based commentary between students about the learning resources	IRC Chat session or computer conference
6	transfer of image files between students for discussion, together with manipulation of such images visible to many students concurrently	whiteboard facility included in many forms of desktop video conferencing
7	submission of assignments by students electronically, together with return of assignments to students by the lecturer	email with attached documents
8	synchronous audio communication between a student or students and the lecturer	audio-conference equipment, party-line call or Internet Phone
9	asynchronous audio communication between relevant parties	answering machine or audio download from a Web page
10	face-to-face visual communication between a student or students and the lecturer	video-conference, desktop video-conference or CUSeeMe call

Table 1 Desired Communications

Current affordable network tools supporting remote learners allow email, file transfer, computer conferencing and Web browsing, but these various tools demand a serious learning effort from their users, not only from the students as learners but also from their lecturers as administrators. This extra learning effort adds an additional barrier between learner and teacher, between learner and learning. The use of a computer in the message-passing stream can be considered an impediment to learning for many students.

In addition, the lead-time and response-time in student-teacher interactions are lengthened. With paper and chalkboard, these times are quite small. Involving a bureaucracy in assignment reception and registration can add weeks to the interaction process. Using electronic communications that require reprocessing and involve an educational technician may also slow the process enormously unless the lecturer takes action to minimise delays, preferably by retaining as much control as possible. Just as the growth of desktop publishing has benefited semi-professional authors by passing control over the appearance of a work from the printer back to the author and reducing the overall production time, Web publishing and course management tools need to be put into the hands of teachers to retain as much immediacy as possible in student-teacher interactions.

Integration

Over time easier methods of achieving these varieties of educational interactions will be developed. The GUI Web browser integrates image and context, enhancing understanding and usability beyond the Gopher browser that gave access to similar material. Just as a Web browser allows file transfer, gopher access and email with little cognitive overhead required of the "reader", so the interface to the varieties of communication required in delivering a course and managing student interactions must be simplified. The separate tools listed in Table 1, with differing methods of operation, will be replaced by a simpler single interface which integrates their purposes and makes it easier for students and teachers to exchange material. It will ease this exchange by reducing the need for the student to master the use of a variety of programs. These new integrated tools will also make it easier for teaching staff to manage the flow of material to and from their students.

By making the process easier, the new tools leave more mental energy available for creativity and communication. Consequently both creation and communication are more likely to occur.

A variety of such learning management tools are being introduced (Harasim (1995) [HREF 4]) as many Universities around the world reinvent their particular wheel (and we are not immune to that disease). Products such as PacerForum and Lotus Notes, while integrating many of the various communications described above, are restricted to use on a local area network or to organisations large enough to afford dedicated technical support for the groupwork system. Newer teaching and communication tools are frequently based on the use of the Web as this offers a pleasant and consistent graphical user interface and avoids many of the problems arising from the wide variety of computers that our students use.

Learning Management By The Lecturer

Where learning material is essentially static and designed to be read and copied by students, it can be stored on a university's Web server computer and maintained by emailing updates to Computing Centre staff directly or by file transfer using tools such as Fetch. If, however, you want to retain the more personal elements of teaching that many staff find rewarding, you may be interested in communicating on an individual level with your off-campus students, receiving and managing student responses, assignments and enquiries online, promoting class-wide discussion of a topic or even adjusting course material for individual student differences.

WEST (Web Educational Support Tools [HREF 5]) is a system developed at University College Dublin which makes it easier to manage the creation and delivery of learning materials over the Web. The ease with which this system can be set up and maintained puts it well within the technical ability of the majority of university computer users. Once the server is running, all lecturer tasks can in fact be carried out from any computer on the network. If the current interest in using the Web to increase the flexibility of course offerings is maintained, personal Web servers backed by management systems like WEST could proliferate on lecturers' desktops, just as presentation software has become a standard part of the lecturer's toolkit. Just as HTML and its associated tools offer "multimedia for the rest of us", desktop educational support tools may add real value to the "ubiquitous servers" in educational institutions.

The diagram below briefly summarises the communications capabilities of the WEST system and shows how it integrates facilities equivalent to the communication types listed as items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9 of Table 1.

Figure 1 WEST messaging methods

The system presents a simple consistent interface making heavy use of buttons and forms, as shown in the Figures below, thus avoiding the need for staff and students to master a variety of different interfaces to achieve the mix of messaging most appropriate to flexible learning.

The WEST system provides facilities for individual registration and controlled access by students who are part of a class studying some course; it allows the allocation of learning materials as Web pages to students or to the whole class; it provides one-to-one messaging between student and tutor and between students, similar to email but based on a Web form as shown in Figure 2. It also allows one-to-many messaging similar to a bulletin board or news group.

Figure 2: WEST form for message to tutor

Students each have access through their Home Page (Figure 3) to their own coursework page, which is a linked table of contents for the course they are working on. Students can send messages to their tutor and submit assignments. They can also send messages to specific students or to the entire class through the open-to-everyone discussion list, where they can read what other students have written about a course discussion topic. The simple interface of the discussion list is easy to understand and use but lacks the thread feature of Internet News.

Figure 3: Student's Home Page in the WEST system

Tutors can receive messages and assignments from students, reply, mark and return assignments or have them automatically marked and returned. They can make announcements to the whole class or address individual students.

Any of the variety of messages can include HTML code and thus include hypertext references to other resources on the Internet. The use by students of simple Web server software (available free (for example EasyServe [HREF6]) and soon to be included in MacOS) will allow multimedia messaging between all participants.

Course content pages are held in a database by the system and made up on the fly (with headers and appropriate control buttons) when selected by students. Course pages are in HTML form. They can include forms and the system automatically carries out the server-side actions needed to report the form data to the lecturer. Form-based exercise pages can include questions with specific answers which can be automatically marked by the system and returned to the student.

Administration of the system, including the addition, alteration or removal of content, classes and students, is through a forms interface, as shown in Figure 4, and can be done from any computer able to browse the Web. A lecturer can use dial-in access to receive, send, create or modify materials using a Mac, Windows or Unix computer at home.

The course page HTML must be written or pasted into the form as shown below. This is a far cry from the ease of such Web-page authoring tools as Adobe PageMill, but the body section of pages created in a Web editor can be copied and pasted into WEST. The instructional material can include links to any other page on the Web, as well as any of the usual variety of embedded Web-delivered multimedia, such as photographs and diagrams, Quicktime movies, Director animations and RealAudio streaming sound.

Figure 4: Creating course pages

The WEST system currently runs as an Asynchronous CGI application only on Macintosh servers running MacHTTP or WebStar. The Webstar server software costs about A$250 and a single-server educational-use WEST licence for 10 simultaneous users (no limit to total users) costs about A$300. Versions of the WEST software for Unix and Windows NT are in beta now (July,1996).

The WEST system is used in the USA, Canada and Ireland for courses varying from a resource of information and research on Chemistry to delivery and management of course material for a multi-disciplinary Open Learning course on the Famine in Ireland.

Some Current Shortcomings

WEST does not keep track of student accesses, nor of how far a student has progressed. These are important features for staff administering courses for remote students, whose flagging motivation may require restorative action unnecessary for on-campus students. These features have been requested for a future version. Additionally the need for students to be able to display non-textual material for discussion and to annotate course materials has not yet been addressed within WEST, thought the personal server solution described above does permit the first of these. Because of these missing features, teachers may feel the need to add further Web utilities to their armoury. This will unfortunately reduce the integrity of the system for the sake of improving its functions.

Javascript code may be embedded within WEST pages though not in the <head> section of the page, the usual location for function definitions. This limitation arises because all the HTML page code before the </head> tag is generated from WEST and is not under the control of the author. This means that Netscape frames cannot be used in WEST pages, though tables and any other feature supported by the Web browser can be used as normal.

WEST at UWS Nepean

The system has been used in early 1996 to deliver and administer an online Staff Development course in Web Authoring [HREF 7]. At the end of February, 42 staff were undertaking the course as they found time. Staff were surveyed two weeks after enrolment and a large dropout rate was immediately evident. This was expected given its nature as essentially a voluntary course rather than one to which emotional or financial commitment had been made. The flexible nature of the course also allowed staff with existing Web Authoring skills to undertake just those parts that were of most relevance to their current needs.

In an interesting example of the differing usages of our communication tools, all staff were contacted by email to assess their progress in the course rather than using the messaging system in WEST. Those staff who were not actively engaging in coursework would not have been aware of the request had it been limited to the Web channel.

Staff using the system were pleased with the interface and found no difficulty understanding its use. They chose slow response as the major limitation of the system. Version 1.1 of the software (which was in beta at the time of writing) is clearly much faster, using an integrated database for data storage rather than the Claris FileMaker Pro database system used in version 1.0.

As the administrator and tutor of the course I also found the WEST software to be relatively slow but quite usable. There were initial difficulties in understanding the sequence in which events such as class creation, registration and assigning of course material needed to be done. There was no error-checking to prevent assignment of duplicate pages to students. The messaging system worked without any problems and the next version has remedied some of the technical difficulties experienced.

The Future

Many teachers will need to learn new ways of teaching as flexible teaching and learning become an expected part of our course design and delivery. The design of material for learning at a distance is not a trivial task, but it will be made easier if the hurdles of Educational Technology can be lowered. Hopefully tools such as WEST will be improved without losing their ease of use and will allow teachers to incorporate a variety of message streams into their course material, to build in interactions that involve their students. If teachers can manage learning processes on the Internet without becoming amateur programmers, they will be able to give more attention to encouraging student-teacher and student-student interactions that are appropriate to the new media and the new learning environment.

References

T Andrews and B Bowser (1995), "Applying Technology Successfully: Meeting the Challenge" in "Proceedings of HERDSA 1995 Conference" , HERDSA

L Harasim (1995), "The Virtual University: new approaches to Higher Education in the 21st Century" in "ASCILITE 95 Conference Proceedings" University of Melbourne

J Lave and E Wenger (1990), "Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation" , Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press

D Rowntree (1985), "Developing courses for students" , PCP, London

Hypertext References

HREF1
: http://www.nepean.uws.edu.au/cimit/staff/rp.html-Russell Pennell's Home Page
HREF2
: http://www.athena.edu/Athena-Home.html-A Virtual University Home Page
HREF3
: http://129.7.160.78/Documents/S/Interactivity.html- Rod Sims' Interactivity paper
HREF4
: http://ASCILITE95.unimelb.edu.au/SMTU/ASCILITE95/abstracts/harasim.html-Lind a Harasim's Keynote for ASCILITE95
HREF5
: http://www.west.ie-Home Page for WEST
HREF6
: http://Summary.Net/soft/easyserve.html-producers of free Web server software
HREF7
: http://137.154.20.87/west/wa.html-CIMIT's online Web Authoring course (login as webauthor/webauthor) for the Staff Development Unit

Copyright

Russell Pennell © 1996. The author assigns to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers, and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the author.

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