Julie Gibson, Open Training & Education Network, 51 Wentworth Road, Strathfield, NSW 2135, Australia. Phone +61 2 97158514 Fax +61 2 97158522 jgibson@vc.tafensw.edu.au
World Wide Web, Education, Internet, Vocational Education, Distance Education
This paper describes the evaluation of a trial of teaching a module using the World Wide Web (WWW) for students enrolled in a NSW TAFE course by distance education. The purpose of the trial was to evaluate WWW-based course delivery for distance education in TAFE, in terms of practical functionality, student acceptance and educational outcomes. A complete module of an existing course was developed for WWW delivery.
Teachers and administrative staff contributed feedback on the methods used, student responses were solicited and results examined. The module was offered only by WWW delivery so no comparative studies were made, the evaluation is anecdotal and the primary usefulness of the results is in examining the methods and techniques used.
Overall the student acceptance of the WWW-based method was very high and results were better than usual in distance education, judged by rate of completions. However functional problems were uncovered with the methods used in terms of the amount of administrative work required. The methodology for assessments duplicated existing mail based methods, a new approach is needed for WWW based delivery.
This paper describes the evaluation of a trial of teaching using the World Wide Web (WWW) for students enrolled in a NSW TAFE course by distance education. This paper will be of interest to educators for its information relating to the use of the WWW as an educational delivery mechanism particularly for distance delivery but also in college based flexible delivery and work based training. It also relates anecdotal evidence of the educational effectiveness and student acceptance of Internet based teaching.
The WWW provides an opportunity for distance educators to create an environment which allows a community to develop amongst students and teachers, and provides for new methods of delivering course materials. By developing a WWW community we attempted to create the social and learning advantages found in a college environment. Some of these benefits are:
The WWW as a teaching medium will also be useful in providing:
This paper has been written to ensure that we reflected on the experience
of using the WWW to deliver a module to a group of students and to provide
some measure of its effectiveness and acceptability as an educational tool.
The OTEN Information Technology Web site [HREF1] was designed to use the medium of the Internet and the World Wide Web to create an infrastructure which would allow for the management of students' learning processes and foster a sense of place and belonging for the members of the community. Eventually it should make use of all the new methods of learning being made possible with the WWW.
The site was opened in January 1996. It provides a complete environment which goes beyond the two dimensional screen. A strong metaphor of a "campus" is used for the graphical interface. This was chosen as it is a familiar concept to all the students and teachers who will use it and allows for good guesswork to be used for navigating, based on the images. The interface uses buildings to represent the different functional areas and visual clues throughout the site. In spite of the tendency to refer to it as a "Virtual Campus" it is in fact a real campus - it is made up of actual teachers and students who come together within the medium of the Internet.
The Site performs the following tasks:
These are the functions which are represented by the buildings:
Classrooms - here there is a space for each module, with access
to all the learning materials and supporting activities.
Assessment Centre - this area is password protected and provides
the mechanisms for submitting assignments or requesting and sending tests.
Campus Information - here any information about how to use the site
or about the courses offered is available.
Students Residence - this is where information about each student
is displayed along with their contact email address.
Staff Offices - this is where information about each teacher is
displayed along with their contact email address.
Library - here a short introduction to searching the WWW, along
with information on finding all TAFE libraries.
Registration Booth - this is where students, staff and other interested
people can let us know about themselves.
The overall Internet teaching project involved the development of learning resources for ten modules. The first module to be ready for delivery was Value Added Information Services (National Module ITG301).
This module, which lends itself to teaching basic Internet skills, was developed first so that it could be used for training students and teachers in the skills that they would require to utilise the Internet for later modules. It makes full use of the Information Technology WWW site, with activities, assignments and tests all requiring interactions with the site. If you would like to take a look at this module you can link to it here.[HREF2]
In order to carry out an evaluation at the earliest possible time we chose to use this module. We understood that the ability to test the educational effectiveness of the site using this module would be limited since it is in fact involved with learning about the WWW itself. However it would still provide a great deal of information about many of the practical aspects of Internet teaching, and allow us to make any mistakes on a small scale.
The opportunity to take part in the trial was offered to all "working" students enrolled in the Certificate of Information Technology (Level 3) at the Open Training and Education Network (OTEN). This included students enrolled through Open Learning Australia.
OTEN - The Open Training and Education Network, is a part
of TAFE NSW which provides TAFE courses by distance education. Students
are generally provided with printed learning materials. Students send in
assignments by mail and carry out supervised tests at the end of most subjects.
The Certificate Level III of Information Technology - This
course provides training for the skills required in a microcomputing environment,
such as the use of a variety of software, basic system administration,
use of the operating system and introductions to programming and networks.
The course is the equivalent of six months of full time study in a college
environment.
Working students - To be regarded as a "working"
student they must have submitted work during the preceding two months.
Over 500 students were invited to participate in the trial, for which they
had to supply their own modem. We received 92 expressions of interest in
the first week. Of these, 39 already had email access of some kind. We
supplied 20 hours of Internet access to participating students, since we
thought that this would allow more freedom of usage without the issues
of cost interfering. Forty students were selected randomly but from within
the local call area for the Internet service provider chosen.
Information Technology students provide the hardware and software which is needed to carry out the practical work involved in their studies. In addition to this equipment they needed a modem in order to connect to the Internet Service Provider. The software required would be a WWW browser such as Netscape and an email application such as Eudora, which were supplied with the Internet accounts by downloading from the provider's site.
We had to select an Internet service provider which would:
There was a very wide spread of students throughout country NSW with over half the applicants from country areas. Most of the 8 interstate applicants were outside of metropolitan areas. We needed to make use of a single provider to minimise the negotiations which were required to achieve these conditions, particularly the method of account payment.
We found that the major ISPs were inflexible in relation to their billing systems and this turned out to be the biggest difficulty at this stage of the trial. Most ISPs bill for what you use rather than allow you to prepay for a fixed amount of time, but this was too risky for us, we could not afford the possibility of too many hours being used, we needed to fix the amount of time available to limit our costs.
In the end, to maximise geographical coverage we had to select one of the larger providers which would also allow a satisfactory payment system, so we selected Access One. Students were then selected within the local call areas for Access One, with a random selection from the Sydney metropolitan group.
The situation with providers is constantly changing, any decisions would always have to be preceded by a current assessment of the services available. There is certainly much better provision in country areas now compared with at the time of the trial.
The overwhelming majority of the students who responded to the trial survey felt that this was a more effective learning experience than their usual way of studying with OTEN.
Students' favourable comments included:
"the feeling of belonging to a class"
"getting to know the other students"
"being able to share the other students' questions and the answers"
"the fast return of assignments"
"preference for learning via a screen"
"ability to study in bursts"
"more personal direct contact with and support from the teachers"
The completion rate for the students involved in the trial of the module was noticeably higher than usual for OTEN students. All of the students who responded to the survey completed the module. This indicates that the responses to the survey questions were all given by a group who had found this a good way of studying and are therefore skewed in its favour. No surveys were received from students who did not complete the module.
| Number | Completed | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
| All Trial Students |
40 |
22 |
55 |
| With email experience |
15 |
9 |
60 |
| Females |
19 |
11 |
57 |
| Survey Respondents |
20 |
20 |
100 |
All of these students are studying the Level 3 Certificate in Information Technology and are already highly technically aware so that their responses are not necessarily typical of the wider population. But with the trend for more people to develop this awareness then these students may be regarded as a measure of the future usefulness of the Internet as a medium for teaching.
Thus the conclusion can reasonably be drawn that this use of the Internet for teaching is at least as educationally effective as the current OTEN methods for distance education.
The aspects of this implementation of Internet teaching which were identified from the student survey as those essential to their success were:
The simpler we can make it to understand what's available then the more the students can make use of it.
Comments from the survey about the WWW Site included:
"it was like a real campus and allowed easy access to different
areas"
"logical division of functional areas"
"well mapped out, very straightforward"
This allows for the development of a learning community.
Comments from the survey included:
"it made it feel a bit more like a face to face class"
"knowing about the teachers backgrounds meant that you knew who to
talk to"
"it makes it more personal - you feel you know these people"
"you know that you're not on your own"
By the end of the trial half the students had started to use email for making administrative requests concerning the rest of their course. A typical comment was:
"I could send off a request late at night while I was working."
As more students become comfortable with using the Internet it will become essential to provide all the usual OTEN services in this way.
All the students who actually made use of the Forum found it useful. Comments about why the students found it useful were:
"seeing questions posted that I would have asked"
"learning about other peoples problems"
"the tips people offered"
All these students felt that they would use forums in other modules if they were available. There were, however, some students who did not ever access the forum, and still completed the module.
The system we used for assessment duplicated the current OTEN mail based system. In this system the students are supplied with print materials which include assignments to be sent in to OTEN. OTEN then assigns the student's work to a teacher and mails it to them. The teacher marks the work, mails it directly to the student and mails a "Marks Record Slip" to OTEN to allow recording of the students results and payment for the work done by the teacher.
The Internet version was made simple to use from a student's viewpoint, however there are aspects of our existing system which need improvement. Until students submit an assignment they do not know who their teacher is, which means that they do not start that connecting process. Part of a teacher's role is as a witness to the student's learning process, when a student does not have a specific teacher in mind for a module they cannot make use of this. So our Internet based system duplicated this failing to some extent.
Assignments had to be attached to an electronic "Marks Record Slip" and sent in first to OTEN then forwarded on to the teacher. Many problems were encountered in this (see discussion of email issues). It all resulted in a circuitous route with more possibilities of error. A more direct method has been developed (Jones, 1996), student results are stored automatically as part of the WWW site and are available for all students to look at anonymously.
A completely new approach needs to be found for managing students in Internet teaching. Any attempts to duplicate existing administrative styles which have been developed to support other forms of teaching are destined to make Internet teaching seem more complex than it is.
In our next trial we plan to make use of aspects of college teaching, with students allocated to a particular teacher and in a class group. Once we have tested this closed system we will attempt to create a more flexible method to allow more open ended enrolments and timing of study, combined with acceptable methods of payment for teachers.
All learning guides should be primarily available on the WWW site and kept thoroughly up to date. These guides are not usually the primary source of subject information, this may come from a textbook, but they are the student's guide to how to use the text and would usually provide some form of self assessment and activities for the student to follow.
For the trial, the complete lesson material was provided in paper form as well as on the WWW site, this meant that many students made use of the paper form in preference to the electronic form. We also did not make it possible for the complete set to be easily downloaded and used off-line. Half the survey group stated that they would find the electronic version sufficient in future. ie half would still prefer to have the paper version available!
In order to minimise connect time the learning materials should be capable of being downloaded onto the student's PC with some updating mechanism in place.
As students posted questions and comments to the forum these items were also placed into their relevant position in the lesson units. This allowed the forum items to be read as part of the lesson, so that the information in them was added to the original as annotations, producing a form of collaborative teaching and learning which makes use of the students' knowledge and skills and the contributions they can make for other students' learning(Rutherford, 1996).
In our next trial a teacher will be responsible for writing learning guides in time for the class to start but not to a final published standard, then using the experience gained during the delivery to make the changes required. We expect that once several classes have been run in this way the materials for the subject will have undergone intensive testing and correcting, with value added from the interactions and additions made by students. So that in stable subjects they may then be ready for a more complete publishing, possibly paper based.
However in Information Technology the subject matter is changing so rapidly that the development may never be complete, but always continuing. This makes the electronic form the best and students can print out the current, up to date version if they wish.
There is a special quality about email conversations, the participants
don't have to actually be present while the others are "speaking",
they don't have to even be paying attention at the same time. A conversation
can take place over several days or even longer. Although it might lack
some of the spontaneity of spoken conversations it can have other advantages:
- thought can be put into composing a reply, but not so much as with a
formal communication.
- people with language difficulties can take the time to understand what
has been said.
- a productive conversation can be shared with many and over a longer time.
Email requirements for Teacher - The assessment system was designed to duplicate the existing system used at OTEN for tracking student work and providing payment for teachers carrying out the marking. This system does not provide for the sort of additional student support which we were requiring from these teachers in interacting with students by email and answering questions in the subject forum. OTEN contract teachers are paid by the assignment marked and all extra support is provided by a smaller group of teachers via a telephone Help Desk system, this makes it difficult for students to make a connection with their particular teacher.We used the existing system as a basis for our design in order to fulfil requirements for internal audit.
Only one teacher participated as a contract teacher, the other teachers carried out the trial as part of their regular duties. It is of note therefore that the sole contract teacher found that the amount of work required went way beyond any payment and withdrew shortly after the trial was completed. The extra requirements of a teacher in this situation are:
Email at OTEN - Problems arose from the OTEN corporate mail system which made changes to email entering the teachers mailboxes, sometimes rendering it unreadable. Since for auditing purposes all submissions of assignments and tests had to come first to the OTEN coordinating teacher this caused major problems.
On one occasion all email at OTEN was lost because of a local power failure, causing some unknown losses and one lost test.
Some students had problems because of the way they had set up their mail program: eg. incorrect return address - this resulted in one very frustrated student who never received any teacher replies to her messages, it was only sorted out via the phone, also different encoding of messages resulting in scrambled attachments.
The routing through OTEN also causes all assignments to appear with identical headers and from_names on the teachers in box.
There are two kinds of accessibility to consider, how easy/difficult it is for the students to make use of the technology and how easy/difficult it is for them to gain access to it.
It is the very fact that the World Wide Web is so easy to use that this project was ever funded. The Internet itself has been in existence for at least 15 years, and it could have been used in several of the ways we are now doing, however it was restricted to a limited group in universities and research establishments, partly because it was neither easy to use nor to understand. The WWW provided a graphical interface and easier ways of navigating the Internet so that many more people became aware of it and could see its potential in their field.
This group of students were already studying Information Technology and so they would have had fewer problems using the technology than most. However this did not mean that they had none and the following are the sort of problems which can arise:
Difficulties getting accustomed to using email etc. - Internet software has to be configured properly in order to work well and the problems will only show up at odd times. Some students had difficulties receiving their email and became very frustrated simply because they had not entered their address correctly, or misunderstood the process of receiving email into their mail program. Any students who are not already proficient with Internet use will experience difficulties of various kinds.
Cost of time on the Internet - Internet access is through a service provider, usually a registration fee and then a cost per hour, currently of about $5. So that all activities which require connection to the Internet will have an overhead of cost for the connect time. Although the students in the trial were provided with 20 free hours they still worried about the usage, since they did not want to run out before they finished. This issue of cost will remain a problem for students until the Internet becomes part of the usual costs of running a household.
Any educational delivery which involves on-line learning activities has to consider the issue of cost to the student. The time that currently is needed to move large amounts of data as is required for video and sound will make this sort of delivery very costly for the student. This situation will change when the Internet becomes integrated with the wide bandwidths which are being supplied for the cable TV system in Australia.
Geographic issues = more costs - For students outside of a local call to the provider, with both connect time charges and STD charges the costs of using the WWW become prohibitive. Although several services attempted to provide local call access throughout Australia this was discontinued as soon as the excessive costs were experienced. There was very poor coverage of country areas at the time of our trial, and we had to restrict participation to those who were within a local call of AccessOne dial up points. Since then the situation has changed considerably, with whole networks of providers appearing in most country areas. There are still many areas which remain outside of the local call access, but technology is emerging to allow satellite links to the Internet which may resolve this access for remote users, also at least one provider has established a local call service (013 dial up) for a moderate additional charge(On Australia by Telstra).
Equipment - A computer is becoming a standard requirement for most forms of education, for Internet learning the only additional equipment needed is the modem. The cost of modems is constantly dropping for an adequate one for current needs.
All teachers involved in Internet teaching must have their Internet access on their desk, it is essential that regular and habitual interactions are established. This may seem self evident, but in the TAFE NSW context it is only in unusual cases that teachers have a computer on their desk, let alone Internet access. Even at OTEN where most teachers have a computer and access to email via the corporate system, very few teachers have full WWW access.
Although the teachers involved in this project were already experienced in the use of the WWW this is not generally true of teachers in TAFE NSW. There has been, and continues to be, very little access to the WWW for teachers in TAFE. This means that in any proposal to implement Internet teaching there will have to be provision of a high level of staff development.
Once staff have Internet access on their desks, their skills development can be carried out by flexible means and via the WWW using a subject such as was used with the students in the trial.
During this project staff development in the form of group meetings to discuss and resolve emerging issues has been used, and would be recommended for any new project. In every different teaching area a different set of issues is likely to emerge based on the requirements of that area. This means that peer support of this kind will be vital.
To create a Web site for educational purposes you will need to take care of the following roles:
Technical
Teacher
Creates content, specifies functions for the technician to code, manages
student teacher interactions, keeps records
Manager/coordinator
Defines standards, the overall content and ensures that the site hangs
together logically, retains a consistent style, and is kept up to date
Administrative
Handles all administrative interactions with students (enrolments,
adjustments etc)
Designer/Instructional Designer
Creates the visual style, develops graphical elements, advises on presentation,
advises on educational design, publishes content.
A web site must be kept up to date and accurate, an individual should be in charge of this task for the site as a whole as the Web site manager/coordinator. The specific content must be cared for by a person directly concerned with it. In our site the intention is to allow the teachers to manage the classroom associated with their module, but a site manager will still be needed to oversee this process.
By automating the steps required to look after the content the teachers will not have to develop specialised Web authoring skills but will be able to remain focused on their subject area and use the automated system. The main benefit from automating the procedures will be that a standard style will be enforced, with all modules conforming to a template.
Work is being carried out relating to this form of automating (Goldberg, 1996) but it is in the context of University teaching which has some essential differences with vocational education, mainly in relation to the extent of teacher interactions required. Note: emerging software is making Web authoring as simple as using a word processor.
Many of the best aspects of our design for educational use have involved a high degree of interactivity between the students and the content. This has required Web scripts and we foresee the need for a student record database capable of interacting easily with email programs. A site must be managed technically in the form of regular backups, security systems etc.
This maintenance role will also involve the setting up and managing of the Internet link.
It became apparent that students who have adapted to using the WWW for their learning processes quickly want to use it also for their administrative interactions with the college. So Internet access, at least email access, will need to be extended to the administrative sections.
It seems very unlikely that any additional administrative support will be required due to WWW teaching. On the other hand it would be reasonable to predict that once student record systems can be automated for Internet teaching then at some time these records should be integrated with the existing systems and there may be a reduction in requirements for administrative support.
Most of the technical issues which arose were between the student and the Internet Service Provider, so that much of this technical assistance should come from that direction. However during this project students were provided with telephone support via the already established Information Technology Help Desk. There was not a heavy usage of the service for this purpose, but when it was needed it was critical to the student's progress.
Any provision for support of this kind by an educational institution would be temporary while the Internet becomes more of an established facet of in our society. Just as now we do not expect to provide technical support for telephone usage to our students and would always refer them to Telstra or Optus.
This project cannot provide accurate cost estimates for the normal usage of the Internet for teaching. However I will make some observations.
Currently these materials are very expensive to produce, it is difficult to find good teachers who have both the time and energy on top of their usual load to write them. Current production and development methods can have costs which quadruple the initial writing cost.
This high cost of production and development has arisen from the need to have stable materials which can fit into a publishing style framework and a large scale distribution system. All eventualities have to be predicted and catered for during the development phase because once created they will stay the same for a substantial time and changes will not be made readily.
By using the Internet as a delivery mechanism these materials do not need to be developed to such a state of perfection The materials made available to students on the Internet can be dynamic, constantly changing to reflect improvements, additions and changes to the curriculum in the way that a teacher in a classroom is constantly adjusting what is presented according to current needs.
Allowing this process to take place over several sessions of offering a module would produce a set of materials which may then be ready for the more expensive publishing processes to take place. With the added benefit of having already been tried out on several groups of students. Of course this would require a subject which itself remains stable, most areas of Information Technology are constantly changing and so the materials are unlikely to ever reach this stability.
In terms of the teacher/writer it would have the benefit of becoming part of a normal teaching load and not have to be carried out as additional work. Along with the benefits of a natural deadlines created by a real group of students expecting the materials to be ready according to a pre-established schedule.
Using this method the initial teaching cost will be greater than the current usual OTEN costs for delivery, however with the initial cost of materials development included in the current estimates of costs then it becomes very likely that this method would reduce costs, especially in the constantly changing field of IT. Once material has been fine tuned through several teaching sessions it would be possible to cut down the amount of teaching time allocated.
These would be replaced with Internet server costs. Currently OTEN bears all of the costs of printing and distribution, if all materials become available only via the WWW then it will be the students who bear the download, possible printing costs and half the emailing costs. At the establishment stage of Internet teaching there would be special expenses due to setting it all up, but over a longer time and with a greater proportion of teaching carried out this way the Internet delivery would become the cheaper option since it would scale up considerably without additional costs. The initial costs required to set up a system for a small number of students and content will not be increased proportionately when more students and content are supported.
We propose to deliver a complete course, the Level 4 Certificate in Information Technology, with some major changes in our method based on what we have learnt from the project so far. The reason for aiming for a complete course is to ensure that the critical mass is reached in the students' use of the Internet as their communication medium. If they are using it for all the subjects they are studying then it can become a normal part of their life as students, and assumptions can be made, for example that email will be read regularly and it will be possible to manage them as a group as happens in a college.
In this project we did one major thing right: we created a learning community for students who usually experience their learning process in complete isolation from other students and with discontinuous interactions with teachers.
Creating this community was largely achieved by the design of the homepage and the structure of the site, by creating a community framework the students own interest was enabled to take over. We provided them with an electronic corridor in which to dally and chat with other students, not necessarily overheard by the teachers.
So we most certainly recommend that this element be preserved in any future effort. Other areas of success are mentioned in the section on identified successful practice.
The limitations we found in our application of Internet teaching in this project were created by our attempt to remain within the existing methodologies in both delivery mechanisms and materials development.
Throughout the project our WWW site was located as a guest on a server run by another organisation. This was unsatisfactory because it limited many of functions we wished to try out for their usefulness. The functions we have identified are:
By making use of the best aspects of the Internet it should be possible to develop a form of teaching which is specific to the Internet. This new form of teaching should be able to make use of the dynamic nature of classroom delivery and put it together with the self paced nature and the visible materials used in distance and flexible delivery now.
Teachers View - Teachers will be assigned to a class group, they will be expected to submit a complete teaching plan before the classes commence with all assessment events ready and any textbooks or other materials to be used already defined; and also a schedule for due dates for any assignments or tests.
They will write the necessary material for students to carry out their work - exercises, references to texts, and ensure that these lesson materials are loaded into their WWW classrooms according to a guaranteed schedule, keeping at least a week ahead of the schedule at all times to allow for the faster students.
They will mark student assignments and return them via email. An Internet accessible student tracking database would be ideal for recording student results but if this is not available teachers could keep a "rollbook" which lists students, their email addresses, phone contact numbers, addresses and records all interactions, marks of assignments and final marks.
Teachers will moderate the forum, answering outstanding questions and ensuring all contributed questions and answers are suitable. They will answer direct email queries from students and post these to the forum when they should be shared by all students. This will be done regularly.
Where appropriate they will organise extra activities required for the completion of the module, possibly also organising workshops and tests for practical events.
Students view - The student will have to conform to a schedule for submission of assignments and tests, the current OTEN system allows students to set their own schedules.
They will know who their teacher is for each module at the start of the semester. They will have to register themself, including a photo, onto the students residence. They will know who else is studying their course and how to contact them.
The lesson units will not always be beautifully presented and edited, but they'll either do the job or the student will be able to ask clarifying questions of the person who has written them.
Work will always be returned within a week, and email responded to within 3 days.
OTEN's view - After the first cycle, for a cost less than a quarter the cost of developing the paper based lesson materials OTEN will have a group of students who have completed the module as well as a set of tested although unedited lesson materials.
After the next cycle, for the cost of college delivery for two classes there will be a further group of students having completed the module and an improved and further tested set of lesson materials.
This can be repeated as it stands or with add-ons like editing or instructional design being contributed while the materials are actually in use. The final task of publishing material at this stage should be a far simpler one than that faced at OTEN now and therefore the cost reductions could be extended.
In the special case of Information Technology where the rate of change of the content of most modules is so great that the current development cycle often means that they are out of date as soon as they are released this method would also have the benefits of keeping our materials up to date.
These guidelines for the future describe a group of students to be managed by OTEN for distance education. Inherent in the plan would be the involving of specialist teachers from other institutes, to look after particular subjects.
The system is directly adaptable to college environments for Internet (Webb, 1996). Expert teachers could be used for their special expertise creating classes put together from students across the Institute or even the state or the country. This would allow teachers to develop their special areas of expertise without being diverted into other areas to fulfil local needs. A whole course could be put together by a college without enough local students to create classes, by cooperating with another college in the same situation and pooling teaching resources.
Many OTEN Information Technology students already study at their workplace with the informal support of their employer, with Internet teaching this could evolve into a formal arrangement, making workplace training just another facet of the same training program for all students.
We can use elements from traditional college delivery, from college based flexible delivery, from work based training and distance education - everything that can be made to work using the WWW as our medium.
I am confident that we can create a community of learning, a conglomerate of people dispersed in space and time but held together by the medium of the Internet and their common interest in learning and teaching about a particular subject area.
The future directions put forward in this paper have been largely followed in 1997. We now have our own server and we have a group of students studying exclusively via this system for their Certificate Level 4 in Information Technology (PC Support). You are welcome to visit this site[HREF3], however this time much of the functioning class material is behind closed doors as it is in any normal classroom.
Goldberg, Murray W (1996) "CALOS: First Results From an Experiment in Computer-Aided Learning" Proceedings of the 1996 SIGCSE Technical Symposium, Feb 1996. Available at http://homebrew.cs.ubc.ca/papers/calos/
Jones, David (1996) "Solving some problems of university education: a case study." Proceedings of The Second Australian WorldWideWeb Conference. [Online] Available at http://www.scu.edu.au/ausweb96/educn/jones/paper.html
Rutherford, Philip (1996) "Annotations: The key to collaborative teaching and learning on the Internet". Proceedings of The Second Australian WorldWideWeb Conference. [Online] Available at http://www.scu.edu.au/ausweb96/educn/rutherford/paper.html
Webb, Greg (1996) "A New Learning Environment for College-Based Programmes - Internet-Based Training" Pre-publication copy, due for presentation at the TAFE NSW Research Association 1996 Conference, Sydney Institute of Technology Dec 1996. Also available at http://www.scu.edu.au/ausweb97/educn/webb/paper.html
The trial was carried out as part of a project funded by the Australian National Training Authority to enable the delivery of TAFE courses over the Internet and also supported by a grant from Open Learning Australia.
The project has been managed by the Open Training and Education Network(OTEN), TAFE NSW. OTEN provides TAFE courses by distance education, primarily using the postal system. Most of the work has been carried out as a partnership between Julie Gibson the project manager and Philip Rutherford the Web site creator and manager, both of whom also carried out Internet teaching roles. Contributions were also made by Cecelia Cilesio who managed the coordination of Internet teaching with the existing OTEN system, Greg Webb as a teacher in the trial subject, Michelle O'Sullivan who efficiently handled all the administrative needs of the survey and Kim Prasertsuksom who now manages the website.
Julie Gibson ©, 1997. The authors 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 grants 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 authors.