Paper presented at On-Line
Educa Berlin, 5th International Conference
|
Electronic Media in Education Research
Group,
Technology Faculty, The Open University,
Milton Keynes, UK.
This paper describes the development and presentation of a new Open University course, aimed at first year undergraduates, which is being presented more completely on-line than any previous, large scale OU course. Our aim was to retain the Open University's traditional high educational standards and high production values, in an approach that is scalable to very large numbers of students.
The course is currently in a pilot presentation, to an initial population of 900 students around the UK and Europe. At the time of writing, over 6,000 students have registered for its full presentation in 2000. About 60 part-time tutors (associate lecturers) worked with the students in the pilot year, and roughly 500 will be needed for 2000.
This course is the latest in a series of innovative distance learning courses at the Open University using on-line communication, starting with DT200 Introduction to Information Technology in 1988. At present, the Open University has over 60,000 students on-line, most of whom use the FirstClass conference system as a supplement to the other teaching media in their courses. This is consistent with a major movement towards the use of on-line teaching in higher education, including the use of groupware and with it, new approaches to learning styles.[1] [2] [3]
The course is made up of 3 modules, each worth 10 points (where a degree requires 240 points), and is meant to be studied for about 6 hours per week for a total of 32 weeks. It is at 'level 1' which is an introductory level for students new to the university. It thus includes material to develop skills of studying and personal organisation. It is also aimed at students with little or no previous experience with computers. Students are assigned to tutorial groups with a personal tutor. Some of the activities are group activities, drawn from these groups.
The first module, You: computing with confidence, contains material at two levels. There is a training level, in which students are taught the basics of using computers, including the use of the Windows operating system, basic office software (word processors, spreadsheets, databases, graphics), email and computer conferencing, searching the Web and creating Web pages using HTML. At a more academic level, students are taught principles of netiquette (effective behaviour on-line), working in a group, and clear thinking.
The software is taught generically. That is, students aren't given instructions on the specific commands of a particular software package or version. Rather they are taught general principles of how to learn new software. Then, for a given type of package, say word processors, they are given a series of graded exercises that progressively involve more and more of the facilities of a word processor. The exercises are backed up with on-line support conferences in which students can report difficulties and request help with the specifics of their software.
The learning methodology is active and problem-based, so that students are made to engage with the concepts they are discussing [4]. There are two student assignments in module 1, both of which require groupwork.
The second module is "Your computer: the story of the PC". It is based around a set book, Accidental Empires by Robert Cringely [5]. It tells the story of how the personal computer came to be one of the defining technologies of our age, and covers key personalities, companies and technologies. The Web site contains study guides, links, resources and assessment materials.
The third module is "The Net: where it came from, how it works". It is also based on a set book, Where Wizards stay up Late: the origins of the Internet, by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon [6]. It covers the evolution of the Internet from its origins in the inter-war years through to the explosive growth of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. It covers key personalities, institutions and ideas.
The only physical learning materials produced for the course are a CD-ROM containing software: browser plug-ins, HTML editor, a typing tutor, FirstClass client and some utilities, and a short Course Guide, giving starting instructions.
As is usual at the Open University, a multi-disciplinary team produced T171. On the production side, it included academic authors, a graphic designer, editor, course manager, and technical staff from the Electronic Media in Education Research Group. To develop the student support and associate lecturer training, the team also included staff tutors (who recruit and manage the part-time associate lecturers) and counselling staff, who prepared materials for staff development and student support.
The team met regularly to discuss drafts of the learning materials, the organisation and design of the course Web site and discussion areas, the educational approach, the form of the on-line groupwork, and the details of the assessment. One of the major strengths of this approach to course development is that so many different perspectives are brought to bear on all its aspects. This approach produces very high quality, but the effort required is only justifiable with large population courses.
The tutorial issues are especially complex, as many of the associate lecturers were new to the Open University system and needed training in that. Also, some were subject experts, but with little or no experience of teaching on-line, and needed training for that too. To maintain consistent academic standards across the associate lecturers, the OU has developed a system of monitoring a selection of the assignments marked by the associate lecturers. This monitoring is normally done using photocopiers and (e-less) mail, and so an on-line equivalent of that had to be developed.
Some of the more interesting technical issues raised by this course were [7]:
The issue here was that the authors
insisted on writing using HTML editors, so that they could see the functionality
they wanted, while the designer came up with a sophisticated design based around
book-publishing standards (Figure 1). All the authors' materials had to be converted
into the designers' style without requiring too much hand coding. The solution
was to use a rendering engine, Frontier, to strip out the authors' original
HTML tags and replace them with the designers' tags. The editor was responsible
for this process, as well as editing the materials for style and consistency.
The result was the process shown in Figure 2.
The dashed line shows that iteration was needed, largely as a result of parallel development of both text and design. A lot of hand editing was still required due to the complexity of the design so the automation wasn't as successful as had been hoped. In retrospect, a simpler design would have been preferable and would also have decreased download times somewhat.
In addition to the formal feedback of assignments, and the informal communication of email and conferences, we wanted to provide:
The self-diagnostic tests and the progress reports were implemented as HTML forms on the Web site, but with special tags and CGI scripts to enable them to interact with the FirstClass server. The completed self-diagnostic tests were automatically sent to the students mailbox for future comparison, while the progress reports were automatically linked to the student's tutor by the CGI scripts and sent to them. The email reminders and study guides required scripts to automatically generate the lists of recipients from the OU's central database.
In addition to the course web site and the FirstClass server, we needed a RealMedia streaming media server for some audio-visual material, a small database for students to experiment with, and the Frontier rendering engine server. This was further complicated by the need to keep material private until development was completed.
A complex and seemingly ever-changing set of servers were used, each of which had to be carefully tested using a variety of browsers and PCs. A difficulty affecting only a small fraction of the students could still generate large numbers of help desk calls. Browser quirks or older machines meant that some plug-ins didn't work, and some audio-visual material displayed too slowly on older machines. These required changes to the web site and a revised method of presenting the audio-visuals.
We gathered information about the success of the pilot presentation from several sources. Several members of the course team also were course tutors and reported their experiences. The on-line conferences were a major indicator of difficulties, and were used to overcome them. Finally, we asked students to complete an on-line feedback questionnaire at the end of each module. The results of all of these are that:
Our overall conclusions are that we have successfully produced a very innovative course, but with a certain degree of technical difficulties and difficulties for beginners at the start. We are hoping to make changes to solve all these in time for the much greater numbers in the full presentation in 2000.
[1] Helen
Robinson, et. al, "As good as IT gets:
have we reached the limits
of what technology
can do for us?", Active
Learning (9), December
1998.
[2] Diana
Laurillard, "Multimedia and the learner's
experience of narrative", Computers
and Education
(31) 1998, pp. 229-242.
[3]Betty
Collis, "New didactics for university instruction:
why and how?", Computers
and Education (31),
1998, pp. 373-393.
[4] For
a fuller discussion of this aspect of the course,
see "Communication
and collaboration on-line:
New
course models at the Open University",
Gary Alexander, in Networked
Life-long Learning,
Eds, Sheena Banks, Celia Graebner,
David McConnell, University
of Sheffield, April, 1998.
[5]Penguin, 1996.
[6]Simon and Schuster, 1998.
[7]
A much fuller description of these technical issues is
given by Will Woods, Building
an online course,
a
personal technical perspective, EMERG technical note.