Dr Gary Alexander
The Open University, UK

Introduction

An experimental multi-media course

This paper describes the design, presentation, and evaluation of an experimental, international multimedia course, XT001 Renewable Energy Technology. XT001 was a distance-learning course, with students of the UK's Open University (OU) working from their homes and other students participating from universities in Finland and Australia. The teaching approach relied heavily on collaborative resource-based learning, integrated with a computer conference system.

The principal multimedia learning resources were provided on a CD-ROM, developed for XT001. The various teaching resources were integrated in a comprehensive 'Interactive Learning Support Environment' (ILSE) which used the metaphor of three 'rooms': a 'study' for individual work, incorporating personal productivity tools; a 'library' with learning resources; and a 'meeting room' for collaboration.

Quality in distance learning

As an experimental course, XT001 differed from conventional distance learning courses, such as those at the UK Open University, in many ways. It was our intention to try out and evaluate various factors which might improve the quality of the learning experience for our students.

We took as our model of the learning process that it is both a private and a social process, which can be influenced by external factors such as inter-personal interactions. It includes re-organisation and modification of the structure of knowledge involving the use of language as a social process. We were concerned to provide 'deep learning' with an emphasis on the higher levels of Bloom's cognitive hierarchy : the ability to analyse, synthesise and evaluate as well as simply to recall. We were reacting against a more conventional approach which is centred around reading textbook material and answering questions about it.

Thus XT001 adopted learning styles in which the students were expected to actively engage with the material. The two pillars of our learning approach were:

• collaborative learning, in which student learning includes discussion and interaction with other students
• interactive, resource-based learning, in which students solve problems supported by a set of resources.

We see the benefits of collaborative learning, our first pillar, as

• Learners have the benefits of other perspectives on the material they are learning. The group inherently brings with it a wider range of experience than does an individual member.
• The learning experience can be structured so that students find themselves presenting and explaining material to other students. Peer discussion can be more relaxed and free than with a teacher. Through discussion students integrate what they are learning into their general understanding. (...as in the old adage, the best way to learn something is to teach it!)
• Working with a group is highly motivating to people. The group provides a pace for its members. People want to be seen to be doing their best. The support and sense of identity provided by the group allays fears and builds confidence.

The second pillar of the approach of XT001 was the provision of a rich set of educational resources for the students, including text, video, and the computer-based environment (ILSE). This gave students a substantial library of materials on CD-ROM and easy access to other students through its computer conference system.

In summary, we sought to enhance the quality of distance learning by providing students with a good set of learning resources at their fingertips, by providing mechanisms for good support from tutors and other students, by ensuring strong motivation from being part of a team, and by providing learning activities in which students actively engage with the material.

Description of the course

XT001 Renewable Energy Technology was a short course, run once only from October 1993 until January 1994. There were 24 students including 5 from Finland and 2 from Australia. Of those, 18 satisfactorily completed the course. This is comparable with the completion rate for other short courses offered at a distance. Students worked in groups on three different activities, each of which used a different approach to collaborative learning. They had to provide their own computers, Apple Macs, but in many cases were loaned modems and CD-ROM drives by the project.

Educational resources provided

In addition to the computer-based materials, students were provided with a course book Understanding Renewable Energy, printed study guides introducing the software and the course activities, and a video, The Renewable Present . The course book and video were taken from an associated project, a resource pack for teachers in tertiary education, which was under development at the same time as XT001.

The Interactive Learning Support Environment (ILSE)

Our objectives in setting up ILSE were to create an environment that

1. would support all aspects of a student's work in the course
2. would be intuitively understandable and require minimum learning time
3. would link different tasks transparently rather than create barriers to working
4. would support and create expectations of collaboration.

The basic metaphor used for ILSE, to provide a comprehensive learning environment, was of three 'rooms', a 'study' for individual work, a 'library' with learning resources, and a 'meeting room' for collaboration.

The study

Our 'study' required an outliner, a word processor and a spreadsheet, plus QuickTime movie display to display the CD-ROM materials. We considered Microsoft Word and Excel, and several integrated packages. We chose ClarisWorks on grounds of price, usability and its ability to mix 'frames' of one type of document within another.

The Meeting Room

The most difficult and crucial ingredient was the communications system. After much discussion and evaluation, we decided to use FirstClass, which has a clear, modern user interface with a tool palette for the most common commands, as shown in Figure 1. It provided a flexible message structure with conferences, sub-conferences, sub-sub-conferences, etc. or folders, and good facilities for navigation and following threads of messages. It had particularly good facilities for attaching documents to messages and for including documents as part of a conference. In fact, FirstClass proved to be very popular with the XT001 students and as easy to use as we had hoped.

We added a number of features to FirstClass to create expectations of community and collaboration for the students.These were 'electronic faces', 'virtual circles', and 'empathy templates'.

Electronic faces: To help overcome some of the barriers of lack of face-to-face contact we wanted students to be able to include an 'electronic face' on each message. To do so, we built a 'Face Maker' program in ClarisWorks which let students assemble a face from parts, and customise any part they wanted. The electronic faces appeared in each message as shown in Figure 1.

• Virtual Circles: We used a message structure called the 'virtual circle', taken from the work of the Johnson-Lenz's . A virtual circle calls for every member of a group to make one statement, and within a given time period. We found this structure very useful in checking the progress and general status of the students.
• Empathy templates: We were very concerned to enhance communication that permits creative co-operation and also to avoid some of the destructive communication that sometimes occurs in computer communication due to the lack of non-verbal information. To this end, Dr. Bob Zimmer of the OU's Institute of Educational Technology developed a set of protocols we called 'the Empathy Templates'. There were four empathy templates, designed for different circumstances, as listed below:
  1. Here's my own experience and what I want to do:
  2. [Name], I'd welcome knowing what you think I mean, to be sure my feelings are accepted.
  3. [Name], Tell me what you want to do here, so that I can see your point of view.
  4. [Name], What I think you mean in essence is ... My own view differs in this way ...

The Library

The purpose of the XT001 Library was to provide students with a set of educational resources at their fingertips. We felt that simplicity of access and convenience would make the primary difference to whether these resources were well used. We hoped that the ability to easily find text, pictures, sounds and moving images in the CD-ROM and copy them into their own work would enable students to produce much richer work than in conventional, non-computer-based learning.

In fact this proved to be the case. Even the earliest 'documents' created by the students included sampled sounds and animations (describing wind turbines) which they found on the CD-ROM. The students' final work made great use of the papers in the libraries provided, and included photographs and diagrams from the CD-ROM. The CD-ROM contained:

• An audio-visual Introductory Lecture describing the course as a whole, and copies of the Study Guides for the course.
• A 'media library' in which were collected in one place many of the pictures from the library documents, and a set of sound clips and animation clips, largely extracted from the course video. This made it very simple for students to include pictures, sound or animation within their documents.
• Libraries of documents prepared specially for the course activities, plus the spreadsheet models associated with them, and a second audio-visual lecture giving an overview of renewable energy technology.

Course activities

To satisfy the academic objectives of the course we developed three activities. It was our intention to find different learning approaches for each activity:

Renewable Energy Technology in Europe

Here, students worked in groups to construct a joint document, in multimedia form if relevant. Each student contributed a chapter describing one renewable technology in a European country for which that technology is appropriate.The first activity was developed with the help of a consultant, Dr. Mike Flood, who assembled a library of over 70 recent papers covering all aspects of the renewable technologies and their use in Europe, for inclusion on the CD-ROM. Students also had a copy of the course book, Understanding Renewable Energy.

Integrated Energy in Ecotopia

A group of students explored a 'virtual world', the imaginary island of Ecotopia. They acted as ' research assistants' in a firm of energy consultants jointly developing an energy policy for Ecotopia. A second consultant, Dr Bob Everett, was commissioned to develop this activity. He developed a spreadsheet model of the Ecotopian national energy system that allowed students to introduce up to 3 wind farms, photovoltaics, a tidal barrage, a pumped storage scheme and 6 possible energy conservation measures. The model calculated the quantity of energy produced, the fossil fuel savings, and a variety of graphs showing time variations of energy supply and demand. Dr. Everett also produced a set of documents giving background information on Ecotopia and the policy positions of various Ecotopian governmental departments and other organisations. Each of these 'policy documents' included a few difficult questions which students had to answer.

Wind Farm for Ambridge

This is an exercise in which students take on various roles in a simulated public planning enquiry into the siting of a wind farm in the fictional village of Ambridge. This activity was adapted from an OU face-to-face teaching activity developed by Dr. Godfrey Boyle and Dr. David Elliott of the OU's Energy and Environment Research Unit. In the original activity, students participated in a mock planning enquiry over a period of a few days. They were given a set of role briefs and background documents relevant to wind farms and planning enquiries. In the XT001 counterpart of this activity, edited versions of the role briefs and background papers were transferred to CD-ROM.

For each of the three activities, students had to alternate between periods in which they did private work using the resources provided and periods in which they participated in discussions with other students using the communication facilities provided. The private work included: finding relevant information in the libraries on the CD-ROM, performing experiments with the model, writing up the results of these searches and experiments. The discussions included commenting on the results of other students and responding to points made in the public enquiry.

Evaluation of the course

To determine the success or otherwise of the experimental aspects of XT001, the Project Team evaluated the students' academic performance, the effectiveness of the learning styles and the learning materials. We did this by gathering reports from the course tutors and other key people, through student questionnaires during and after the course, a face-to-face meeting with many of the students, and an analysis of the student messages on the conference system.

Academic evaluation

Probably the most critical test of XT001 is the students' academic performance. Did they learn anything, and how well did they learn it?

Looking at the students' output, it is hard to avoid being impressed. With little or no previous experience of multimedia, the students have produced detailed, well-illustrated materials, some of which make good use of colour, sound and animation. This would have been virtually impossible in a conventional course. The students put a tremendous amount of effort into their work, despite receiving no credit for it.

The student's own view of their academic achievement is quite good. In their responses to the questions in the final questionnaire like, 'do you feel that you got a fairly comprehensive view of the field of renewable energy?', 'How well did you feel that you accomplished the three course academic objectives?' and more specific questions probing their understanding of the three activities, the average answers were about 7 or 8 on a scale of 10.

The view by the tutors is mixed. They comment that it is extremely hard to judge the student materials. There were no clear standards expected, and often it is hard to distinguish what is taken directly from library materials and what is the students own interpretation. Also, none of the three activities actually ran according to the plan and timetable set at the beginning.

In RET in Europe, the tutor comments that there is a wide range of results from "excellent, well written, easy to read, and to the point","well researched and bursting with technical details" to: "this section is written more in the style of notes, which do not always hang together", "a rather condensed style, which leads to some rather surprising statements..." .

The tutor in Ecotopian Energy is generally quite positive. He gives the three students who completed the activity ratings out of 10 of 7, 7 and "9 and a bit". He made comments like,

"The e-mail discussions were wide-ranging and showed a good interest in the deeper issues, financial investment, energy storage, etc."

"This was well-written and went well beyond the initial suggestions of the exercise, showing a really excellent all-round knowledge of renewables and energy conservation."

"The Windfarm in Ambridge role playing exercise went very well, despite the lack of face to face interaction, with the students clearly getting into the roles."

Effectiveness of the learning approaches

XT001 was heavily laden with educational approaches which, in the context of distance learning and university-level learning are highly innovative. The activities were designed to be collaborative rather than individual, it was based upon multimedia resources which students explored very freely rather than upon a set textbook or lecture course which was followed freely, and it was highly interactive using models and discussion rather than more passive forms of learning.

With some reservations, it is nonetheless clear that the learning approaches do work, and are highly motivating to students. Collaboration clearly takes place on all three activities. The XT001 conferences and sub-conferences and student mailboxes are full of messages in which students ask and answer each other's questions, provide new information to each other. There are numerous examples of students adding information which would not be otherwise found in the course materials, and of student comments setting other students off along avenues they would not have followed if working alone.

It was also clear that where there was face-to-face contact (as with the Finnish group and some others), this made for much better collaboration. Some students remarked that they would prefer a mixture of face-to-face and electronic meeting.

In questionnaires, the students gave high ratings to the benefit they perceived from the time spent in collaboration and to the motivation they received from collaboration. Their comments on those ratings included such statements as:

"collaborative aspects made the learning process much more vivid and richer but not necessarily offered new information"

"(enhanced) by the exchange of ideas stimulating my thought, by being fun, by synergy, by other students giving support in the difficult bits"

"I got a lot of information without having to spend time to research."

"I could follow closely the others work and see different methods of approach to the material."

"It was extremely interesting to send messages and find the reaction from other students...this really helps a lot."

but also:

"I felt I learnt less than the conventional way of learning OU Courses...I didn't read all the course material, only the sections relevant to my contribution."

In our view, this may be a problem with any course having a high volume of resources.

Overall conclusions

1 Our experience with XT001 was successful, and confirmed our basic assumptions:

• A multi-media course on Renewable Energy Technology can be made accessible to students in different countries, collaborating through electronic communications.
• An Integrated Learning Support Environment which enabled students to work efficiently, produce much more sophisticated output than using conventional media, and collaborate effectively.
• Students found the collaborative, multi-media nature of the course to be highly motivating and enjoyable and their academic performance was good.

2 The collaborative approach really worked in terms of creating motivation and enjoyment. It    provided students with much better support than they got from their tutors, both academically    and in using the tools and materials. The combined breadth of experience of a group of students    is a significant addition to the resources provided for a course. At the same time, students    confirmed the advantages of working on their own as well, in terms of independence and    completeness.

3 The use of a CD-ROM as a large learning resource was very effective. Students praised the high    quality of the materials, and were able to make good use of them. At the same time, they would    have liked better indexing and search facilities and more help learning how best to learn with them.

   Assembling a good set of learning resources requires quite a significant effort, but less than writing    texts covering a comparable academic area. However, issues of copyright and intellectual property    rights are significant obstacles requiring effort to overcome.

4 Interactive learning techniques, such as exploring a virtual world or participating in a role-playing    activity throw up many insights students are unlikely to have simply by reading texts or listening    to lectures. The use of IT enables them to be used successfully in distance learning.

5 The combination of a 'library', 'study', and 'meeting room' worked very well to support efficient    student learning.

   A library of documents, models, lectures, and audio-visual materials on a CD-ROM, when available    in the    format of an integrated package so that students can easily make use of them, provides    flexible tools for students to do research and create high quality reports. The addition of a modern    electronic conference system allows these materials to be discussed and exchanged freely between    students.

6 For effective collaboration between students to occur, it is not enough simply to provide communication    facilities for them. They also need structured exercises in which they get to know each other and form    groups, with good staff support. In addition, they need guidance on how to communicate supportively    and with confirmation of mutual understanding and agreement.