Chris Hutchison
School of Information Systems, Kingston University, UK.
Email: chrish@isys.kingston.ac.uk
<<Building brickwork and stained glass edifices is costly. Yet centres of excellence seem to demand them. Such centres are of limited use unless their product -- expertise -- can be distributed beyond their walls. Moving experts around the globe to solve problems is costly; moving the problems to experts is not always possible. Virtual institutions can cut the cost by enabling the expertise of a centre of excellence to be distributed more widely and, through telepresence, by enabling more problems to be moved to the experts.>>
[N. Beard, 'Virtual Institutions', Personal Computer World, July 1994, p.428]
Yet it was the purely physical restrictions on access to scholarly authority (whether medieval monk or Oxbridge professor) and to the written and printed word that necessitated the creation of bricks-and-mortar centres of learning: a subject expert could only ever be in one place at one time, and if you wanted to benefit from his knowledge and expertise you had no choice but to be where he or she was. In the (-- and it has become a clichéd expression --) constantly and rapidly changing world in which we now live, with new technologies relentlessly redefining the way we work and live, it may not merely be an anachronism to continue to embrace the model of the traditional residential university as the primary locus of learning -- it may arguably be an impediment to appropriate learning and ultimately a threat to growth, both economic and personal.[1]
The potential of telematics for the creation and maintenance of 'virtual institutions' is now well recognised (Beard, 1994; Rheingold, 1994). The confluence of microelectronics, computing and telecommunications that is enabling the emergence of divers kinds of 'virtual spaces' and the 'virtual communities' that inhabit them is beginning to persuade the tertiary and adult education sectors that there exist real opportunities for, and that there are substantial benefits to be accrued from, the construction of 'virtual universities' for open and flexible distance learning and vocational training.[2] If structured high quality learning materials are available online to whoever has access to a computer and modem, without constraints of time and place, then the traditional residential teaching university becomes -- from the students' perspective at least -- largely redundant. (This would then also enable universities to recapture their historical role as centers for research and for the 'pursuit of knowledge', as is exemplified in the UK for instance by residential research activities at the Milton Keynes campus of the Open University.) It was this conviction that last year inspired the European ERASMUS Inter-university Cooperation Programme (ICP) of which I am coordinator to create, in support of its transnational teaching and learning activities, the 'Virtual Summer School'.. A brief survey of others can be found here.) At the same time, the political and industrial climate is now nurturing further exploratory forays, in the aftermath of the European DELTA programme, into telematics-based distance learning (see, for instance, the EU White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness, and Employment, December 1993, the Bangemann group's recommendations on Europe and the Global Information Society, May 1994, the CCTA report Information Superhighways: Opportunities for public sector applications in the UK, May 1994, and the CEC COM(94) 347, Europe's Way to the Information Society, July 1994, especially with regard to distance learning/'tele-education'). Echoing the Delors White Paper with its stress on "life long learning for a changing society", the report from the Bangemann group, for example, seeks through Application Area Two to "promote distance learning centres providing courseware, training and tuition services tailored for SMEs, large companies and public administrations" as well as to "extend advanced distance learning techniques into schools and colleges."
Against that background, the present paper reports on our ERASMUS 'ICP OnLine' initiative to date, and looks ahead to future developments.
After two years of disappointingly low mobility (an optional rather than necessary part of the home courses), the ICP partners observed that, in the light of the very few students we are able to move annually in the Student Mobility programme, even an ad hoc cost-benefit analysis clearly showed a disproportion between the considerable time and effort invested in developing the curricula and teaching materials and the meagre benefit accruing to the partner institutions and their students as a whole.
In the third year, the decision was therefore taken to enable and support 'virtual mobility' by porting the programme to the Internet, and building it into the students' home institution taught course. Yet since the programme could now in principle be made accessible to anyone with access to the Internet, whether or not a member of any one of the partner universities, we were further led to the notion of a truly public access distance education no longer tied to the traditional residential university. The principal criteria underscoring and guiding the direction of our initiative were:
Resources to facilitate the 'virtual mobility' of email-linked transnational student teams include an experimental WWW 'shopfront' to the 'ICP OnLine', with links to a description of the ERASMUS project itself and of the ICP, to partner institution WWW home pages, to profiles of the participating universities and the cities in which they are located, links to syllabi, courseware, bibliographies, research reports, project guidelines, CVs of staff, cultural resources and relevant 'social' USENET newsgroups, and pointers to European language resources, including electronic newspapers, journals, books, and dictionaries.[3] To help 'virtually mobile' students orient themselves within the 'ICP OnLine' as well as to navigate their way around the labyrinths of CyberSpace, the ICP commissioned, as an expense under the Curriculum Development Programme, the production of an ERASMUS Student Guide to the Internet. Although the electronic copy of the Guide is not yet 'on-line', paper versions are being issued to students this year.
In preparation for this, students in each institution wishing to participate in the scheme are asked to submit an 'expression of interest' to their home programme director at the beginning of the academic year, from which a global list of students' email addresses (around 100 in this first year, from six of the universities) is compiled and distributed to all interested students in the ICP. The students then confirm their interest by establishing contact, during the first semester, with other students in partner universities, eventually -- with tutorial guidance -- settling into self-selecting transnational groups of (optimally) four.[4] Clearly, students who are participating in the scheme electronically (i.e., without physically moving) will not have the opportunity to immerse themselves directly in the cultural and linguistic context in which their peers live and work. We therefore agreed that it was essential that the cultural experience be shared vicariously by getting students talking to each other at an early stage. They would ideally be exchanging not only email descriptions of themselves and their lives, but also, by postal mail, photographs, maps, sample course handouts (for non-core courses), for example, and specimen cultural artefacts such as bus tickets, theatre brochures, photocopies of student cards, and so forth. As the project progresses over time, we hope also that, in a 'student area' of the 'ICP OnLine', participating students will themselves author 'cultural' pages that, through the use of text and graphics, recreate the student experience in their home institutions, for the benefit of their peers in other partner universities.
Students are also individually encouraged to browse the linguistic and cultural resources page of the 'ICP OnLine', to access the language laboratories and multilingual text archives, to use the online language dictionaries, to read USENET newsgroups for national cultures, e.g., soc.culture.british, soc.culture.french, soc.culture.german, soc.culture.italian, ..., and so forth. To further enhance the cultural experience, 'walking tours' of the cities for the universities are accessible from the 'ICP OnLine' home page.
In the period February to June (i.e., second semester), during which most of the partner institutions would be running AI modules, transnational student groups will work together on teamwork projects, communicating by electronic mail, sharing common online resources, and working collaboratively on assessed AI projects. The coursework reports are to be written up in each of the languages involved (i.e., in French by the French student, in Italian by the Italian student, etc), and collated reports submitted to the home programme director for each student. Executive summaries of each report will be published online.
Students successfully completing the programme will then, in addition to the normal assessment for a home degree, be awarded an ICP 'Certificate of Participation' acknowledging their participation in the ERASMUS 'ICP OnLine' project.
Delivery of courseware would be via a mix of CMC media, including the World Wide Web, Timbuktu Pro, ISDN and Internet-based video-conferencing with shared whiteboards, and FirstClass conferencing. Monitored online self-assessment for rapid feedback together with submission and assessment of coursework via electronic mail would form the hub of the student evaluation process; creditation is expected to be given by the participating universities, other course providers, and by professional bodies.
The CLRCs (including the first demonstration sites for the project), as the physical nodes and access points to the proposed 'virtual university', are planned to be:
Among the numerous parameters along which successful learning may be measured, three emerge as particularly significant:
Creating the ideal student environment is a massive and costly task. The consortium is this year submitting a proposal for funding, under the European Framework IV programme, of a Telematics in Education and Training project which, over the three years of funding, would enable us to study and, we hope, implement the above measures.
With a population-to-host computer ratio of 101 for Finland, 372 for the UK, 543 for Germany, and 801 for France (figures published in Wired, UK edition, April 1995, p.34), and with the rapid penetration of cable into European homes (96% of homes in the Netherlands, for example, are cabled), the infrastructure for online learning is already in place.
Our belief that the mode of access to the proposed 'Virtual Campus' should be through the World Wide Web was likewise in part based on the growth of WWW traffic in 1993 (in, that is, the 12 months following the launch of the Mosaic browser) by a phenomenal 443,931%. Although we propose to undertake, as part of a forthcoming extensive user needs analysis, a more rigorous survey of the market, our confidence in a broad and expansive learner base for the European virtual university has been reinforced by surveys conducted (in 1994) by MacWorld magazine of its readers and by Inteco of 11,500 European cable subscribers and computer owners which clearly indicated that learning-on-demand is a high priority for subscribers to telematic services (BBSs, Internet, AOL, CompuServe, ...).
Finally, however, we clearly recognise that however feasible in principle, in practice there will be problems, in a multicultural and multilingual Europe, of acceptance and cultural adjustment. Most of such problems are obvious, and need not be rehearsed here. The cross-cultural problems are potentially, perhaps, the most interesting and ultimately the most daunting. Teichman (1994, p.66), for example, highlights misunderstandings between American and German high school students in the course of a teleconference between their respective schools:
The fact that one set of American cards of self-introduction was made on pieces of cardboard ripped by hand from old folders no longer needed, had very amateur photographs and were written in pencil in what would be classified in Germany as poor handwriting led to the incensed interpretation by the German recipients that the American partner pupils obviously were not really interested in the project and had not taken care to produce high quality results. In other words, they interpreted the appearance of the American artefacts by reference to their own cultural standards of the importance of neat external form and orderly appearance and the economic possibilities of their school to provide quality, new cardboard and photographic equipment and expertise.Clearly, having access to the appropriate technology is only the beginning of the project. The major issues are not technological but social.
Brown, J.S. & Duguid, P. (1991). 'Organisational Learning and Communities of Practice: Toward a unifying view of working, learning, and motivation', Organisation Science 2(1), pp.40-57.
Dunbar, R. (1992). 'Why Gossip Is Good For You', New Scientist, 21 November 1992, pp.28-31.
Dunbar, R. (1994). 'Co-Evolution of Neocortex Size, Group Size, and Language in Humans', Journal of Behavioural and Brain Sciences.
Hämäläinen, M. (1994). 'Collaborative Distance Education: The Role of the Internet in Resource-Based Collaborative Learning'. Draft MS of paper to be submitted to The Journal of Organizational Computing.
Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rheingold, H. (1994). The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerized World. London: Secker & Warburg.
Teichman, V. (1994). 'An Interdisciplinary Project Orientation Using Telecommunications Media in Freign Language Teaching', in H. Jung & R. Vanderplank (eds.), Barriers and Bridges: Media Technology in Language Learning. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
[2] Distance learning is, of course, not a new phenomenon. >From the 'commercial correspondence courses' in the 19th century to the 'Open Universities' of the late 20th century, the notion of solitary learning at a distance has become well established. Much of the growing appeal of telematics-based learning as a successor to the traditional correspondence course mode lies in the capacity for reaching, and responding to, learners more rapidly and, through the potential offered by videoconferencing, recreating the sense of presence inherent in face-to-face communication. [Back]
[3] At the present time, English remains the lingua franca of the ICP, not through choice but through necessity. With most academic publishing being in English, non-English speaking students throughout Europe are obliged to acquire a competence in the language, while native speakers of English -- especially when students of technology -- have little incentive to learn other languages. We hope to address this issue over time, however, and are already starting to publish materials in more than one language. [Back]
[4] The magic number '4' was based on research into conversation groups by anthropologist Robin Dunbar (Dunbar, 1992; Dunbar, 1994). Adducing evidence from a broad array of sources across time and space, he not only persuasively argues that "human conversation groups should consist of an average of 3.7 individuals" but convincingly shouws that "indeed they do". Dunbar's work was subsequently used as a theoretical basis for the design of a 'virtual meeting room' by Chris Condon, of Brunel University, in two EC funded projects in industrial 'telepresence'. The meeting room was designed around a 4-way video window. Our own experience of managing student group work in the universities has been that not only do self-selecting groups optimize around four members, but also that where the number of group members is four the performance of the group as a whole (coordination of group work, project management, quality of outcomes) is better. [Back]