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Post industrial society now possesses the technical ability to offer distance mode university courses in a way which is, for the first time, a close analogue of the traditional university model. Such a possibility has far reaching consequences for tertiary education and society in general. The very role of universities themselves may be at issue.
As technology has advanced the communications media have played an increasing part in the delivery mix. Fax machine and teletutorials have significantly improved the quality of the learning experience for the student. Faxes allow the .swift transfer of textual and graphical material both to and from the lecturer/ tutor thus decreasing feedback times. Teletutorials, a special phone link wherein several persons can talk and interact at once, allow discussion and interaction between tutor s and peer group members in real time.
These techniques do not in themselves provide the optimal university environment. There are still many facets of the university role not provided for in this mix. However there are two recent technological advances which will facilitate the provision of the virtual university.
Ted Nelson in the 1960s coined the term Hypertext to mean documents that contained links to other documents or to elsewhere in the same document. This is manifested by words and areas on the computer screen which when selected cause the screen display to change in some way, usually to a screen of related text. This is information organisation by association.
Throughout the sixties and seventies work progressed on hypertext systems without any great deal of publicity. In 1984 Apple computers released the Macintosh computer with its user friendly user interface. One of the early products for the Macintosh was called HyperCard. HyperCard extends the Hypertext metaphors to other objects such as cards and buttons.
HyperCard allows the rapid showing of successive cards to provide simple animation and allows the input and interpretation of text. HyperCard also allows music, speech and other sounds to be played. The augmentation of text and graphical information provision with sound and motion is called multimedia. Advances in digital compression techniques now allow computers to reproduce full motion video as well.
It is therefore possible to convey moving visual information with sound and text on computers. Commercial products employing this technology are now available. Examples are the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopaedia and children's titles such as Just Grandma and Me.
Holzl and McCarthy give a thorough and comprehensive description of the enabling technologies for the virtual university in their paper CBT and the Electronic University (Holzl & McCarthy, 1993).
This ability will be provided by an advanced communications infrastructure allied to computer managed learning (CML) technology and access to large multimedia databases.
How might one provide the experiences services and function of the traditional university, with its physical limitations of location and temporal rigidity, to a broader community not constrained by place or time? One has first to consider what those functions and services are, and indeed what the virtual university might be able to offer which is in addition to, or superior to, the traditional university.
The lecture is the most widely used and traditional mechanism of teaching mode in the university. The lecture consists of one or more wise persons standing at the front of a large room containing many students and giving forth information verbally. This is a unidirectional information flow. Questions are not usually encouraged in the formal lecture mode. The verbal dissemination of information is occasionally augmented with textual and graphical information presented on one or more of a black/white board; a large display screen; or via paper handouts which usually reproduce the content of the displayed material. The black/white board model facilitates some ad hoc information display. Very occasionally the lecture is augmented by some physical exposition of the topic at hand in form of a performed experiment or displayed skill such as, say, a performed dance step or tuning of a piece of electrical equipment.
Don Bligh cites many studies on efficacy of lectures (Bligh, 1971) and concludes that the lecture is effective only for the provision and acquisition of information by the student. Lectures are potentially very efficient in the transfer of information from the wise person to the recipient. One may pack a large hall with five hundred to a thousand students and so long as the audio system and the handouts have sufficient quality, the learning experience for each student is the same. There are some drawbacks in the lecture model however. Bligh identifies three factors affecting the acquisition of information in the lecture:
The typical human attention span during intense concentration is about 20 minutes. However most lectures have a duration of one or two hours. Despite recesses this represents a Herculean effort on behalf of the student and learning outcomes are severely jeopardised by such duration. Why then are lectures so long? The answer lies in logistics and the economies of scale alluded to earlier in this paper. Logistically it is easier to timetable and fill lecture theatres in blocks of two hours than it is to fill them in 20 minute lectures. In many case the two hour lecture is provided because that is the way it has always been done.
There are other disadvantages in the lecture mode. They require complex logistics and capital investment to provide the infrastructure. the large room, for the exposition. A room which incidentally spend much of its time half full or even empty. Lecture theatres too have limits in capacity. If a course is to be presented to 500 students and the largest lecture theatre has a capacity of 300 then two lectures must be given.
The function of the lecture can just as easily be fulfilled by videos and terrestrial TV. A video of a wise person talking is just as effective as a standard lecture. Care must be taken though as the soporific effect of a talking head video must not be underestimated. The video lecture must be broken up into manageable sections. Twenty minutes per section would seem to be an appropriate duration. Given that the lecture can be emulated in the virtual mode what advantages can be derived from the new mode? The first and most obvious advantage is that the student can view the lecture at any time and at their own pace. So a student can choose to view one, two or more sections depending on their particular schedule or capability. Another advantage of videos is the ability to provide self testing facilities for the student at the end of each section. This could be in a paper based form or in the form of a computer quiz. This is possible, and even common, in traditional lectures. However the time taken for the lecture based quiz will reduce the amount of time for the lectured content.
A third advantage of the virtual lecture mode is that a famously wise person can be employed to give the lecture. World renowned experts can be used to talk about their own theories rather than having junior academics deliver the information second hand.
Are there any disadvantages in the virtual mode? There is the effort and cost of production and dissemination of the video lectures. However, if the numbers are sufficiently high, these costs become minimal in comparison to the costs of maintaining traditional buildings and staff rolls. Terrestrial TV offers economies of delivery but the flexibility of time scheduling is lost. University students though might be expected to be able to acquire and use video cassette recorders.
The tutorial
A tutorial is traditionally a period of individual student instruction by a competent person sometimes but not always a lecturer. The traditional university tutor is often a graduate seeking to supplement their income during a period of study towards a post graduate degree. The strict one to one ratio has in many cases however been modified to mean an actual ratio of one to few. Tutorial groups of twenty or even thirty are not uncommon in Australian universities in the 1990s. The reason for this flexibility in semantics is, of course, funding.
The function of the tutorial is to allow interaction and discourse of the subject matter between a knowledgeable person and the student. This discourse is in practice often enhanced by the presence of more than two persons. Ideas flow and are bandied about more easily in a group than in the stultifying expert learner model. There is evidence that some students more readily learn from their peers than from their tutors.
The key learning attribute here is the provision of interaction. In the course of discussion and exposition, learning often takes place. Sometimes it is the best environment of all for meeting learning objectives. The advantage of the tutorial is sometimes lost however in large groups. In this situation individuals might dominate discussion and many irrelevant paths might be followed. Tutorials can include assessment. Tutorial exercises are given, marked, discussed and feedback obtained. Can this model be emulated in the distance mode? Linda M Harasim (Harasim, 1990) identifies five attributes of online education:
More recently commercial software packages such as the Electronic Classroom for Apple computers have become available. This system provides immediate (or a few seconds delay over very long distances) transfer of text, images, scribbles and even sound to many participants over a telephone link. Each participating computer must have the software loaded and a standard modem. This is all that is required. The tutor has the option of passing control of the electronic whiteboard to any participating computer. Students can be asked to draw diagrams on the electronic whiteboard. The voice component is carried over a separate telephone line. Students on external courses are often required to purchase computers and standard software products. The additional purchasing of software such as the Electronic Classroom should not present too great a cost burden.
For purely text based discourse it is sufficient for the tutorial group to log onto the same computer and use one of the many text based conversation software packages such as the UNIX talk and the VMS Phone software.
The provision of full television like communication for virtual tutorials is more problematical. The computer vendors all have their own real time digital video phone hardware and software available. However such equipment is expensive and usually requires extremely wide bandwidth for transmission. This function is still a novelty and not considered to be mainstream communications activity. Teleconferencing on the other hand its an established communications activity. Teleconferencing requires two or more inexpensively equipped television studios set out in the form of a meeting room. Cameras focus on each of the participants or a camera operator is employed to pan from one participant to the other. Teleconferencing requires considerably less bandwidth than full motion broadcast standard video. Typical teleconferencing can take place with a bandwidth of 56 to 2000 kilobits per second as compared to broadcast quality which requires something of the order of 100 megabits per second.
Teleconferencing is relatively cheap and is well established in the commercial and academic sectors. However there is the requirement for the studio and the cost that it implies. Also the participants are required to attend the studio thus reducing flexibility. However there are still efficiency gains with the teleconferences. Studios are cheaper to build than whole buildings full of tutorial rooms and may even be portable. One can imagine a teleconference truck touring rural Australia in the near future. Many of the existing Open Learning Access Centres (OLACs) already have teleconferencing facilities. The combination of teletutorials, electronic whiteboard software and the occasional teletutorial will provide most of the functional elements of the traditional tutorial.
The seminar
The seminar is traditionally a small university class to supplement the larger lecture. In recent time though this function has been subsumed into the tutorial role and a seminar has come to be interpreted as consisting of a short exposition of a topic, 20 to 40 minutes being the typical duration, followed by a question time and perhaps a full interactive discussion. In effect it is a mini lecture with a degree of interaction. This process can very easily be emulated using a combination of videos and teletutorials or a straight forward teleconference. Although this last option would seem somewhat inefficient. The possibility is not far off when a short seminar or lecture containing full motion full screen video can be accommodated on a single CD-ROM.
The Philips CD-I (Computer Disc Interactive) system has been used to store full motion, full screen commercial movies on two CD-ROMs with a combined running time of over 70 minutes. Using CD-I or similar technologies opens up considerable potential for a delivery mode which contains a short digital video lecture including footage outside the realms of the standard lecture such as film of an experiment or operation, followed by self test exercises, followed by a teletutorial with assessment feed back and discussion.
Practical workshops and practicums
This is by far the most difficult of the universities teaching roles to emulate. Each of these activities consists of actual hands on exercises. The students are usually well supervised during these activities and are often assessed in situ. It is an assessment of ability and applied skills as well as knowledge. The dance student will dance, the coaching student will coach the physics student will perform experiments, the biology student will dissect.
There are two fold difficulties with emulating this mode. There is the inability to supervise and the difficulty in assessment. Tom Docherty and Harry Edgar described some approaches to the problem in their paper The surrogate laboratory interactive video project (Docherty & Edgar, 1990) wherein an electronics laboratory is simulated using video disc technology. It is clear however that some subjects and skills can never be provided for in this mode. The establishment of authenticity alone is insurmountable. One can imagine a ceramics student being required to produce a pot as a workshop exercise. How can one possibly check that the work provided is the work of the student. The simplest and most effective way of dealing with this problem is to reduce the percentage marks available for unsupervised work and have the students attend hands on workshops for the bulk of the marks. This seems to negate the point of the virtual university. However this is not necessarily the case. This mode will still reduce the amount of expensive workshop time required for any particular course.
Multimedia offers some attractive benefits in the workshop area too. One can imagine a vocational course on, say, car maintenance wherein the expert mechanic tunes a car. The digital video shows the mechanic performing the tuning. It can be played as many times as desired at varying speeds and at the end of the section the sound of the tuned engine is reproduced. "If your engine does not sound like this then its not tuned correctly" the student might be told. The range of new areas for distance education is immense. They might include music tutoring, sign language tutoring, dance, potting technique, experimentation, biology, physiotherapy plus many others.
Physical/infrastructurally
Will we need all of these university buildings and who would buy them if they were sold?
Financially
The virtual university can save money. High quality courses can be provided very cheaply. Indeed the real possibility exist of a user pays scenario.
Socially/sociologically
A university education is not just about learning a subject. It is a period of personal development and the acquisition of problem solving and communications skills. It is an opportunity for students to experience people from other walks of life and experience other points of view. The virtual university cannot ever substitute this for our young people.
Industrially
Fewer physical universities would mean fewer lecturers. This has an industrial context. Most lecturers have tenure to ensure academic freedom so retrenchment is problematical. If the tenured lecturers were disposed of by waiting till they retire (a maximum of twenty years), what are the prospects for our brightest young graduates? Why persevere in academia when the wages are low there is little job security and the work is relatively menial tutorials.
Politically
The virtual university is cheap. Some centralised wise body delivers the standard curriculum and the other universities become simply assessment or accreditation centres. Custodians of standards. The teaching role of the university would be negated. More tutors and less lecturers would be the norm. This may leave the universities free to conduct research or development, a role many see as their natural function.
What percentage of the population does society require to posses university degrees? Are we in danger of becoming a highly certified society which is in fact poorly educated and skilled?
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Docherty, T. M. and Edgar, T. H. (1990). The surrogate laboratory interactive video project. In R. Atkinson and C. McBeath (Eds.), Open Learning and New Technology: Conference proceedings, 117-120. Perth: Australian Society for Educational Technology WA Chapter. http://www.aset.org.au/confs/olnt90/docherty.html
Harasim, L. (1990). Online Education: Perspectives on a new environment. NY Praeger
Holzl, A. & McCarthy, M. (1993). CBT and the electronic University. Conference Proceedings, ASCILITE 93, held at Southern Cross University, NSW Australia.
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| Author: George Lee Stuart, Southern Cross University, Lismore, NSW, Australia. Email: gstuart@scu.edu.au
Please cite as: Stuart, G. L. (1994). The virtual university: Some practical considerations. In J. Steele and J. G. Hedberg (eds), Learning Environment Technology: Selected papers from LETA 94, 332-337. Canberra: AJET Publications. http://www.aset.org.au/confs/edtech94/rw/stuart.html |