Full Paper

Clare McBeath

mcbeathc@educ.curtin.edu.au

Faculty of Education

Curtin University of Technology

Those of you who have read my earlier abstract on the Web, may have noticed that the main focus of this paper was to be an evaluation of student learning styles and preferences after a semester of learning from the Internet. I am afraid this is not going to be the case, as the project has not yet reached the stage of having students use the Internet materials.

My research and teaching specialism is in curriculum development and educational change, and I would like to change the focus of this paper to view the current development of an on-line Education unit from that perspective. One of the clearest messages to emerge from the literature on educational change over the last quarter century is that it is never easy. The fact that the trial and evaluation of this project has not yet eventuated is indeed witness to this fact.

There are two strands of research into curriculum development and educational change. One is micro-development, which deals with the individual teacher or lecturer attempting to produce the ideal learning materials according to the principles of learning theory, instructional design and educational technology. The other is change and development at the macro level, which wrestles with the concepts of development within the broader political, administrative, economic and social constraints of the educational environment. Both of these are important aspects of the change process, but the issues in this paper are those of micro-curriculum development, or those dealt with in the literature of instructional design and educational technology.

There is, as yet, little clear evidence of the superiority of Internet delivery over any other kind of teaching-learning mode. Why then did the Faculty of Education decide to go down this path and start developing the Graduate Diploma in Higher and Further Education as an Internet course?

Any new tool which offers a possible alternative method of delivery needs to be tried. Since the early research into maximising the variety of educational media to cater for individual differences, educationists have regarded new technology as a valid tool for teaching and learning. The Internet was there. We needed to see what we could do with it. Second, there exists a belief, far from proven, amongst university managers that it might make course delivery cheaper. Certainly the rising cost of printing on most campuses has us looking for cheaper delivery methods. Third, its novelty will give it an advantage for some years. Students will gain from the excitement and challenge of doing something different, in many cases something that none of their colleagues and friends have done before. And fourth, it is important for the Faculty of Education to keep in the forefront of techniques and strategies coming into education and training and, conversely, not be seen as out of date or resistant to change.

The target student group is enrolled in one of the Vocational Education and Training (VET) courses. This program already has a culture of flexible and open learning. Students in these courses are all mature aged and working in post-school training institutions, such as TAFE colleges, universities, private industry and government departments. Most have families and other commitments. Typically, students choose to enrol partly as on-campus and partly as external students. They already understand the principles of androgogy and expect their courses to contain self directed learning and workplace-based assignments. Assignments are often negotiated individually. Staff encourage open communication channels and students make use of a range of teleconferencing, email, post and telephone contacts.

Electronic communication as an alternative delivery method is already included as a topic in the studentsí course work, and as more of their workplaces are moving into Internet access, it should be a small step for them to expect electronic access to become part of their course delivery. Thus the project was in line with present practices in open and flexible delivery and was well timed to meet the changing needs of this group of students. They were expected to be more able to access and use on-line open learning than the average school-leaver Education student.

Work on this project began in mid January 1997. Initially one unit from the Grad Diploma (Higher and Further Education) was chosen for pilot development. It was thought that once a template had been developed, other units would be developed quickly and easily. The unit chosen was Ed522 Curriculum and program development.

One of the strongest features of using learning material on the Internet is the facility to layer the material, and the ability to link quickly from ìupperî levels to more and more detailed materials below. Hundreds of ìpagesî of information, exercises, self testers and assessment management systems can exist in a vast network of interlocking layers. This facility is particularly valuable for intensive learning of a skill or a clearly defined competency. It is not necessarily as effective when it comes to acquiring knowledge through extensive reading and reflecting.

The most distinctive feature of this unit in its Internet format is how wordy it looks, in comparison with the more typical electronic learning programs with short screens and multi-layed pages. The unit structure had to deal with an enormous amount of reading in the simplest manner possible.

The decision to structure the unit into 14 weekly modules mirrored the process students used traditionally with their print-based materials. There was a familiarity in the weekly structure which it was hoped that students would relate to. It also helped retain the integrity of the original content structure and curriculum design.

Another reason for choosing the weekly module of work as the basic unit of study was the yet unknown method by which students would choose to access the material. A number of students would have to access the coursework by STD modem connection, and probably would not choose to stay on line to read and interact. They would seek to minimise their phone bills by down-loading to their own hard disc, or by printing the Internet pages to study in their own time. Larger blocks of material would be much easier to handle in this way.

The major issues in designing the ìpagesî, with so much reading material, was that of retaining interest through visual variety. Visual variety is achieved on a printed page in tried and tested ways and is somewhat different from the demands of the Web.

First, the screen size is different. The standard A4 page size has to be converted to ìlandscapeî layout, with headings, diagrams and text assuming a different shape. The developer must be aware of a screen page as the basic visual unit. Diagrams have to be re-drawn, headings and introductory statements have to become screens with a visual integrity of their own, and the flow of the page has to be seen from a different perspective.

Second, colour is important. Colour was a completely new element for the developer who has worked only with black and white. A graphic artist was employed early in the development, and asked to develop a colour design. This was a good strategy in that it stretched the imagination of the developer. However, the artistís ideas were not necessarily good instructional design. His perspective was more that of advertising. He did a lot of work putting in design ideas which were later deleted on the basis that they would distract from the process of learning and understanding. The strength of bringing in a graphic artist early in the process, however, was that it enabled the developer to think laterally about the visual component. The design adopted eventually was a considered compromise between cognitive psychology of learning and marketing/advertising theory. Neither party could have done this without the other.

The graphic artist designed the icons for the various weekly sections. He was asked to choose a metaphor for each topic heading and turn it into a picture. This proved an interesting experiment. The metaphors in each case are obvious, however their effect on students needs to be explored when the materials are piloted.

Several features used in designing for print-based materials were transferred in the hope of increasing the learning impact of the Web version. The design aimed for a variety of activities, in the hope that frequent changes of pace would help retain student interest. For the same reason it aimed for visual variety on each page. Exercises and questions for reflection helped do this, as did the headings and subheadings. As a general rule, the text is broken between almost every screen with a heading, a quotation or series of quotations, a diagram or table, or with exercises and activities. Each screen is supposed to look interesting, with plenty of change and plenty of space. This is much harder to achieve than it is on an A4 printed page and at times became impossible.

Netscape Navigator Gold was used as the basic html writing tool. However, there are a number of things which cannot be done with this program and it was necessary to learn how to adapt and correct the html code to achieve the desired effect.