Shirley Agostinho

Ph.D Candidate, Faculty of Education
University of Wollongong

Contact: shirley_agostinho@uow.edu.au

As the implementation of flexible delivery strategies within Australian Universities gathers momentum, the need for research to examine the pedagogical effectiveness of such strategies is becoming more critical. This Work In Progress presents the emerging themes from an exploratory study that examines how learning in higher education can be facilitated by the use of network technologies.

The researcher was a participant observer in an Information Technology postgraduate subject during 1996 and 1997. The course, offered by the Graduate School of Education at the University of Wollongong, comprised two remote classes, one held on campus and the other held in Sydney (80 kilometres north). In 1996, the course was implemented as a pilot study to explore how interactions can be established amongst participants when using video conferencing and World Wide Web technologies. The insights gained from the pilot study were used to refine the Web-enhanced learning environment implemented in the 1997 course offering.

The pilot study was structured as a fourteen week session and students were required to physically attend class each week for three hours. The strategies employed to establish interaction between the two sites were focused mainly on synchronous communication. In 1997, a more flexible delivery approach was adopted. World Wide Web asynchronous discussions were used to supplement the face-to-face delivery. Physical class meeting times were scheduled on a fortnight basis over a fourteen week session.

Key issues to surface in this study include:

• The structure of class activities and their relationship to assessment requirements influence the level of interaction.
• Web sites need to be continually developed and maintained as they are no longer static sets of instruction.
• The instructional process for lecturers takes on a new and different form.

The proposed time frame for the completion of this dissertation is end of second quarter 1999.