- Email: [email protected]
From distance education to online education
Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63 ± 74
From distance education to online education Robin Mason* The Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, Geoffrey Crowther Building, Milton Keynes, UK Received 1 August 2000; accepted 1 November 2000
Abstract The UK Open University (OU) was founded 30 years ago as a print-based distance teaching institution. It is gradually transforming itself into an electronic university. This article describes some of the steps along the way, focusing on the use of computer conferencing and the Web for course delivery and support of students. Many of the barriers and problems are analysed, as well as the successes and key turning points. The research issues related to this change are also highlighted, as are some of the evaluation studies carried out at the university on its use of new technologies. D 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Distance education; Computer conferencing; Global education
1. Introduction The UK Open University (OU) is a mass distance teaching institution founded 30 years ago to provide higher education opportunities for working adults. By any standards, it has been an outstanding success: It pioneered a model of supported open learning that has been copied the world over; it has gained a reputation for the quality of its teaching that is the envy of many established universities and despite its enrollment of over 250,000 students, it had to turn away every year for its first 25 years enough students to form a small university elsewhere. However, the times change and nowhere more so than at universities these days. This article documents some of the ways in which the OU has been transforming itself to meet the higher education demands of the 21st century, in particular, the ways in which its use of * Tel.: +44-1908-653-137; fax: +44-1908-654-173. E-mail address: [email protected] (R. Mason). 1096-7516/00/$ ± see front matter D 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S 1 0 9 6 - 7 5 1 6 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 3 3 - 6
64
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
computer conferencing have brought about an evolution from distance teaching to online education. I will highlight key points along the way and describe the problems and barriers that marked this journey. My own career as an academic is directly mirrored in this journey of the OU, as I was employed in 1986 to work on the university's first use of computer conferencing in mass distance education. 2. First use of computer conferencing Following small-scale trials of the use of electronic mail on two courses and after an evaluation of a range of conferencing systems, the OU purchased the CoSy conferencing system from the University of Guelph, Ontario, in 1986. Its principal use was for the proposed course An Introduction to Information Technology: Social and Technological Issues, for which nearly 1400 students registered in its first year of presentation. The largest portion of this course, as with all major OU courses to date, was the print component of seven `blocks' of material. These were enhanced by a course reader, audio and broadcast media, and other supplementary materials. However, in addition to these standard presentation media, this course was one of the first to require all students and tutors to have an IBM computer in order to gain practical experience of the social and technological issues discussed in the written material. Computer conferencing along with word processing, database management, and spreadsheet analysis, made up the practical component of the course, which accounted for about 20% of the students' study time. Consequently, the conferencing element was a very small part of the whole. 3. Integration of the communications medium A number of steps were taken to prevent this small communications element from being perceived by students as an added extra, which could be ignored if necessary. As OU students resemble many other students in tending to be `assignment-driven', and being distance learners, feel isolated from an academic environment, the obvious uses of the conferencing system were as a means of tutor and peer support and as an integrated component of the assessment system. Consequently, about half of the face-to-face tutorials were replaced by online interaction with the tutor in small tutor group conferences (1 tutor and 25 students) and in larger, plenary conferences for discussion of general course issues. In addition, the main use of conferencing in the assessment of the course was for the final doubled weighted essay in which students were expected to write an evaluation of computer-mediated communication, based on their experience of it during the course, on the textual material presented in the units about conferencing, and on the reactions of their fellow students. The latter information was to be drawn from a database formed by all students uploading answers to two detailed questionnaires concerning their use of the conferencing system during the course. Students were expected to download data and combinations of data from this remote database, present it in graphs and tables using the various software packages provided, and write an assessment of some aspect Ð social, educational, or technological Ð of computer conferencing.
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
65
4. Problems and successes in the early implementation I carried out extensive evaluation and analysis of students' and tutors' use of the conferencing system as part of my PhD, which was a case study of this first use of the medium at the OU (Mason, 1989a). Through survey questionnaires, telephone interviews, and on-site visits to students and tutors in their homes, I gathered detailed accounts of the problems and successes that characterised this first implementation. Technical problems in logging on from home plagued the early implementations of computer-mediated communications, although not to the extent that the pessimists had predicted. The university provided telephone help service and online support conferences, and the course team prepared extensive training materials including an audiotape to talk students through their first log on. Eventually, nearly all 1400 students managed to log on, but not all became competent and confident users. The social barriers to use were, as usual, much greater than the technical barriers. The variability of tutors' input to their small group conferences was another problem. Many of the 70 tutors gave unflaggingly their time and energy in contributing to the conferences, while others put in an opening message and expected their students to get on with discussions themselves. It soon became clear that tutors who continued to put in messages Ð cajoling, informative, chatty, or substantial Ð produced the most interactive groups. These were the tutors who enjoyed the medium, as a communications tool or as a new piece of educational technology. Similarly, about a third of the students immediately gravitated to the medium with comments like the following: I have used the conferencing, conversation and mailing facilities almost every day from the beginning of the course until the end and have found the system an invaluable tool in helping with the course work, overcoming initial technical difficulties and discussing the arguments surrounding the study of IT (quoted in Mason & Kaye, 1989, p. ix).
Many other students complained about how time consuming it was to find useful information on the system Ð for every gem of a discussion, there were too many irrelevant or chatty messages. Reluctance to input messages led to desultory conferences or to dominance of the active discussions by the most frequent and confident users. Nevertheless, the computer-generated statistics showed that well over 50% of students were reading the active conferences and reported that they felt very much less isolated on this course than they ever had as distance learners.
5. Barriers to use Despite the undoubted problems of the first large-scale implementation, the enthusiasm of a significant number of students and tutors, added to the obvious potential that the course team could see for this medium, led to immediate refinements and requests by other faculties to use conferencing.
66
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
One of the main barriers to widespread take-up of conferencing was, in fact, the cost of telephone charges, or to be more accurate, the perceived cost of them. This was an issue I investigated in some depth in my interviews with students and in my analysis of the user statistics. Partly because of the relatively high cost of telephone charges in the UK, compared with North America, and partly, perhaps, to cultural differences, the UK could be described at that time as `telephone shy'. The absolute costs of online connections over the whole 9 months of the course were between £5 and £10 for the majority of students Ð not more than a couple of evenings in the pub, as one student pointed out to me. However, the complaints about the costs and the accusations that the OU was transferring costs to students were out of all proportion to the actual costs incurred by students. It is ironic that with the UK deregulation of the telecommunications industry in the 1990s and the subsequent explosion of the mobile phone phenomenon, the UK has suddenly become one of the least telephone shy nations in the world! However, in addition to this early barrier of `quantity', there was an equally strong barrier around the issue of quality. Many users turned away from the medium as being a poor investment of their precious study time Ð there was too much chat, too many messages in the wrong place, and not enough structure to the discussion. The conclusion I drew from my research on this first use was: This model of a very small exploitation of the medium amongst a plethora of other teaching tools cannot be recommended for other applications and indeed, was responsible in great part for the little use made of it by the majority of students. Some of the frustrations experienced by tutors and students alike would be considerably reduced if conferencing formed a more significant role in the teaching and delivery of a course. Tutors would have to receive proper recognition for their role in the presentation of the course and all students would be obliged to log on frequently to take the course. The life-blood of a conferencing system is the contributions and interactions of its users. It can integrate with and enhance other teaching media, particularly print, but not when relegated to a 5% stake in a course (Mason, 1989b, 143).
6. Early research While the OU was the first large-scale user of conferencing in higher education, there were many institutions that had been using the medium before the OU. We decided to hold a faceto-face conference at the OU in 1988 to bring together researchers who already had experience of the issues we had just met on our first implementation that year. Over 200 people attended from Europe and North America, and from the keynote presentations and other articles, we produced one of the first books on computer conferencing, entitled Mindweave: Communication, Computers and Distance Education. It soon sold out even of its second reprint and when the copyright reverted to us, we made it available electronically through our International Centre for Distance Learning at http://icdl.open.ac.uk/mindweave/ mindweave.html. It continues to be cited regularly and chapters from the book have been used on innumerable courses about conferencing around the world.
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
67
Despite this early recognition abroad, I must note that we extended invitations to attend the conference free of charge to anyone and everyone at the OU who had any input to our use of computer conferencing. Less than 10 people came and then only to the odd session. The medium had a few champions at the OU, but was regarded with suspicion by most academics and certainly most computer staff who saw communications as a poor use of computing power.
7. Hindsight reflections It is remarkable to me looking back at this early implementation with over 10 years of refinements and the development of new technologies, how many issues are still with us and yet how much the OU got right first time.
The socio-psychological support side of the medium continues to have important implications for a distance teaching institution. The integration of the medium with student assessment continues to be a focus of development, experimentation, and innovation. The collaborative nature of the project and other activities designed for the first presentation were bold and innovative for their time and have been built on in all subsequent courses.
The combination of small tutorial groups plus larger conferences for discussion of the main course themes continues to be the framework for subsequent uses, although there has been considerable experimentation and elaboration on courses across the disciplines. The issues that continue to cause the most difficulties are tutor and student workload, getting all students to participate actively, reluctance of a minority to take part in collaborative work, and students' lack of time to participate as much as they would like. The problems that, fortunately, have faded into the background are costs of connecting (although not costs of the initial PC), training students and tutors to use a conferencing system (command-line CoSy was incredibly daunting compared to current systems), messages in the wrong place, and the `gee whizz' nature of the early interactions when the medium was so novel to most users.
8. Research and development Following this initial large-scale use of the medium, a range of early adopter courses in the OU began to introduce conferencing as a partial replacement for face-to-face tutoring. Various kinds of collaborative activities were designed and integrated with assignments. One example is the following: An area on the system is allocated to groups of between ten and twenty students, and discussion of the assignment question lasts for anything up to three or four weeks. Students
68
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
then select some of their messages to submit for assessment and the criteria for marking include such items as: the extent to which the student has used the issues raised in the course material to develop their arguments, the way in which the student's messages build on and critique the ideas and inputs of other contributors to carry the discussion forward, and the succinctness with which the student's arguments are conveyed (Mason, 1995, p. 213).
Group projects, common enough in campus-based education, could now be used in distance education, and we experimented with various combinations of individual and group work, such as an individual introduction and conclusion to the assignment with a common core produced jointly. On another tack, we began to develop a system for the electronic submission of assignments, in order to improve turnaround time. Other courses used the conferencing system to provide access to previous assignments, examinations, and databases of `best answers'. My own research turned to the issue of analysing the content of educational conferences, as a way of understanding how to improve the value of conferencing for students. I argued for a qualitative approach against what I saw as the prevailing quantitative and systemsbased approach in which messages were counted and message maps created to look at who sent messages to whom Ð as if the amount of interaction indicated the amount of learning taking place. I have attempted to draw up a typology of conference messages related to the educational values they display. This method involves a thorough reading of a set of messages with a view to discovering what, if any, skills and abilities the participants are displaying or developing. Some of the questions the educational analyst would want to bear in mind during such a process are:
Do the participants build on previous messages? Do they draw on their own experience? Do they refer to course material? Do they refer to relevant material outside the course? Do they initiate new ideas for discussion? Does the course tutor control, direct, or facilitate discussion?
This kind of questioning would lead to a typology of messages that focuses on the independence and initiative of the student, and would provide a means by which evidence of these attributes in students can be sought in the conferencing medium. By using other educational goals, such as collaborative learning, critical thinking, deep understanding of course material, or broad awareness of issues, and by breaking these down into examples of behaviour or written work that display these characteristics, it is possible to analyse conference content and draw conclusions about the educational value of the particular online activity. Quantitative data can be used to show to what extent all students took part, or what percent of the total activity the educationally valuable interactions represent. By using a strategy such as the one suggested here, we can, as a community progress beyond description to analysis. We should not be afraid of making value judgements about what is educational interaction. The educator/evaluator can go beyond description and explanation of conferencing interactions, and actually interpret them according to educational criteria. This stance represents a view of evaluation as `construction' of knowledge rather than `discovery' of knowledge (Mason, 1992, pp. 114 ±115).
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
69
Throughout the 1990s, a large research program in telematics was funded by the European Commission and this launched a whole series of investigations, experiments, and developments in the use of computer conferencing across Europe. The OU was the lead partner in one of these projects, and as a result, hosted an international conference on site about computer conferencing in 1994. Only about 25 places were available for OU staff, and as one of the organisers, I experienced every form of arm-twisting and downright abuse from OU colleagues trying to secure a place, so great was the demand to attend. Six years on from our first conference, the medium had certainly come of age at the OU. 9. Turning points During the early 1990s, there were three major turning points at the OU that account for this transformation of interest in computer conferencing. The first was the arrival of our new Vice Chancellor, Sir John Daniel in 1990. He already had some acquaintance with CoSy and quickly threw his weight behind electronic communication generally, both for staff and students. A program of funding was set up as `seed-corn' money to encourage electronic tutoring initiatives across the university at grassroots level. He installed a Pro-Vice Chancellor with a specific brief to develop and manage the OU's use of electronic media. His leadership of the transition of the OU from a print-based university to an electronic university has been unflagging and wholehearted, and his own research and public addresses have been a significant encouragement (Daniel, 1996 and http://www.open.ac.uk/vcs-speeches/). A second turning point has been brought about by technology developments: The advent of another Canadian conferencing product, FirstClass, which the OU adopted following trials conducted as part of its European funded research project. FirstClass was so much more intuitive a system than CoSy, that much of the effort for staff in preparing training materials and for students in trying to apply them to their system at home became a thing of the past. Training could now focus on more significant issues of how to use the system educationally. By the mid-1990s, we had nearly 50,000 students online, about half were studying courses that required computer conferencing and the rest using it optionally for contact with their tutor and other students. FirstClass, a robust and well-supported software, facilitated this growth in numbers and allowed academics to adapt conferencing more fully to the demands of their curriculum. We combined conferencing with CD-ROM material for resource-based learning (Alexander & Mason, 1994), ran a Virtual Summer School (Issroff, 1994), and branched out with other models of course design (Mason, 1998a). The other technology development at this time was, of course, the Web. Contrary to the practice of many institutions rushing to become electronic, the OU did not see any value for its students in `putting all its courses on the Web'. It was evident to us from experiments with CD-ROM as a delivery medium for course content that students prefer to print out materials for study, partly because they are not accustomed to learning from a screen, but also because of their need to study at times and places where a computer is not available (journeys to work, holidays, etc.). Our printed materials are of a very high quality and it would be using technology for its own sake rather than for any educational benefit to put materials written and designed for the print medium onto the Web. Nevertheless, we have found that a wide
70
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
range of administrative uses of the Web is transforming the university into an e-university far more effectively than mere course delivery could. Apart from the obvious facilities of registration, student records, and submission of assignments, we have begun an ambitious program of putting `course tasters' on the Web to help new and continuing students make the right course choice. Precourse materials in mathematics and computer literacy and in study and essay-writing skills, and counseling and careers advice are all being offered on the Web for students who need extra support in preparing to study. Whereas in the first years, it was a considerable investment for distance students to buy their own PC for one course, now there is a whole range of benefits that the university can offer to justify the expense. We currently have 100,000 students online and the day when all 250,000 students will be required to have access is within sight. 10. Teaching online During the early 1990s, I began to design and tutor online courses myself. In the Institute of Educational Technology, we ran a series of professional development courses using CoSy and soon FirstClass, and right from the beginning, these courses attracted students from all over the world. With the advent of the Web, we wanted to integrate online course material and links to the many relevant websites at other institutions, with the online discussions. FirstClass was slow to develop an integrated system and we tired of sending out FirstClass disks around the world with all the attendant problems this caused. We developed our own system in-house that had many of the best features of FirstClass but was fully available from a Web browser. Based on our experiences from the short professional development courses, we initiated a Masters Program and taught online to a global student body of 150 students. One of the courses, Applications of Information Technology in Open and Distance Education, provided me with the opportunity to implement the ideas and conclusions I had come to as a PhD student and subsequent researcher of online interaction:
the need to reduce the course content if students are to make a major contribution to online discussion and group collaborations; the need to structure online interactions if all students are to feel comfortable about taking part; the importance of valuing online discussion by encouraging students to use extracts in their assignments. We began experimenting with smaller group sizes and with set activities, giving everyone a specific task and an area of the system in which to discuss their findings. In addition, we allowed those with the time, access and enthusiasm to participate across any of the sub groups if they wanted . . . We developed the concept of an online debate, choosing carefully a polemical statement which contests central course issues, which has good resources available to substantiate both sides of the argument, and which is significant enough to warrant discussion over a three-week period. We assigned specific roles to each person in the group
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
71
such as: moderator of the discussion, proposer of the motion, opposer of the motion, documentalists (who summarise relevant ideas from the set readings), researchers (who go and find relevant papers and resources on the Web), commenters (whose specific task is to discuss the ideas put forth by the opposer and proposer), and finally rapporteur (who is responsible for summarising the discussion at the end of 3 weeks). The first four months of the course are based on collaborations of this sort and have two supporting books and a short Web study guide, but the last four months have more printed materials and more individual work. What we have found is that this mixture of intense collaboration tailing off into traditional, more independent study works very well. The students, many who became total converts to the value of collaborative learning in the early stages of the course, were definitely flagging by about four months into the course. The term `collaboration fatigue' was coined to express their combination of appreciation but overload with the demands of collaborating online. The problems are: that the structure and timetable imposed by collaborative learning makes the course very much less flexible than traditional distance education that the schedules of busy professional people who are attracted to this programme mean that holidays, family crises, sudden job commitments are a major hindrance to regular, sustained participation in group activities ironically, that students definitely experience more guilt and stress about failing their colleagues in collaborative work than their tutors in individual work! Collaborative work is definitely more time-consuming, more stressful and less flexible than individual work. However, in many ways it is more rewarding. The benefits of collaborative activities as the core content of the course are: that students can engage in authentic tasks directly relevant to their work, in this case as educators and ICT specialists, that the whole, usually in the form of a group report, is more than the sum of the parts which are the individual contributions, that the individual expertise of the students is brought into the teaching/learning environment to the benefit of all concerned, that larger, more comprehensive tasks can be undertaken through the combined efforts of a group, and that the burden of supporting and motivating students can be shared by all the students, not just the tutor (Mason, 1999, pp. 7 ±8).
As Director of this Masters Program, I am now turning my attention to designing shorter learning opportunities that build on what we have learned from this course, but are more accessible and flexible. However, the taste of working with a global student body has led me to a major new research program Ð the globalisation of education (Mason, 1998b), and in particular, the cultural issues one encounters in online interactions, assessment, and collaborative activities when students not only are working in their second language, but in an adopted and unfamiliar educational paradigm.
11. The OU as a global educator Throughout the 1990s, the OU has systematically changed itself into a global institution. It has probably invested more than any other established university, certainly in the UK, to re-
72
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
engineer itself for the challenges of the new educational market, and has transformed itself into a global education provider using new technologies and a range of methods for operating in different countries. It has incorporated in the US and soon will be offering UK courses in North America through the channel of the USOU. It has an extensive network of partners in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and South America. It offers courses throughout Continental Western Europe and Ireland, using its own study centres and tutors. It leads a number of aid-funded projects in various countries (e.g., Ethiopia, Eritrea) where western business and management methods are in great demand. While it is undoubtedly the case that telecommunications technologies are an essential component of this global activity, they are all means to an end. The OU has become one of the most prominent examples of an institution enshrining access to educational opportunity and openness to students of all backgrounds, not only into its name and mission statement, but into the very heart of the organisation: its preparation of course materials, its enrollment procedures, its tutorial support provisions, and its commitment to helping similar, developing organisations around the world. 12. A large-scale online course While our Masters Degree developed the first online, Web-based course in the OU, it remains small and handcrafted by OU standards. The first large-scale undergraduate course delivered entirely on the Web was offered in pilot form to over 800 students in 1999. It was so successful that over 12,000 students signed up for the course in 2000. The course is innovative for the OU in the following ways:
the course is supported entirely online and there are no face-to-face tutorials the course content, apart from several set books, is entirely on the Web the combination of teaching information and communication technology (ICT) to complete beginners, using online group work, and very large-scale online delivery is unique in the OU and probably the world.
Along with the course team chair, I carried out an evaluation of the first presentation of the course. It was not without its problems and obviously with such large student numbers, some were disappointed with the content and approach of the course. In our evaluation article, we (Mason & Weller, 2000) wrote: There has been a good deal of evaluation of the use of computer conferencing as a means of interaction between students and tutors on distance education programmes over the last ten years. One way of characterising its use as an educational medium is to say that its strengths are also its weaknesses: it doesn't require fixed times for study, but consequently other demands on one's time easily take precedence, it maintains a record of all interactions Ð but this makes many people wary of committing their ideas to such a public forum, and it allows everyone to be `heard', but this leads to an overload of messages that many find completely overwhelming. One of the paradoxes of this medium which is very apparent in the student feedback of this course lies in the disparate perceptions that on the one hand, there were too many
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
73
messages, or that, on the other, there was too little participation. For example: ``I couldn't have coped without the conferencing.'' ``Because of the mix of people, there is a lot of selfhelp.'' ``I wouldn't have understood nearly so much of the course if there hadn't been the support conferences.'' But also ``I felt intimidated by the level of knowledge some people displayed in the conferences.'' ``I found the online conferencing unusable. I tried a few times to get into the discussions, but without success. I would have had to be logging in everyday for it to work and this was impossible.'' ``The most disappointing thing about the course was the lack of participation in the conferencing.'' ``Most people seem to be too busy to contribute to the conferences and this is a real pity.''
Despite all the improvements in computer conferencing systems, the huge benefits of the Web, and the increase in our understanding about how to design online courses, it remains the case that these comments by our students in 1999 are virtual replicas of feedback from students on our first ever use of the medium over 10 years before. However, so integrated is online teaching in the way the OU operates now, and so positive are the enthusiasts and our huge student association, that we are committed to developing our online capacity, while maintaining traditional print-based methods for those who prefer this style of learning.
13. Current research One of the many lines of research being pursued at the OU in support of online teaching, is that of real-time learning opportunities using streaming technologies on the Web. We have been convinced of the value of real-time interaction among students and tutors right from the inception of the university. In fact, in my opinion, we are more aware of the benefits than campus-based universities that squander precious time together in the same room by lecturing at students! Our Knowledge Media Institute has developed software for running large-scale events on the Web. One example of this is the Virtual Graduation Ceremony we ran for the first graduates of our Masters Degree in March 2000 (http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/vdc/). Other software has been developed for holding small real-time tutorials using multi-way audio and a shared screen. This has tremendous potential for us in terms of student-initiated real-time interaction, student presentations, real-time debates and discussions, problemsolving tutorials, second language practice, and so on.
14. Conclusion Many things have changed or developed since we first bought CoSy in 1986. The OU has adopted computer conferencing as a medium for social, educational, and administrative interaction, and has supported all three directions through research, evaluation, and start-up funding. Nevertheless, it has listened to the students who cannot afford access, who do not want to collaborate with other students, or who do not want to learn online. The vast majority of our courses are not delivered on the Web, and conferencing and online access are optional
74
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
on many courses. The business of encouraging people to learn is delicate, artful, and evolutionary. We are ready as soon as all of our students are, to be an e-university. References Alexander, G., & Mason, R. (1994). Innovating at the OU: resource-based collaborative learning online. CITE Report No. 195. Milton Keynes: Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University. Daniel, J. (1996). Mega-universities and knowledge media. Kogan Page. Issroff, K. (1994). Virtual summer school evaluation. CALRG Report 144. Milton Keynes: Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University. Mason, R. (1989a). A case study of the use of computer conferencing at the Open University. CITE Thesis No. 6. PhD dissertation, Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University. Mason, R. (1989b). The evaluation of CoSy on an Open University course. In: R. Mason, & A. Kaye (Eds.), Mindweave: communication, computers and distance education ( pp. 115 ± 145). Pergamon. Mason, R. (1992). Methodologies for evaluating applications of computer conferencing. In: A. R. Kaye (Ed.), Collaborative learning through computer conferencing: the Najaden papers. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Mason, R. (1995). Using electronic networking for assessment. In: F. Lockwood (Ed.), Open and distance learning today ( pp. 208 ± 217). Routledge. Mason, R. (1998a). Models of online courses. Asynchronous Learning Networks Magazine, 2 (2). October (online). Available at: http://www.aln.org/alnweb/magazine/vol2_issue2/Masonfinal.htm. Mason, R. (1998b). Globalising education. Trends and applications. Routledge. Mason, R. (1999). IET's Masters in Open and Distance Education: what have we learned? CITE Report No. 248. Milton Keynes: The Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University. Available at: http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/r.d.mason/. Mason, R., & Kaye, A. (Eds.) (1989). Mindweave: communication, computers and distance education. Pergamon. Mason, R., & Weller, M. (2000). Factors affecting students' satisfaction on a Web course. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 16 (2), 173 ± 200. Available at: http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/ajet/.
From distance education to online education Robin Mason* The Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, Geoffrey Crowther Building, Milton Keynes, UK Received 1 August 2000; accepted 1 November 2000
Abstract The UK Open University (OU) was founded 30 years ago as a print-based distance teaching institution. It is gradually transforming itself into an electronic university. This article describes some of the steps along the way, focusing on the use of computer conferencing and the Web for course delivery and support of students. Many of the barriers and problems are analysed, as well as the successes and key turning points. The research issues related to this change are also highlighted, as are some of the evaluation studies carried out at the university on its use of new technologies. D 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Distance education; Computer conferencing; Global education
1. Introduction The UK Open University (OU) is a mass distance teaching institution founded 30 years ago to provide higher education opportunities for working adults. By any standards, it has been an outstanding success: It pioneered a model of supported open learning that has been copied the world over; it has gained a reputation for the quality of its teaching that is the envy of many established universities and despite its enrollment of over 250,000 students, it had to turn away every year for its first 25 years enough students to form a small university elsewhere. However, the times change and nowhere more so than at universities these days. This article documents some of the ways in which the OU has been transforming itself to meet the higher education demands of the 21st century, in particular, the ways in which its use of * Tel.: +44-1908-653-137; fax: +44-1908-654-173. E-mail address: [email protected] (R. Mason). 1096-7516/00/$ ± see front matter D 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S 1 0 9 6 - 7 5 1 6 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 3 3 - 6
64
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
computer conferencing have brought about an evolution from distance teaching to online education. I will highlight key points along the way and describe the problems and barriers that marked this journey. My own career as an academic is directly mirrored in this journey of the OU, as I was employed in 1986 to work on the university's first use of computer conferencing in mass distance education. 2. First use of computer conferencing Following small-scale trials of the use of electronic mail on two courses and after an evaluation of a range of conferencing systems, the OU purchased the CoSy conferencing system from the University of Guelph, Ontario, in 1986. Its principal use was for the proposed course An Introduction to Information Technology: Social and Technological Issues, for which nearly 1400 students registered in its first year of presentation. The largest portion of this course, as with all major OU courses to date, was the print component of seven `blocks' of material. These were enhanced by a course reader, audio and broadcast media, and other supplementary materials. However, in addition to these standard presentation media, this course was one of the first to require all students and tutors to have an IBM computer in order to gain practical experience of the social and technological issues discussed in the written material. Computer conferencing along with word processing, database management, and spreadsheet analysis, made up the practical component of the course, which accounted for about 20% of the students' study time. Consequently, the conferencing element was a very small part of the whole. 3. Integration of the communications medium A number of steps were taken to prevent this small communications element from being perceived by students as an added extra, which could be ignored if necessary. As OU students resemble many other students in tending to be `assignment-driven', and being distance learners, feel isolated from an academic environment, the obvious uses of the conferencing system were as a means of tutor and peer support and as an integrated component of the assessment system. Consequently, about half of the face-to-face tutorials were replaced by online interaction with the tutor in small tutor group conferences (1 tutor and 25 students) and in larger, plenary conferences for discussion of general course issues. In addition, the main use of conferencing in the assessment of the course was for the final doubled weighted essay in which students were expected to write an evaluation of computer-mediated communication, based on their experience of it during the course, on the textual material presented in the units about conferencing, and on the reactions of their fellow students. The latter information was to be drawn from a database formed by all students uploading answers to two detailed questionnaires concerning their use of the conferencing system during the course. Students were expected to download data and combinations of data from this remote database, present it in graphs and tables using the various software packages provided, and write an assessment of some aspect Ð social, educational, or technological Ð of computer conferencing.
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
65
4. Problems and successes in the early implementation I carried out extensive evaluation and analysis of students' and tutors' use of the conferencing system as part of my PhD, which was a case study of this first use of the medium at the OU (Mason, 1989a). Through survey questionnaires, telephone interviews, and on-site visits to students and tutors in their homes, I gathered detailed accounts of the problems and successes that characterised this first implementation. Technical problems in logging on from home plagued the early implementations of computer-mediated communications, although not to the extent that the pessimists had predicted. The university provided telephone help service and online support conferences, and the course team prepared extensive training materials including an audiotape to talk students through their first log on. Eventually, nearly all 1400 students managed to log on, but not all became competent and confident users. The social barriers to use were, as usual, much greater than the technical barriers. The variability of tutors' input to their small group conferences was another problem. Many of the 70 tutors gave unflaggingly their time and energy in contributing to the conferences, while others put in an opening message and expected their students to get on with discussions themselves. It soon became clear that tutors who continued to put in messages Ð cajoling, informative, chatty, or substantial Ð produced the most interactive groups. These were the tutors who enjoyed the medium, as a communications tool or as a new piece of educational technology. Similarly, about a third of the students immediately gravitated to the medium with comments like the following: I have used the conferencing, conversation and mailing facilities almost every day from the beginning of the course until the end and have found the system an invaluable tool in helping with the course work, overcoming initial technical difficulties and discussing the arguments surrounding the study of IT (quoted in Mason & Kaye, 1989, p. ix).
Many other students complained about how time consuming it was to find useful information on the system Ð for every gem of a discussion, there were too many irrelevant or chatty messages. Reluctance to input messages led to desultory conferences or to dominance of the active discussions by the most frequent and confident users. Nevertheless, the computer-generated statistics showed that well over 50% of students were reading the active conferences and reported that they felt very much less isolated on this course than they ever had as distance learners.
5. Barriers to use Despite the undoubted problems of the first large-scale implementation, the enthusiasm of a significant number of students and tutors, added to the obvious potential that the course team could see for this medium, led to immediate refinements and requests by other faculties to use conferencing.
66
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
One of the main barriers to widespread take-up of conferencing was, in fact, the cost of telephone charges, or to be more accurate, the perceived cost of them. This was an issue I investigated in some depth in my interviews with students and in my analysis of the user statistics. Partly because of the relatively high cost of telephone charges in the UK, compared with North America, and partly, perhaps, to cultural differences, the UK could be described at that time as `telephone shy'. The absolute costs of online connections over the whole 9 months of the course were between £5 and £10 for the majority of students Ð not more than a couple of evenings in the pub, as one student pointed out to me. However, the complaints about the costs and the accusations that the OU was transferring costs to students were out of all proportion to the actual costs incurred by students. It is ironic that with the UK deregulation of the telecommunications industry in the 1990s and the subsequent explosion of the mobile phone phenomenon, the UK has suddenly become one of the least telephone shy nations in the world! However, in addition to this early barrier of `quantity', there was an equally strong barrier around the issue of quality. Many users turned away from the medium as being a poor investment of their precious study time Ð there was too much chat, too many messages in the wrong place, and not enough structure to the discussion. The conclusion I drew from my research on this first use was: This model of a very small exploitation of the medium amongst a plethora of other teaching tools cannot be recommended for other applications and indeed, was responsible in great part for the little use made of it by the majority of students. Some of the frustrations experienced by tutors and students alike would be considerably reduced if conferencing formed a more significant role in the teaching and delivery of a course. Tutors would have to receive proper recognition for their role in the presentation of the course and all students would be obliged to log on frequently to take the course. The life-blood of a conferencing system is the contributions and interactions of its users. It can integrate with and enhance other teaching media, particularly print, but not when relegated to a 5% stake in a course (Mason, 1989b, 143).
6. Early research While the OU was the first large-scale user of conferencing in higher education, there were many institutions that had been using the medium before the OU. We decided to hold a faceto-face conference at the OU in 1988 to bring together researchers who already had experience of the issues we had just met on our first implementation that year. Over 200 people attended from Europe and North America, and from the keynote presentations and other articles, we produced one of the first books on computer conferencing, entitled Mindweave: Communication, Computers and Distance Education. It soon sold out even of its second reprint and when the copyright reverted to us, we made it available electronically through our International Centre for Distance Learning at http://icdl.open.ac.uk/mindweave/ mindweave.html. It continues to be cited regularly and chapters from the book have been used on innumerable courses about conferencing around the world.
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
67
Despite this early recognition abroad, I must note that we extended invitations to attend the conference free of charge to anyone and everyone at the OU who had any input to our use of computer conferencing. Less than 10 people came and then only to the odd session. The medium had a few champions at the OU, but was regarded with suspicion by most academics and certainly most computer staff who saw communications as a poor use of computing power.
7. Hindsight reflections It is remarkable to me looking back at this early implementation with over 10 years of refinements and the development of new technologies, how many issues are still with us and yet how much the OU got right first time.
The socio-psychological support side of the medium continues to have important implications for a distance teaching institution. The integration of the medium with student assessment continues to be a focus of development, experimentation, and innovation. The collaborative nature of the project and other activities designed for the first presentation were bold and innovative for their time and have been built on in all subsequent courses.
The combination of small tutorial groups plus larger conferences for discussion of the main course themes continues to be the framework for subsequent uses, although there has been considerable experimentation and elaboration on courses across the disciplines. The issues that continue to cause the most difficulties are tutor and student workload, getting all students to participate actively, reluctance of a minority to take part in collaborative work, and students' lack of time to participate as much as they would like. The problems that, fortunately, have faded into the background are costs of connecting (although not costs of the initial PC), training students and tutors to use a conferencing system (command-line CoSy was incredibly daunting compared to current systems), messages in the wrong place, and the `gee whizz' nature of the early interactions when the medium was so novel to most users.
8. Research and development Following this initial large-scale use of the medium, a range of early adopter courses in the OU began to introduce conferencing as a partial replacement for face-to-face tutoring. Various kinds of collaborative activities were designed and integrated with assignments. One example is the following: An area on the system is allocated to groups of between ten and twenty students, and discussion of the assignment question lasts for anything up to three or four weeks. Students
68
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
then select some of their messages to submit for assessment and the criteria for marking include such items as: the extent to which the student has used the issues raised in the course material to develop their arguments, the way in which the student's messages build on and critique the ideas and inputs of other contributors to carry the discussion forward, and the succinctness with which the student's arguments are conveyed (Mason, 1995, p. 213).
Group projects, common enough in campus-based education, could now be used in distance education, and we experimented with various combinations of individual and group work, such as an individual introduction and conclusion to the assignment with a common core produced jointly. On another tack, we began to develop a system for the electronic submission of assignments, in order to improve turnaround time. Other courses used the conferencing system to provide access to previous assignments, examinations, and databases of `best answers'. My own research turned to the issue of analysing the content of educational conferences, as a way of understanding how to improve the value of conferencing for students. I argued for a qualitative approach against what I saw as the prevailing quantitative and systemsbased approach in which messages were counted and message maps created to look at who sent messages to whom Ð as if the amount of interaction indicated the amount of learning taking place. I have attempted to draw up a typology of conference messages related to the educational values they display. This method involves a thorough reading of a set of messages with a view to discovering what, if any, skills and abilities the participants are displaying or developing. Some of the questions the educational analyst would want to bear in mind during such a process are:
Do the participants build on previous messages? Do they draw on their own experience? Do they refer to course material? Do they refer to relevant material outside the course? Do they initiate new ideas for discussion? Does the course tutor control, direct, or facilitate discussion?
This kind of questioning would lead to a typology of messages that focuses on the independence and initiative of the student, and would provide a means by which evidence of these attributes in students can be sought in the conferencing medium. By using other educational goals, such as collaborative learning, critical thinking, deep understanding of course material, or broad awareness of issues, and by breaking these down into examples of behaviour or written work that display these characteristics, it is possible to analyse conference content and draw conclusions about the educational value of the particular online activity. Quantitative data can be used to show to what extent all students took part, or what percent of the total activity the educationally valuable interactions represent. By using a strategy such as the one suggested here, we can, as a community progress beyond description to analysis. We should not be afraid of making value judgements about what is educational interaction. The educator/evaluator can go beyond description and explanation of conferencing interactions, and actually interpret them according to educational criteria. This stance represents a view of evaluation as `construction' of knowledge rather than `discovery' of knowledge (Mason, 1992, pp. 114 ±115).
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
69
Throughout the 1990s, a large research program in telematics was funded by the European Commission and this launched a whole series of investigations, experiments, and developments in the use of computer conferencing across Europe. The OU was the lead partner in one of these projects, and as a result, hosted an international conference on site about computer conferencing in 1994. Only about 25 places were available for OU staff, and as one of the organisers, I experienced every form of arm-twisting and downright abuse from OU colleagues trying to secure a place, so great was the demand to attend. Six years on from our first conference, the medium had certainly come of age at the OU. 9. Turning points During the early 1990s, there were three major turning points at the OU that account for this transformation of interest in computer conferencing. The first was the arrival of our new Vice Chancellor, Sir John Daniel in 1990. He already had some acquaintance with CoSy and quickly threw his weight behind electronic communication generally, both for staff and students. A program of funding was set up as `seed-corn' money to encourage electronic tutoring initiatives across the university at grassroots level. He installed a Pro-Vice Chancellor with a specific brief to develop and manage the OU's use of electronic media. His leadership of the transition of the OU from a print-based university to an electronic university has been unflagging and wholehearted, and his own research and public addresses have been a significant encouragement (Daniel, 1996 and http://www.open.ac.uk/vcs-speeches/). A second turning point has been brought about by technology developments: The advent of another Canadian conferencing product, FirstClass, which the OU adopted following trials conducted as part of its European funded research project. FirstClass was so much more intuitive a system than CoSy, that much of the effort for staff in preparing training materials and for students in trying to apply them to their system at home became a thing of the past. Training could now focus on more significant issues of how to use the system educationally. By the mid-1990s, we had nearly 50,000 students online, about half were studying courses that required computer conferencing and the rest using it optionally for contact with their tutor and other students. FirstClass, a robust and well-supported software, facilitated this growth in numbers and allowed academics to adapt conferencing more fully to the demands of their curriculum. We combined conferencing with CD-ROM material for resource-based learning (Alexander & Mason, 1994), ran a Virtual Summer School (Issroff, 1994), and branched out with other models of course design (Mason, 1998a). The other technology development at this time was, of course, the Web. Contrary to the practice of many institutions rushing to become electronic, the OU did not see any value for its students in `putting all its courses on the Web'. It was evident to us from experiments with CD-ROM as a delivery medium for course content that students prefer to print out materials for study, partly because they are not accustomed to learning from a screen, but also because of their need to study at times and places where a computer is not available (journeys to work, holidays, etc.). Our printed materials are of a very high quality and it would be using technology for its own sake rather than for any educational benefit to put materials written and designed for the print medium onto the Web. Nevertheless, we have found that a wide
70
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
range of administrative uses of the Web is transforming the university into an e-university far more effectively than mere course delivery could. Apart from the obvious facilities of registration, student records, and submission of assignments, we have begun an ambitious program of putting `course tasters' on the Web to help new and continuing students make the right course choice. Precourse materials in mathematics and computer literacy and in study and essay-writing skills, and counseling and careers advice are all being offered on the Web for students who need extra support in preparing to study. Whereas in the first years, it was a considerable investment for distance students to buy their own PC for one course, now there is a whole range of benefits that the university can offer to justify the expense. We currently have 100,000 students online and the day when all 250,000 students will be required to have access is within sight. 10. Teaching online During the early 1990s, I began to design and tutor online courses myself. In the Institute of Educational Technology, we ran a series of professional development courses using CoSy and soon FirstClass, and right from the beginning, these courses attracted students from all over the world. With the advent of the Web, we wanted to integrate online course material and links to the many relevant websites at other institutions, with the online discussions. FirstClass was slow to develop an integrated system and we tired of sending out FirstClass disks around the world with all the attendant problems this caused. We developed our own system in-house that had many of the best features of FirstClass but was fully available from a Web browser. Based on our experiences from the short professional development courses, we initiated a Masters Program and taught online to a global student body of 150 students. One of the courses, Applications of Information Technology in Open and Distance Education, provided me with the opportunity to implement the ideas and conclusions I had come to as a PhD student and subsequent researcher of online interaction:
the need to reduce the course content if students are to make a major contribution to online discussion and group collaborations; the need to structure online interactions if all students are to feel comfortable about taking part; the importance of valuing online discussion by encouraging students to use extracts in their assignments. We began experimenting with smaller group sizes and with set activities, giving everyone a specific task and an area of the system in which to discuss their findings. In addition, we allowed those with the time, access and enthusiasm to participate across any of the sub groups if they wanted . . . We developed the concept of an online debate, choosing carefully a polemical statement which contests central course issues, which has good resources available to substantiate both sides of the argument, and which is significant enough to warrant discussion over a three-week period. We assigned specific roles to each person in the group
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
71
such as: moderator of the discussion, proposer of the motion, opposer of the motion, documentalists (who summarise relevant ideas from the set readings), researchers (who go and find relevant papers and resources on the Web), commenters (whose specific task is to discuss the ideas put forth by the opposer and proposer), and finally rapporteur (who is responsible for summarising the discussion at the end of 3 weeks). The first four months of the course are based on collaborations of this sort and have two supporting books and a short Web study guide, but the last four months have more printed materials and more individual work. What we have found is that this mixture of intense collaboration tailing off into traditional, more independent study works very well. The students, many who became total converts to the value of collaborative learning in the early stages of the course, were definitely flagging by about four months into the course. The term `collaboration fatigue' was coined to express their combination of appreciation but overload with the demands of collaborating online. The problems are: that the structure and timetable imposed by collaborative learning makes the course very much less flexible than traditional distance education that the schedules of busy professional people who are attracted to this programme mean that holidays, family crises, sudden job commitments are a major hindrance to regular, sustained participation in group activities ironically, that students definitely experience more guilt and stress about failing their colleagues in collaborative work than their tutors in individual work! Collaborative work is definitely more time-consuming, more stressful and less flexible than individual work. However, in many ways it is more rewarding. The benefits of collaborative activities as the core content of the course are: that students can engage in authentic tasks directly relevant to their work, in this case as educators and ICT specialists, that the whole, usually in the form of a group report, is more than the sum of the parts which are the individual contributions, that the individual expertise of the students is brought into the teaching/learning environment to the benefit of all concerned, that larger, more comprehensive tasks can be undertaken through the combined efforts of a group, and that the burden of supporting and motivating students can be shared by all the students, not just the tutor (Mason, 1999, pp. 7 ±8).
As Director of this Masters Program, I am now turning my attention to designing shorter learning opportunities that build on what we have learned from this course, but are more accessible and flexible. However, the taste of working with a global student body has led me to a major new research program Ð the globalisation of education (Mason, 1998b), and in particular, the cultural issues one encounters in online interactions, assessment, and collaborative activities when students not only are working in their second language, but in an adopted and unfamiliar educational paradigm.
11. The OU as a global educator Throughout the 1990s, the OU has systematically changed itself into a global institution. It has probably invested more than any other established university, certainly in the UK, to re-
72
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
engineer itself for the challenges of the new educational market, and has transformed itself into a global education provider using new technologies and a range of methods for operating in different countries. It has incorporated in the US and soon will be offering UK courses in North America through the channel of the USOU. It has an extensive network of partners in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and South America. It offers courses throughout Continental Western Europe and Ireland, using its own study centres and tutors. It leads a number of aid-funded projects in various countries (e.g., Ethiopia, Eritrea) where western business and management methods are in great demand. While it is undoubtedly the case that telecommunications technologies are an essential component of this global activity, they are all means to an end. The OU has become one of the most prominent examples of an institution enshrining access to educational opportunity and openness to students of all backgrounds, not only into its name and mission statement, but into the very heart of the organisation: its preparation of course materials, its enrollment procedures, its tutorial support provisions, and its commitment to helping similar, developing organisations around the world. 12. A large-scale online course While our Masters Degree developed the first online, Web-based course in the OU, it remains small and handcrafted by OU standards. The first large-scale undergraduate course delivered entirely on the Web was offered in pilot form to over 800 students in 1999. It was so successful that over 12,000 students signed up for the course in 2000. The course is innovative for the OU in the following ways:
the course is supported entirely online and there are no face-to-face tutorials the course content, apart from several set books, is entirely on the Web the combination of teaching information and communication technology (ICT) to complete beginners, using online group work, and very large-scale online delivery is unique in the OU and probably the world.
Along with the course team chair, I carried out an evaluation of the first presentation of the course. It was not without its problems and obviously with such large student numbers, some were disappointed with the content and approach of the course. In our evaluation article, we (Mason & Weller, 2000) wrote: There has been a good deal of evaluation of the use of computer conferencing as a means of interaction between students and tutors on distance education programmes over the last ten years. One way of characterising its use as an educational medium is to say that its strengths are also its weaknesses: it doesn't require fixed times for study, but consequently other demands on one's time easily take precedence, it maintains a record of all interactions Ð but this makes many people wary of committing their ideas to such a public forum, and it allows everyone to be `heard', but this leads to an overload of messages that many find completely overwhelming. One of the paradoxes of this medium which is very apparent in the student feedback of this course lies in the disparate perceptions that on the one hand, there were too many
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
73
messages, or that, on the other, there was too little participation. For example: ``I couldn't have coped without the conferencing.'' ``Because of the mix of people, there is a lot of selfhelp.'' ``I wouldn't have understood nearly so much of the course if there hadn't been the support conferences.'' But also ``I felt intimidated by the level of knowledge some people displayed in the conferences.'' ``I found the online conferencing unusable. I tried a few times to get into the discussions, but without success. I would have had to be logging in everyday for it to work and this was impossible.'' ``The most disappointing thing about the course was the lack of participation in the conferencing.'' ``Most people seem to be too busy to contribute to the conferences and this is a real pity.''
Despite all the improvements in computer conferencing systems, the huge benefits of the Web, and the increase in our understanding about how to design online courses, it remains the case that these comments by our students in 1999 are virtual replicas of feedback from students on our first ever use of the medium over 10 years before. However, so integrated is online teaching in the way the OU operates now, and so positive are the enthusiasts and our huge student association, that we are committed to developing our online capacity, while maintaining traditional print-based methods for those who prefer this style of learning.
13. Current research One of the many lines of research being pursued at the OU in support of online teaching, is that of real-time learning opportunities using streaming technologies on the Web. We have been convinced of the value of real-time interaction among students and tutors right from the inception of the university. In fact, in my opinion, we are more aware of the benefits than campus-based universities that squander precious time together in the same room by lecturing at students! Our Knowledge Media Institute has developed software for running large-scale events on the Web. One example of this is the Virtual Graduation Ceremony we ran for the first graduates of our Masters Degree in March 2000 (http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/vdc/). Other software has been developed for holding small real-time tutorials using multi-way audio and a shared screen. This has tremendous potential for us in terms of student-initiated real-time interaction, student presentations, real-time debates and discussions, problemsolving tutorials, second language practice, and so on.
14. Conclusion Many things have changed or developed since we first bought CoSy in 1986. The OU has adopted computer conferencing as a medium for social, educational, and administrative interaction, and has supported all three directions through research, evaluation, and start-up funding. Nevertheless, it has listened to the students who cannot afford access, who do not want to collaborate with other students, or who do not want to learn online. The vast majority of our courses are not delivered on the Web, and conferencing and online access are optional
74
R. Mason / Internet and Higher Education 3 (2000) 63±74
on many courses. The business of encouraging people to learn is delicate, artful, and evolutionary. We are ready as soon as all of our students are, to be an e-university. References Alexander, G., & Mason, R. (1994). Innovating at the OU: resource-based collaborative learning online. CITE Report No. 195. Milton Keynes: Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University. Daniel, J. (1996). Mega-universities and knowledge media. Kogan Page. Issroff, K. (1994). Virtual summer school evaluation. CALRG Report 144. Milton Keynes: Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University. Mason, R. (1989a). A case study of the use of computer conferencing at the Open University. CITE Thesis No. 6. PhD dissertation, Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University. Mason, R. (1989b). The evaluation of CoSy on an Open University course. In: R. Mason, & A. Kaye (Eds.), Mindweave: communication, computers and distance education ( pp. 115 ± 145). Pergamon. Mason, R. (1992). Methodologies for evaluating applications of computer conferencing. In: A. R. Kaye (Ed.), Collaborative learning through computer conferencing: the Najaden papers. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Mason, R. (1995). Using electronic networking for assessment. In: F. Lockwood (Ed.), Open and distance learning today ( pp. 208 ± 217). Routledge. Mason, R. (1998a). Models of online courses. Asynchronous Learning Networks Magazine, 2 (2). October (online). Available at: http://www.aln.org/alnweb/magazine/vol2_issue2/Masonfinal.htm. Mason, R. (1998b). Globalising education. Trends and applications. Routledge. Mason, R. (1999). IET's Masters in Open and Distance Education: what have we learned? CITE Report No. 248. Milton Keynes: The Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University. Available at: http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/r.d.mason/. Mason, R., & Kaye, A. (Eds.) (1989). Mindweave: communication, computers and distance education. Pergamon. Mason, R., & Weller, M. (2000). Factors affecting students' satisfaction on a Web course. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 16 (2), 173 ± 200. Available at: http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/ajet/.