World wide learning

The vision of a virtual learning world for tertiary students is gradually becoming a reality. Several institutions offer study options that make use of the internet to varying extents and the Government is pouring millions of dollars into e-learning development projects.

But Dr Bill Anderson, an e-learning specialist at the New Zealand institution with the longest history of distance learning, Massey University, doesn't foresee a learning landscape dominated by the internet.

"The idea that one particular medium is the way to go in education is absolutely incorrect," says Anderson, who is based in Palmerston North.

"What we need to be recognising is that various technologies offer us various ways of creating learning material and engaging with our students."

Increasing numbers of students want to engage from their own home in their own time. For Auckland-based Helen Miller, extramural study fits in with raising a child and part-time work.

"The purpose of enrolling extramurally is to avoid attendance because of other commitments," she says.

Miller, who is studying after a 27-year break, is doing a post-graduate diploma in applied journalism and communications, taught at Massey's Wellington Business School, but delivered by the internet. She is completely at home using a computer and modem to connect to WebCT, Massey's learning management system, from where she accesses her course.

"The material covered is presented as separate lectures from the professor," Miller says. Her habit is to print course material, preferring to read it on paper than on-screen. The system also connects students to one another and the lecturer.

"Within WebCT there's a discussion forum and for any issue that arises, students can post questions or answers that they come across. That co-operative problem-solving helps the learning process because it proves to oneself that the material is understood. The ultimate test is being able to communicate it to someone else," she says.

According to Anderson, a senior lecturer in Massey's College of Education, the best learning results are achieved by choosing the appropriate technology for the educational goal.

Considerable effort is going into working out how technology can be applied to getting the desired educational results. A year ago the Government allocated $34 million to projects "to improve e-learning and foster innovative ideas in tertiary education". That followed the release of a report, Highways and Pathways, in March 2002 by the Government's E-Learning Advisory Group.

The advisory group found plenty of tertiary e-learning activity within the country. Hundreds of courses with an internet component are available from institutions including Massey, the Open Polytechnic, Waikato Institute of Technology, Waikato University, Universal College of Learning, Whitireia Polytechnic, Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (CPIT) and Auckland University of Technology.

No one is saying internet-delivered courses will empty university campuses but there's general acknowledgment of growing demand for learning at a distance. Tertiary Education Minister Steve Maharey, in his introduction to the advisory group report, says e-learning will make it "possible for people to more effectively undertake tertiary learning from home, work and other centres in the community".

Liz Barker, the president of Massey's Extramural Students Association, thinks the push is coming from changes in society as much as technology.

"I wouldn't necessarily say the technology alone has attracted more people to distance learning," Barker says.

"I think we have to look to the world of work in the past two decades — it has been hugely transformed.

"We no longer have the job for 40 years that you go into and you get trained and you move up. We now have people changing careers many times in their life."

Barker says that means retraining. However many people aren't in a position to leave their work to attend a university.

"The distance mode of learning is very attractive to those people and many of our students would be doing that kind of thing. They'd either be upgrading their qualifications to move on to a more senior position in whatever job they're in or they would be changing career entirely."

Catering for such people is helping drive Christchurch Polytechnic courses online. Other influences on the changing nature of study, the polytech says, are the financial pressure students are under from loans. That can mean having to work part-time to pay for their study.

But there is also an expectation, as a generation for whom internet use is second-nature enter tertiary study, that institutions will increasingly use technology to make remote learning possible. The danger there, Barker says, is that those without access to computers and the internet — the less well-off — could be shut out.

"We have to recognise that there is a social issue out there that I would describe as the digital divide. In embracing the internet 100 per cent we are inevitably eliminating people from having access to education and I think that would be a terribly sad thing."

She cautions against the "holus-bolus" transfer of courses to the internet.

Institutions have been making serious moves online for several years and some are putting entire degrees on the web. The Open Polytechnic, for example, began doing so in 2000 with its bachelor of business and bachelor of applied science degrees, with the aim of understanding what resources and organisational systems were needed to become an online institution. In 2001, Waikato Institute of Technology opened a Centre for Learning Technologies (CLT) to enable it to get to grips with online teaching. Both institutions now offer hundreds of web-delivered and supported courses.

Massey has a longer history than any other institution of "dual-mode" teaching, offering degrees and diplomas both through face-to-face study on its three campuses (Palmerston North, Auckland and Wellington) and through its large extramural programme, in which more than 18,000 students are enrolled. Anderson says Massey's vision for e-learning is to use the medium to develop learning communities.

An example is a teacher training degree, available online since 1998.

"The teacher education programme has a heavy emphasis on students interacting with each other, developing a sense of professional community and learning through their interaction with each other."

Helen Miller, however, points out one fly in the ointment: if student grades are scaled, as in one of the papers she did last year, students are effectively competing with each, undermining the co-operative approach to learning.

The other way the web is being used is to deliver "learning objects", computer programmes accessed over the internet to simulate, for example, a scientific concept.

"The vet school is a great example of this with all sorts of little simulations and things that work as learning objects, that help students engage with particular aspects of their course material," Anderson says.

While there is a range of applications of the internet to teaching, its use merely as a communications medium can't be overstated, he believes.

"There's a considerable amount of research that goes into ensuring web-based communication is well structured, is well developed and enhances student learning in all sorts of ways.

"Using the web in a communicative way can be a highly advanced skill."

Barker endorses the view that use of the internet needs to be well thought out.

"Courses that are being delivered via the web need to take account of pedagogy and good learning and teaching practice. It's not just a matter of slapping all that stuff up on a website and thinking that's going to work."

She also warns that not all courses offered online are of equal quality.

"In the end everything comes down to quality and authenticity and out on the net you can't be sure of the quality if you don't have clear benchmarks to measure against. We can be sure, because of the rigorous quality audits that all our New Zealand institutions go through, that the courses offered will be of good quality. But from an overseas website you can't be certain how the qualifications offered will stand up."

With a few provisos, Barker thinks the internet is a great learning tool.

"I can speak as a student myself. I'm doing a PhD and I certainly do access the internet to find papers or presentations and speeches that happened a week ago on the other side of the world.

"There's no way that without the internet that I would have had access to that kind of material."