Peter B. Sloep
published in: Didaktik des Fernstudiums aus erwachsenenpädagogischer Sicht, Dokumentation Zum Symposium am 6/7 11 1995 in Tübingen, pp. 156 - 161, Martha Bergler, Deutsches Institut für Fernstudienforschung an der Universität Tübingen (DIFF), 1996
The Open university of the Netherlands (OuNL) has been offering open distance taught courses to adults for a little over ten years now. Although the OuNL was by no means the first player in this field, since its founding a sizeable number of academic and non-academic institutions have embarked upon a similar route. There is one feature that characterizes the OuNL and with it only a relatively small subset of all distance teaching schools: openness. The OuNL has always considered openness to be an essential aspect of its educational philosophy. Openness results from a view that regards students as autonomous learners; learners, that is, who to a large extent structure their learning processes themselves. It is fleshed out by granting students a number of distinct liberties.
Openness taken this far fits in with a view of adults as responsible and able persons, fully in charge of their own destiny at all times.
The distance aspect of the OuNL's educational system, and that of many others, points to the physical remoteness of student and teacher, more concretely, to the lack of a classroom where teacher and students get together regularly to teach and be taught. There may be various reasons for erecting a system of distance teaching. In the sparsely populated areas of Canada and Australia they are different than in the densely populated Netherlands. In the former case it is the physical impossibility to get together frequently, in the latter the social impossibility or undesirability of doing so. Students that have full-time jobs cannot always attend classes at the moments that the education provider finds convenient. Alternatively, students may prefer to do the bulk of their studying in the quietude that only their own study offers them.
An educational system that stresses openness this much and relies this little on personal contacts puts the brunt of the burden on the students: whether a student succeeds in or fails at passing a course or getting a degree is largely in his or her own hands. Of course, the university is not entirely without responsibilities, though. It should offer its students a customized educational setting adapted to the philosophy of open, distance teaching. The teaching materials ('courses') that students work with have to be suited, preferably specifically designed for this type of setting. This implies, for in stance, that students may estimate their own level of aptitude before starting a course, indeed before starting their studies at all; that students' questions will have to be anticipated and answered in the material, that students may assess their own progress in self-assessment quizzes and sample tests, etc. In short, the written material should be self-instructional.
Tutoring, although kept to a minimum, should not be done away with completely, though. It should not be mandatory, for then it would detract from the liberties of place, time and pace. However, students should be offered help, both at the level of the course contents, the organization of their study-program, the level of the university bureaucracy. The extent to which they make use of it, however, is at their own discretion.
Off late, one has come to realize that important though it is to stress the student's own responsibility for her or his study process and progress, the chance of actually passing a course or getting a degree may well be increased considerably by offering students a little more guidance (Boon, 1993). Often, one is inclined to think that social interactions among students - even if they do not strictly concern educational matters - and between students and their tutor/teacher, may be very effective in this respect. To this end one could set up regular classes in which courses are being taught face to face. Or one could organize more and perhaps longer meetings between students and tutors. Indeed, the latter policy has been discussed and to some extent implemented within the OuNL (Gastkemper et al., 1995). Such solutions, however, detract from an educational philosophy committed to openness. They also stretch the available funds to and perhaps even beyond their limits: either the university's funds when additional tutoring is provided at no extra cost, or the student's personal funds when the extras cost extra. In contemplating means of avoiding the dilemma, the subject of the present paper, the virtual classroom, comes in view.
It is hoped that virtual classrooms may offer the required guidance without seriously colliding with the openness of the educational system. In addition to this, virtual classrooms offer a few other interesting features which will receive attention too. The paper does not provide a definitive or even provisional insight into the veracity of this hope. However, it does offer some thoughts that could help elaborating the concept.
The notion of a virtual classroom is a metaphor. Virtual classrooms do not exist in physical space, at best, they may be said to reside in cyberspace. Nonetheless, like ordinary classrooms they provide a means for teachers to interact with their students and for students to interact with their teachers and fellow students. Precisely this feature of supporting communication processes, of course, is what the metaphor seeks to convey and stress. However, communication in traditional classrooms is different than in virtual classrooms. In a traditional classroom it is direct, in a virtual classroom it occurs through the intervention of a variety of technical, telematic if you like, means. This technology mediated character implies that, as compared to ordinary forms of communication, it is amputated. For instance, smells do not make it across glassfiber, and the details of facial expressions are lost in 128 kilobytes per second video conferences. However, this is not necessarily a drawback. Indeed, the ability to intervene in the communication transmission implies the possibility to orchestrate the communication process, and this, in turn, offers opportunities for fine-tuning it to the educational ends it is expected to serve. Virtual classrooms, then, should be designed and a firm idea of what one seeks to achieve with the educational process at large is an imperative prerequisite for that.
What considerations do play a role when designing virtual classrooms?
One could, for instance, argue that, like ordinary class rooms, virtual classrooms should not restrict their functions to the purely educational. Where people meet on a regular basis, whether in physical space or cyberspace, social contacts emerge along various lines. Clearly, in a classroom those contacts should primarily serve the purpose of furthering teaching and learning. However, wider social contacts should be allowed and perhaps even be encouraged. First, one may well argue, because such is life; second, because they may be conducive to the learning process in indirect ways, for instance by preventing early drop-outs.
An analogy with the use of practicals in distance teaching readily comes to mind. Traditionally, practicals form an ineliminable part of each academic science program. However, organizing frequent practicals for distance taught students collides with the basic philosophy of open distance learning. It is also fraught with all sorts of practical problems. The way out of this predicament is offered by making an analysis of the learning objectives of practicals. It then turns out that many of the objectives may be achieved in different ways such as the use of computer mediated practicals, some relate to socialization processes that are of little relevance for adult students, and only few pertain to skills that can only be acquired via the traditional practicals. On the other hand, non-traditional means as computer practicals may help achieve objectives that traditional practicals are unable to attain (Kirschner et al., 1995). Similarly, whereas virtual classrooms will in some respects be amputated real classrooms (such as the lack of direct contacts), in other respects they will offer opportunities that regular classrooms don't. Discrimination by gender, for instance, will be much harder to avoid in physical classrooms than in virtual ones. Also, the ability to quickly respond in live, synchronous discussions may give way to the ability to provide answers that are well thought through in the protracted, asynchronous discussion one finds in a virtual class room.
Entertaining as these explorations of the metaphor of a virtual classroom may be, at some point of time one needs to actually experiment with virtual classrooms in order to test one's theoretical musings. This needs to be done also in order to assess the very viability of the notion. The concept, then, first needs to be made operational; subsequently, concrete structures constituting the virtual classroom will have to be implemented. Finally, a 'substrate' is needed, a concrete piece of educational material, upon which the virtual classroom may be erected. A grant provided by a number of directorates general of the European Commission provided the much needed funds to run an experiment with a virtual classroom. The grant was given to the European Open University Network (EOUN), a satellite organization of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU), with the express aim of aiding in establishing a network of distance teaching institutions and study-centers (so called EuroStudyCentres) across Europe. The virtual classroom under discussion was set up in the larger framework of a course entitled 'European Environmental Science: Towards Sustainability'. Before getting into the details of how this was done, it is important to learn a few things about the course in order to be able to judge the validity of the experiment.
In order to make the experimental presentation as life-like as possible, it was important to attract regular students. Therefore, students had to pay a registration fee, albeit it a relatively modest one of about 35 ECU. More importantly perhaps, students were stimulated to enrol because they could receive credits for successfully completing the course. (Conversations with students taught me that some indeed would not have participated without the possibility of receiving credits.) The credits - 3 weeks of full-time work - were awarded by the Open University of the Netherlands. They were not automatically transferable to the student's home institution. Discussion with tutors, however, had revealed that transferring the credits would be easier than having the course registered at the participating institutions at short notice.
The course arose out of an initiative of the EADTU's program committee science and technology, it was developed by a course team of specialists from four different countries whose institutions were all members of the program committee (Swedish Agricultural University, Uppsala; Center for Environment and Development, Norwegian University of Science and Technology,Trondheim; De Montfort University, Leicester; Open University of Netherlands, Heerlen). The development process, which was extremely short due to the constraints imposed by the EC, started with one course team meeting. After that, the course team members communicated with each other via electronic mail and occasionally via the telephone (of and in itself this was a valuable learning experience).
The course was presented to students early 1995 over a period of about three months. Some 125 students enrolled, spread over nine EuroStudyCentres in seven different countries (Sweden, Norway, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Finland). Of these about 85 took the final exam, half of which passed. Exams were and will be held at the participating EuroStudyCentres. They consist of closed questions so as to eliminate as much as possible differences in language skills. This also allows for centralized marking, which is important not only for the sake of comparability but also because the OuNL's examination board demands it.
Like the majority of distance taught courses, the major component of the present course was the written material: seven blocks of text on different subjects ranging from the scientific (the earth, ecosystems, remote sensing), via the technological (agricultural production systems, industrial production systems) to the political (principles of environmental policy, European environmental policies). Although the texts were self-instructional, questions were expected about unclear passages, particularly since an interdisciplinary subject was offered to quite a heterogeneous group of students. Also, problems were expected with the questions that the students were offered at the end of each block and which they were advised to answer. In order to adequately deal with both types of problems students need to be able to confer with a tutor.
In the present course, the developers of the course materials doubled as tutors. This means students did not receive anu help from their EuroStudyCentre on questions regarding the course's contents, only in logistic and procedural matters. Subject-oriented questions were the exclusive domain of a remote tutor. Of course, this is not a hard and fast rule, in other situations EuroStudyCentres may offer additional content tutoring, for instance to help students who lack the requisite language skills or to apply general or foreign examples to the local situation.
In order to allow students to interact with their tutors a computer conferencing system (FirstClass by SoftArc from Ontario, Canada) was set up. To each block a separate conference was dedicated, moderated by the block developer/tutor. Students could log in onto the computer server that hosted the conference and pose their question. They could also read the questions posed by fellow students, and the answers given to those questions by the tutor or by other students. Indeed, they themselves could react to questions posed by fellow students. Although all transactions had to be done while on-line, they were asynchronous. That is, the system neatly fits in with the liberties of place, time and pace, that open distance learning cherishes so much.
In addition to the block-linked conferences, three conferences of a more general kind were offered. The first of these - the global bar - was entirely unmoderated and offered students and tutors alike an opportunity to raise any issue they felt worth raising. The second one contained only official messages by the course's management. Matters such as exam dates, announcements about the conferencing system, etc. were issued through this conference. Although people could react to such messages, they would only be made public after a screening, if indeed at all in this conference. The course manager was responsible for the screening process. The third conference offered tutors a platform for having internal discussions, for instance about exam questions. Students not only had no reading privileges for this conference, they were even completely unaware of its existence as it did not show up on their computer screens.
In summary, the computer conferences thus offered a place were contacts could occur between all course participants, both regarding the course's contents and the wider social arena. In order to further strengthen the sense of belonging of the students and in order to elaborate particular course themes, a series of three interactive television programs lasting 90 minutes each was staged. The first, which took place at the course's inception, introduced the course and the course team members to the students. The second was scheduled half-way through the course and was an elaboration of a block on remote sensing. The third more or less closed off the course and consisted of a panel discussion on European environmental policies.
Unlike computer conferences, interactive television programs have to be watched at a particular pre-set time. Via satellite the program, that was recorded live at a studio in Brussels, was broadcasted and could be received anywhere in Europe provided one had the appropriate equipment (dish and tuner). Since the program was live, students could interact with the people in the studio by phoning in, faxing, sending electronic mail, or even by engaging in a videoconference thus codetermining the contents of the program. In the computer conference, separate conferences were dedicated to the interactive television broadcasts so as to offer both a means of preparing the event and a follow-up to it.
In the above, the course set-up was not discussed in full detail. I have left out of consideration a parallel research effort conducted at both the University of Leuven and the DIFF in Tübingen in particular as the results are still pending and no doubt deserve a much fuller discussion than I would be able to give here. However, some conclusions of a qualitative nature may be drawn based upon the cumulative experience I myself gathered. First, and on a slightly tangential note, although outside grants are an asset in that they provide opportunities that otherwise would have been difficult to come by, they are not without their problems. Grants are often accompanied by constraints that may stand in the way of an optimally designed and managed project. In the present case, the obligation to complete the entire project - adaptation, presentation, and evaluation of the course - within one year in the complex organizational structure that the EOUN is, has seriously aggravated the effect of an already ill-functioning computer conferencing system (due to logistical problems about half of the students got access only half way through the course, the conference was not set-up to specifications, and the server crashed frequently resulting in losses of messages). Although one may keep this in mind when trying to formulate conclusions about the value of computer conferencing, it does detract from the overall value of the experiment.
Second and on a theoretical level, it seems to me that some more creative work has to be put into elaborating the concept of a virtual classroom, particularly in making more effective use of the metaphor. The example of the computer conferencing system may aptly illustrate what I am hinting at. Although both tutors and students seemed to be comfortable with the computer conferencing system that was used, its ease of use hardly resulted from a clever use of the conferencing metaphor. Indeed, and this does not only go for FirstClass but also for others like TeleFinder, I surmise that the program owes its ease of use entirely to the clever use of another metaphor, the desktop metaphor that is used by both the Macintosh and Windows user interface. This metaphor, however, is irrelevant to the notion of a virtual classroom. It would be very interesting to see to what extent a conferencing program with an embedded conferencing metaphor could contribute to the success of virtual classrooms.
Third and directed at the perceived value of the computer conferencing system, I am deeply convinced that computer conferencing is the most crucial building block of any realization of a virtual classroom. In spite of the problems experienced with the system, those students that were able to log on early often made extensive use of it. Not all students did, though, and to some extent this is entirely legitimate: not everybody does experience problems and not everyone feels like socializing with fellow students. However, to the extent that low contact intensity correlates with high drop out probability or low grades, this is undesirable. At present the existence of such correlations have not been confirmed. Nevertheless, in the planned rerun of the course measures will be taken to stimulate a more intensive use of the conferencing system. The optional questions at the end of each block will be replaced, partly by questions the answers of which will have to be e-mailed to the tutor, partly by group activities that demand contacts with fellow students.
Fourth and directed at the perceived value of the interactive television broadcasts, although I believe there is an important added value of such an element to the virtual classroom, staging three of them over a three month period is two too many. After all, in open distance teaching one should as much as possible honor the liberties of place and time referred to earlier. Moreover, one may well ponder their cost effectiveness: interactive television is very expensive and one should always compare the costs of a particular tool with the benefits reaped from it as compared to alternative tools. Then it quickly becomes clear that an introduction to the course may well be offered via the computer conference. An interactive television broadcast should only be staged if it offers educational experiences that are otherwise difficult to come by. The final broadcast qualifies best in this respect. A lively panel discussion that touches upon issues discussed throughout the entire course, staged at a moment that students have acquired enough knowledge to interfere and interact with the panel, definitely is a valuable learning experience.
Finally, then, by way of a closing note, although there is no doubt in my mind that the notion of a virtual classroom is a promising one for open distance learning, if the experiment discussed has taught me anything, it is that much work, both of a theoretical and an experimental bend, needs to be done in order to make it a truly viable notion.