Edited by Gayle Morris and Gloria Latham RMIT UNIVERSITY PRESS
9 781921 166020
Other title in the series: Supervising Postgraduate Research: Contexts and Processes, Theories and Practices
E-learning in the University: Some Constructionist Perspectives
ISBN 1- 921166- 02- 9
E-learning in the University: Some constructionist perspectives brings together stories of research and practice concerning online learning across a large, disparate and evolving university. In different ways, contributors explore the extent to which emerging technologies engage with issues of identity, and of community. In doing so, each contributes to a broader conversation about whether we are experiencing a change in the very nature of learning, and in how we see ourselves, as both teachers and learners. The text is intended for academics and students who share an interest in exploring both the possibilities and limitations of e-learning in post-compulsory contexts. The SOLTAR series (Studies on Learning, Teaching and Research) raises issues related to learning, teaching and research of relevance to university educators, students, professional development staff and curriculum support personnel. The series provides varied instances where educators reflect on their own practices in terms of their theoretical positions. The series seeks to encourage other practitioners to reflect on their own theory and practice, with a view to pushing boundaries and extending repertoires as well as options.
E-learning in the University:
Some Constructionist Perspectives
Edited by Gayle Morris and Gloria Latham
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E-LEARNING IN THE UNIVERSITY: SOME CONSTRUCTIONIST PERSPECTIVES
Edited by Gayle Morris and Gloria Latham Studies on Learning, Teaching and Research (SOLTAR) Series Editor: Professor John Bowden RMIT UNIVERSITY PRESS MELBOURNE
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First published by RMIT University Press © Gayle Morris and Gloria Latham 2005 Copyright in the individual chapters is held by the authors of those chapters. Edited by Kath Harper Cover design by David Constable Design and production by Publishing Solutions All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any mean electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: E-learning in the university: some constructionist perspectives ISBN 1 921166 02 9. 1. Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. 2. Internet in higher education - Victoria. 3. Computer-assisted instruction - Study and teaching (Higher) - Victoria. 4. Education, Higher - Computer-assisted instruction. 5. Educational technology - Victoria. I. Morris, Gayle. II. Latham, Gloria. (Series : Studies on learning, teaching and research (SOLTAR)).
378.17340994
Published by RMIT University Press, an imprint of: RMIT Publishing PO Box 12058, A’Beckett Street, Melbourne Victoria 8006 Australia Telephone 61 3 9925 8100 Fax 61 3 9925 8134 Email:
[email protected] http://www.informit.com.au Online edition available on Informit e-Library, http://search.informit.com.au
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Contents
Series preface Preface Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Pathways to a constructivist approach to teaching and learning corporate law Abe Herzberg, Phillip Lipton & Deborah Jones Just bumping into people—or an opportunity to create a learning community? The role of incidental social interaction in the development of a learning community Lisa Harris Blurring the borders: creating a dialogical space online Gloria Latham & John Peters Spheres of influence: MOOs, identity and learning communities Mex Butler & Andrea Chester E-learning and program quality: seeing the connection Kathleen Gray, Fiona Wahr, Garry Allan & Alex Radloff Sustainable large scale online development Linda Pannan, Chris van der Craats & Jim McGovern Academics in transition: search for a new identity Sandra Jones Pedagogical leadership: seeking virtue in the virtual Andrew Scown
List of contributors
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Series preface
The life of a university has traditionally been focused around three activities: research, teaching and community service. In recent decades, as the university systems in most countries have expanded substantially and have simultaneously diversified, the interest in these three areas of activity has been sustained, although the distinction between community service and the other two is becoming more blurred (Bowden and Marton 1998, 2004*). With greater numbers of academics undertaking an ever-increasing range of responsibilities, professional development in those roles has outgrown the informal apprenticeship model that characterised the elite universities of the past. In particular, the past four decades have seen the development of a professional field devoted to improving learning and teaching in universities, with associated academic structures, research agendas and refereed journals. One of the areas of expansion has been the use of computers in learning, an application that has experienced an exponential growth during that period. In the mid–1960s, a computer was a novel construction that some science students were given the chance to visit; they would spend perhaps half an hour walking around and gazing at dials and spinning tapes attached to large frames spread around them throughout an entire room. Such bulky technology was capable only of some of the simple calculations children now undertake routinely using $5 electronic calculators. In 2005, in contrast, there are students who undertake entire educational programs in which their total contact with the university, its staff, much of the course material and reference works, as well as their interaction with other students, are via the computer screen and keyboard. Behind those experiences are academics who have developed the capacity to devise courses, design curricula, manage the student experience and monitor standards using increasingly sophisticated technology. These processes are often referred to as e-learning, and their quality will depend on not only the technology per se but also the professional development that teachers have undertaken to enable them to maximise the potential of the technology. * Bowden, J. and Marton, F. (1998) The University of Learning, Kogan Page, London (Paperback edition published by RoutledgeFalmer in 2004).
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The experience of many of us who have been involved in professional development activities is that, while understanding the theory–practice relation is an important learning process if the university system is to progress, there are many teachers, supervisors and researchers who do excellent and sophisticated work without necessarily being able to articulate theoretically why they act as they do. Often the professional development they engage in results in a post hoc appreciation that they have already been acting as theory would suggest they should. That in itself is satisfying and it is also beneficial in making further development more likely through even more deliberate application of theory to new practices. Those for whom this does not apply would do well to become aware of the practices of those who have been successful. The processes of articulating your own practice and making sense of it both in terms of the practical goals you have and the available theoretical models that provide explanation of the varying levels of success achieved are important learning activities for all teachers and researchers. At least, that has been my observation over more than three decades dealing with professional development across learning, teaching and research. The idea for this series of monographs, the SOLTAR Series (Studies on Learning, Teaching and Research), was derived from those observations. I was very aware of the existence of a wide range of successful practices among academics that had not been articulated in a way that made them accessible to others. This series of monographs is intended to address that need. The first to be published was titled Supervising Postgraduate Research: Contexts and processes, theories and practices. This second monograph in the SOLTAR series is titled E-learning in the University: Some constructionist perspectives. The SOLTAR series of monographs raises issues related to learning, teaching and research of relevance to university educators, students, professional development staff and curriculum support personnel. The series provides varied instances where educators reflect on their own practices in terms of their respective theoretical positions. A divergence of views and practices on topics is presented. Further, the series seeks to encourage other practitioners to reflect on their own theory and practice, with a view to pushing boundaries and extending repertoires and options. John A Bowden Series Editor October 2005
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Preface
At the time of its inception as part of the SOLTAR Series at RMIT University, this monograph on E-learning in the University: some constructionist perspectives was a vehicle to bring together stories of research and innovative practice concerning online learning, across a large, disparate and evolving university. While a long time coming, the final collection of articles reveals not only the diversity of online practices across RMIT University, but also the depth of thought that is emerging from research in the field. Each of the contributors engages with the theme in unique but often overlapping ways. Of interest is the way in which these papered conversations recast online learning towards the creation of identity and communities of practice. Contributors explore what this recasting means from the perspective of an academic or student, and how emerging technologies shift practice. And each contributes to broader intellectual conversations about whether we are experiencing a change in the nature of learning, and in how we see ourselves as both teachers and learners. As you read through the collection, we hope that you will discover a space through which we as academics can learn about ourselves and help our students learn in new and as yet unimagined ways. In the first article Abe Herzberg, Phillip Lipton and Deborah Jones look to technological innovation to improve their practice. ‘Pathways to a constructivist approach to teaching and learning in corporate law’ shows how complex learning needs are addressed in the development of a corporate law website. Authentic enquiry is at the centre of this innovation, with the learners acting as practitioners, connecting theory to practice as they increasingly take responsibility for knowledge acquisition. We then move to three contributions which develop the theme of community and uncharted landscapes of learning, each pushing our understanding of community a little further. In Lisa Harris’s ‘Just bumping into people’, the development of an online community slips over into the everyday world of libraries vii
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and cafes for a group of on campus ‘Contemporary Social Theory’ students enrolled in an online module. In exploring the interrelationship of ‘virtual space’ and ‘physical space’, she argues for a model of online learning more attentive to the incidental and informal contact in the development of a learning community. John Peters and Gloria Latham explore the relational dimensions of a community place formed between two inter-university graduate student cohorts across the USA and Australia. The two groups meet online, discussing and discovering one another, and explore cultural readings in social construction in dialogue with their authors. In their ‘take’, virtual space is a constructed space where multiple social realities are fostered, and where embodied meanings are shared. Mex Butler and Andrea Chester share with Peters and Latham an interest in multiple identities as they describe how ‘playful’ virtual environments, such as MOO spaces, enmesh students in a web of relationships and build a sense of community. They show us how the participants, the students, take on multiple identities and how those identities influence the community. This raises particular challenges for teachers as they endeavour to facilitate learning. From community as pedagogic practice, we shift to the broader communities of ‘faculties’ where the complexity of meshing quality with sustainability is explored in the following two articles. In ‘E-learning and program quality’, Kathleen Gray, Fiona Wahr, Garry Allan and Alex Radloff situate the theme of ‘virtual classrooms’ within a broader framework of program quality. Gray et al challenge the view of online learning and quality as incommensurable, arguing instead for an integrated view. They draw from a longitudinal case study in educational development to show how a synergistic relationship can be both sustained by and contribute to more robust learning activities for academics and students. An interest in the sustainability of quality online support is shared by Linda Pannan, Chris van der Craats and Jim McGovern in ‘Sustainable large scale online development’. They draw on ‘whole’ faculty data to foreground the importance of developing staff capabilities as part of a more expansive framework of quality. Ultimately they argue that embedding online considerations in the ‘everyday’ work of academics is integral to the sustainability of large online initiatives. While sharing with the others an interest in new communities of practice, our last two contributors explore more rigorously what all this means for academics and their sense of identity. Sandra Jones puts academic identity at the core in ‘Academics in transition: search
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for a new identity’. Reflecting on two practice-based experiences, Jones seeks to question how academics will fare in the shift away from what she sees as the traditional autonomy of design and delivery of subjects. We close with a philosophical take on online learning in Andrew Scown’s ‘Pedagogical leadership: seeking virtue in the virtual’. In this expansive piece, Scown attempts to make sense of the challenges that academics encounter, by putting forth a model of pedagogical practice. But even as he does so, one is left feeling less optimistic than cautious. As you move through the collection, we hope that you find something that resonates with the new challenges confronting academics in teaching and learning. Gayle Morris
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CHAPTER 1
Pathways to a constructivist approach to teaching and learning corporate law Abe Herzberg, Phillip Lipton and Deborah Jones Introduction We are fortunate as teachers of Australian corporate law to have access to a large volume and variety of freely available internet resources. These resources include law reports, legislation and accompanying explanatory memoranda, journal articles, law reform proposals, websites of regulatory bodies and legal and other professional service providers, update bulletins, corporate annual reports, information generated by professional bodies for members and speeches. This paper seeks to outline how the teaching of corporate law may be enhanced through the utilisation of these resources so as to create a richer learning experience for corporate law students and other learners.
The broad aims of teaching corporate law As with other subjects within the law degree, corporate law as taught in law schools has usually emphasised the continuing development of skills in legal methodology. This has generally been achieved by emphasis on the long-established teaching resources of a textbook, legislation and sometimes a case book to convey the main principles of substantive law. The major assessment is an examination, which is usually composed largely of problem-type questions. To successfully answer these questions, the student is expected to develop the intellectual skills necessary to analyse a legal problem, ascertain the relevant legal issues, apply the relevant law and consider the applicable legal arguments. This approach and these skills certainly lie at the heart of legal education and justifiably will continue to form the core of the learn1
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ing experience and intellectual development of law students. The main thrust of this paper is to suggest that this approach could be augmented with the development of other skills and capabilities by the integration into the curriculum of a wider range of resources accessible on the internet. Corporate law is also taught within business degrees (particularly those degrees involving accounting majors), where it is the second most studied law subject. The subject is also one of the prerequisites for professional accounting accreditation. Graduates of business degrees do not enter the legal profession, nor do they practise law. Legal studies in this context have the broad aim of raising the awareness of students about the legal environment of business. While there is some benefit in business students being introduced to aspects of legal methodology, the main emphasis is on enabling the student to better understand the legal environment so as to be aware of legal issues in their professional lives and be able to better relate to lawyers in relation to these issues. Further, there are a number of pedagogic opportunities presented by teaching law subjects such as corporate law. These subjects are often the most language-dense subjects studied by business students. In terms of graduate attributes, they allow for development of language, communication and research skills while enhancing the capacity to think in conceptual and abstract terms. This paper strongly suggests that business students undertaking the study of corporate law would benefit greatly in developing these attributes by engaging with internet resources as an integral part of the curriculum. The reliance upon textbook and legislation as the dominant resources in teaching and learning corporate law invariably leads to a strong emphasis on teacher-centred learning. The lecturer sets out the parameters of the course, with the implicit message that everything in the course materials is important and everything not in the course materials is unimportant. This is reinforced by the fact that excluded matters will not be included in the examination or other assessment. The role of the student is to accept these parameters by engaging in the curriculum within its four walls as directed. In seeking an alternative teaching strategy, we have tried to introduce elements of a student-centred approach to teaching and learning corporate law. This approach invites students to choose the topic areas or issues about which they want to learn. While the teacher has a central role in prescribing the curriculum, some teaching and learning activities and assessment tasks are determined by the individual student. This approach is facilitated by use of internet resources for the reasons stated below.
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Using internet resources in the learning environment Internet resources are valuable in support of teaching corporate law. Teaching students how to access these resources promotes the development of an active and self-directed learning approach towards information literacy skills in finding and using legal resources online, critically analysing the law and applying the law in the context of realistic business problems, and developing an ability for managing legal issues in the corporate environment. As Kunkel (2000) states, now this information is readily accessible online, business law teachers are able to shift their focus from simple knowledge of legal rules to critical thinking and more sophisticated analysis and application of legal rules in a business context. In this sense, use of the internet allows promotion of ‘deeper’ research and learning. The incorporation of internet resources into the curriculum provides several advantages from a teaching and learning point of view: • readily available learning content such as legal databases, professional and regulatory organisation websites, academic journals and bulletins, legislation and corporate websites is substantially increased beyond that available in the form of prescribed and recommended references; • internet content may often be more dynamic and current than is possible with static hard copy texts or CD-ROM; • students are able to engage in a wider range of learning activities outside the classroom or off-campus and can utilise resources in their own time and at their own pace; • internet research skills and information literacy skills are developed; • learning activities are more stimulating and require techniques which are closer to the leisure activities of many students; • the internet can provide an equitable platform for learners; • deeper learning experiences and transformation of information into knowledge through investigation, research, reflection, analysis and application are possible; and • an effective collection of resources with guided navigation can make internet searching quicker and more effective than researching hardcopy resources in a library.
A ‘constructivist’ approach The paper by Wilson and Lowry (2000), ‘Constructivist Learning on
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the Web’,1 explores how adult learners may make use of the vast resources available on the web and thereby construct meaning through its use. The paper also describes key features of the web as a learning resource, going on to explain that a well organised collection of links is as valuable as a highly interactive multimedia site. Significant education benefits arise where commercial usage is combined with academia and users have control over the learning experience. The reader becomes an active participant and determiner of the learning process. This process provides an alternative experience to traditional forms of teaching and learning. Students are encouraged to attempt to make sense of their learning environments and of the information presented to them by constructing frameworks of knowledge and learning as opposed to highly technical multimedia-filled interactive learning packages. This in itself is a powerful element in the learning process. We envisage that the internet can be used to incorporate instructional design elements that focus on the use of online learning materials and resources that adopt educational technology combined with a constructive learning approach. Theoretically, the essence of constructivism lies in its emphasis on learning as a process of personal understanding and meaning making that is active and interpretive. In this domain, learning is viewed as the construction of meaning rather than as the memorisation of facts (Oliver 2000). The key to successful teaching and learning in law is the provision of support and strategies in critical thinking and analysis applicable in the corporate world. This incorporates a constructivist learning approach where students are encouraged to construct meaningful knowledge from the information discovered by them. Constructivism focuses on the learner’s ability to build their own conceptualisations and solutions and to apply these in a contemporary professional context.
‘Pathways’ In order to address the learning needs of students and other users, we have developed a corporate law website, <www.lipton-herzberg.com.au>, which aims to make a comprehensive collection of publicly available internet resources that are relevant to corporate law more accessible by providing a structured and annotated map of these resources. The richness of internet resources paradoxically results in difficulties for students. In a sense, the internet is a dense jungle with few signposts and guides. Students may often be referred or find their way to a home page or other website content but lack focus in knowing
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what to look for or how to extract meaningful information and understanding from within a particular site. This dilemma squarely raises the central question in teaching and learning of how students and other learners can be assisted in ascending from information gathering to forming meaningful conceptual frameworks and understanding of particular issues. This question, which we seek to address, arises from an embarrassment of riches in the subject. There are many websites with valuable information buried within them that is not readily apparent on first viewing or is difficult to find or utilise in a meaningful way. We have created ‘Pathways’ as a navigational tool that organises available corporate law internet resources in a readily accessible way.2 It contains topic by topic deep links to legislation and cases, explanatory memoranda, articles, law reform reports, speeches, ASIC and Treasury websites and other resources.3 Pathways places these resources into the context of topics with cross-references to the text Understanding Company Law (10th edition, 2001, Lawbook Co.) and links to study questions designed to encourage self-directed learning and develop skills in using the internet. Legal education needs to be ‘inclusive’ and wide ranging with broad scope, and the curriculum should provide an opportunity for the learner to discover and investigate. Schneider (1994) points out that the learning environment should be designed as a ‘powerful dedicated working environment’, and must be ‘rich and complex reflecting the essential properties of what has to be learned’. He also considers that the environment must be structured to avoid unnecessary complexity as this will reduce learning. We have attempted to incorporate these guiding principles into the creation of a multimedia package comprising hardcopy text and website.
Suggested learning experiences It is apparent from the resources collected in Pathways that only some topic areas are represented. This clearly indicates that in terms of the total subject, the website and text are complementary. Some topics are best covered by reliance upon the text in the traditional way while others are best served by use of both the text and the website. Bearing this in mind, we suggest five types of learning activities which largely involve the use of resources available on the internet: • commercial practice questions; • internet searching;
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• reflective journal; • law reform proposal research; and • corporate law in the real world. Commercial practice questions These activities involve the student engaging in a simulation of a process or activity which may arise in professional practice. Topics such as the role and functions of ASIC, registration procedure and fundraising best lend themselves to a hands-on approach by the student using the regulators’ (ASIC and the ASX) and other corporate websites. As an example, the following questions contained in ‘Pathways/registration procedure’4 require the student to engage in a useful learning experience that simulates professional practice: 1. Abe and Phillip would like to form a company to be called Vandalay Industries Pty Ltd. Is the name available? 2. Assume you wish to form a company. a. Select an available name for your proposed company. b. Fill in an application for registration. c. What is the fee for lodging an application for registration with ASIC? d. What consents must be obtained before the application for registration is lodged with ASIC? e. Do you need to prepare a constitution for your proposed company? f. Outline the books, records and registers that your company must establish after it is formed. g. Can your company’s invoices set out its ABN instead of its ACN? These questions may be added to existing tutorial questions and be the subject of later discussion in class or assessment, or students may answer the questions in their own time. The information which the student must access to answer these questions comes from using both the textbook and the relevant Pathways links. Internet searching The ability to effectively search and find useful commercial information on the internet is a vital learning objective for students in all disciplines. Data gathering and synthesis improves research skills,
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methodology, evaluation and reporting and quantification. It also represents an opportunity for authentic enquiry, with the learner acting as if a practitioner, connecting theory to practice and taking responsibility for acquiring knowledge. In the corporate law context, the ASIC website presents a vast array of resources but also presents the difficulties arising from navigating such a vast website. Pathways encourages the development of internet research skills by posing specific queries and thereby enabling students to focus on particular matters while conducting their searches. It is suggested that navigating a large website while seeking answers is more effective than aimlessly wandering the website, especially as encouragement is also given to digress and look at interesting resources which are stumbled upon. For example in ‘Pathways/legislative framework’5 we pose the following questions regarding ASIC: 1. Describe ASIC’s role and functions. 2. Refer to the most recent ASIC Annual Report: (i) List four organisations or professional groups regulated by ASIC. Briefly explain, for each, how they are regulated. (ii) In what ways has ASIC sought to meet the challenges posed in regulating e-commerce? (See speeches on this topic by ASIC Commissioners and officers.) (iii) What are the corporate governance structure and practices of ASIC? In your answer consider matters such as how commissioners are appointed, how they carry out their responsibilities, how potential conflicts of interest are dealt with and how the commissioners are monitored. (iv) What were the main issues raised by the inquiries into Burns Philp Ltd and Spedley Securities Ltd? What were the main lessons learned? (v) What are the main activities of ASIC in relation to enforcement and regulation of small business? (vi) List five examples of people successfully prosecuted by ASIC for criminal offences. Include the type of offence and sentence. (vii) How many registered companies are there in Australia (according to the latest Annual Report)? (viii) How many investigations were commenced by ASIC during the previous year? (ix) Give three examples of interventions by ASIC where it believed the law had been breached in relation to the operation of securities and futures markets.
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3. Outline the differences between business names, company names, domain names and trade marks. 4. How is a company registered electronically? 5. How is a company deregistered? 6. What is the purpose of the ‘Gull of the Month Award’? Describe a scheme which won this award. 7. What is the Corporations and Securities Panel (the Takeover Panel)? Illustrate your answer with reference to a recent matter which went before the Panel. 8. How can investors, creditors and others ascertain whether there have been changes to a company’s documents lodged with ASIC? 9. Describe some of the regulatory issues which have arisen as a result of increased use of internet securities trading. How has ASIC sought to prevent misconduct? (See T. Phillips, ‘Avoiding Share Scams in Cyberspace’, and J. Segal, ‘Regulatory Initiatives by ASIC in the Cyber Age’.) 10. Pick a report issued by the Companies and Securities Advisory Committee (CASAC). Briefly describe the main issues raised and recommendations made in the report. The answers to these questions can be found by searching the ASIC website, which is linked from Pathways. The objectives met by these questions are to enable: 1. the student to gain experience in searching a complex, multitiered website containing vast amounts of commercially useful information; and 2. enrichment of the learning experience by means of internet surfing in ways which cannot be matched by hard copy resources alone. Company law journal For several years we have been attracted to Professor Michael Adam’s6 idea of using a reflective company law journal as an assessment task. The reflective journal requires students to select and discuss a range of current news items and legal issues. The main benefit of this assessment task is that the learning process becomes student-centred. The choice of topic and approach to exploring the topic are determined by each individual student. This approach signals that the parameters of the subject extend far beyond the topics that can be covered in the syllabus in the time available, usually one semester. The student is
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encouraged to find a topic of interest and learn how to learn about it. This is quite a different experience to the teacher-driven approach of setting out the topic areas, covering these in lectures and excluding everything else. Pathways can enhance this learning experience by providing a wide range of links to journal articles, law reform proposals and discussion papers, the Corporate Law Electronic Bulletin issued by the Centre for Corporate Law and Securities Regulation and other links. The Lipton-Herzberg website also hyperlinks the National Library’s collection of newspaper sites.7 Law reform An appreciation of future directions in corporate regulation is an important learning objective of any company law course. A text-based approach tends to imply that the subject is fixed in content and is relatively static. An assessment of a law reform proposal may lend itself to group work with the team reporting back to the class. Pathways provides a large number of links to law reform recommendations, discussion papers, journal articles, speeches and explanatory memoranda. Corporate law in the ‘real world’ A proper understanding of corporate law requires more than an understanding of legal principles derived from legislation and cases. It also requires an appreciation of how business practice applies these principles in a ‘real world’ context. The ‘Top ASX Listed Companies’ page on the Lipton-Herzberg website is intended to clothe corporate law principles with a ‘real world’ context.8 This page, which at time of writing was still under development, provides links to the websites of Australia’s largest businesses. While such a collection of sites is available on a number of other websites, we intend to couple the links with student-focused activities that aim to highlight how the top ASX companies respond to legislative and other corporate requirements. For example, we intend to pose questions such as the following: • One of the recommendations in the ASIC guidance paper, ‘Better Disclosure for Investors’, was that companies should post pricesensitive information on their websites to give investors better access to information. Visit the websites of 3 companies which have posted
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such information and compare how they deal with continuous disclosure issues. • ASX Listing Rule 4.10.3 requires the Annual Report of a listed company to set out a statement of its main corporate governance practices. Choose 3 listed company Annual Reports and compare and contrast their corporate governance practices. • Choose a company and go to information regarding its last annual general meeting. (a) What information is contained in the notice of meeting? (b) What resolutions are proposed? (c) When does the proxy form have to be lodged?
Conclusion The combination of Pathways and traditional teaching content and activities creates a simple but effective learning framework that incorporates a strategy towards meaningful constructive learning, which places the learner at the centre of the process. The website does not seek to replace the traditional text, learning activities and role of the teacher. Rather, it seeks to make use of several important advantages which the internet has over traditional, hardcopy media. It makes a range of resources available to the learner, to be used when and where convenient. It allows users to access commercial websites and documents so as to facilitate a practical, commercial perspective of the subject. Beyond the subject itself, such an approach develops electronic research and literacy skills, enabling law subjects to play an important role in fostering the necessary graduate attributes essential for professional development in the twenty-first century.
Notes 1
This paper may be accessed at
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2
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3
The Lipton-Herzberg website contains the following ‘Pathways’ topics: • Legislative Framework • Effect of Registration • Registration Procedure • Fundraising • Disclosure • Corporate Governance • Directors’ Duties – Good Faith & Proper Purposes
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• • • • • •
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Directors’ Duties – Care, Diligence & Skill Directors’ Duties – Directors of Insolvent Companies Meetings Members’ Remedies Corporate Insolvency Financial Services Reform Legislation
4
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5
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6
Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney.
7
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8
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References Boshier, R., Mohapi, M., Moulton, G., Qayyum, A., Sadownik, L. and Wilson, M. 1997, ‘Best and worst dressed web courses: strutting into the 21st century in comfort and style’ in 18 Distance Education 327–48. Bostock, S. 1994, ‘Application of ID Models to the Development of a Courseware Example’, available from . Instructional Design Checklist, USQ, available from (accessed 22 December 2000). Kunkel, R. 2000, ‘Shifting the paradigm in business/law teaching: from content delivery to constructivist learning’, Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference ASCILITE 2000. Oliver, R., 2000, ‘When teaching meets learning: design principles and strategies for web-based learning environments that support knowledge construction’, Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference ASCILITE 2000. Schneider, D. 1994, ‘Teaching and learning with internet tools: a position paper’, available from (accessed 13 July 2000). Wilson B. and Lowry M., ‘Constructivist Learning on the Web’, . Wilson, Jonassen and Cole 1993, ‘Cognitive Approaches to Instructional Design’, available from (accessed 7 May 2000).
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CHAPTER 2
Just bumping into people—or an opportunity to create a learning community? The role of incidental social interaction in the development of a learning community
Lisa Harris One of the standard legitimations advanced by students who favour the face-to-face or on campus model of tertiary education is the experience of ‘social interaction’ or what might be called ‘community’. While the term ‘community’ abounds in recent literature relating to the development of online courses, most of these authors (drawing on their own experiences) provide only anecdotal evidence as to the benefits of fostering a learning community online. There is a lack of independent research available confirming students’ experience of these environments or detailing what significance learners place on the development of a learning community. This chapter uses the experiences of RMIT undergraduate Social Science students studying an online course as a case study to explore the significance of ‘community’ in tertiary online learning environments. The case study is used to explore the students’ ideas about what constitutes a good learning environment, their relationships with their fellow students and their reflections on what was different about studying a course online as opposed to on-campus. These are on-campus students who have chosen to complete a single course of their program online, even though this course is also offered on campus. The online courses they have undertaken are quite rudimentary in design and have no specific elements aimed at fostering a sense of community between the students. Interestingly, this case study not only confirms that students believe that ‘social contact’ does support their learning, but—more importantly for the future development of online learning environments—it also illustrates how the seeds of a learning community are actually sown through the informal, often incidental, ‘social interactions’ which occur on campus. I will argue that online learning environments of the future will need to provide similar opportunities for such 12
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informal, incidental ‘social interactions’ to occur to support the development of learning communities. The value of developing learning communities in tertiary learning environments is well documented in the face-to-face educational literature. Tinto’s research into the benefits of learning communities for oncampus students is often cited by those educators and policy makers interested in the issues of student engagement and the quality of higher education in Australia (McInnis 2001). In particular Tinto’s research (2000) highlighted the value of collaborative learning settings, reporting that the benefits of creating learning communities extended beyond just understanding the ‘content at hand better’ and concluding that: • learning community students developed their own selfsupporting groups, they spent more time together outside of the classroom and did so in ways students reported as supportive; • learning community students became more actively involved in classroom learning; • participation in the learning community seemed to enhance the quality of the student learning—learning community students perceived themselves as having made significantly greater intellectual gains over the course of the semester than did other students; • learning community students persisted into second year at a rate 25 percentage points higher than non learning community students; and • students in these programs reported an increased sense of responsibility to participate in the learning experience, and an awareness of their responsibility for both their learning and the learning of others. In the educational literature relating to online learning environments, many authors include the development of learning communities as key factors in successful online courses (Lave and Wenger 1991; Ragan 1998; Clark 1999; Palloff and Pratt 1999; Gunawardena, Plass et al. 2001). The most detailed of these offerings has been Palloff and Pratt’s contribution to the literature, Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective strategies for the online classroom (1999). Palloff and Pratt argue that the development of student learning communities is central to online learning environments: Key to the learning process are the interactions among students themselves, the interactions between faculty and students, and
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the collaboration in learning that results from these interactions. In other words, the formation of a learning community through which knowledge is imparted and meaning is cocreated sets the stage for successful learning outcomes (Palloff and Pratt 1999, p. 5). At the heart of both Tinto’s and Palloff and Pratt’s approaches to teaching and learning is the adoption of a constructivist approach to learning. Seminal authors on tertiary teaching and learning such as Biggs (1999) and Ramsden (1992) have adopted constructivist approaches to learning to inform their teaching and learning models. Biggs suggests constructivism provides a learning theory framework that ‘aid[s] reflection [and is] a theory of learning that is broad-based and empirically sound, and that easily translates into practice’ (Biggs 1999, p. 12). While there is no ‘one’ agreed upon definition of constructivism (Grabe and Grabe 2001), Wheatley provides one of the most cited and eloquent descriptions of constructivism: A constructivist believes that knowledge is not disembodied but is intimately related to the action and experience of a learner—it is always contextual and never separated from the knower. To know is to act. To know is to understand in a certain manner, a manner which can be shared by others who join with you to form a community of understanding (Wheatley, 1991, p. 10). Inherent within this constructivist approach is the need for dialogue between students as they reflect and contextualise their understanding of an issue. It is within this context of a ‘learning community’ that proponents of the social constructivist approach to learning suggest that it is the ‘trust’ engendered within the group environment that provides a student with the opportunity to risk their perceptions, reflect on and realign their understandings of an issue through dialogue (Lisi 2002). The educational literature suggests that trust is developed within the context and application of group discussions using verbal and non-verbal social cues. My research sought to understand, first, how these trust relationships developed in face-toface learning environments and, second, if and how students translated these processes into the online learning environments they had chosen to study in.
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Methodology This paper draws on one of three case studies that together form a doctoral research project. The purpose of each of these case studies is to explore the significance of community for students in tertiary online learning environments. The overall project is using a grounded theory approach and the nature of the subject being enquired into, namely the ‘significance of community’, required a method flexible enough to explore both the nuances of how students engaged with each other and their perceptions of the environment they studied in. The method chosen for data collection for this case study was a semistructured, in-depth qualitative interview. This method offered an extremely flexible process for exploring students’ responses and allowed these responses to shape the direction of the interview within a defined framework.
The sample Students studying the online version of Contemporary Social Theory were invited via email to participate in the research, and 15 interviews were conducted in total during 2000 and 2001. The students studying this course were chosen as the sample group because all students undertaking this course have completed at least one semester of courses on campus and as such could reflect on a variety of learning experiences. This was also the only course that was to be offered online several times during the sample period and that would remain largely unchanged during this time. While the project sought to explore the significance of community and how it occurred for students, it did not set out to gather a representative sample of all online students’ experiences. However, the age range and gender mix of the 15 participants loosely aligns with that of the demographic data of the possible sample group of 29 students. The interviews ranged in duration between 45 minutes and 1 hour 45 minutes.
Design of the interview framework Although the interviews were not formally structured a framework of questions was developed. This framework loosely consisted of three sections. First, students were asked to reflect on and explore positive learning experiences they had had in face-to-face environments. This included the relationships they developed with other students and what effect those relationships had on their own study processes. The
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second section asked them to reflect on negative learning experiences they had had in face-to-face environments. The final section of the interview explored the students’ experiences in the online course they had taken in light of the previous discussions, including how students’ experienced the two learning environments as different ‘spaces’ in which to interact. The interviews were taped and then professionally transcribed.
Analysis method and tools The transcribed interviews were then analysed using QSR Nvivo qualitative data analysis software and Neuman’s Successive Approximation model of analysis. Neuman’s (2000) model involves the researcher starting with a set of questions, concepts or ideas to explore. An initial set of data is gathered and repeatedly analysed. From the analysis of this data the researcher builds an understanding of how well the data explores the issue at hand. Both this model of analysis and the use of Nvivo software proved particularly useful in this project. Neuman’s Successive Approximation model requires repeated passes through the data to understand the nuances of what the respondents are revealing. This process was greatly assisted by Nvivo’s capacity to organise and reorganise coded items into themes. This exposed connections within the data that revealed key themes not represented in the literature to date, such as the significance of ‘incidental meetings’ in the development of trust and community. Initial analysis of the data looked for comments from the students about the importance of the social aspects of student life in general and if (and how) these social aspects supported their study, about their sense of connectedness with other students, and about factors that were common in the positive learning experiences. Subsequent analysis of the data sought to understand the nature and development of the students’ relationships with each other and their teacher that appeared to underpin their positive learning experiences and seemed absent in their negative learning experiences.
Findings This research confirmed current thinking on the value of using constructivist pedagogies and the value of learning communities for tertiary undergraduate students; it also provides new insights into how these learning communities, or what might be called ‘social learning support networks’, are formed. Analysis of the data suggested that interdependent relationships exist between students’ sense of
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trust with each other, the development of social networks (which also supported their learning processes), the desire for a highly interactive or constructivist learning environment, and the processes by which these social support networks formed (which generally occurred on campus but not necessarily in the classroom). In effect, students suggested there was a snowballing effect whereby when a student had a sense of connection with others in their course, this often provided the trust that encouraged them to participate in discussions. This trust in turn created a greater sense of connection with each other and resulted in them wanting to participate more and increased their desire to have classes that were structured in a way that encouraged and indeed required this type of participation. These positive learning experiences were typically described in very active terms, as the tute ‘going off’ (CS13), or of it being a ‘real buzz’ (CS4). One student actually stated that you often came away from a good class feeling ‘good socially and good in the sense that everyone gets the big picture on things rather than the one like just reading the material’ (CS7). On the other hand, when students described learning experiences that were not favourable they commented on the lack of connection with other students, on the lack of discussions within the classroom and typically that the learning experience was ‘flat’ (CS2) or ‘lacked energy’ (CS13). Sometimes they attributed this to the design of the learning experience or the fact that they didn’t know anyone in the class or that the teacher spoke all the time and didn’t let the students talk or contribute in their own time. From analysis of both the positive and negative learning experiences it was clear that what differentiated these experiences for the students was the sense of connection they felt, or developed, with each other and the subsequent engagement they felt encouraged in. Interestingly, when students reflected on their experiences in the online learning environment they spoke in similar terms about online discussion groups either working well or not. They attributed this to students’ willingness to participate and commented on the different participation styles engendered within the two common engagement tools used in online learning environments: chat rooms and discussion boards. Students commented that while in chat environments they felt they got to know the other students better because it was spontaneous and people often included personal aspects of their lives. They also felt the academic quality of the contributions in the discussion boards was far better. None of the students felt they really got to know the other people they were studying with in the online environment unless they had known them previously.
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Most students attributed this to either the anonymous nature of the online medium or the lack of physical presence to each other. Even though all the students’ names appeared in the online environment, most still commented that somehow it felt ‘anonymous’. One student recounted how she had realised that one of her fellow students worked in the same government department and decided to attend a panel discussion at their workplace to actually meet. Unfortunately she arrived late to a seminar and missed the introductions. The student talked of the frustration of still not knowing who her co-worker actually was because she had missed the introductions and couldn’t put a face to the name. Another student recounted a chance meeting with a fellow student who she knew to be studying in her program. During their conversation they discussed the semester of study they had just completed and came to realise that they had both completed the Contemporary Social Theory course online but didn’t realise who the other person was until that point. Most students commented on the lack of physical presence in the online learning environment and, while two commented that they found they participated far more in this environment than in the on-campus learning environment, all believed the lack of non-verbal cues associated with face-to-face environments restricted their capacity to engage with each other or to ‘really’ get to know each other. Two students commented that this combination of anonymity and the lack of physical presence resulted in some students getting into arguments or responding to other students in a different way than they would if they had been in the same physical room. As one student remarked, ‘they would never say that sort of thing if they were in your face’ (CS3). Interestingly when asked if they felt this was destructive to the learning process both commented that it wasn’t and that it tended to spur on greater debate in the forum. When asked to explore this idea of ‘knowing’ or ‘not knowing’ their fellow students and how that sense of connection might form with another student, the respondents revealed a pattern of engagement with students which largely was initiated or formed outside the classroom setting. Most believed it was a complex thing that could involve a multitude of factors. When respondents were asked to recall how they developed connections with people they were studying with, it became evident that there were three possible factors or processes at work: • connections developed as part of working in a group (either in the classroom or externally);
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• connections developed as the result of incidental or informal meetings with other students; and/or • connections developed when support or assistance was provided from one student to another. Students suggested that the first of these factors, relating to working in a group, could be important in the development of a sense of connection between students. Typically students reported that while working in a group context students tended to share more of their personal lives ‘by the way’ and this became the basis of a shared connection with each other. This shared connection often resulted in the students making connections with each other outside the classroom for personal or academic support. This would seem to confirm the significance Brown et al (1989) place on the role of group work in the development of trust between students and the subsequent importance of trust in the learning process. Brown et al suggest learning becomes ‘a process of enculturating that is supported in part through social interaction and the circulation of narrative’, and that in this process ‘groups of practitioners are particularly important, for it is only within groups that social interaction and conversation can take place’ (Brown, Collins et al. 1989). However the second and third factors outlined by students suggest that the physical environment provided by being on-campus may also contribute significantly to the development of these trust relationships. Students reported that the combination of just bumping into one another on campus and the possibility of providing assistance to a fellow student often resulted in the development of an ongoing acquaintanceship between the students. What characterised the physical meeting up of two students was the often-unplanned nature of these meetings. They described bumping into a fellow student in the library or Druids (local café) or in the corridor while waiting for class to start. Secondly, there often seemed to be some form of assistance given by one student to another, often related to academic matters but also sometimes of a personal nature. The following excerpts from respondent CS15 are examples of how students described these factors at work: CS15: One class I have had this year, I come from work straight here and usually I just go sit on the floor outside the room; anyway there were a couple of us in the same boat who used to arrive about quarter of an hour before class started. It varied a bit who was there but by about week 3 or 4 I realised
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this one girl was usually there when I was and you know you would sort of look and smile and that as you do. Anyway one day I bumped into her in the library and we sort of joked about things, I can’t remember what now; anyway, I guess in those little moments you sort of get a sense of someone or whatever, like you sort of know them a bit. Anyway, a week later when we were in class we had to form into groups to do a bit of assessment together, and I am now part time and I hate that moment a bit now because other people in the class often know each other and I am the one that doesn’t know anyone. Anyway I looked around and Susie, the woman I met in the library, was talking to a couple of people she knew and she looked at me and smiled and waved to come over and join them. Like, I just don’t think that would have happened if I hadn’t sort of made that connection with her in the library. Interviewer: So that unexpected or unplanned meeting in the library sort of helped out or smoothed the way for something to happen in class? CS15: Yeah. Like, I actually got to know Susie quite well in that class, and I know if we were in the same tute again that there would be that connection there again between us. This extract when unpacked shows these two factors at work: the idea that this student spent time with the other student outside the classroom (in this case bumped into them in the library), and the connection they made in those few short meetings provided the basis of an acquaintanceship that goes on to support CS15 in the classroom. Again, later in the interview this student identified how these chance meetings on campus provided opportunities to build a connection with another student and how he felt he could draw on that relationship to support his learning. CS15: I guess the other thing is spending time with people outside of class, when I think about it that is where you really sort of get to know more about people and that sort of builds the foundations of that trust stuff in class, I guess. Interviewer: So how does that happen that you spend more time with someone out of class, how do those connections happen? CS15: Well I guess often they just sort of happen by accident: you know, you meet people or bump into them or whatever and something happens, maybe you help someone out or
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they help you out and you sort of go on from there. It is not a planned thing or whatever, I think it just happens. Interviewer: So can you describe something like this happening with yourself? CS15: I knew you would ask that. Mmmm, yeah, I can think of a couple of examples from my own life. I remember last year I was at Druids coffee shop and this guy from class was buying a coffee and he was 20c short. I recognised him from my tute and I just put the 20c on the counter and smiled at him. Like, I still don’t really know his name, but whenever we see each other we smile and nod. And in that tute there was a couple of times where there was an interaction in class and you just had this sense that there was something there more than before. Interviewer: Did you go on to develop a friendship with him? CS15: No, not really. Like, we don’t see each other outside of uni or whatever, but like, I know I could ask a favour of him if I had to or whatever, like if I need someone to get the notes for me or something, or I wasn’t sure what to do about something and he was there, I would feel fine about asking him. These extracts reveal the complex and often serendipitous nature of how students build trust between themselves and others. What is particularly interesting about this extract is the fact that although CS15 didn’t develop a friendship with this student (he still didn’t know the other student’s name), he did feel that he could ask him a favour relating to his school work if the need arose. Certainly the role of the physical space of the campus—how students interact in that space and how this relates to their identity and confidence as students—was very clear. The following extracts explore this well and show some of the nuances of students’ relationships with each other and the campus. Interviewer: Does that feel important, that running into people and saying ‘hi’ stuff? CS10: I guess it makes me feel like I am here or whatever, like I know people. I mean, I remember my first few weeks here, you know, and you walk around campus with your head down ‘cause you just don’t know anyone and you sort of, like, you don’t feel lonely but you sort of come here, do something and go. Interviewer: You don’t hang round?
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CS10: No. I don’t know, then you get to know people and you click with some, and I don’t know, you just start to hang round more, and like, you know you walk round campus with your head up because when you see someone you know, even if you just smile it is sort of a good feeling or whatever. Like sometimes you don’t even know their name, but you have seen them in your class or whatever, and you just smile and nod. CS9: Yeah, I think that is one of the things I love about uni: you come here, you feel part of something. I mean, first year is a bit weird, coming from school and stuff, but this year when I walked in on my first day, actually even when I came in to enrol, I sort of thought, yeah, I know this place now and I sort of belong ... sounds silly, I know. CS4: I know that I think it is very, ah, look, I personally get a buzz when I walk into the uni, I go into the library and I say ‘I belong here’ … the physical environment is very important, the umm, going to the lectures, going to, communicating one to one, being in the tutorials with them, umm, you know, having the discussions, the group discussions and whatever goes round, that you are having the one-to-one contact or the group contact, umm, the physical in the sense of, umm, the library is here, umm, the buildings are here. It is a community and it is an identification like when you say to somebody, ‘Where are you? Oh, I’m at RMIT’, you are part of a community.
Implications of this research and conclusions It is clear that the tertiary education sector in Australia is still very much in the process of developing a more complex understanding of what constitutes a good online learning environment—the appropriate mixes of technology, pedagogy and delivery modes. During this process of refining online learning environments educationalists have often drawn on their understanding of ‘good pedagogy’ from the oncampus classroom and started to pull apart the intricacies of what the student does, what the teacher does, and the relationships that need to occur in the classroom to support the on-campus learning process. What this paper is suggesting is that there is obvious value in understanding what role the physical space of a campus plays in the facilitation and development of learning communities, or what I have termed social learning support networks.
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This research confirms much of the current educational community’s emphasis on a constructivist approach to learning and the significance of community and social networks for students engaged at a tertiary level. However, this research also clearly suggests that the development of these social networks often relies on the incidental, often informal, connections students make on campus. These findings are significant not only because they confirm and validate claims about the importance of learning communities for students, in both the on-campus and online environments, but also because they indicate an important factor for the future development of online learning environments. These findings signal the importance of developing online learning environments that are not only pedagogically sound but that also provide for some of the nuances associated with the physical campus environment, namely the opportunity for incidental and informal contact, which can facilitate and support the development of learning communities. While this research doesn’t directly indicate the way to move forward with the development of this concept in the online learning environment, it would seem that understanding how the students in this research came to be ‘where they were on campus’ and ‘why they had gone there’ gives an indication of the types of spaces that may be required. These spaces included local cafes, the library, corridors before class, or just walking around, entering or exiting the campus grounds. The reasons why students found themselves in these various spaces was generally of a utilitarian nature, including: getting something to eat; following up something in the library; waiting for class to start; and attending the university campus to attend classes. It is important to note that students were not attending a space designated as ‘social’, like a common room or student activities centre, although it is reasonable to surmise that the development of these social networks of support may lead to the use of these facilities by students who already know each other. Rather, these students were doing ‘student business’, being students, bumping into one another in a physical environment that was common to them because they were students of the institute. This would indicate that any online space designed to encourage the development of social learning support networks or learning communities should replicate spaces through which students pass as part of their everyday practice of being students studying a course online. During 2001 and 2002 the idea of creating web portals to provide a personalised ‘entrance’ for students to pass through when accessing the university web page system started to take shape, and
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many Australian universities or individual departments are now starting to explore and develop such web portals. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to detail how these web portals might be adapted to provide the ‘space’ for students studying courses online to ‘bump into each other’, it is reasonable to suggest that the design of these sites should include some synchronous and asynchronous tools such as chat facilities, discussion boards and personalised student information pages to facilitate and assist the development of social learning support networks or learning communities. For individual course designers and those concerned with the quality of the learning experience provided via online learning environments, this research provides a clear challenge. We need to focus beyond the electronic classroom walls and what we, as teachers, design to occur within them. We need to recognise that the development of the learning communities that we have come to see as integral to the quality of the learning experience for students may well have their inceptions outside the boundaries provided by most course management systems in current use. The challenge for course designers and the developers of future online environments will be to integrate the online classroom into an online learning environment that offers the same seamless opportunities for students to engage with each other as they do on a physical campus.
References Biggs, J. 1999, Teaching for Quality Learning at University, Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, Buckingham. Brown, J.S., Collins, A. et al. 1989, ‘Situated cognition and the culture of learning’, Educational Researcher 18(1), pp. 32–42. Clark, S. 1999, ‘Overcoming barriers to creating on-line communities’, Responding to Diversity: The 16th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education, Brisbane. Grabe, M. and Grabe C. 2001, Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. Gunawardena, C., Plass, J. et al. 2001, ‘Do we really need an online discussion group?’ in Online Learning and Teaching with Technology: Case studies, experience and practice, eds D. Murphy, R. Walker and G. Webb, Kogan Page, London, pp. 36–43. Lave, J. and Wenger E. 1991, Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
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Lisi, R.D. 2002, ‘From marbles to instant messager: implications of Piaget’s ideas about peer learning’, Theory into Practice 41(1), pp. 5–12. McInnis, C. 2001, ‘Signs of Disengagement? The changing undergraduate experience in Australian universities’, inaugural professorial lecture, (accessed August 2001). Neuman, W.L. 2000, Social Research Methods: Qualitative and quantitative approaches, Allyn & Bacon, Needham Heights, MA. Palloff, R.M. and Pratt K. 1999, Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective strategies for the online classroom, Jossey-Bass Inc, San Francisco. Ragan, L.C. 1998, ‘Good teaching is good teaching: an emerging set of guiding principles and practices for the design and development of distance education’, DEOSNEWS 8(12). Ramsden, P. 1992, Learning to Teach in Higher Education, Routledge, London. Tinto, V. 2000, ‘Learning better together: the impact of learning communities on student success in higher education’, Journal of Institutional Research 9(1), pp. 48–53. Wheatley, G.H. 1991, ‘Constructivist perspectives on science and mathematics learning’, Science Education 75(1), pp. 9–21.
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CHAPTER 3
Blurring the borders: creating a dialogical space online Gloria Latham and John Peters ‘At the borders the rules must change.’ Steven Hawking The ways in which we come to know one another and make meaning together, are deeply complex and challenging. Our genders, cultures, political orientations, multivoiceness, gestures, prior knowledge and understandings are all brought to the collaborative space and only understood in the context of that space. A dialogical space is one where people learn to know one another (more aptly named ‘multilogues’). Shank (1993) argues that internet communication, in particular, permits a multiplicity of players to join the spinning of a semiotic thread. He proposes the term multilogue for this computer mediated form of significant interaction. The most effective and unique forms of scholarly internet communication, Shank claims, emerge where the multilogue is used for the abductive activities of grappling with issues of meaning: for fostering shared understandings of circumstances and phenomena. In this chapter we have adopted Shank’s term multilogue to describe and analyse an inter-university, inter-cultural online experience. A strikingly new culture with new meanings was created as we engaged in conversation. Bakhtin (1981) reminds us that dialogue is the conduit for intellectual and moral development and therefore essential to our lives. He believes that in order to engage in dialogue, one must be able to apprehend, internalise, and recreate the utterances of others. As participants bring with them a cultural inheritance, an identity kit which frames their responses, the task becomes greater. Kenway and Modra (1992) add a cautionary note to authentic dialogue, warning that it is very difficult to foster because it relies on assumptions of similarity and equality between participants that may not actually exist. We can no longer act as if the conditions for community (reasonableness, trust, and shared understanding) are ‘always present or always capable of achievement’. Kenway and Modra sug26
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gest: ‘perhaps we would do better to see dialogue as the goal of pedagogy, not the condition for it’ (1992, p. 163). In examining one global online exchange, cultural conditions quickly surfaced. There were the cultural and geographic differences in accessing and feeling comfort with the technologies, the discipline knowledge, differences in the cultures of teaching and learning, and differences in finding a shared place in space. Yet, upon careful analysis of this online community, these differences provided rich opportunities for participants to experience the unfamiliar; to be surprised and in so doing learn more about their many selves and about acts of communication which have become commonplace in face to face communication. One participant articulated this lack of awareness. ‘Perhaps the greatest danger is the individual becoming too comfortable by staying with the non-challenging totally accepting community’ (D, 2/20/01). Another participant, M (4/3/2001), expressed his discomfort as he moved outside familiar ways of knowing and away from the safety of his surrounds: I’m getting lost in all the responses—the threads and the responses. I read a response and then another, then another and I think—okay that sounds good, interesting, surprising etc. I make mental notes of coming back to the response, then I do other things, I return to the Cyber Café, and discover a new list of responses that I feel compelled to read and the cycle repeats itself I’m switching brains as I pick up a thread here and there and then read another infinitum. The forum moves from direct responses…I’m impressed with the lively talk as if we’ve known each other for years although we’ve never met. I’m moved by comments that are alien to me…In a sense I feel that I won’t really know any of you—your world and mine, your experience and mine are similar yet totally dissimilar. We are aware that an intense struggle is taking place between our own and other peoples’ utterances in any act of dialogue (Bakhtin 1981). The struggle that is inherent in the creation of a collaborative place is compounded when the participants are from different countries, communicating inter-connectedly in asynchronous exchanges within a virtual community. It became increasing clear that ‘we do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs’ (Delpit 1988, p. 297). Although much has been written about dialogic thought, far less research has explored the multilogical place
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in which thoughts can achieve a withness and participants can build a shared place. This chapter seeks to explore the potential and relational dimensions of a community place formed between two groups of university graduate students and offers insights to inform future online communities. It is an exploration of virtual space as a created place where multiple social realities can be fostered, and celebrated, and where embodied meanings can be shared.
The context In 2001, a group of graduate students and professors in Educational Psychology and in four other fields of study at the University of Tennessee joined students and professors in the then Faculty of Education Language and Community Services at RMIT University online; each group also met in classrooms at their respective locations. Joining these groups were virtual visiting scholars from Oxford University, Harvard University, Swarthmore College and the University of New Hampshire. Works of the virtual visitors, world-class scholars in the field of social construction, formed the background for class preparation. Following four weeks of face-to-face learning, students and faculty in the United States and Australia joined each of the four virtual visiting scholars in two to three weeks of dialogue on social construction and collaborative learning. A course management system called ‘Course Info’ was used to organise the various components and activities, which included message construction and management, document storage, links to internet resources and routine communication among course participants. The Tennessee participants were engaged in a semester course and met face-to-face for weekly sessions. RMIT students and faculty were engaged in an academic year-long course that included a subject matter module on constructionism and research methods, roughly overlapping the online portion of the joint course experience. However, timelines were not synchronous, and RMIT participants began their interaction with Tennessee participants earlier than the official start time of their module in order to get acquainted and to read required text materials. Students and faculty read two texts on social constructionism during the first four weeks of the course (Gergen 1999; MacNamee and Gergen 1999). Throughout the semester, additional papers and a book were posted online by the visiting scholars. The spirit that generated this inter-university multilogical experience differed considerably from that offered by traditional distance
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education providers. By definition, distance education sends information and resources out into the community to people who need to learn in this fashion or to those who wish to learn at their own pace. Traditional distance education transmits information to students. In contrast, the virtual exchange between university graduate students and academics had a focus of bringing resources in, thus empowering all participants as generators of knowledge and allowing participants to make meaning together. The authors felt it was essential not to merely replicate what takes place in university classrooms, but rather to attempt to discover new ways of making discoveries by blurring the boundaries in virtual space, meeting at the borders rather than at the centre. Examination of one online inter-university exchange over a semester, which generated over 1000 responses, offers forth some of the inherent challenges involved in finding a shared place but also illuminates fertile ground upon which to build greater harmonies and awareness between learning partners.
Finding a place: hosts and visitors Settling in The initial inter-university multilogues were filled with the struggle to articulate the processes involved in the online and face-to-face exchange. Participants from the University of Tennessee were all enrolled in the same course, yet they had varied backgrounds and interests. Among them were counsellors, a forester, an engineer, teachers, social workers and full time parents. These people needed to find a way of relating. The group members tried to articulate the myriad ways they could make a group and establish themselves. B (1/2001) asked: ‘How do we dialogue with each another via this medium, I think only by building on what the other said.’ D’s (1/2001) comment demonstrates the complexities of the endeavour, when she remarked that: ‘It takes a lot more than putting our chairs in a circle to make a circle.’ Some participants struggled with the technology itself. J expressed early in the exchange: ‘All of this online chat stuff is new (to me)’ (2/11/2001). S confessed: ‘I must express my awkwardness with this way of participating in dialogue. I have little experience with chat rooms.’ Some participants had difficulty logging on and frustration peaked when participants wrote volumes of ideas to share with others and then lost it all. There were also the constraints with the software itself. For instance, some participants got lost in the web of responses.
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Yet there were also positive feelings about the online multilogue. J, a student participant, commented that: ‘Many of us hold back our thoughts when we begin the process of interacting with others until we feel “mentally safe enough” to speak out’ (4/3/02). For J, communicating via the web reduced this timeline because of the virtual anonymity that the medium engendered. While some members of each group decried the lack of personal contact, it was also the case that for some members of each group, the ‘impersonal’ aspect of online collaboration freed participants to express themselves more openly.
G’day from Oz: settling in together After a few weeks of online and face-to-face interactions at the University of Tennessee, the Australian participants joined the interuniversity discussion and a flood of entries filled the site with welcomes, introductions and questions which were posted in the ‘Getting to know each other’ folder. ‘Hello, howdy!’ ‘What a hoot!’ ‘G’day!’ ‘I have no idea where Tennessee is.’ ‘Do you celebrate St Patrick’s Day?’ ‘I’m curious, when we write to you does it arrive today or tomorrow?’ The exchange generated curiosity and opportunity to learn about customs and rituals firsthand. Yet aside from the technology, an initial divide was established between the travellers (RMIT guests) and the home-owners (University of Tennessee hosts). The RMIT participants thought of themselves as visitors in this online experience. They required cultural orientation to participate effectively; to take time to hover, to lurk and remain silent within the space, the content and the nature of the interactions before making contributions. It was inevitable that more frequent interactions for the Tennessee group would result in the development of what one Australian participant called an ‘in group’. Several participants also expressed feeling like a stranger with the discipline knowledge itself. D (2/9/2001) wrote: ‘I sometimes feel…as if I have been dropped in some alien country where I do not speak the language or know the culture.’ She went on to say: ‘I do not speak social constructivism and that is the language of this course. Therefore it is foreign to me’ (2/11/01). S added, ‘I do not want to be the visitor but rather a member of the group in all respects—which includes understanding Gergen, struggling to understand each other, and struggling to understand myself (and of course struggling to understand the computer’ (2/20/2001). Furthering the feeling of being on the outside of the discipline knowledge, M said: ‘As a visitor I felt the
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awkwardness of being an outsider, an interloper, a stranger. In fact the word visitor implies someone who does not belong, someone who stops for a moment or two and then leaves’ (2/15/2001). M’s definition of ‘visitor’ raises questions about whether the need is for participants to assimilate into the new cultural place or rather to co-exist. There were countless metaphors created which referred to participants as travellers: ‘as a fellow traveller’, ‘the road paved with good intentions’, ‘more on track with your train’, ‘I missed the boat’, ‘we are on a great adventure’. Lakoff (1993) proposes that the ‘locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualise one mental domain in terms of another’ (p. 203). Metaphor is relational and appeared to assist participants in expressing their shared learning and ways of being together. Language was made selfconscious and at times expressed feelings of discontent over participants’ own over-used words. The notion of moving outside known boundaries and making new discoveries often made everyday words appear insufficient. Participants also had cause to wonder whether or not their particular ways of using language were being understood by their overseas counterparts.
Crossing cultural boundaries of teaching and learning1 Finally, what emerged most clearly in the examination of this experience was not the cultural differences evident in terms of geographical locations, but the differences in terms of the cultures of teaching and learning. These differences crossed lines of gender, age, and place, having to do instead with the expectations of roles of ‘experts’ and participants in all locations. Peters and Armstrong (1998) provide a useful frame for differentiating three types of teaching and learning. Type I (T-I) is ‘teaching by transmission, learning by reception’. Type II (T-II) is ‘teaching by transmission, learning by sharing’. Type III (T-III) is ‘collaborative learning’. In T-I the primary focus is subject matter that reflects the experience of the teacher and the centrality of subject matter. Here the focus is on individual learning, and the primary relationship, although mediated by the teacher, is between individuals and the subject matter. The primary source of information is the teacher. The flow of communication is from teacher to learner and sometimes from learner to teacher. The most familiar form of T-I is the lecture. In T-II the emphasis is also on individual learning, and the teacher is also the primary, though not the only, source of information. The students may serve as principal sources of information, and
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they are given opportunities to make meaning of the subject matter in terms of their own experience. The flow of communication is from teacher to student, student to student, and student to teacher. The most familiar form of T-II is the lecture–discussion format; various applications of cooperative learning or ‘group work’ also fit this model. In T-III, collaborative learning, the emphasis is on both individual and group learning. The teacher becomes a member of the group and participates with students in the joint creation of new knowledge. The flow of communication is from member to member, member to group, and group to member. The basis of their joint action is the members’ own experiences, including the teacher’s experience. T-III is thus a form of joint action and participatory knowing, in which the teacher and students work together to create new knowledge. While the course focused on T-III, collaborative learning, the course content and format and students’ experiences with the course suggest that it can be located in all three of the types described by Peters and Armstrong. Type I took form in the early relationship between visiting virtual faculty and students. This relationship was expressed in terms of written assignments and the way in which visitors and other course participants initially communicated online. The course was designed in such a way that students needed information provided in the visitors’ texts and their papers posted on the course website. Although some were already familiar with social constructionism, students and guest faculty needed to minimally familiarise themselves with the range of ideas expressed in our visitors’ publications and papers. The course facilitator asked participants to read and react online to each visitor’s set of papers at the beginning of their designated segment of the course. This assignment positioned students and visitors in a question and answer mode. Students read, asked questions of the author, and the author/visitor answered. Sometimes visitors elaborated and took the readers into other aspects of their ideas, thus offering a mini-lesson on a point; at other times they provided rather straightforward answers. However, it was apparent early on that there was room for more to be gained from the visitors’ responses, as course participants showed a hunger for considering the meaning of the material in their own lives: I’ve been thinking about the great potential of the people who breathe this site life. It appears to me that we have tied these coffee chats around some very important ideas, shaping ways of being, inner and between knowing. They remain, however, quite tied to the ideas of each guest author (G, 4/01).
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There was clearly room for T-II and T-III teaching and learning experiences. T-II experiences were apparent when students offered diverse interpretations of the visitors’ ideas and began to share them with one another: (D)ialogue and collaborative learning are, in truth, challenging my old ways of learning. I like to think of myself as flexible and adaptable, but in these circumstances, I am faced with changing a lifetime of habits. ‘Listen to the teacher…don’t interrupt’…the teacher is the ‘expert’ and the keeper of the knowledge, and therefore, must be heard at all times. Ingrained feelings such as this have held me back from jumping into the discussion—sometimes I’ve kept looking to find the ‘expert,’ the ‘voice’ that dictates the beat of the music and determines what the dance shall be…I’ve had to struggle to let go of the need to ‘give the right answer’ (N, 3/01). This experience brought fresh new perspectives and challenges to the ideas of the visiting scholars, as students were making meaning in the context of their professional and personal lives, as well as in terms of their interest in how all constructionist ideas related to collaborative learning. Collaborative learning, for most, was an area of study as well as an area of practice. When students were engaged in learning about collaborative learning, their experience could best be characterised as T-I or T-II. Thus, the visitors’ ideas were received by students not in their own terms, but the ideas were further shaped in the conversation about personal lives, practices and related other academic interests: This has been in the background and the forefront at times. We have thought about an author and how can the words the author writes become a part of our dialogue. Even chapters of books by different people stand alone. That was one reason for suggesting there be a talking among all of us. But how do you do that? Could we change the process now and have everyone talk? (D, 3/01). The structure of the course and expectations set by faculty, students and virtual visitors were such that T-II teaching and learning would dominate participants’ experiences. We were all thrust into a situation of making sense of selected ideas offered up by experts in social constructionism and by other participants who were experts in
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their own lives. We found ourselves sorting out the meaning of this concept and that, the meaning that others attached to the concepts, and the meaning of their meaning. While we were learning a great deal in this experience, what we were making meaning of was primarily someone else’s rich ideas (the group of visitors, mainly, but also many of our own and ideas drawn from other sources of literature), especially early on in the experience. What we weren’t doing was constructing new ideas, which is the focus of a T-III experience. As time went on, it became necessary for us to go beyond our reliance on the experts in order to engage in collaborative learning and to coconstruct ideas, with each other and preferably with the visiting scholars as well. This presented quite a challenge, especially to a group of students and faculty interested in the study and practice of collaborative learning. However, and in keeping with what seems typical of most collaborative learning situations, after wrestling with this challenge for most of the term we began to learn collaboratively and to create something new for ourselves. In short, for most of the online experience, we were doing T-I and T-II; it was only in the later stages of working online that we were able to see ourselves being engaged in a T-III experience. T-III experiences were mainly evidenced by the learning culture that we formed while grappling with our online and face-to-face experiences. We began to see ourselves in a new and different way of teaching and learning, a different way of being in higher education, as we dealt with the strangeness of being in this course environment—a new experience for nearly everyone involved. As one participant put it, ‘I feel blessed by these creative contributions which, it seems, are themselves beginning to write a new narrative’ (K, 4/01). While sorting out what it meant to dialogue with an unseen other, what third meaning could come from joint meaning making, and how we ought to position ourselves in relation to the subject matter experts, we saw ourselves actually creating our own new environment for being engaged in such a teaching/learning experience: This experience of…being in class, being in the collaborative learning cohort has been like travelling with my hair on fire. Exhilarating, empowering, maddening, overwhelming, hilarious, sad, ponderous, off-balance, aggravating, defending, comforting, guarding, blurting, apologizing, appreciating, sharing…’ (J, 4/01). This environment was other than and more than what the
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remarkable technical facilities allowed for in the way of multinational and cross-cultural dialogue, although they were magical in their own right; and the environment also went farther than what a circle of chairs and candlelight assembled in our face-to-face meetings at UT could provide in the way of atmosphere. There was a transforming quality to the type of interaction we experienced, and the type of interaction was uniquely our construction. We made the dialogical space into which we acted and from which we acted (Shotter 1993). We weren’t just receiving information from the outside, or just making our own meaning from it. The environment we finally made for ourselves did not exist before and was not handed to us in most aspects; rather, it was created as the background for our meaning making and joint construction of additional ideas, practices, and ways of going on. We were creating the rules of a new language game (Wittgenstein 1984). We also sought out a new language for what we were doing, having found our usual way of engaging ideas insufficient for a T-III experience: I must say that for me, the sweetest part of this exchange has been those times when we wandered off the path from the interpretations of author’s words and started to playfully connect and weave some loose threads of our own (G, 4/01).
Reflections The course was practical: we developed our own environment for learning and it worked for us. Participants found ways to use aspects of this way of knowing in their own professional practices, and we incorporated a relational way of being into our personal lives. The experience of living the ideas in the culture we created was ample evidence of concreteness and worth for us: I have been challenged, touched, surprised, excited, saddened, provoked, but never bored, and always, always engaged…As we have moved away from scholarly self-consciousness and into wonderment, I have treasured the sacred space in which our connections grow like some strange and beautiful flower, blossoming in the candlelight (B, 4/01). Far from adopting the prevailing discourse of taming or laying claim to territory and ideas generated from the Wild West of America
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and the Outback of Australia, the authors were interested in creating a borderless frontier—a blurring of geography, rules, and norms. Yet it proves difficult to break from the conventions of how things have been done in the past and how things are being done. Limitations were also evident with the tools themselves. When using online discussions it seems we continue to employ very old rules and follow traditional notions of boundaries (Friedlander 1999). In advocating new understandings Friedlander suggests that we might think of online communication borders as permeable membranes encircling shared values, rather than viewing them as ‘battlements and moats’. In a search to create a borderless frontier, the online inter-cultural interuniversity exchange under discussion was raw potential. We trusted, since we could not know or plan how the learning would be experienced nor what outcomes it would foster. It evolved and changed in the moments together and we followed its rhythmic trail, making the journey by traversing it together. M’s reflection captures the sentiments expressed by many of the participants: I feel like I’ve been on a carnival ride. You wait your turn, you step into the ride, you buckle up, you wonder what will happen next, you start slowly and gain momentum, you feel the rush of being one with the ride, you think you need to get off this thing because it’s going too fast, you lose your fear and throw caution to the wind, you unbuckle and relax, you try to memorize the feeling, you feel the ride begin to slow, you know it’s ending, and you leave the ride feeling alive, fresh, brave and somehow refreshed for having done this. (M, 4/01) The ride taken in this online exchange may be viewed as a microcosm for a multicultural society of inhabitants who discover how to learn together, how to be together and how to value that which is not held in common. Multilogues provided us with the multiple social realities needed to transform our thinking, to create a new beginning, to offer surprise and tension and at times awkwardness, to invigorate our search for heightened language, to challenge the notion of the ‘norm’ in order to create a far more inclusive and shared place in space, blurring the borders.
Notes 1 Portions of the text in this section were based on Ragland, Peters, Donaghy and
Latham (2002).
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References Bakhtin, M. 1981, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas, Austin. Delpit, L.D. 1988, ‘The silenced dialogue: power and pedagogy in educating other people’s children’, Harvard Educational Review 58, pp. 280–98. Friedlander, A. 1999, Editorial Mp Magazine, The Centre for Information Strategy, Policy Science Application International Corporation. Gergen, K.J. 1999, An Invitation To Social Construction, Sage Publications, London. Hofstede, G. 1991, ‘Cultures and organizations: software of the mind’, 21 The American Journal of Distance Education 3(1), pp. 38–49. Kenway, J. and Modra, H. 1992, ‘Feminist Pedagogy and Emancipatory Possibilities’ in Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy, eds Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore, Routledge, New York, pp. 138–66. Lakoff, G. 1993, ‘The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor’ in Metaphor and Thought (2nd edn), ed. A. Ortony, Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 202–51. McNamee, S. and Gergen, K.J. (eds) 1999, Relational Responsibilities: Resources for a Sustainable Dialogue, Sage Publications, London. Peters, J.M. and Armstrong, J.A. 1998, ‘Collaborative Learning: People Labouring Together to Construct Knowledge’ in The Power and Potential of Collaborative Learning Partnerships, New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, eds I.M. Saltiel, A. Sgroi, and R. Brockett, Fall, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, pp. 75–86. Ragland, B.J., Peters, J.M., Donaghy, R.C. and Latham, G. 2002, Three Cultures of Teaching and Learning Across Continents’, Conference of International Society for Comparative Adult Education, St Louis. Shank, Gary 1993, ‘Abductive multiloguing: the semiotic dynamics of navigating the Net’, Arachnet: Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture 1:01 (22 March 1993), ftp://ftp.lib.ncsu.edu/pub/stacks/aejvc/ aejvc-v1n01-shank-abductive. Spellmeyer, K. 1993, ‘Too little care: language, politics, and embodiment in the life-world’, College English 55, pp. 265–83. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1984, Culture and Value, ed. George H. Von Wright, trans. Peter Winch, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
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CHAPTER 4
Spheres of influence: MOOs, identity and learning communities Mex Butler and Andrea Chester You find yourself standing in a seminar room littered with orange plastic chairs. On one wall is a whiteboard, entitled ‘Netiquette’. To read the whiteboard, type READ NET. Tiger and Flemmex are here. Tiger smiles and says, “Well, shall we get started?” Learning is more like a sphere than a production line. You enter realms of thought, knowledge, people and things. You are influenced by many factors—who you are, the people you meet, how you are taught, what books you read, how interesting you find it. Some spheres of learning you may never leave. Some exist only in the virtual realm. At RMIT University’s Tokyo Campus you have to type to talk and read to see. The learning environment exists only in the imaginations of the people who inhabit it, and in a computer program called MOO. The computer is at Chubu University in Japan. The students who use it are in a course at RMIT in Melbourne. Together we construct this learning sphere. Their ideas shape the environment; their chosen identities influence our community. In this chapter we explain something of what this program is, how we have used it in one course and what we understand as a result of what we did.
Why choose MOOs? A MOO (Multi-user domain Object Oriented) is a network-accessible virtual environment where text is used to create and describe spaces and objects. The MOO owners can construct whatever sort of reality they choose. MOOs are cross-platform, have low bandwidth requirements and users have a choice of software for connecting to them. This means you can use just about any kind of computer and you 38
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don’t need a fast internet connection. All users really need is telnet access, which is available from almost all internet service providers. Both the server software and database are free, with a variety of implementations available, giving MOO owners a range of choices, from building everything themselves from scratch through to using one of the well developed versions, such as those with graphical web-based interfaces which come with a tool-box of pre-programmed objects. Developing out of MUDs (Multi-User Domains), the earlier networked adventure games of the ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ genre, MOOs became primarily social spaces, with an emphasis on collaborative construction of the environment rather than combative role-playing. Users, referred to in MOOs as ‘players’, connect via the internet to the MOO server, and type commands that move them around in a textual world. Instead of seeing images or watching animated visuals, players read descriptions of where they are and interact with both the environment and with other players via the keyboard and monitor. On connecting to a MOO, you are presented with a description of the room or space in which you find yourself. There will be a list of ‘obvious exits’ that connect your current space to others. If there are other people connected to the MOO and in the same space as you, their names will be listed, and they will be able to read any lines of dialogue that you write. The quote at the beginning of this paper is a room description, followed by a line of dialogue. The two users are the authors of this paper, Tiger (Andrea) and Flemmex (Mex). Each player develops a distinct persona, whether by intentional choices of behaviours and characteristics or simply by the way in which they communicate, as much or as little like their ‘real life’ self as they choose. Each time they connect, they are allocated the same password-protected ‘character’ to use. They name and describe their character and choose a gender (MOOs offer a choice of ten) that is then reflected in all the pronouns that refer to them. Communication in MOOs is primarily via typed conversations, the words appearing almost simultaneously on the screen of the speaker and the other connected players. The MOO program parses speech and actions so that they appear with correct syntax depending on the point of view of the participant. For example, if the character Tiger enters the following text: Say Did you see Aurian’s talking parrot? on pressing enter, the following text will appear on Tiger’s monitor:
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You ask, “Did you see Aurian’s talking parrot?” Anyone else in the same MOO space as Tiger will see: Tiger asks, “Did you see Aurian’s talking parrot?” Within the MOO world, players can extend the environment by adding spaces that they can describe and program to function in specific ways. Such privileges are traditionally awarded to players on demonstrating their worthiness through learning the required commands. For example, a student dorm may be allocated to a player as a result of their learning to send MOOmail (the internal MOO email system) and using this to apply for a room. Similarly, players can create interactive MOO objects. These can take any form, for example a note telling others where to go next in a treasure hunt, a bag of grapes that produces a different message each time someone opens it, or a magic mirror that shows each player their description in reverse. The scope of such objects is limited only by the imagination. MOOs allow for data to be collected simply and easily. Transcripts of synchronous interactions can be recorded. Information about users can also be collected, such as how often a particular user has logged on, how long they have spent online in total and their average session length. With access to these data we have become aware that some students connect to the MOO, find no one connected, then simply ‘idle’ in the MOO till someone else arrives. Idling means keeping a connection open without actually doing anything in that window of your computer user interface. Multiple windows on the computer screen enable users to multi-task, working on other projects and checking the MOO window from time to time to see if anything has happened. Finding someone already there to talk to, others connecting later are more likely to stay and interact. A few key personalities who are frequently connected can act as the cornerstone for the development of a community, like the proprietor of a cafe or the bartender of the local pub. Each iteration of the MOO version of this course has had at least one such personality—a student who has spend long hours idling and been online when others have logged on. Interestingly, each time these people have stayed on as members of the MOO community long after the course has finished. MOOs are playful and whimsical places, and this tone has an impact on users. The first time you write something with three exclamation marks, you’ll know why. You may think you’re only being a
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little emphatic, but everyone in the same space as you will see Tiger [substitute your name] almost wets her pants and exclaims, “Wow!!!” [substitute your assertion] The core of the MOO database is sprinkled with the gentle humour and friendliness of the original programmers, and of those who have followed in their code-prints. Pavel Curtis, the person most often attributed with the development of MOOs, saw himself as a ‘simple country hacker’ who had developed a ‘nice place’ called LambdaMOO, which attracted all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons: some for the programming, some for the novelty and some just because it was a good place to be. Compared with the ‘hack and slay’ of the Dungeons and Dragons predecessors, LambdaMOO was indeed at first a pleasant and peaceful place. In his article ‘Not just a game’, Curtis writes: …I just treated folks more or less as I would have face to face: with respect and a naive, implicit expectation that everyone would behave well. Oddly enough, people picked up on that expectation and, in general, fulfilled it as if it were the most natural thing in the world; I guess, at the time, I was naive enough to think that it was. (Haynes and Holmevik 2001, p. 31) These expectations are visible everywhere in the structures and behaviours of MOO objects. Users are addressed in the second person in response to commands (‘You find yourself in a light airy cafe…’ and ‘You need to be a builder to do that—why not ask one of the wizards’) and are prompted to read HELP MANNERS, a document that explains each MOO’s social norms, and HELP MISSION, the statement of intent. The MOO that hosts this course is called saMOOrai. It is primarily an English language learning environment. The reasons for choosing that MOO in particular were simple: one of us (Mex) already had wizard (administrator) rights there; the archwizard (Associate Professor Yoshi Awaji), was supportive and keen to have us there; and there was already a core of regular players, providing our students with a small, friendly community to interact with beyond just the members of their own class. All of these factors made MOO a very appealing environment for the development of the RMIT Tokyo Campus in saMOOrai as the
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venue for our course. Let us now turn to the course itself and explore how it fits with the MOO environment.
Personal identity and community in cyberspace ‘Personal Identity and Community in Cyberspace’ is a 13-week undergraduate elective offered by the Division of Psychology at RMIT University. The aim of the course is to critically examine psychological aspects of cyberspace, with particular focus on cyberlife, community and understanding the self in this context. This is a relatively new field in psychology. A small amount of theoretical and empirical work exists in areas central to the course, such as the creation and negotiation of cyberselves (e.g. Waskul and Douglass 1997; Turkle 1995), connections between on- and off-screen experiences (e.g. Murray 2000), internet addiction (e.g. Suler 2002), online relationships (e.g. Joinson 2003) and virtual communities (e.g. Rheingold 2000). In order to examine these psychological issues we challenge our students to join us in a process of participant–observation. Experiences in the MOO become the core processes of the course. The course brings together readings, theories and actual experiences of cyberlife. Pedagogy, identity and community in cyberspace are the content of the course, the subjects of research and the practice of our daily experience there. All our interactions in this course take place online in the MOO, and all participants, staff as well as students, use their character names in their interactions. At least one tutor, one technical support person/MOO wizard and an administrative assistant facilitate the course. All of the members of staff play an active role in the MOO community. Visiting scholars using the MOO for research purposes also have their own spaces and observe the virtual equivalents of ethical research behaviours, such as obtaining consent before gathering data from participants. Each semester we have an intake of approximately 20 students. There are typically more male students than female, but in some semesters this balance has been reversed. Students taking the course have come from every school in the university. There are no prerequisites for the course; however, all students bring some online skills: most have some internet ‘chat’ experience, but only a small proportion have used MOO-type programs prior to the course. Students contribute to their own and other students’ learning through assessable and unassessed activities. We use four assessment methods to explore the two key themes of identity and community in cyberspace:
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synchronous conferences; asynchronous seminars; private journals; and projects.
Synchronous conferences Synchronous conferences serve different purposes as the course progresses. We use real time conferences at the beginning of the course to build connections between participants and to provide them with the basic skills they need to operate in a text-based environment. As the semester progresses, they are used to cover core material and facilitate ongoing communication within the group. Later they are the vehicle by which students demonstrate mastery of skills and development of concepts. The Gallery of Dreams exercise is an example of a later stage synchronous conference. Preparing for this activity, students work in pairs to design an object representing their experiences of cyberlife. The culmination of their work is a real time exhibition opening in the Gallery of Dreams. In this excerpt, LaliPuna presents and explains her Magical Mirror. LaliPuna says, “Everyone take a look into the mirror...” The Magical Mirror a window into a dimension which is the total opposite to the MOO-world as we know it. Framed by green pearls and gold lettering in an unrecognisable language, this is one portal which you will never regret entering into... ]tseuG[ renetsil.gnihtyreve ot snetsil tub ,gnihton syas ohw enO Fidelius takes a long hard look at h*self in the Magical Mirror. Aurian takes a long hard look at herself in the Magical Mirror. LaliPuna says, “The Magical Mirror aims to make a statement about the illusory nature of the cyber-world.” LaliPuna says, “We look into the mirror and see an apparent reflection of ourselves...” LaliPuna says, “But really, what we see is the opposite of what it appears to be.” LaliPuna says, “The cyber-world seems to reflect real life/the real world, but actually it is totally different to the real world.” LaliPuna says, “People in the cyber-world might have normal
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‘names’ and personalities/descriptions, but actually they could very well be (to use an extreme example) complete psychopaths!” Tiger says, “Are you a different person online LaliPuna?” Aurian looks with interest. LaliPuna says, “Of course I am, although I may very well fool myself most of the time into thinking I am my online self.” Londongal says, “What about all the people that are themselves online?” LaliPuna says, “I am not really the way I come across in the words I choose.” LaliPuna says, “And further to that, everyone interprets the words I choose differently!” WicketWarrick thinks that everyone will be surprised at who is what name when they meet... foxy_dance says, “Wouldn’t a bit of our real personality be shown on line?” Aurian [to foxy_dance]: Definitely. Fidelius says, “For sure.” Aurian says, “That’s the underlying basis to our online selves.” LaliPuna says, “Londongal, I just want you to question whether people are who THEY THINK they are online...” In this excerpt, students look at themselves in LaliPuna’s Magical Mirror and see their own character description reflected backwards. A programmable feature of MOO allows for any string of letters to be printed in reverse order. LaliPuna utilised a simple programming function to symbolically represent a very complex set of ideas about the interface between online and offline identity. Asynchronous seminars The essentially conversational nature of the synchronous text reflects the spontaneity of the interaction, distinguishing it from the more considered and theoretically based asynchronous seminars. These discussions take place in seminar rooms, overlooking a central courtyard. Each room is ‘decorated’ to evoke the content of the seminar. Seminar Room 2 — Online Gender Swapping You find yourself in a room whose walls are all different. One wall has wallpaper with a pattern of pink and white bows, lace curtains at the windows. The opposite wall is austere red with
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black lacquer trimmings: a tie rack hung with neckties and leather belts, a shaving table with razor and soap, and a small oval shaving mirror. The third wall is a riot of colour, draped with rainbow flags, feather boas, evening frocks and leather harnesses. The last wall is covered with mirrors, each a different shape and size. None of the mirrors seems to be able to reflect your image quite the way you thought you looked before... You see Online Gender Swapping, Seminar Whiteboard, and Web Review Whiteboard. Obvious exits: courtyard Each seminar room contains a note introducing the seminar theme. Clickable hyperlinks to key online readings are provided, together with questions to promote discussion. Each room contains two whiteboards, one for content contributions, and the other for website reviews (complete with 5 star ratings). For the most part, staff contributions are brief: the emphasis is on students, in dialogue, producing their own response to the topic. Although the key topic areas are set at the start of the semester, the content of the seminar is constructed from students’ experiences and reading. Journals To encourage reflection on identity, students keep journals that are submitted to the tutor for assessment. The first journal comes at the start of the course and the last at the end. These provide the students with the opportunity for self-evaluation and serve a function similar to pre- and post-testing; they reinforce the value of stating aims at the beginning and comparing them with actual outcomes at the end. A by-product of this process has been that some students begin to write about themselves as learners, moving the experience into the realm of meta-learning, examining who they are as learners and how they have changed as a result of their experiences in the course. Our next step is to make this meta-learning more explicit by restructuring the journal questions to incorporate more focus on the process of learning to learn. Projects Towards the end of the semester students have the opportunity to design their own MOO community in their Virtual Community Project.
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Projects have included a rambling house for new parents, a Harry Potter community, and a spaceship MOO for children undergoing cancer treatment. The projects are made available to the class and each student provides written comments on at least one other project. This piece of assessment encourages students to generalise their experiences in the learning community, and because they are designing, but not implementing, they are unconstrained by programming or practical limitations. The project therefore encourages creativity.
Spheres of influence: theorising our experiences In trying to make sense of the vast potential of this environment and our experiences in it, we have come back repeatedly to the terminology of worlds, realms and spheres. So many factors seem to influence how any one individual, teacher or learner, experiences ‘life on the screen’. As teachers and as learners, we perceive ourselves as the focus of many elements that we respond to or manage in order to achieve our ends. Time, place, energy, interest, outside commitments—these are all facets which must be dealt with. Circumstances are rarely ideal, for learners and teachers alike. We are a focal point within our own universe of experience—but not necessarily at its centre. We can view these forces as a myriad of lines, continua of possibility, upon each of which we choose a point, or find ourselves, as a result either of circumstance or of choice. Any element in a learning environment can be represented by a linear continuum, showing the degree to which that element plays a part in a particular context for a particular person. Imagine the learning environment as a sphere, intersected by all the many continua that represent the elements existing in that environment. These elements include such diverse matters as teaching styles and connection to others as well as practical parameters such as time and location. All the participants in a course could be mapped to various locations within this sphere, depending on their location along each of the different continua of possibility. These positions may change many times within the period of any course. Some of these possible elements are illustrated in Figure 1. In the following sections we explain four of these continua: models of teaching and learning, communality, synchronicity and reality.
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In community
Constructionist model
Magical reality
Asynchronous
Synchronous
Conventional reality
Transmission model
Alone Figure 1. The spher e model of lear ning environments
Constructivism/transmission Whether learning in face-to-face classrooms or through computermediated environments, there exists the possibility either that the teacher will operate from within the ‘transmission’ model, seeing herself as charged with the task of transmitting information to the students, or that she will choose to immerse the students in a ‘constructivist’ experience that will guide them through a process of constructing their own understandings. It appears to be generally agreed that the constructivist focus on learner responsibility is ‘one of the characteristics of progressive pedagogy in general and online educational innovation in particular’ (Goodfellow 2001, p. 79). However, the teacher’s choice may vary, according to the content, the stage of the course, the students’ needs, by negotiation or as a result of other factors. Although much of our teaching in this course is informed by a constructivist pedagogy, our experiences suggest that this model is not always the most appropriate one to adopt. MOOs implicitly encourage many of the aspects Jonassen (1994) associated with constructivist learning environments: complex multiple representations of reality, meaningful tasks that are inherently contextualised and collaboration rather than competition. As in
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the rest of life, people find themselves at many different stages of competence within the MOO environment. The roles of teacher and learner begin to merge, as students in the course acquire skills and build upon their existing knowledge to become fluent operators in the virtual world. Teachers cannot maintain the illusion of being the ‘sage on the stage’, controlling all learning and experience, when much of the learning takes place between students. It is not uncommon for an almost new MOOer to experience great satisfaction from teaching a complete ‘newbie’ how to talk, look around and describe herself. This is a ‘situated learning’ experience for all participants, where an existing social structure is explored, and ultimately expanded and modified, by the students. The multifaceted nature of this kind of learning is described by Stein (1998): In the adult classroom, to situate learning means to create the conditions in which participants will experience the complexity and ambiguity of learning in the real world. Participants will create their own knowledge out of the raw materials of experience, i.e. the relationships with other participants, the activities, the environmental cues, and the social organization that the community develops and maintains. In our course, there are many sequenced and structured activities and specific learning goals for students in this environment, with clearly expressed instructions for the acquisition of skills. However the practice of these skills takes place in the ‘real world’ of their final application—cyberspace—rather than being expressed merely as abstractions. The modelling, support and feedback necessary to achieve mastery come from the course staff, fellow students, other users of the MOO and indeed from the MOO itself, in the form of programmed messages of confirmation or error, and embedded help files. The object-oriented nature of MOOs makes them particularly appropriate for practising knowledge construction. Learning occurs ‘especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe’ (Papert and Harel 1991). This concept of construction, in which external, shared objects facilitate learning, is at the heart of the Gallery of Dreams exercise. Although much of the course embodies constructivist principles, transmitting information has an important role to play, especially early on in the semester. There are distinct bodies of knowledge that must be acquired by the students, particularly in relation to operating
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within the MOO environment. We have no hesitation in adopting a direct transmission method of instruction where we feel it is appropriate, or in modelling this natural helping behaviour. While RTFM (read the uh manual) is a common and educationally sound response to questions from a reasonably competent MOOer, it is at the very least frustrating to the newbie who doesn’t yet understand how to use the uh thing. A simple procedural instruction is, in this case, the most appropriate form of teaching. Fanderclai (1995) describes both the scope and the tensions created by this continuum: MUDs are places for self-directed learning, learning that blends work and play, that often looks chaotic but that is uniquely effective. A MUD is not an environment that can be controlled; to use MUDs effectively, educators must replace control with structure. Students need clear goals, and knowledge of the tools and methods they might use to accomplish those goals. The beauty of MOOs is that they allow teachers to move along the continuum between transmission and construction of knowledge flexibly, creatively and interestingly.
Alone/in community MOOing is an inherently social activity. As Reid (1999) explains, the pseudonymity of MOO interaction facilitates a sense of safety for many players. Feeling safe, players experience emotional disinhibition and they come to express themselves in ways they might not in ‘real life’. This more open behaviour, together with a sense of proximity to others, facilitates the formation of relationships as real as, and sometimes more meaningful than, relationships in everyday life. These features of MOOs enmesh players ‘in a web of relationships’ (Reid 2000, p. 114), building a sense of community. For us and our students, learning about MOOs leads to an understanding of how to learn in MOOs. And this learning process involves community in at least three ways. First, any knowledge is useful to someone who doesn’t yet have it: even a relative newbie can help a first time MOOer. Second, lots of people may have the information a student needs, not just the staff. The more experienced MOOer may be the course tutor, but there is a much greater likelihood, given that MOOs are open 24 hours a day and students can log in whenever it suits them, that it will actually be a fellow student, or
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indeed a total stranger who just happens to be using the MOO at that time. Third, learning MOO procedures follows good educational principles including modelling, supported practice, feedback, and independent practice. Community in learning is important, especially if we see knowledge as having an impact on its context and vice versa. Learning communities encourage us to contextualise the process of knowledge construction. They open up multiple representations of reality and generate ideas we might not otherwise have considered. Decontextualised knowledge has the potential to result in dangerous and unethical behaviour. Contextualising knowledge means asking students to think about how knowledge might be used and to consider its impact on other people. Learning how to communicate knowledge is central to the idea of a learning community. Without our having the ability to communicate, the usefulness of knowing is decreased. MOOing, as we have done it in this course, has students learning, doing, and communicating, all in together. Because of the central place of community in our course we have taken steps to nurture community. Virtual communities, like all communities, are predicated on there being at least a minimum level of interactivity (Jones 1997). With each iteration of the course, we have increased the number and range of structured small group activities, both off-task and on-task. Bielman (2000) argues that students who engage in off-task sharing of thoughts, feelings, and experiences develop rapport, discover commonalities and increase familiarity with their colleagues. Socialising, she maintains, encourages openness in on-task activities, allowing students to extract the maximum potential from group work. It should therefore, not just be encouraged, but can be built into the curriculum. It is particularly reassuring when these activities result in meaningful connections, as illustrated in the following journal entry: Aurian and I have been partnered for the Virtual Relationships scenario group work. We spent the night discussing the questions and delving into our own experiences of online relationships. I’m really glad we got partnered up coz we’ve had similar experiences, and therefore our thoughts on the topic were extremely interesting to discuss. It was quite nice talking to someone who’s been through a similar experience and can understand what I’m going through...Tonight I feel as if I’ve had a better experience of our virtual community. It’s important for me to talk to as many people as I can to get a
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feel for our community, otherwise it doesn’t feel like a community at all! Talking to Aurian, I felt like myself. Not all learners want to engage in this degree of intimacy however, and not all see it as a desirable aspect of their learning experience. ‘Lurking’, the act of hanging back quietly in an online conversation, is a legitimate form of participation in some components of this course. While there are dyad and group activities, there are also significant requirements for individual work, such as contributions to the seminar whiteboards and, most especially, the journals. This latter activity is done outside the MOO, giving the students time and space for reflection on their MOO experiences.
Synchronous/asynchronous communication Online interactions are typically classified as either synchronous, ‘same time/same place’, or asynchronous, as ‘anytime/anywhere’. We have incorporated both synchronous and asynchronous modes into our course. Participation in real-time meetings is generally high. Even when these conferences are not assessed, they typically attract more than 50 percent of the students. This observation contradicts conventional wisdom. Assessment is, after all ‘perhaps the strongest motivating force that a teacher can use to encourage students to complete activities’ (Oliver 2001, p. 86). Although students consistently request more real-time meetings, some find the experience of real-time interaction stressful. The dialogue can move quickly and often involves multiple simultaneous threads. Familiarity with real-time chat, quick typing, and a strong grasp of written English are all advantageous when participating in real-time conferences, as one student from a non-English speaking background noted: …it was hard for me to join such conversation since English is not my first language and my typing is very slow. So every time when I have an idea and try to type it in words, it always seems to be too late to press ‘enter’ to put the words on screen. In contrast to the time constraints of real time conferences, asynchronous seminars offer opportunities to reflect on ideas that others have presented and to carefully prepare one’s response. In addition, they allow the expression of one’s ideas without interruption (Bielman 2000).
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MOOs therefore offer opportunities to incorporate both synchronous and asynchronous modes of communication. But MOOs also challenge the simple synchronous/asynchronous dichotomy. Students in our MOO frequently engage in multiple synchronous conversations. This can be done by following several simultaneous threads in a real-time chat or by using the whisper or page commands to talk privately to other players who are either present in the same room or in another part of the MOO. By allowing players to stay logged on indefinitely and continue to read text that has occurred in the room in which they are located, MOOs also enable players to engage in extended synchronous interaction, continuing a conversation on and off, over hours or even days.
Conventional reality/magical reality One of the aspects of MOO communication that might surprise a non-MOO user is the sense of reality that is created. Despite the fact that our buildings and their contents are constructed entirely with text, we and our students have developed a belief in the physical reality of the RMIT Tokyo campus. Steuer (1992) described this phenomenon as telepresence, which he explained as a product of two aspects: interactivity and vividness. Interactivity is the extent to which users can manipulate their environment. MOOs are highly interactive environments: they enable a broad range of changes to be effected almost instantaneously, from moving around the space and communicating with others, to building one’s own room. MOOs also permit users to see the impact of their actions in the virtual world, a process known as ‘mapping’ (Wood and Smith 2001). For example, when Aurian typed ‘look Magical Mirror’ in the Gallery of Dreams, we all saw ‘Aurian takes a long hard look at herself in the Magical Mirror’. The second component of telepresence, vividness, refers to the breath and depth of sensory information available to the user. Some forms of online communication use only text, while others use images, sound, and animation. MOOs have historically been text-based environments, but users have always been able to at least provide the URLs to web graphics, and in recent years there have been various releases of the MOO server software with graphical web-based front ends. These developments have provided a ‘point-and-click’ interface, relieving the user of the task of remembering new commands. At first glance, one might assume that this would add to the value of MOOs as educational tools, but in our experience this is not nec-
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essarily the case. Limited to text as the primary channel of communication, users are unimpeded by the constraints of their skills with graphics tools, or their ability to locate an approximate image to match their ideas. By describing the world of their imagination in words, they can create exactly what they want, rather than settling for someone else’s drawing or photograph. Moreover, in using words to describe what they see only in their mind’s eye, they can speak more directly to the imagination of those who read their work. As a film can only present one interpretation of a novel, so an image limits the possibilities of interpreting an idea. A key difference between the experience of using other online chat facilities and using MOOs is the sense of embodiment that MOOs provide. Almost the first task given to the student once they have a MOO character is to describe themself. In choosing a gender and a description, the students adopt attributes that may or may not reflect their everyday experiences of life. A student who in real life needs a wheelchair for mobility can experience herself running and dancing and even teleporting from one place to another. The aged and arthritic can do handstands, the male can be female, the human can be feline. Nodding, smiling, winking, ‘thwapping’, swimming in mountain pools hidden behind waterfalls—these are all standard fare in a MOO day. New MOOers are amazed and delighted at the expressiveness that is available to them, simply by typing what they wish to do. It is this sense of embodiment that makes exploring a MOO interesting and exciting, even when there are no others connected at the same time. In other real-time communication systems with no environment or objects to interact with, lack of company makes it a boring and pointless activity. In MOOs, one can always hang around and play a few games of Boggle or Yahtzee while waiting for the others to arrive. The high level of interactivity, together with the relatively low level of vividness of the MOO we use, facilitates a sense of realness beyond the corporeal reality in which we live. We have come to think of this reality as ‘magical reality’.
Conclusions Our students often occupy a range of positions within learning spheres. One of our challenges as teachers is to find ways to facilitate learning within and around these different positions. In this chapter we have looked at how MOOs are uniquely flexible learning environments, capable of accommodating a wide range of different positions. MOOs, we have argued, are inherently constructivist, but nevertheless
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might be used for the more didactic transmission of content that is often an important part of teaching and learning. We discussed the way MOOs facilitate community and noted how integral community is to learning. But MOOs also respect users’ privacy; the online culture in general provides opportunities for silent, unobtrusive observation and reflection. In examining asynchronous and synchronous communication, we identified advantages and limitations to both. Combining ‘same time/same place’ and ‘anytime/anywhere’ approaches appears therefore to hold benefit for the majority of students. Many online learning environments, such as Blackboard, allow instructors to build both forms of communication into their students’ learning. In contrast to other learning environments, however, MOOs are beginning to blur the boundaries between what has traditionally been considered synchronous and asynchronous. But one of the most unique features of MOOs is the reality created through them. MOOs not only permit but actively encourage creativity, innovation, fantasy and play—a sphere both within and apart from conventional reality.
Notes 1
In this case the conference was recorded by Listener, a guest login created for the purpose of recording interactions for our research. Listener’s character description is presented in line 7 of the transcript.
References Bielman, V.A. 2000, ‘Building community in a virtual classroom: construction of classroom culture in a postsecondary distance education class’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Las Vegas, Nevada. Fanderclai, T.L. 1995, ‘MUDs in education: new environments, new pedagogies’, Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, vol. 2, no. 1, (accessed 12 February 2003). Goodfellow, R. 2001, ‘Credit where it’s due’, in Online Learning and Teaching with Technology: Case studies, experience and practice, D. Murphy, R. Walker and G. Webb (eds), Kogan Page, London, pp. 73–80. Haynes, C. and Holmevik, J.R. 2001, High Wired: On the design, use and theory of educational MOOs, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
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Joinson, A. 2003, Understanding the Psychology of Internet Behaviour: Virtual worlds, real lives, Palgrave Macmillan, Great Britain. Jones, Q. 1997, ‘Virtual communities, virtual settlements and cyberarchaeology: a theoretical outline’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 3, no. 3, (accessed 12 December 2002). Jonassen, D.H. 1994, ‘Thinking technology: toward a constructivist design model’, Educational Technology, April, pp. 35–7. Murray, B. 2000, ‘A mirror on the self’, Monitor on Psychology, vol. 31, no. 4, (accessed 12 December 2002). Oliver, R. 2001, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’, in Online Learning and Teaching with Technology: Case studies, experience and practice, D. Murphy, R. Walker and G. Webb (eds), Kogan Page, London, pp. 81–7. Papert, S. and Harel, I. 1991, Constructionism, (accessed 28 February 2002). Reid, E. 1999, ‘Hierarchy and power: social control in cyberspace’, in Communities in Cyberspace, M.A. Smith and P. Kollock (eds), Routledge, London, pp. 108–34. Rheingold, H. 2000, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Stein, D. 1998, Situated Learning in Adult Education, ERIC Digest No. 195, (accessed 15 January 2003). Steuer, J. 1992, ‘Defining virtual reality: dimensions determining telepresence’, Journal of Communication, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 73–93. Suler, J. 2002, ‘The basic psychological features of cyberspace’, in The Psychology of Cyberspace (orig. pub. 1996), (accessed 12 December 2002). Turkle, S. 1995, Life on the Screen: Identity in the age of the Internet, Weidenfeld, London. Waskul, D. and Douglass, M. 1997, ‘Cyberself: the emergence of self in on-line chat’, Information Society, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 375–96. Wood, A.F. and Smith, M.J. 2001, Online Communication: Linking technology, identity, and culture, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey.
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CHAPTER 5
E-learning and program quality: seeing the connection Kathleen Gray, Fiona Wahr, Garry Allan and Alex Radloff Introduction: trends in educational development Notwithstanding the very public rhetoric of the 1990s about the total transformation of every aspect of tertiary education through networked information and communication technology (see for example Daniel 1996; Rossman 1993), in the early twenty-first century we see no revolutionary change in the core activity of major tertiary institutions in the modern world, that is, in the provision of diploma and degree programs. It is true that some programs now afford markedly enhanced learning resources and much greater flexibility in study modes by using certain online features, such as web documents and discussions. It is also the case that some tertiary education providers are now managing the underpinning internal and external communications, workflow processes and record-keeping in new ways that are enabled by online technology applications like web forms and databases. And it is certainly hard to imagine how tertiary teaching and learning could stay in business without email. But society still has the same fundamental expectations about tertiary study—an adult activity leading to improved personal capabilities and socio-economic status, recognised with an award granted by an institution, serving as a formally endorsed marker of expert knowledge. Universities continue to ‘represent learning to individuals and knowledgeable individuals to society’, as Brown and Duguid note in their analysis of the Information Age (2002, p. 216). Almost without exception diploma and degree programs retain the same fundamental conventions as before they went online—taught by tertiaryqualified people, learned course by course following an outline of set topics over a period of time, tested by written assignments and examinations. Meanwhile another kind of influence has been affecting the core activity of tertiary education institutions. More quietly but no less 56
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insistently, the expectation has arisen that they ought to be able to give a transparent account of teaching and learning to their stakeholders—in a publicly funded tertiary education system, the general public, and on their behalf, the public service. Offering a recognisable definition and demonstrable evidence of the quality of tertiary education programs has become part of the responsibility of those who provide them (see for example Woodhouse’s 2002 summary of the multiple roles of quality assurance in higher education). The origins of this influence in the consumer rights movement, in political reform agendas, in radical intellectual thought or elsewhere are not the issue here, any more than is the rise of the internet from military security needs. The aim of this paper is to offer a constructive interpretation of the reality currently faced by managers of educational development in Australian universities and technical training institutes. Having been preoccupied with realising the idea of the virtual classroom for several years (the themes and proceedings of key conferences in the sector provide plenty of evidence), they are now recognising that they need to evaluate teaching and learning initiatives that use online information and communication technologies—or e-learning for short—with reference to the concept of quality assurance in tertiary education. Some key questions can guide the task of making sense of this apparent shift of focus in educational development work. Is the quality of a degree or diploma program critically redefined by e-learning? Conversely, does e-learning make a particular, otherwise uncategorisable, kind of contribution to program quality? This chapter reports on the evolution of educational development activities in RMIT’s former Faculty of Life Sciences—now part of the University’s Science, Engineering and Technology Portfolio—where we have sought to strengthen the connections between e-learning and program quality, to work in an integrated way with both to improve tertiary education, and to evidence this improvement.
Background: strategy and implementation at RMIT Online education has had great strategic importance at RMIT since the University’s Information Technology Alignment Project; from the late 1990s onwards this provided for a learning management system that supported mainstreaming of e-learning to enhance the flexible delivery and student-centredness of programs (McNaught 1999 gives further details). During this period RMIT’s Faculty of Life Sciences engaged in a planned educational development process aimed at implementing
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some level of online course teaching and learning in all of its more than thirty programs. Meanwhile, social concern about quality assurance and quality improvement of teaching and learning broadly in Australia’s tertiary sector has been given new impetus by the establishment of a national quality framework for both sectors of tertiary education, operationalised through the Australian Quality Training Framework in the vocational education sector and the Australian Universities Quality Agency in the higher education sector. RMIT elevated attention to program quality to greater strategic importance, and commissioned the University’s Quality Unit to develop a conceptual framework and policy and procedure instruments to support an evidence-based approach to assuring the quality of its programs. The Faculty of Life Sciences piloted the implementation of a program quality management system for all aspects of program activities in all its programs during 2001–2002. The aim of the Life Sciences approach was to support achievements that address agreed quality assurance criteria through reflective, quality improvement practices, as described in Wahr and Radloff (2002). Thus, in implementing RMIT strategic directions—themselves reflective of wider trends in improving tertiary teaching and learning—educational development of Life Sciences diploma and degree programs led to a concerted effort first to mainstream e-learning and then, in short order, to systematise program quality assurance. This demanded careful thought about the connection between online education and program quality—was educational development in Life Sciences changing pedagogies, or changing identities, or pursuing a consistent vision of improving teaching and learning?
Case study: educational development activity in Life Sciences These questions are explored here through a case study of how an integrated view emerged from educational development activity in Life Sciences over the period from 1999 to 2002. Staff who led this change worked as Directors of Teaching Quality and Information Technology and as associated teaching and learning project officers, based in the Faculty Centre. These staff effected change through continuous engagement with the staff of course and program teaching teams on a range of initiatives: implementing and advising on academic policies and procedures; designing curriculum and learning environments; promoting the improvement of teaching practices; and supporting evaluation of the effectiveness of change by means of staff
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focus groups, student feedback and progress tracking, and formal external review processes. Facilitating online learning RMIT’s Information Technology Alignment Program had sponsored a period of general familiarisation and broad experimentation with the teaching and learning possibilities in Life Sciences that were opened up by online tools such as Blackboard Classroom™. The aims of program and course renewal for online learning (RMIT Faculty of Biomedical and Health Sciences and Nursing 2000) were characterised by an emphasis on the economic enterprise of teaching and learning. The need to renew programs and courses for online learning rested on propositions that included the following: • With the globalisation of ‘e-ducation’, our success depends on competing and collaborating electronically with other knowledge-based organisations. • To remain viable and credible, we need to offer quality-assured, flexibly-accessible, up-to-the-minute educational solutions, for existing and new client groups. It was acknowledged that online teaching and learning is most sensibly and most satisfactorily experienced when it has been properly contextualised in terms of the design, resourcing and operation of the whole of a degree program. Staff ‘learning technology mentoring’ projects and course refurbishment/renewal projects proceeded from the premise that the online design of each component course ought to contribute to making the whole program a purposeful and productive system of teaching and learning. Evaluation of outcomes of the mentored course-by-course approach to renewal for online learning (Gray and McNaught 2001) indicated the need for Life Sciences to ‘undertake a major review of online learning in all its online courses, on a program-by-program basis, so that discussions about the quality and strategic dimensions of online learning could be better integrated with other whole-ofprogram management issues’. There followed a phase of educational development that assumed a base level of online teaching skill in all staff, and thus concentrated more closely on providing specialist design and production support for specific courseware projects. Such projects focused on diploma and degree programs that were designated as having especial
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strategic importance to the University’s program re-engineering and market re-positioning. The aim of this form of educational development became to target support to maintain or improve educational quality while sharing a group of commonly taught courses among multiple programs, or while extending programs to regional and international learning centres. These programs had to be feasible in their development and delivery costs and price-competitive in their enrolment fee structures. Without doubt, facilitation of online learning during this phase paid close attention to quality assurance strategies of many kinds, but these tended to be concerned with an amalgam of technical– bureaucratic and decontextualised pedagogical issues: web publishing standards and copyright records on one hand, and each separate course’s internal design and course-specific evaluation on the other. Staff managing educational development had identified a need for greater attention to program-level quality assurance of factors like those described in Lee and Dzubian (2002)—program team leadership and administration, overarching curriculum design and operation, courseware production and management systems, motivations and accountabilities of teachers and students. An evidence-based integrating framework for reviewing and improving online educational quality in these terms was still wanting.
Implementing program quality assurance Contemporaneously, in the pilot of the University’s overall Program Quality Assurance system, all Life Sciences programs were supported to complete an initial cycle of program quality assurance. This engaged all program leaders in a rigorous annual reporting process, based on finding and using evidence to take stock of their past year’s performance and on setting priorities for the future year’s improvements. As part of this implementation project, the philosophy and principles of educational quality in Life Sciences programs and courses, characterised by an emphasis on the lived experience of teaching and learning, were promulgated (RMIT Faculty of Life Sciences 2002a). These included: • a qualitative conception of learning; • a constructivist approach to learning; • an orientation to teaching that is student-centred/learning oriented; • constructive alignment in designing programs and courses;
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• a scholarly approach to teaching; • a commitment to Boyer’s scholarships; and • a commitment to evidence-based practice in teaching and learning. RMIT Faculty of Life Sciences also had set out IT Scenarios (2001) that outlined in the following terms the need for new ways of thinking about programs—ways that embraced both the quality of the learning experience and also the enterprise of tertiary education, the behaviour of markets in education and the service expectations of clients, and changed work practices arising from structural change in industry sectors (including Life Sciences-related industries and the education sector itself): • In relation to the professional/disciplinary domains included in the life sciences, IT is reshaping the nature of knowledge and skills, the ways these are acquired, and the structure of work. • In relation to the experience of being a learner in the life sciences, IT offers tools to increase the availability of information, and enhance the capacity for simulation, communication and reflection. • In relation to academic life, IT is an aid to creativity and productivity. Academics now need to engage in continuous learning about IT systems of relevance to our academic roles—an important new dimension in the continuing professional development of academics. • In relation to the work of the Faculty, IT has expanded the scale and speed of activity in the business environment in which we operate. Feedback and follow-up on the first cycle of program quality assurance focused especially on building a sense of active, shared ownership of each program’s future within the program teaching team. It also sought to strengthen the linkages between what types of educational development initiatives (e-learning or otherwise) programs needed most, and what educational development resources were actually available to make them happen. Reflection on the first cycle of program quality assurance revealed inter alia (as noted in Wahr, Radloff and Gray 2002) that many program teaching teams needed to develop their capabilities not only to implement these student-experience-centred aspects of
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educational quality, but also to draw elementary management inferences for their programs from the online-technology-powered knowledge economy. As well, it emerged that the educational design objective to re-purpose courses into more than one program wherever possible (rather than duplicating course teaching unnecessarily) required making improvements in cross-department and cross-faculty networking, to ensure that the teaching and learning needs of distinct program cohorts of students were being gauged and met. The re-use of courseware in different programs—in other words, a learning-object approach to improving program efficiency—gave rise to very complex demands for planning and evaluating the investment in e-learning initiatives. These findings about the fundamental orientation of program teaching are well-founded. Oliver (2000, p. 1) says: The need for a turn around is quite pressing. There appears a growing feeling among many of those who run universities and who have until now energetically funded these [on-line learning] developments, that the returns on investment have been too low and some are starting to question the real value of technology as a learning tool. Laurillard (2002, p. 25) says: Without a change in approach, new technology will not serve universities in meeting the challenge of mass higher education and lifelong learning for the knowledge society. The digital age will find its own ways of managing without us. This case study drawn from the educational development activity in RMIT’s Faculty of Life Sciences shows how two educational improvement initiatives that were apparently informed by the separate paradigms of e-learning and program quality arrived at a convergent view about program sustainability. Based on grounded experience in educational development over this period, and reinforced by educational planning and management literature cited in this paper, two things are clear: • E-learning and program quality are distinct, separate and major paradigms in which educational developers work in tertiary education. A reciprocal relationship—paradigm synergy rather than paradigm shift—can be sustained between them.
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• An essential task of educational development in the sector currently is to inform program design and infuse program operations with this synergy. Tertiary programs can evidence their sustainability in terms of this synergy, using a shared set of criteria. The synergy discovered in the Life Sciences case has been recognised elsewhere in quality frameworks. Consideration of the distinctive nature of e-learning is treated explicitly as part of external educational quality standards frameworks such as the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (Baldrige 2002) and the UK Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. But there may be discontinuities in strategy and in practice between these frameworks, the implementation of program quality assurance systems, and the structuring of educational development and management services in a tertiary education institution. The formation of an Office of Program Quality in the Faculty of Life Sciences sought to bring the necessary cohesion to the task of educational development.
Outcomes: managing for program sustainability An outcome of the Life Sciences educational development experience just described is a method of applying a shared set of criteria. These criteria can accommodate equally the knowledge enterprise concerns of e-learning and the learning experience concerns of program quality. They offer a detailed evidence-based management tool to assure program sustainability. Our implementation of RMIT’s program quality assurance system used seven criteria for making claims about a program’s performance, and supporting these with evidence. For our purposes we have found that these can be extended from a strictly pedagogical paradigm of program quality, and can be used to make claims about a program’s sustainability in ways that equally represent the e-learning paradigm, and can support such claims with evidence. Five criteria for defining the aims and evidencing the status of an RMIT program can be paraphrased for this purpose as: 1. the strategic and business case for the program within the University’s strategic plan and directions; 2. the accessibility of the program to all potential learners and the equitable operation of the program in all actual learning settings;
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3. the educational design of the program, including the structuring of learning experiences and assessment in relation to intended outcomes; 4. the provision of facilitation, resourcing and supports to learners that lead to the achievement of learning outcomes in the program; and 5. the operations management of the program in terms of routine academic, administrative, technical and business procedures and responsibilities. Two further meta-criteria for the sustainability of RMIT’s programs are paraphrased here as: 6. self- or internal review and reporting of program performance in the context of the university’s quality systems; and 7. peer or external review and reporting of program performance in the context of relevant industry and professional interests. Guidelines for finer-grained analysis of program performance against such criteria from a program quality perspective have previously been developed (for example in RMIT Faculty of Life Sciences 2002b). As rephrased above, these criteria readily accommodate the key considerations of both a learner-centred pedagogical paradigm and an e-business strategic planning paradigm. They can effectively marshal evidence of these aspects of program performance to make a case for particular educational development interventions or improvements on the basis of their combined impact on: inherent teaching and learning values and qualities; relevance as training and preparation for work in a particular profession; and viability to deliver within the resources of the educational organisation More detailed discussion of the utility of these criteria illustrates the synergies: 1. The strategic and business case for any program within RMIT’s strategic plan and directions assumes that the substance of knowledge, educational markets and policies, and methods of designing and offering programs have all changed and will all continue to change, in the digital age. Program quality rests on detailed program planning documentation that quantifies an understanding of such change and on regular monitoring of key performance indicators,
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reflecting a life-cycle management approach to the renewal and regeneration of the University’s suite of programs. (Note: The technology-enabled disaggregation of course provision from program provision and accreditation has yet to make a substantial impact in the Australian higher education sector, and remains vexed by issues of quality assurance, as discussed at length in Twigg (2001). In particular, viable proposals to produce and manage repurposable courseware that is independent of the University’s own suite of sustainable degree or diploma programs are not common.) 2. The accessibility of the program to all potential learners and the equitable operation of the program in all actual learning settings is a growing challenge in the contexts in which programs now operate—for example, geographically distributed independent learners and group learning centres; diverse cohorts composed of mature age students, international students and students needing basic learning skills or bridging knowledge; and increasing recognition of individual learning styles, accompanied by increasing class sizes. In these contexts, appropriate use of online learning environments (including digital audio and visual media and library resources and electronic tools for presentation, communication and collaboration) is important to support and enhance the quality provision of learning opportunities; equally important is being able to account for the impact of e-learning on student satisfaction. 3. The educational design of programs—including the structuring of learning experiences and assessment in relation to intended outcomes—can draw upon clear consensus among educational researchers about principles of effective learning and good practices in teaching in higher education. The ability to leverage learning experiences and assessment through networked information and communication technology that is carefully embedded in curriculum is an acknowledged major advance in educational design. The relationship of student e-learning activities and outcomes in any particular course in relation to a program’s more general learning objectives across a year or stream must be evident. 4. The provision of facilitation, resourcing and supports to learners that lead to the achievement of learning outcomes in the program includes maintenance and risk-management of online learning environments. But more importantly, it
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includes optimising the human resource, that is, teaching staff who are not just teachers but also active researchers and professional practitioners. The way in which academics manage the ever more rapidly refreshed base of knowledge and practice in their discipline, so that this can be shared with students as well as colleagues, is a key to program quality. Such knowledge management now depends critically on scholarship and study that takes advantage of electronic forms of publication and communication, and teaching methods that broker these effectively. 5. The quality of operations management in a program—in other words, well-coordinated routine academic, administrative, technical and business procedures and responsibilities —is strongly affected by the ability of the program staff to work, and manage working knowledge, as a team. In academic work environments where staff are dispersed, multitasking, highly mobile and time-poor, electronic records management protocols and virtual meetings can facilitate regular shared reflective practice about teaching and learning, and can ensure the inter-operability of essential program functions and business continuity as leadership and coordination roles change. 6. Self- or internal review and reporting of program performance is a fundamental meta-criterion of program sustainability, evidenced at RMIT in the system of program annual reporting. Meaningful use by program quality management of a program annual reporting system is dependent at a fundamental level on the quality assurance of routine operations described in item (5) above. Importantly, an interactive electronic annual reporting system also enables efficient integrated analysis of program performance data and goals, for collaborative planning about teaching and learning across the many levels in the organisation where program quality factors are influenced and where changes that improve program performance need to occur. 7. Peer or external review and reporting of program performance in the context of relevant industry and professional interests has the same requirement as the research and reporting activities described in items (4) and (6) above, for a timecritical and professionally presented approach to partnershipbuilding and networking. With thoughtful deployment of e-communication and e-learning strategies for such purposes,
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a program may not only maintain its credibility with industry and professional stakeholders but in some cases show leadership and foster innovation among them.
Conclusion: future directions E-learning and program quality may be seen to represent two different ways of looking at the advancement of teaching and learning in tertiary education. Each has a clear set of values and intentions, is supported by a body of scholarship, and offers a community of practice with which educational developers may identify. But they are not mutually exclusive; indeed, using either perspective to understand program performance can be more revealing when it is informed by the other. Program successes can be propagated, and program shortfalls can be addressed or obviated, through program planning and program management that integrates both e-learning and program quality approaches to educational development. At RMIT strategic planning for the future of teaching and learning seeks to ensure that program development work and program leadership work manifest a more and more sophisticated understanding of the interdependencies of e-learning and program quality, in order to sustain the value and competitive edge of our programs. The roles and responsibilities of those academics who develop and manage teaching teams are changing as the two paradigms intertwine. In particular, there is a growing need for program leaders to build the capability in themselves and their teams to use information and communication technologies judiciously to manage program performance against key targets and indicators, make sound business decisions about educational improvement and work effectively in diverse teams. The changing nature of leading and working in program teams has implications for academic teaching staff development, including the focus of staff development programs, the modes in which staff development is offered and undertaken, and evaluation of its outcomes. Few formal training or continuing professional development options currently exist for academic teaching staff in which learnings about e-learning and about program quality are aligned one with the other. There are fewer still where the staff learning experience can be shown to translate directly into the effectiveness and efficiency gains essential to the sustainability of the program with which the staff member is affiliated. For such reasons, the Faculty of Life Sciences chose to work less and less with traditional workshop and training-
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course formats, and increasingly with web resources for self-directed just-in-time learning and with action research models of workintegrated staff development. There are also implications for educational developers and the management of educational development itself. At RMIT, planning has been done to bring together, using the logic of sustainability, what had previously seemed to be the two separate educational development agendas of, on one hand, courseware renewal for online learning, and on the other, program renewal to reorient the curriculum to emerging industries and professions. This planning has resulted in restructuring work groups and processes, and encouraging all educational developers to broaden their base of interest and expertise to include both e-learning and program quality. This planning has also underscored the importance of agreeing to and applying valid quality assurance criteria for educational development work itself, where much remains to be done. At this point in the continuing evolution of the tertiary education sector, working complementarily with both e-learning and program quality paradigms seems to us to strengthen the likelihood that our core teaching and learning activities will serve our students, our academics and our other educational partners well into the future.
References Baldrige National Quality Program 2002, Educational Criteria for Performance Excellence, National Institute of Standards and Technology, US Department of Commerce, (accessed 30 September 2002). Brown, J. and Duguid, P. 2002, The Social Life of Information, Harvard Business School Press, Boston. Daniel, J. 1996, Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology strategies for higher education, Kogan Page, London. Gray, K. and McNaught, C. 2001, ‘Evaluation of achievements from collaboration in a learning technology mentoring program’, in Meeting at the Crossroads (Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE), 9-12 December, Melbourne), G. Kennedy, M. Keppell, C. McNaught and T. Petrovic (eds), Biomedical Multimedia Unit, The University of Melbourne, (accessed 30 September 2002). Laurillard, D. 2002, ‘Rethinking teaching for the Knowledge Society’,
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Educause Review, Jan–Feb, pp. 16–25, (accessed 30 September 2002). Lee, J. and Dzubian, C. 2002, ‘Using quality assurance strategies for online programs’, Educational Technology Review 10(2), pp. 69–78, (accessed 30 September 2002). McNaught, C. et al. 1999, ‘Developing and evaluating a universitywide online Distributed Learning System: the experience at RMIT University’, Educational Technology & Society 2(4): [12 pp.] (accessed 30 September 2002). Oliver, R. 2000, ‘When teaching meets learning: design principles and strategies for Web-based learning environments that support knowledge construction’, in Learning to Choose – Choosing to Learn (Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE), Southern Cross University, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 9–14 December), R. Sims, M. O’Reilly and S. Sawkins (eds), (accessed 30 September 2002). RMIT Faculty of Biomedical and Health Sciences and Nursing 2000, Plan of Program and Course Renewal for Online Learning, internal publication. RMIT Faculty of Life Sciences 2002a, Educational Philosophy and Principles, internal publication. RMIT Faculty of Life Sciences 2002b, Outline of 2002 Program Annual Report/2003 Program Action Workplan, internal publication. Rossman, Parker 1993, The Emerging Worldwide Electronic University: Information age global higher education (Praeger studies on the 21st century), Praeger, Westport CT. Twigg, C. 2001, Quality Assurance for Whom? Providers and consumers in today’s distributed learning environment (Report on the 3rd Pew Symposium on Learning and Technology, 13–24 July 2000, Lake George, NY), Center for Academic Transformation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY (accessed 30 September 2002). UK Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education [n.d.] Distance learning guidelines [11 pp.], (accessed 30 September 2002). Wahr, F. and Radloff, A. 2002, ‘Using quality assurance to drive a teaching and learning agenda: taking a risk, meeting the challenge’, in Quality Conversations (2002 Annual International
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Conference of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia, 7–10 July, Perth, Western Australia), Research and Development in Higher Education vol: 25, A. Goody, J. Herrington and M. Northcote (eds), (accessed 30 September 2002). Wahr, F., Radloff, A. and Gray, K. 2002, ‘Program quality assurance: just another management fad?’ Paper presented at the 7th Annual Quality in Higher Education Seminar, Melbourne, October. Woodhouse, D. 2002, ‘Quality: making a difference’, in Quality Conversations (2002 Annual International Conference of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia, 7–10 July, Perth, Western Australia), Research and Development in Higher Education vol. 25, A. Goody, J. Herrington and M. Northcote (eds), (accessed 30 September 2002).
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CHAPTER 6
Sustainable large scale online development Linda Pannan, Chris van der Craats and Jim McGovern Introduction RMIT University, like many providers of traditional face-to-face tertiary education, has embraced online delivery as an important part of all of its courses. In support of this goal, RMIT has provided the technology infrastructure and a courses portal through its Distributed Learning System (DLS), as well as a centralised support group of project managers, web publishers, multi-media developers, and instructional designers through Learning Technology Services (LTS) (see Kenny 2001 for a thorough description of course development in this environment). Although the central facilities and commitment at RMIT are substantial, necessary and important, they are not sufficient to achieve an online presence for 100 percent of all courses, and much of the work of implementing the University strategy falls to the Faculties and Schools of the University. The management of the Faculty of Applied Science fully supports the University initiative, believing that it offers the possibility of improved student learning and satisfaction, and new opportunities to create revenue streams through its main business of science education. This is supported by indications of a ready and willing market for fully online education (Thornton 1999), and evidence of satisfaction within the non-traditional market served by fully online education in the USA (Maloney 1999). The success of online programs through Open Learning Australia (OLA) indicates that this is also the case in Australia. Already the Faculty has been able to leverage online development for one purpose into material that can be used for other purposes, particularly in high demand areas like Computer Science where online material is being re-used through OLA, the Africa Virtual University, off-shore partners in Malaysia, and RMIT Vietnam. Often these different sites use different teaching models centred around the 71
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same online material. The availability of its portfolio of online courses allows the Faculty to exploit opportunities to deliver science education into new markets. The large scale of online developments that support this initiative necessarily depend on appropriate organisation, and the dedicated and sustained effort of academic and support staff. This chapter describes the overall approach taken in the Faculty of Applied Science at RMIT. The approach is built on the recognition that sustainable, large scale flexible delivery requires that online considerations become a routine part of teaching and learning, and that support services need to be accessible and relevant to all staff. The approach is based on encouragement and support, and use of development methods that recognise that staff will have a range of capabilities and motivation. The remainder of the paper describes the background in the Faculty of Applied Science, and the two major planks in the Faculty strategy to develop its online activity: organisational and technical support, and a development framework. Finally, an assessment of the effectiveness of the Faculty strategy is briefly discussed.
Online delivery within the Faculty of Applied Science The Faculty of Applied Science at RMIT consists of almost 300 academic staff delivering over 1000 courses. It is a diverse faculty, covering the higher education disciplines of Applied Physics, Applied Chemistry, Environmental Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Operations Research, Computer Science, Food Science, Nutrition, Consumer Science, Psychology, Disability Studies and Geospatial Science, as well as TAFE programs in a number of these applied sciences, across multiple campuses. In 1997, at the start of the RMIT online program, the development activity and expertise was spread unevenly throughout the Faculty. At one end of the online adoption spectrum, the Department of Computer Science routinely delivered lecture notes, assignments and supplementary material through websites, generally accessible through the lecturers’ home pages. At the other end of this spectrum, several departments provided little online access to students. Within all departments, however, there were (and still are) online enthusiasts, so that in a few courses in all departments there was a significant online presence, often involving quite sophisticated use of multimedia. Overall though, less than 10 percent of academic staff were participating in online development.
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While the Faculty approach has many interrelated features, it may be useful to view it in terms of its organisational and technical support, and its development framework. The organisational and technical support provides general services that facilitate information flow and decision making. The development framework also facilitates communication, but further provides a practical model for academic staff to engage with online development. The framework allows staff to enter online delivery at a level appropriate for their course, capabilities and resources, but also establishes a context and direction for further development.
Organisational and technical support The Faculty’s organisational and technical support approach manages the application, technical, organisational and environmental factors that impact on development efficiency and delivery effectiveness. These are well described by Sumner and Hostetler (1999), who confirm the importance of the following factors relevant to the adoption of technology in teaching: • application development factors, which include: • the compatibility of online development with the capabilities and skills of an organisation; • the compatibility of online development with the goals of adopters; and • the availability of the required technological infrastructure; • support factors, which include: • the availability of technical support; • management commitment to resources and professional development; • communication and recognition of success; and • user participation in decision-making; • organisational factors, which include: • good internal communication; • support for innovation through decentralised, functionally differentiated structures; • collaboration between technical support specialists and academic content providers; and • support for mentoring; and
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• environmental factors, which include: • the culture of technological leadership in an organisation; and • external imperatives, such as uptake of online delivery by competitors. Within the Faculty these factors are addressed through the organisation of committees, structures and work units. These are used to deal with motivation, sharing of goals, information flow to and from the central organisation, communication between developers, celebration of success, provision of resources, lobbying for resources, maintaining the development and delivery infrastructure, and interfacing with the central University system. The organisational and technical framework, more fully described by McGovern, van der Craats and Pannan (2001), is briefly outlined here. The major committees, support facilities and activities include the following. • The Information Technology Technical Support Group, Applied Science (ITAS): this committee consists of the technical support staff of all Departments. It pools information and resources in the development of the Faculty’s IT resources, lifting overall Faculty capabilities and services to staff and students. • The Flexible Delivery Leadership Group (FDLG): this committee is composed of academic staff and developers, with a representative from every department and campus location, as well as faculty, the Faculty Learning Resource Centre and ITAS representation, providing a direct link between all academics and faculty flexible delivery planning. It maintains a focus on pedagogical issues while determining and advising on student, staff and IT support requirements across the Faculty, assists with staff development planning, provides mentoring to colleagues, and acts as a communication network for information exchange across departments and locations, and between the Faculty and staff within departments. • The Faculty Learning Resource Centre (FLRC): this support unit currently comprises just over three full-time equivalent staff with project management, instructional design, multimedia development and web publishing skills, providing assistance to staff of the Faculty engaged in online delivery projects. It develops relationships with these staff and sets up resources and processes to support their work.
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• Faculty Flexible Delivery Forum: this forum, which meets twice yearly, provides broader perspectives on online delivery through demonstrations of approaches, celebration of staff online achievements, presentations of project outcomes, and staff and student panel discussions. • Flexible delivery workshops: these workshops, originally held to enhance the IT literacy of all staff, provide some specialist skills, and increase staff exposure to the possibilities of online delivery, are now held ‘on demand’ and include hands-on experience with specialist tools, and using the DLS and FLRC tools and processes. Often attendees bring their own material and FLRC staff and FDLG members assist them to create websites for their courses. • Staff development activities: these include funded small projects, workshops, courses, and participation in ASSETT Research Group (Advancing Scholarship & Science Education through Technology) activity. The Faculty facilitates projects, assisting in project management and seeking funds. Notable projects include: enhancement of an online objectives-based testing environment developed in the Faculty called RMIT WebLearn (WebLearn 2003) to include improved question editing and integration with Maple (mathematical package), direct funding of the OLA project, and other online development projects, together with experimentation with various aspects of online delivery.
The development framework The development framework used within the Faculty supports an iterative, or evolving, approach to the creation of online resources and courses. It offers five levels of development and recognises that not all courses need to use online resources completely, nor do they need to use every online delivery tool right from the start. Online resources can be developed incrementally. The level chosen for development may be determined to best match the subject context, student needs, and a teacher’s individual requirements, experience and resources. Each level has its own particular demands and meets different outcomes. These levels can be traversed slowly, with several development iterations possible as the personal skills of the staff involved are enhanced, student demand increases and, most importantly, the learning needs of students are identified. As such, it supports a usercentred approach to online course design (Blythe 2001), where the
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designer is able to develop their course in response to feedback from users. Figure 1 provides an overview of this Faculty five-level development and delivery model, and a brief outline of the administration, technological support, pedagogy and skills issues raised by each level is presented here, with a more complete description given by van der Craats, McGovern and Pannan (2002). • Level 1 addresses university policy and administration of courses. It provides basic information, such as syllabuses, timetables, important dates and activities, as well as learning resources and requirements usually specified as mandatory by the University. • Level 2 provides course management systems and their use with minimum technical complexity. The value of this level is in communication and availability of clear well-structured access to documents such as lecture notes, assignments, or any resources created in electronic form by standard document processors. • Level 3 provides a more intensive online resource and greater use of technology in student learning. Movement is away from temporally based material in traditional documents to learning material that tends to be presented around cohesive and coherent topics using HTML. Discussion forums and strategies for taking the focus off the lecturer and developing peer-based and self-assessed formative assessment are incorporated. Basic online teaching principles are adopted (see, for example, Driscoll 2000). • Level 4 deals with support for fully online learning. Learning objects (Oliver 2001) are the basis of course material. There is more emphasis on interaction between students and material, and guided interaction between students. Online-specific pedagogical imperatives are addressed. Material is more flexible and navigation through material more sophisticated. • Level 5 provides media rich computer-based resources. (Project management strategies may be needed for successful outcomes.) These include high-end commercial products, and efficient and effective, quality-assured online distance-based education courses.
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5 LEVELS OF ONLINE DEVEOPMENT Level 1: Administration
Course guides Staf f contact Timetable Assessment r equirements List of r eferences, texts and other r esour ces
Level 2: Document distribution
Lecture notes and PPT slides Assignments Timetable Past exams Announcements
Level 3: Enhanced face-to-face
Navigable str ucture of course Topic based course material Discussion for ums Graphics and photos etc Formative assessment (quizzes)
Level 4: Fully online
Flexible deliver y Choice of lear ning activities Online assessments Moderated discussion for ums Of f campus contents
Level 5: Enhanced online
Inclusion of media rich r esour ces Flexible teaching and lear ning Of f campus contents Suitable for other markets
Figure 1: Development flow in the 5-level model
The design of this five-level development framework is based on the premise that adoption of online teaching and learning by academic staff will be more likely to be achieved if it fits in with their current work practice and meets the likely requirements of their students. Staff can use their existing material and documents. It firmly places control of any development with the teachers of the course, and the technical support provided in the Faculty is accompanied by skills development and practice wherever possible. Basically, the strategy is to engage staff at levels appropriate to their own need and skill base, to build close relationships between staff and technical support, and to make resources accessible and relevant to the Faculty.
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Implementation experience The Faculty’s organisational and technical support approach, described above, was implemented in immediate response to the University’s online delivery goals and has evolved over the past five years. The progress achieved and the gradual change towards greater acceptance of online delivery methods provided the impetus for creation of a development framework that could engage staff at varying levels of capability and delivery requirements. Hence, the Faculty fivelevel development approach was gently developed and implemented over a number of years. A short guide was prepared in 2001 and made available to all academic staff. Also, a Faculty flexible delivery forum was dedicated around the five-level theme to further communicate its content and purpose. At that time many teaching staff greeted the model with relief. Among other issues, they appreciated the clarity of the intent of the different levels and the ‘revelation’ that not all courses need be, or indeed should be, developed to a fully online level, and that they did not have to master a wide range of complex web development tools. Currently, the Faculty FLRC staff use the fivelevel model, at the course level, to assess and assist online development appropriately. From a student perspective, University-wide feedback (as reported by Scarlett 2002) indicates that the students in the Faculty programs are relatively frequent users of online material. By and large, students find the material useful. Less readily available is feedback about the staff experience. While the positive student feedback implies significant staff commitment to quality and student-centred online material, it does not reveal the impact of the Faculty strategy, nor where the Faculty should place its resources now. Questions that may provide useful information in allocating Faculty resources for future online development include: • What do academic staff understand by online delivery, and does it fit with Faculty aspirations? • What motivates and guides staff in the development of online material? • What levels of the Faculty’s five-level model are being embraced, and what resources are needed? • What tools are being used, and what are staff development needs in this area? • How is online development resourced? • What are impediments to further online development?
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These questions, among others, were part of a Faculty survey of staff perceptions of, engagement with, and hopes for online delivery and learning. The main results are reported below. Analysis of staff online learning questionnaire Twenty-six staff provided anonymous responses to the Faculty questionnaire on a self-selection basis. The level of online engagement reported by the respondents was well distributed across levels 2, 3 and 4 (Figure 2). It appears that this sample group did not include representation from the handful of staff with a course at level 5, but otherwise the spread of engagement extent corresponds to that observed anecdotally in a review of the Faculty DLS courseware. Level of online development & use 1 Staf f engaged at this level
2
3
4
5
*** ** *** **** ***** * * *** ** * *
Figure 2: Distribution of staf f online engagement extent, accor ding to the 5-level model
Analysis of responses reveals that a majority of staff have a positive (38%) or at least a neutral (42%) definition of online delivery, as opposed to negative (11%) or null (8%). Sixty-two percent believe it is ‘very effective if used to augment face-to-face’ teaching, and most believe that their students find it effective or potentially effective in support of their learning—46 percent agreed that their students ‘expect this style of material and treat it as a normal part of learning’. Also, half of the staff make daily (50%) use of online facilities as part of their course presentation, course communications and/or course assessment, while almost all of the remainder use it weekly (38%). A few stated that they never (8%) use these facilities in their courses. Figure 3 reveals that there is a definite trend of greater use of simpler tools; although staff conveyed a variety of uses of the technology in their courses, ‘distributing course notes’ (77%) was still rated ‘v. high’ on the importance scale, while ‘providing enhancements’ (65%) rated second. It seems that staff were often using tools that they had already mastered in their purely face-to-face courses. This is consistent with development level 2–3, at which most courses and staff are operating, and indicates the potential for use of more sophisticated tools and techniques.
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Digital technology tools & online deliver y tools
Frequency of tool use (% of r espondents) Sometimes
Often
Email
23
77
Internet
31
69
8
23
69
PowerPoint pr esentations
11
31
58
Learning management system
35
27
35
HTML files
19
50
27
Discussion for ums, newsgr oups
35
38
23
Quiz & assessment
19
58
19
Web tools
54
35
8
Animation tools
62
31
Word documents
Never
Figure 3: T ools used by staf f—tool type and fr equency of use
Staff further revealed that ‘colleagues’ and ‘forums & workshops’ played pivotal roles in alerting them to the potential value of online technology in student learning (62% and 35% respectively). Attribution for assistance in starting to use it in their courses was to these same sources (54% and 31% respectively), and both sources received the highest importance ratings. Most online development is achieved through extra work, with 73 percent of respondents admitting that ‘I work many extra hours— from home or at work’. Not surprisingly, the biggest barrier to achieving online learning is cited spontaneously by at least 62 percent as being ‘time’ for training and development; lack of adequate resources follows a close second. Quite unexpectedly, a gratifying majority (58%) count this development work as ‘part of my normal work’; assistance in the form of casual staff (19%), departmental IT personnel (15%) or the FLRC (19%) is also acknowledged.
Discussion While this is a limited survey, its results generally provide encouraging support for the Faculty strategy. Staff appear well motivated to use online
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material in their teaching, and participation levels are high. Staff acknowledge online development largely as part of their ‘normal work’. Teachers, by and large, accept the potential and effectiveness of the online medium for enhancing student learning. This supports the view that the need for motivators and mentors for engaging staff may be waning, and that online development can be included in the routine processes of course development as performed by program teams at RMIT. Already, there is evidence that the early adopters who provided the initial energy and direction for the FDLG are not interested in the more routine work of large-scale online delivery, and are already moving on to what they see as more interesting challenges of online learning. There is still potential for staff development, as simpler tools and basic online techniques dominate the current delivery environment. Enhancing staff online capabilities forms part of the Faculty strategy, and with many staff acknowledging that both staff and students are still learning how to use the tools effectively, the potential for use of more sophisticated tools and techniques will be achieved over time. This has implications for the support provided by the FLRC and the staff development workshops. These may need to move their focus to support for more sophisticated tools and use of more advanced online pedagogy. Least encouraging is the reality that many staff dedicate many extra hours of their own time to online development, and that time is the most frequently reported barrier to further development. This is a common finding with respect to adoption of online delivery. In the words of Sumner and Hostetler (1999), staff need ‘time, time, time: time to learn it, time to set it up, and time to teach it to students’. With workload perceived as an issue in Australian universities, this may not be sustainable, and finding the mechanisms to support staff in developing their online teaching will be a challenge for the Faculty. It would appear that the more incremental, iterative Faculty approach is not incompatible with the project-based development model used by the central online development unit within LTS at RMIT. The purpose and expected outcomes of these two approaches, as well as their resource and operating environments, are substantially different. Both, however, have their place. The project-based LTS approach supports rapid development of strategically targeted courseware to a high online level within a comparatively small number of specific projects, where the academics assume the role of content experts. At this higher end of the online scale, resources must be more targeted and a far more stringent pedagogical quality assurance process needs to apply (such as that described by Kenny 2001). In
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comparison, the Faculty of Applied Science development framework provides all staff with the opportunity for varying degrees of online involvement, as well as encouraging incremental development and expansion of online delivery over time.
Conclusion The challenge for many universities is to provide quality online support for a large number of courses and programs with few additional resources. To employ the required number of instructional designers, web publishers and multi-media developers is not practical, and perhaps not even necessary or desirable. The approach here is to develop academic staff skills along with their courses, and to give academic staff a stake in the development of such courses. Staff need to be supported organisationally, technically and by processes that allow them to start from a relatively low skill base and to participate in a form of self-paced development. The support structures and process framework described in this chapter have contributed to the Faculty’s success in improving staff capability thus far and in attaining its current level of online delivery and learning. By providing mechanisms and real support relevant to staff, and by engaging staff early at basic levels, the Faculty has been able to provide a portfolio of online courses, useful in their own right, but which are also the basis of enhanced, improved courses. It is also approaching the stage where online considerations are now routinely handled by teaching staff and the programs teams that guide content and delivery at the program level. Issues that may hinder the sustainability of these processes also require attention, and have been identified as the reliance on ‘extra work’ from staff with little time to spare, and the limitations of the skill levels and basic online techniques being used by the majority during development and delivery. Achieving greater levels of online material as staff and students become more demanding will provide a continuing challenge for universities.
References Blythe, S. 2001, ‘Designing online courses: user-centred practice’, Computers and Composition, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 329–46. Driscoll, M. 2000, ‘Ten things we know about teaching online’, Teaching Online, Technology for Learning Newsletter, Lakewood Publications, Minneapolis, MA, vol. 1, pp. 4–5.
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Kenny, J. 2001, ‘Where academia meets management: a model for the effective development of quality learning material using new technologies’, in Meeting at the Crossroads (Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference of ASCILITE, 9–12 December 2001, Melbourne), G. Kennedy, M. Keppell, C. McNaught and T. Petrovic (eds), Biomedical Multimedia Unit, University of Melbourne, pp. 327–34. McGovern, J., Pannan L. and van der Craats, C. 2001, ‘Large-scale delivery of web-based university courses: the experience of one science faculty’, in AusWeb01: The Pervasive Web (Proceedings of 7th Australian World Wide Web Conference, 22–25 April 2001), A. Treloar and A. Ellis (eds), Southern Cross University Press, Lismore, NSW, pp. 235–46. Maloney, W.A. 1999, ‘Brick and mortar campuses go on-line’, Academe, Washington, 85(5), pp. 18–24. Oliver, R. 2001, ‘Learning objects: supporting flexible delivery of online learning’, in Meeting at the Crossroads (Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference of ASCILITE, 9–12 December 2001, Melbourne), G. Kennedy, M. Keppell, C. McNaught and T. Petrovic (eds), Biomedical Multimedia Unit, University of Melbourne, pp. 453–60. Scarlett, S. 2002, RMIT Program Experience Survey 2002: Universitywide Report & Faculty Report, prepared for Student Feedback Project, August 2002, Quality Consultancy Unit, RMIT University, Melbourne, pp. 1–4. Sumner, M. and Hostetler, D. 1999, ‘Factors influencing the adoption of technology in teaching, Journal of Computer Information Systems, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 81–7. Thornton, C. 1999, ‘Back to school, web style’, PC World Online, vol. 17, no. 7, pp. 39–40. Van der Craats, C., McGovern, J. and Pannan, L. 2002, ‘A five-level approach to the large-scale development and delivery of online programs’, in Winds of Change in the Sea of Learning (Proceedings of the 19th Annual Conference of ASCILITE, 8–11 December 2002), A. Williamson, C. Gunn, A. Young and T. Clear (eds), Unitec, Auckland, NZ, vol. 2, pp. 681–90. WebLearn 2003, .
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CHAPTER 7
Academics in transition: search for a new identity Dr Sandra Jones Introduction The need to design learning environments that combine a studentcentred approach with utilisation of the virtual learning made possible by the internet creates challenges for universities and the staff they employ (academics, administrators and technical experts). First, there are issues of cost and quality related to the design and provision of this new educational environment. Second, there are student issues such as equity of access. Third, there are questions of the level and type of academic knowledge and skills required to design and deliver such learning environments. My focus in this chapter is on the last of these challenges, namely the impacts of these changes on academic identity. Chief among these is the question of how academics react to limitations in the traditional autonomy they have had in relation to designing appropriate educational delivery models. The chapter will first discuss these challenges and then present a short personal reflection of two examples in which I sought to design student-centred virtual learning environments. This latter provided me, as an academic practitioner embedded in a university, with the opportunity both to reflect upon my practice and the practice of others, and to take advantage of the peculiar benefit of deep insider research, namely: the knowledge the researcher brings concerning history and cultures, and an awareness of body language, semiotics and slogan systems operating within the cultural norms of the organisation or group (Edwards 2002, p. 72).
Changing pedagogy—changing identity? Under the traditional teacher-centred educational pedagogy, academicsas-researchers and teachers, steeped in a culture of academic freedom and autonomy, have made all decisions concerned with the design 84
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and delivery of the educational environment (Jones and Creese 2001). Academics have traditionally been discipline-based experts who embark on a continuous double loop process in which their research informs their teaching. In this environment the first priority is to ‘keep up with developments in their content discipline . . . and . . . contribute to them through research’ (Biggs 1999, p. 5). In this context teaching has been regarded as the delivery of oratory, sometimes supported by visual aids, with students as passive recipients of information (Ramsden 1992). The move to a student-centred educational pedagogy, which seeks to provide opportunities for student conceptual knowledge and experience to become central to learning through analysis and reflection, requires a new role for the academic-as-teacher, as a guide, coach, motivator, facilitator and co-ordinator of learning resources. It requires the academic-as-teacher to create a ‘context of learning which encourages students actively to engage in subject matter’ (Ramsden 1992, p. 114; Laurillard 1994). In this context the student becomes an active ‘doer’, presenting, analysing, questioning, judging, and combining ideas and information against an argument in order to solve problems and construct ways to develop knowledge (Ballard and Clanchy 1997). This requires the academic-as-teacher to design the educational experience as a two-way interactive, reflective and iterative process, compared to the traditional environment in which knowing and doing are separated (Resnick 1987). This also changes the role of the academic-as-researcher, as knowledge gained from research becomes only one contribution to the learning environment. Various models have been developed to explore this new student-centred pedagogy. All recognise the need to design activities by which students’ prior knowledge is linked to that of the teachers in a way that encourages discussion, reflection and adaptation, in a realworld context (Dunkin and Biddle 1974; Brown, Collins and Duguid 1989; Laurillard 1994). The ‘situated learning environment’ created enables knowledge development, learning and cognition to be regarded as ‘integral parts of what is learnt within the real-world’ (Brown, Collins and Duguid 1989, p. 4). Accordingly, creating an effective situated learning environment requires different skills from those traditionally associated with the ‘Platonic’ philosopher/teacher whose research formed the foundation of their discipline-based scholarship. Boyer (1990) summarises this as the need to recognise the link between the four scholarships by which the academic first ‘discovers’ new knowledge, then gives it meaning (integration), applies it to consequential problems (application) and
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finally transfers the knowledge to others (teaching). Academics need to first reflect upon their teaching practice and then to develop ‘authentic learning environments’ in which ‘activities of the domain are shaped by its culture’ (Brown, Collins and Duguid 1989, p. 4). Biggs (1999) claims further that academics-as-teachers need to engage in a more participative educational design that focuses on deep rather than surface learning, in which students progress from purely rote learning and repetition to understanding the underlying ideas, themes, principles or successful applications. This student-centred educational pedagogy has also led to greater emphasis on teaching as action learning in which reflection on student feedback is used to improve teaching (Biggs 1999). This requires academics-as-teachers to explore new ways to engage students though action-based learning and research (Cherry 1995), to design experiential individual and group activities that recognise education as a partnership with students (Jones 1999; 2000), and to collaborate and share knowledge and ideas with peers (Biggs 1999). The outcome of this pedagogical change is that the way academics view their identity must change from knowledge developers and communicators to knowledge sharers. This change has significant implications for those academics who have been drawn to the university environment by the opportunity to undertake ‘pure research’ and to impart their discipline-specific knowledge to students. Instead, what is required is a new academic identity that is more collaborative and that brings together academic, administrative and technical experts. This has the potential to cause a significant identity crisis for academics unless the university establishes a supportive culture in which there are positive rewards and acknowledgement for the adoption of a new identity, such as promotion prospects and acknowledgement of teaching excellence (Jones 2001). Further challenges to academic identity are created when the virtual environment is superimposed on the student-centred educational pedagogy, as discussed in the next section.
Virtual classrooms—changing identity? The virtual learning environment made possible by the internet provides students with the opportunity to eradicate the disadvantage of ‘social distance’ that has characterised ‘distance education’, by increasing their ability to communicate and share ideas, knowledge and experience (Gerrard 2001). Laurillard (1994) claims that advances made possible by interactive communication technology, such as computer-mediated teleconferencing and computer-based simula-
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tions, provide the opportunity for a two-way interaction and negotiation between teachers and students. Reeves, Herrington and Oliver (2002, p. 565) argue that the internet provides the opportunity for ‘authentic tasks to guide student learning’. They present examples of how the virtual learning environment can be used to afford students greater flexibility to move freely around the resources provided rather than move in a linear fashion that may not ape the complexities of real life. Problems presented to students can use the full capacities of the technology to present situations and scenarios in video clips, texts links and images to give meaning and purpose to the students’ endeavours, and to provide motivation to complete the task (Reeves, Herrington and Oliver 2002, p. 566). However, others caution against too exclusive a reliance on the virtual learning environment as a replacement for the face-to-face learning environment. A Senate Committee Report into Universities in Crisis (2001, p. 173) cautioned that quality teaching is about ‘finding the right balance between face-to-face communication, interaction via other media and individual work so that each experience is maximised’. This supports Privateer’s (1999, p. 65) call for a ‘strategically guided approach to technology-mediated instruction’. Whether one adopts an IT augmented approach to face-to-face educational delivery, or a fully online virtual learning environment, there are challenges to academic identity. The more sophisticated the educational design needed to support the virtual learning environment, the more technical expertise is required. For example, simply placing information ‘online’ for students to read (a design that conforms more closely to a teacher-centred pedagogy) requires fewer skills than designing interactive learning opportunities for students. Accordingly, as academics attempt to design real-world learning opportunities for students using the virtual environment, greater threats to their identity as autonomous actors occur as they are forced to rely on others for their technical skills and expertise. Kandlebinger (1999, p. 2) states that there is a need for ‘some combination of graphic designers, computer programmers, video makers, animators and content experts’. Indeed Gerrard (2001) describes a typical team as one in which all decisions on the structure of the course and module content are collegiate…academics are assisted by media producers,
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educational technologists, designers, editors and administrators, but the actual academic development is entirely in the hands of academics (p. 579). This need to rely on a broad range of technical experts to design the educational experience threatens the autonomous identity of academics as discipline experts. Laurillard (1994, p. 21) claims that teachers may not have the skills to adapt to this new role as a ‘facilitator of knowledge preparing, supervising and de-briefing the multimedia assisted learning and providing students with interactive access to large text and audio-based learning’. Collings (1999, p. 5) argues that academics do not have the knowledge required for ‘articulation’ or ‘the work involved in negotiating the development and use of information technology infrastructure and designing and organising new ways of teaching’, while Reid (2000) states that academics need to adapt to a new ‘knowledge culture’ characterised by ‘hardware and software…used by staff and students, a new net language, and new processes through which knowledge is created, shared and exchanged’. A report by the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Technology summarised the challenges for academics as follows: Previously integrated activities undertaken by an individual academic—such as course design, materials preparation, lecturing and tutoring, assignment marking and assessment— are being ‘unbundled’. New specialisations of labour in relation to the delivery of teaching and learning have been established. (2002, p. 6). Given the challenges to the autonomy that has been the hallmark of their identity, it is to be expected that academics will resist these changes. To explore these challenges further, the next section presents the personal reflections of the author-as-academic-teacher on the challenges she faced as an academic when designing virtual learning environments underpinned by a student-centred educational pedagogy.
Designing a virtual student-centred educational environment Example 1: Designing a virtual situated learning environment As the academic responsible for a post-graduate course in negotiation, mediation and advocacy skills, I had developed a student-centred
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learning environment by designing a situated learning environment (SLE) (a restaurant complex with a number of outlets) that I used to provide a common platform on which students could negotiate a number of ‘real world’ problems. I had chosen a restaurant complex because all students have some familiarity with restaurants and so each of the practice negotiation experiences has a ‘real-world’ context. In 2001 I decided to experiment with the additional possibilities provided by the virtual learning environment. Given my limited technical knowledge of the online environment I approached the University multi-media expert for advice. He suggested that the SLE could be designed as a virtual SLE (VSLE) in the form of a company website. The website would be atypical of existing company websites, with the ‘look and feel’ (or graphics and navigation) equal to, or better than, that of the real company website. Students would access company information through this website, thus creating a more real-world context. Moving from the concept to the actual design required a collaborative effort by myself and various technical experts. First, I had to rewrite the company information in a way that would meet the technical standards required to ensure ease of navigation around the website. A technical web author then translated this information into Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), and designed appropriate web navigation tools and graphic designs. Legal expertise was also required when it was recognised that the name I had chosen for the restaurant complex was the name of an actual restaurant complex. This required major technical changes as a new name had to be given to the VSLE. Once the website was completed I was able to consider how to present it as part of a whole learning process. I was advised that hyperlinks to resource websites could be provided for students, but this required further technical know-how from resource librarians to gain access to resources and copyright approval. I was also advised that the University Distributed Learning System (DLS) included various ‘webtools’ that could increase communication both between myself and students and between students. However, this required another technical expert to transform the documentation I had provided in MS Word format into Acrobat PDF format before it could be uploaded to the DLS. This process was later simplified to allow me to upload MS Word files without having to change them to Acrobat PDF format. In summary, in order to effectively use the virtual learning environment to enhance the student-centred learning experience (SLE) I had previously (and quite autonomously) designed and used, I had to
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become part of a cross-functional collaborative team of experts. This at times caused some friction as the various experts strove to understand the different requirements of each of their contributions. Not least of the problems was my periodic concern that I was ‘losing control’ of the educational environment (and thus my identity as an academic expert) to a technical design process that seemed to be controlling, and restricting, my objectives. Example 2: Designing a virtual learning environment Following on from this experience, in late 2001 I was asked to redesign an existing post-graduate course from a face-to-face to a ‘virtual’ delivery format for delivery globally. The aim of the course was to introduce students to the challenges of a networked enterprise for management, leadership and employee relations, as well as economically based business issues. The particular face-to-face course is underpinned by a studentcentred pedagogy and is designed by a small team of academics. The philosophy on which the course is designed is that practitioners have significant practical experience that, guided by reflective practice, will result in an effective learning environment. The course thus has little secondary source material and few formal lecture notes. Redesigning this course for the virtual environment thus presented a number of challenges, including how to network the practitioner experiences of the students in the virtual world. Based on my experience in designing the VSLE described above, I first established a design team that included myself, the same multimedia expert, a new educational designer and the same copyright expert. We used the first meeting to brainstorm the major elements of the face-to-face learning environment that would be needed to guide the virtual environment. I explained that I wanted to design a new VSLE on which a number of professional practice activities would be used to link students to each other and to the formally presented lecture material. It was agreed that a publishing company website should be designed, given the newly emerging ‘book tailoring’ made possible by the internet and the global positioning of publishing companies. This would provide numerous opportunities for designing professional practice activities for students who would be possibly spread globally. Students could then access the website for common information; they could link to websites of similar companies for their research; they could communicate with each other through the RMIT DLS; and they could explore the influence on, and effects of, the
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virtual environment on business strategy development, work, management-leadership and employment relationships. Supported by this initial collaborative team approach, production of this VSLE proceeded smoothly, with members of the design team working both independently and collaboratively. The initial task for me was to research and write the company background for the case study. My past experience meant that I understood the most appropriate way to present this material for conversion to HTML format. The educational designer prepared the template for the total portal, including the company website. However, problems arose when the design went beyond the VSLE to the production of written material. In anticipation of the need for this written material the face-to-face classroom iteration of the course had been taped, with the aim being to have these tapes transcribed and placed on the DLS site for the course. My role was simply to check and authenticate the transcription. However, the reality of this process was very different and caused a plethora of challenges for me, which not only resulted in a further questioning of my role and identity as an academic in a virtual learning environment, but also challenged the degree of confluence between a student-centred pedagogy and a virtual learning environment, as described next. Faced with pages of written material, I had to first order the notes that, it must be remembered, had originated in a two-way interactive learning environment. This process required multiple iterations, exposing repetition that was relevant in the interactive face-to-face environment but which lost its relevance in the written form. It required more explanation, given the inability to rely on the nuances present in a face-to-face environment. Material had to be presented in a common format and a common structure. The number of activities had to be increased and simplified, in a clearly articulated and stepped process. The spontaneity of a two-way and collaborative student interchange of information and ideas had to be factored out. The opportunity to encourage student participation in contributing their practitioner experience had to be removed. The lack of opportunity for collegial learning between students had to be recognised. In short, the experience demonstrated again both the difficulty and challenges of transferring a highly interactive student-centred learning environment into the virtual learning environment, and the need for a collaborative approach that required a plethora of skills to be utilised.
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Conclusion: changing pedagogy, virtual classrooms and changing identities This chapter sought to explore the challenges to traditional academic identity that accompany the introduction of a student-centred pedagogy in a virtual learning environment. The emphasis has been more on the additional challenges presented by the virtual learning environment as academics seek to design situated learning environments that provide ‘real-world’ experiential learning activities for students. The two examples presented highlight the need for academics to work more collaboratively with a number of cross-functional personnel with expertise in various aspects of the virtual environment. The claim that designing for the virtual learning environment creates challenges for academic identity is supported by my reflections on this experience. Given these findings, further research is required into how universities, while encouraging academics to utilise the virtual learning environment, must also consider how to achieve this in a manner that supports academics as their identity changes.
References Ballard, B. and Clanchy, J. 1992, Teaching Students from Overseas: A Brief Guide for Lecturers and Supervisors, Longman Cheshire P/L, Melbourne. Biggs, J. 1999, Teaching for Quality Learning at University, SRHE and Open University Press, Buckingham. Boyer, E. 1990, Scholarship Revisited, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, San Francisco. Brown, J.S., Collins, A. and Duguid, P. 1989, ‘Situated cognition and the culture of learning’, Educational Researcher, 18(1), Jan–Feb, pp. 32–42, http://www.astc.org/resource/educator/situat.htm (accessed 22 November 2002). Cherry, N. 1995, Action Research: A pathway to action, knowledge and learning, RMIT Press, Melbourne. Collings, P. 1999, ‘Sustaining academics’ agency in determining work practices in information technology-mediated teaching and learning’, HERDSA Annual Conference, 12–15 July, Melbourne. Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Technology 2002, Striving for Quality: Learning, Teaching and Scholarship, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra. Dunkin, M. and Biddle, B. 1974, The Study of Teaching, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York.
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Edwards, B. 2002, ‘Deep insider research’, Qualitative Research Journal 2(1), pp. 71–84. Gerrard, C. 2001, ‘Promoting excellence in distance education – a TQM led approach’, Integrated Management – Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on ISO 9000 and TQM, eds K. Ho and M. Donnelly, School of Business – HKBU Paisley Business School & Authors, pp. 578–83. Jones S. 2001, ‘Collaboration: a threat to academic autonomy?’, Paper presented at ASCILITE ‘Crossroads’ Conference, Melbourne, September. Jones, S. 2000, ‘Politics, power and persuasion: documenting a drama for students – the 1998 waterfront dispute’, Australian Screen Education, 22, Autumn 2000, pp. 80–8. Jones, S. 1999, ‘Avoiding the spider: how to use technology to achieve collaborative education’, Proceedings HERDSA - Cornerstone Conference, July 1999, retrieved from http://www.sunsite.anu. edu.au/education/herdsa/vic/html/cornerstone.htm. Jones, S. and Creese, L. 2001, E-education: Creating Partnerships for Learning, available on: http://ultibase.rmit.edu.au (10 August 2001). Kandlebinger, P. 1999, ‘Valuing collaboration in design for the world wide web: a creative team approach’, HERDSA Annual International Conference, Melbourne, 12–15 July. Laurillard, D.M. 1994, ‘Multimedia and the changing experience of the learner’, Proceedings: Asia Pacific Information Technology in Training and Education Conference and Exhibition, 28 June–2 July, Brisbane, pp. 19–25. Privateer, P. 1999, ‘Academic technology and the future of higher education’, Journal of Higher Education, 70(1), pp. 64–6. Ramsden, P. 1992, Learning to Teach in Higher Education, Routledge, London. Reeves, T., Herrington, J. and Oliver, R. 2002, ‘Authentic activities and online learning’, Proceedings HERDSA Conference, Perth, July. Reid, A. 2000, ‘The web, knowledge management and universities’, Ausweb 2K, 6th Annual World Wide Conference, available on: http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw2k/papers/reid/paper.html (27 May 2001). Resnick, L. 1988, ’Learning in school and out’, Educational Researcher, 16(9), pp. 13–20. Senate Employment, Workplace Relations, Small Business and Education Reference Committee [Senate Committee Report] 2001, Universities in Crisis, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra.
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CHAPTER 8
Pedagogical leadership: seeking virtue in the virtual Andrew Scown The university has traditionally been a place, albeit a large cognitive network segmented into disciplinary tribes and territories (Becher and Trowler 2001). Now, with distance learning and borderless education it is increasingly becoming a space—one space amid many others. There is a distributed knowledge production and consumption system. Knowledge is diffused, configured and reconfigured. New sites include virtual, for-profit, open, corporate, technical, consortia, franchise, offshore… (Morley 2003, p. 8). The task of teaching is both complex and difficult (Hargreaves 2003), and with the introduction of the virtual classroom (and the many other sites of knowledge production and distribution as mentioned above) the degrees of complexity and difficulty of teaching (and learning) are increasing exponentially. Whilst teaching has long been taken for granted both as part of academic work and as a principal feature of the academic calendar, it has until recently been highly regularised in terms of space and time—such regularity providing a rhythm in academic life for both academics and students. This rhythm has now been fragmented through a compression of time and space of the teaching and learning process, with the result that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find meaning, purpose, and virtue in the pedagogical process. Pedagogy, described by van Manen (1991) as an ‘encounter of togetherness’ (p. 31) is now forced in and through the virtual classroom to seek a new identity that allows the teacher and learner to find new meaning in a relationship that is stripped of the physicality that once constituted its very essence (Brabazon 2002). Once the domain of individual academics and independent faculties, the task of teaching is now subject to contestation and examination through exogenous standards that dictate as reward and punishment the rights of an academic to tenure, promotion, or even continuing employment in the academy. 94
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This chapter attempts to make sense of the challenges that academics encounter in the task of teaching in a virtual classroom, and explores some of the avenues that indicate that there is still a hope of identifying pedagogical virtue in the virtual classroom. The chapter begins by encouraging diversity (negotiated rather than mandated) in pedagogy through challenging the trends in higher education that dictate linearity. Such linear trends align closely with and typify what Habermas (1987, p. 355) referred to as the ‘colonization of the lifeworld’, and what Giroux (1985, p. 25) labelled as ‘management pedagogies’. To understand the processes associated with a colonising of the lifeworld and the exploitation of pedagogy as a management strategy, it is essential to first understand the concept of ‘lifeworlds’ as it was intended by Husserl (1973). Accordingly, this chapter both introduces this concept, explores the essential place of lifeworlds in pedagogical relationships and as datum points for authentic pedagogy (Newmann et al. 1995), and then examines how these lifeworlds can and are being colonised and managerialised in the academy. Despite frequently repeated exhortations by educators (van Manen 1991; Sergiovanni 2000; Cope and Kalantzis 2001; Scown 2004) to restore the primacy of teacher and learner lifeworld(s) as a font of pedagogical hope, such requests appear to fall on deaf ears or to be muffled by the noise of the chancellery echoing the mantras ‘increase profits’ and ‘exploit technology’. To reclaim the primacy of the lifeworld in the virtual classroom calls for pedagogical leadership—an approach to educational leadership that constitutes pedagogy as leadership and leadership as pedagogy (Lingard et al. 2003). Such pedagogical leadership is possible despite the many attempts within today’s academy to impose compliance on and to silence teachers and students through the homogenising influences of pre-ordained standards that fail to recognise creativity, meaning, and transformation in and through the pedagogical process. The chapter concludes with an overview of a model of pedagogical design—the Evidence, Critique, Impact (ECI) model for virtual classrooms—that values the diversity of learners (in their multiple lifeworlds) within learning, the teacher (again operating across a myriad of lifeworlds) within teaching, in an attempt to give voice to all engaged in the pedagogical relationship. The model, predicated on the belief than an exploration of lifeworld experiences is foundational to authentic adult learning, was co-designed by the author and is used as the pedagogical framework for virtual learning in post-graduate courses in Educational Leadership and Management at RMIT University.
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Negotiating difference—a challenge for online educators The customer-care revolution and an outcomes-based approach, with the emphasis on product specification, entitlements and consumer rights, has changed social and pedagogical relations in the academy…Signs of quality have been introduced to reassure consumers that their interests are being met. There has been the introduction of an array of mechanisms including learning contracts, guidelines, assessment criteria, learning outcomes, core skills—all of which in various ways attempt to systematize and codify student-teacher interactions. (Morley 2003, p. 129) The notion of transformational change has long been associated with learning. Through the processes of learning the learner is both transformed and is capable of transforming the world in which he or she lives. Transformation—or Transformed Practice, in which students transfer and re-create Designs of meaning from one context to another (New London Group 1996, p. 83)—is thus an integral element of many learning theories and pedagogies (Cope and Kalantzis 2000; Wegner 1998; Giroux 2003). Essential to any pedagogical approach that supports a transformation of the players in the pedagogical relationship through teaching and learning is a necessary recognition and a purposeful negotiation of diversity—the diversity that exists amongst learners exhibiting a diverse range of learning styles and capabilities, the diversity that accompanies the many lifeworlds that teachers and learners alike inhabit and bring to the pedagogical process, and the diversity of the lifeworlds to which learners return and which they shape through the process of appropriating the new and deeper ways of knowing and being in the world that have accompanied the learning process. Whilst the negotiation of diversity has always been difficult in educational paradigms that emphasise sameness (the ‘standards approach’ being an example of such homogeneity), the introduction of mechanisms to systematise and codify pedagogical relations as outlined above by Morley suggest that the negotiation of diversity in pedagogy is both undesirable and unattainable. Such systematisation is obstructing the negotiation of diversity essential to a transformative pedagogy and can easily be identified as a domination of the systemsworld over the lifeworld in which the ‘world of instrumentalities’ erodes the lifeworld characteristics of ‘culture, meaning, and significance’ (Sergiovanni 2000, p. 4).
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The concept of ‘lifeworlds’ and its application in higher education The concept of lifeworld originates in the work of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), who described the concept in his text Experience and Judgement, and in his lectures that later constituted the text The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Husserl’s lifeworld concept has been extended from its original transcendental phenomenological perspective to involve an existentialist phenomenological perspective—in particular through the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1962), and Schutz and Luckman, The Structure of the Life-World (1973)—and also from the critical hermeneutic perspective in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action (1987). The lifeworld (lebenswelt) refers to that ‘world in which we are always already living and which furnishes the ground for all cognitive performance and all scientific determination’ (Husserl 1973, p. 41). The lifeworld is thus foundational to any pedagogy that seeks to work with the matter of life and living in an attempt to reach new and renewed understandings of everyday phenomena and to achieve impact in the world through the processes of social reconfigurations that ‘transform communities and economies of meaning’ (Wegner 1998, p. 219). Lifeworlds are neither simple nor singular. Each of us inhabits multiple, different, and overlapping lifeworlds (Schutz and Luckmann 1973; van Manen 1990; Kalantzis 1997), which at the same time are often competing, conflicting, and contradictory. For example, in the lifeworld of higher education we have students from overseas countries who leave family and nation for an international education, only to be immersed in a culture that is often less than welcoming, that imposes a curriculum of sameness on the pedagogical process, and that repeatedly exemplifies local scenarios and definitive answers as to the way the world does or should work. Another example of conflicting and competing lifeworlds in higher education is that of the committed academic who along with the teaching imperative is desperately trying to develop a research and publication profile, is trying to maintain healthy family relationships and parent children, and yet is burdened by a teaching and administrative load that would once have been assumed by three academics with administrative support. Despite this conflict and competition, it is only in and through these lifeworlds—’the realm of original self-evidences’ where ‘that which is self-evidently given is, in perception, experienced as “the thing itself”’ (Husserl 1970, pp. 127–8)—that the material for authentic pedagogy
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is found (Newmann 1995, Sergiovanni 2000). It is in the pre-predicative, pre-reflective, natural attitude of the lifeworld that we have the possibility to return to lived human experience ‘as it is immediately given to us before we make sense of it…a return to the possibilities for meaning which our experiences offer’ (Crotty 1996, p. 4). Such a foundation enables the learner to find the meaning of the phenomena of life within the horizons of the lifeworlds which constitute their own being, and provides the conditions to enable a return to the things themselves as they are known to the learner through lived experience rather than as someone else portends they should be. It is here in the lifeworld that the possibility of authentic pedagogy, which displays the characteristics of intellectual quality, sustained conversation, depth of knowledge and understanding, and connectedness to the world, is to be found (Education Queensland 2000, p. 72). Sergiovanni (2000) describes the lifeworld of education as that of ‘culture, meaning, and significance’ (p. 4) which ‘provides the foundation for the development of social, intellectual, and other forms of human capital that contribute, in turn, to the development of cultural capital, which then further enriches the lifeworld itself. This is a cycle of “cultural reproduction”…a world of purposes, norms, growth, and development’ (p. 5). In contrast, these lifeworld experiences of purpose and meaning can be thwarted by the world of systems. The matter of the systemsworld is described as ‘a world of instrumentalities, of efficient means designed to achieve ends. The systemsworld provides the foundation for the development of management and of organizational and financial capital that, in turn, contributes to the development of material capital, which further enriches the systemsworld. This is a cycle of “material reproduction”...a world of efficiency, outcomes, and productivity’ (Sergiovanni 2000, p. 5). Thus, the lifeworld and the systemsworld can be bifurcated with the result of a loss of identify and meaning (lifeworld) at the expense of supremacy of management control (systemsworld). This concept of systemsworld, and its impact on current initiatives in higher education (especially virtual teaching systems), is explored in greater depth in the following section.
The concept of systemsworld and its application in higher education The maxim ‘Linearity Kills’ echoes clearly the reaction that many academics experience as they move (often unwillingly) from face-toface to virtual teaching. In the physical space of the lecture theatre or
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tutorial room there is a presence of an academic and students that is relational and inviting of communication. In the virtual classroom, however, the presence of both academics and students is potentially non-existent and is easily overlooked or ignored by those participants who are fearful of, or lacking confidence in, utilising online teaching and learning technologies—it is very easy to be faceless and to hide in such a virtual space. The advent and the introduction of information and communication technologies (ICTs) into universities is but one example from many of the globalising trends (Burbules and Torres 2000) that are determining what it is to be in the world today as an academic or as a student. Whilst it is easy to recognise that the benefits of ICTs are immense in terms of assisting universities to perform more competitively in the market-place (Marginson 1997) through increased and measured productivity (another globalising trend), there has been little, if any, support provided to academics to assist in re-defining the pedagogical imperative that is an essential element of being an academic (Scown 2003b). Such globalising trends can at best be described as evidence of the systemsworld taking over the lifeworld of education (Sergiovanni 2000), thereby reducing the potential for leadership within universities to grow from and be nurtured by the practices of pedagogy. Rather, academic leadership is being stifled by managerialist approaches assuming the rubrics of an academic management systemsworld that is (often poorly) exercised to ensure compliance with exogenous standards that disregard the essential players in the pedagogical relationship—learners and teachers. Although, as Hargreaves (2003) says, ‘teaching should not be driven by the false certainties of gurus, governments or research oligarchies but by a combination of and creative tension between commitment and doubt’ (p. 146), it is becoming increasingly difficult to find meaning in the tensions that currently impact on academic life; this creative tension that Hargreaves encourages is denied as academics ‘become split subjects, simultaneously interpellated in different ways and caught in damaging oscillations’ (Morley 2003, p. 100). There are several dominant trends in higher education today that are destroying this creative tension that is a necessary condition for academics ‘to learn and grow from conversations: keeping their commitments but also revising them as they engage their doubts’ (Hargreaves 2003, p. 146). I have written previously of evidence that identifies the homogenised nature of academic work (aligned with this homogenisation is a disregard for the essential nature of being an academic), and have identified a need for universities to move away
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from such homogenising influences that are stifling the conversations that enable the possibility of negotiating diversity within the teaching and learning process (Scown 2003a, 2003b). Such homogenising influences assert the following: • Teachers and learners want (in fact demand) virtual classrooms to replace outmoded face-to-face teaching and learning situations (a ‘clicks-and-mortar’ campus style approach). • A ‘one curriculum fits all’ approach can and should be applied within and across programs through common core and course architecture approaches. • Assessment procedures that stipulate conformity (with all students completing the same assessment tasks), and the use of norm-referenced assessment modes, are easier to manage and provide more reliable data for quality assurance. • Pre-determined outcomes approaches to teaching and learning that are predicated on generic capability and attribute statements (a ‘Training Package Approach’ to teaching and learning) ensure teachers teach what they are expected to teach, and students learn what they need to learn. • Information and communication technologies allow for successful pedagogy—that ICTs are often linear and inflexible (the ‘text-book online’ approach supported by many online teaching and learning platforms) is irrelevant, as teaching should be standardised and be able to be replicated in different scenarios. • A bounded approach that mandates a dominant theory of teaching and learning and that can be digitised into re-usable learning objects offers economic efficiencies (pre-determined curriculum can therefore be delivered by any online facilitator to any student at any time in any place). • Decision-making process regarding teaching and learning should be aligned with criteria exogenous to the pedagogical relationship (teaching should be shaped upon ‘CourseExperience Questionnaires’ to ensure that institutional performance can rate successfully in comparison to other universities around the nation). Interestingly, nearly 20 years ago, Giroux (1985) cautioned of such influences—examples of ‘the dominance of technocratic ratio-
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nality’—in which ‘teachers are viewed less as creative and imaginative thinkers, who can transcend the ideology of methods and means in order to critically evaluate the purpose of educational discourse and practice, than as obedient civil servants dutifully carrying out the dictates of others’ (p. 23). The question arises: why have educational systems failed to heed such a caution? Clearly each of the trends outlined above and the concomitant changes that accompany the implementation of such are examples of the systemworld of higher education now leading to a colonisation of the lifeworld—this occurs when the systemsworld begins to dominate the lifeworld (Sergiovanni 2000, p. 7). This colonisation of the lifeworld is described by Habermas (1987) as follows: ‘When stripped of their ideological veils, the imperatives of autonomous subsystems make their way into the lifeworld from the outside—like colonial masters coming into a tribal society—and force a process of assimilation upon it’ (p. 355). What is happening through this process of enforced assimilation and compliance is that the very nature of the university is being challenged, with technocratic, instrumentalist views of knowledge replacing traditional epistemological foundations (Brooks 2001); academics are recast in ways that ignore and contradict the essence of the phenomenon of being an academic (Scown 2003b); and students are being reconstructed as consumers who are no longer ‘recipients of welfare, but purchasers of an expensive product’ (Morley 2003, p. 129). Within this process of reconstruction and transformation of higher education the inherent dangers rest not with the fact that education is assuming the identity of ‘a frontier industry in globalization’ (Cope and Kalantzis 2001, p. 198), or that academics are challenged to assume a identity different in meaning to traditional understandings of what it is to be an academic (Barnett 1997), but that the virtue that characterises the pedagogical relationship is being totally stripped away to be replaced with little other than performative measures that satisfy criteria completely external to the foundations of pedagogy. To reclaim these foundations is thus a challenge for pedagogical leadership and the arena for such a challenge is the lifeworld of pedagogy—the lifeworlds of learners, teachers, universities and newly distributed sites of virtual pedagogy. The gap between lifeworlds and systemsworld is clearly widening. The challenge, for the pedagogue and the administrator alike, is to seek to bridge this widening gap, and to attempt a balance between lifeworlds and systemsworlds that is generative of authentic learning within a framework that meets systems accountabilities.
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Bridging the gap—balancing the lifeworld and the systemsworld Whilst the matter of learning, especially transformative learning through the negotiation of difference, is the matter of the lifeworld, the matter of systematisation, especially the linear conformity of the virtual classroom, could be seen as the matter of the systemsworld. Given that the two worlds currently need to co-exist it is important to work towards a symbiotic relationship that ‘brings together two dissimilar elements in a way that both benefit’ (Sergiovanni 2000, p. 4). Such a challenge to achieve symbiosis between these worlds of life and system is becoming more clearly articulated in pedagogical frameworks and models that are developing for school education— for example, the Multiliteracies framework (New London Group 1996); the Productive Pedagogies framework (Education Queensland 2000; Lingard et al. (2003). However, there is little evidence that similar frameworks—pedagogical approaches and models aiming for a purposeful negotiation of diversity—are evolving in higher education. Indeed, as Morley (2003) suggests, ‘the pedagogical project has become socially decontextualized, with learners constructed as cognitive entities’ (p. 143). It is within this higher education context that the current author was challenged in the year 2000 to develop a virtual program for the virtual classroom. But where was one to begin…? The Master of Education: Educational Leadership and Management program was designed and managed by the current author on his appointment to RMIT University in 1997. Following successful iterations of the program on a fee-for-service, face-to-face delivery basis from 1997–1999 it was decided by the Faculty in which the program was housed to use the program as a ‘flagship’ program that was to be made available totally online through the virtual classroom. Such development was in response to the challenge of the University at that time to work towards an IT Alignment Program aimed to ‘develop an Information Technology Strategy designed to facilitate the implementation of the objectives of the Teaching and Learning Strategy in respect of electronically mediated flexible learning environments’ (McNaught 2001, p. 6). Underpinning the success of the Master of Education: Educational Leadership and Management program in its earliest delivery was the pedagogical relationship that was developed amongst the teaching and learning community—such pedagogical relationships enabling an approach to teaching and learning based on phenomenological inquiry (Scown 1998). The challenge to transfer such an approach to a virtual classroom called for a pedagogical
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framework that centred around, respected, and negotiated the differences of learner and teacher lifeworlds within a virtual community that was now borderless—the physicality that was once so essential to the lived experience of pedagogy was no longer possible. However, such physicality cannot be ignored, and the importance of the physicality in teaching and learning is described below by Brabazon (2002, p. 106): I am not worried that students watch my physicality. It is one way—and a powerful way—to teach a body of knowledge. Whilst lecturers and teachers have a responsibility for the learning environment, students have a responsibility to be present, aware and prepared for learning. We provide the frame: they create the landscape. If students miss lectures, they have simply stepped outside the frame. To get students into the lecture theatre, awake and interested, I will use anything, especially my body. In the virtual classroom physicality is not available in its usual sense, and hence this existential of corporeality needed to be compensated for by the other existentials—temporality, spatiality, lived relationship—that constitute our being in the world and form the basis for how we understand and find meaning in the things of life (van Manen 1990). Clearly, the virtual classroom interprets temporality and spatiality (24 hours x 7 days a week, from anywhere in the world you can logon to the internet) in ways different to regular face-to-face teaching (Lecture Room 7, Building 6, Thursday 5pm–8pm). Despite such facilitating features in the virtual classroom as synchronous chat (often limited to 500 characters per entry and speed dependent on how many people are trying to converse at the same time) and the use of audio and video that aim to create a ‘barrier-free’ approach to classroom practice (Treviranus and Brewer 2003) the virtual classroom is and must be different to the revered space of the physical classroom. In searching for the link to overcome the differences between the physical and the virtual, between relational pedagogy in a ‘safe space’ and linear transmission to an anonymous mass of students distributed around the globe, it became evident that a pedagogy that centred on Husserl’s concepts of lifeworlds and phenomenological inquiry could be transferred and in fact could be a virtue for the virtual. The result of this search was the Evidence–Critique–Impact (ECI) pedagogical model.
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Evidence-based pedagogy—the Evidence–Critique–Impact (ECI) model The Evidence–Critique–Impact (ECI) pedagogy was developed by a team of Australian educationalists (Andrew Scown, Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope and Stavroula Tsembas) who are committed to working with diversity as a foundation for learning, development, and growth and as a vehicle for transformation of both the learner and the many lifeworlds which learners inhabit. By necessity, lifeworlds are diverse and hence any pedagogy that works with lifeworld experiences both recognises and values the differences of each and every participant in the learning relationship. The ECI approach is one that encourages an evidence-based exploration of the lifeworld(s) of learners amidst the backdrop of critique of current knowledge and the potentiality of transformation through appropriating this new knowledge through lived experience in both present and future scenarios. Whilst this objective was essentially the matter of pedagogy, it also became the matter of pedagogical leadership—a leadership that is described by Lingard et al. (2003, p. 19) as one whose central purpose is the ‘maximization of students’ academic and social outcomes via improvements in classroom practices: pedagogy and assessment’. Such leadership was needed to shape a design for the virtual classroom amidst an environment that was promoting homogenising systems—a pedagogical leadership founded on the imperatives that learning be invitational to learners and be centred in an exploration of the differences of learner lifeworlds, rather than following the usual path of virtual programs that present a textbook online and are often exclusive (teaching to the common experience), thereby excluding students who are from different lifeworlds and who employ non-linear learning styles. Such exclusionary approaches are clearly evident in management programs where problem-based learning and case-study approaches determine and predict both the content and the outcome of learner engagement.
The philosophy underpinning the ECI approach The Evidence-Critique-Impact (ECI) approach to virtual teaching and learning is based in the epistemological and ontological tradition of constructionism—that view that considers ‘truth or meaning, comes into existence in and out of our engagement with the realities in our world…Meaning is not discovered, but constructed…In this view of things, subject and object emerge as partners in the generation of meaning’ (Crotty 1998, pp. 8–9). This partnership in the generation
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of meaning is essential to transformative approaches to pedagogy to ensure that students are not merely subservient to the ‘God-Professor’ didactic (read positivistic) model of teaching that once characterised academe, or to the current systemsworld model as mentioned above that embraces an objectivist epistemology (inferring ‘that meaning, and therefore meaningful reality, exists as such apart from the operation of any consciousness’ (Crotty 1998, p. 8)) that seeks to impose quantitatively pre-determined outcomes and measures on staff and students. If constructivism in teaching and learning—pointing to the unique experience of each of us and suggesting ‘that each one’s way of making sense of the world is as valid and worthy of respect as any other’ (Crotty 1998, p. 58)—is to be a hallmark of pedagogy, whereby students ‘become active makers of their own knowledge’ (Cope and Kalantzis 2001, p. 207) then these issues of the epistemological and ontological foundations underpinning teaching and learning need to be foundational to the design of any pedagogical model for education, especially virtual education where the usual communicative relationship is distanced in time and space. However, in saying this, such a model also needs to recognise that for many students their predisposition may be aligned to either an objectivist or a subjectivist epistemology and hence for learning to be meaningful there needs to be a number of entry points to approach the content and process of any defined pedagogical sequence. Therefore, the ECI model offers a number of datum points into diverse epistemological and ontological realities as it invites students to engage in learning through multiple perspectives. As described by Cope and Kalantzis (2001), ‘learning occurs through a number of epistemological “takes”: i) empirical/ evidential; ii) theoretical/conceptual/critical; and iii) active/transformative in a “real world” context. All “takes” are necessary, and none sufficient to ground knowledge’ (p. 207). Through ensuring that all these ‘takes’ are an integral component of the student learning process, the ECI model integrates difference into a common activity of learning—that of making sense and meaning of the world around us. Such learning accords with Crotty’s (1998) caution that the attention we pay to the objects with which we are working in a constructivist vein requires that we not remain straitjacketed by the conventional meanings we have been taught to associate with the object. Instead, such research invites us to approach the object in a radical spirit of openness to its potential for new or richer meaning. It is an invitation to reinterpretation. (p. 51)
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The pedagogical design for the Evidence–Critique–Impact model of online learning It is not enough to emancipate individuals or to enable them to disclose their lived worlds for their enlightenment and our own. Lifeworlds themselves have to be reflected on critically; in visible contexts they have to be transformed. The culture and its traditions compose part of the context; so do the languages of the present, and the noxious clouds and the hoarded books and the socio-economic phenomena of the world. I hope we can ponder the opening of wider and wider spaces of dialogue, where diverse students and teachers, empowered to speak in their own voices, reflect together as they try to bring into being an ‘in-between’…They may through their coming together constitute a newly human world, one worth enough and responsive enough to be both durable and open to continual renewal. (Greene 1985, p. 81) Whilst the concept of lifeworld is essential to the ECI model it is important not to dwell merely in the realm of current experience, but to move backwards and forwards between the evidence of current lifeworld scenarios, to critique what is known and postulated about the world as we currently know it, to re-design current scenarios we have inherited as a rich legacy of the past, and to design the future of the world we and those who follow us will inhabit. Accordingly, in agreement with the above quote from Greene, it is necessary to move beyond the natural attitude to achieve both the scope and the intensity that accompanies the ‘processes for “denaturalizing” the lifeworld, of making the everyday strange in order to cast new light on it and have a more informed basis upon which to design both imminent meanings and our larger social futures’ (Cope and Kalantzis 2000, p. 211). In the ECI model there are three aspects of the learning process: 1. Evidence—working with the matter of the world as experienced directly through learner lifeworlds and making sense of the raw information that accompanies our living in these lifeworlds. 2. Critique—engaging with the knowledge narratives, theories, and concepts that are accepted as the canons of knowledge that make up the world as we know it. 3. Impact—transforming the world through applying knowledge to innovate and change the world and to test, clarify, and create further knowledge through the processes of reflective praxis.
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Whilst the model calls for the learner to engage with all three aspects of the learning process, the order in which such engagement occurs depends on the learning styles and preferences of the learner. Taken together, the three aspects of the ECI mode are foundational for a pedagogy that is both critical (through offering opportunities for critique) and transformative (through appropriating and applying new learning to achieve impact). In tabular form the focus of the three aspects of the ECI model can be described as follows: Table 1: The elements of the ECI model
Evidence
Critique
• To explor e and examine the lived experience of individual lear ner lifeworlds.
• To compar e and contrast the evidence of the lifeworld against generalising concepts and theories that for m the canons of cur rent knowledge.
• To engage with the empirical experience that constitutes the world as we know it. • To extrapolate fr om the things of ever yday life experience those aspects of knowing and being that will for m the basis for critical analysis and critique.
• To critically frame and reflect on the narratives and theories that underpin the world as we know it. • To conceptualise and theorise about what makes the world work and how it can work in dif ferent and better ways.
Impact • To innovate new practice using newly framed knowledge. • To implement change to our ways of knowing and being in the world to achieve transference of knowledge and transfor mation through knowing. • To integrate new knowledge and skills into our r eper toire for futur e design.
* A more detailed description of the ECI pedagogical framework, along with a sample of learning materials, is available at http://www.rmit.edu.au/education/edulead/.
The application of the ECI model for virtual learning appears in a 9-cell matrix format with each matrix representing the discipline focus under investigation (there is an ECI matrix for each course contained in the program). The content of the disciplinary focus (represented in the title of the course of study, for example—Leading and Managing Change) has been researched and analysed to allow for synthesis and categorisation into three key themes that accompany the
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relevance of the discipline to the nature of the program: Educational Leadership and Management. Each of these three themes is then analysed by the learner from the perspective of Evidence (life experience, organisational structures, socio-political structures etc), Critique (theory, prior knowledge, interpolation of data both historical and current) and Impact (the ways in which the knowledge gained can be reworked and/or interpreted to impact on our world). Key to the ECI model is flexibility and adaptation. Should a learner demonstrate a learning preference that focuses on the abstract and conceptual then working through the three themes in the Critique column would be the starting point for this student. However, to adopt this approach as a sole and singular method of learning is impoverished as it does not draw on life experience (even though it may be maintained that these experiences are reflected in the text of others), nor does it engage in a processing of information that will impact on practice. To achieve this wholeness of learning it is then necessary for the learner to take the content of their reflections and new learning and to read them against the ‘real world’ in terms of Evidence—that is an interpretation of current practices and policies, life experiences etc.—and to inform the practical through engaging with Impact—the future tense of Evidence. Clearly, the order of the processing of these three takes on knowledge will be determined by the learner, in consultation with their facilitator in the virtual classroom. Another journey through the ECI model is to assume a more linear approach that is often represented in the traditional classroom and is akin to a learning sequence where experiences are explored, concepts are investigated from a number of different perspectives, and then closure is sought as the new learning is consolidated and ratified through application. This approach would involve a student working through the course on a theme-by-theme basis. Again, students may exercise a preference for ‘book’ learning and feel compelled to approach the Critique cell of the ECI matrix before they read-back this take on knowledge into the Evidence of their world, or as they reframe their prior insights with this learning into action for a new world through Impact. Similarly, some students prefer to try new ways of doing, investigate alternative ways of thinking etc. in light of current realities and then seek meaning and understanding through a conceptual analysis of the new scenario in light of previous and historical data. This would enable a different configuration of approach to the ECI model. What is essential to the model is that each student engage with all nine cells of the ECI grid and develop a consolidated approach to
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learning that encapsulates the many different experiences of each concept within their life and the world, the historical and contemporary data that presents certain interpretations of these scenarios, and the future configuration and possible interpretations of these realities that result from new learning. The Evidence–Critique–Impact pedagogy is about using knowledge to remake the learner through learning and the world through putting knowledge to work. It is about change-through-knowing and it uses lifeworld evidence both as an essential element for engaging in learning processes and as connecting points between prior learning and future engagement with the world. Its learning focus is on self and environmental transformation. The purpose of knowing and learning is not simply to understand ourselves in the world, but to transform the world, and ourselves through a pedagogical process that is at once virtual and virtuous.
Virtue in the virtual classroom—transforming the online learning experience This chapter has attempted to address some of the challenges and difficulties that represent attempts of the systemsworld of higher education to dominate the lifeworld of learning. These attempts are resulting in constant struggles in which academics and administrators are despairing and are almost speaking different languages. An obvious arena in which these struggles are currently played out is in the lived experience of teaching and learning, especially in the disembodied space of virtual education. The current literature of higher education documents and illustrates well these challenges and, in doing so, suggests clearly that the current scenario of higher education is that the university is in crisis. Whilst acknowledging and agreeing that the lifeworld of higher education is in crisis, there are, however, multiple interpretations of this phenomenon and accordingly there are multiple pathways to address the crisis. Today’s academics are challenged as much as were our academic predecessors to be principal agents of change in the production, collection, and dissemination of knowledge. What differentiates us from our predecessors is the availability and speed of technology that is both driving and enabling this change. To work as an academic today demands new ways of working with technology, knowledge, and culture. Within the virtual classroom the roles of the academic and of the student are changed and there is a constant search for binding threads that forge pedagogical links in a world of distributed learning systems
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characterised by digitised communication that disregards the boundaries of time and space (Scown 2002). The Evidence–Critique–Impact pedagogy is one attempt to critically frame and re-frame the processes of learning within a world that is ever-changing, especially the world of virtual education. Within this pedagogical framework there is the constant challenge to work with the known both personally and communally and to recognise the strengths of cultural difference (Evidence), to engage in a critical dialogue with the frameworks and guiding narratives that constitute knowledge as we currently receive it (Critique), and to appropriate new learning and knowledge through application to expand the horizons that limit us and to achieve transformation through innovation and change (Impact). Granted, this pedagogy is but one among many along the continuum of adult education approaches that utilise human experience as an essential ingredient to adult learning. What characterises this approach is its acknowledgement that lived experience of the lifeworld is the essential pathway to a genuine exploration of the phenomena that constitute human life, that this lived experience needs to be critiqued against current knowledge, and that our current knowledge needs to be re-worked through application so as to arrive at new knowledge. Through this process it is possible not only to achieve authentic learning but also to redress the imbalance that exists when lifeworld scenarios are ignored by the learning process. There is little doubt that, due to phenomena such as globalisation, managerialism, and systemsworld accountabilities, the lifeworld experiences of teaching and learning in higher education today are vastly different than they were in previous times. Such changes will continue through necessity and they are the matter of lived experience. Accordingly, such lived experience that characterises the lifeworlds of higher education and pedagogy can and should be part of any teaching and learning process that aspires to authenticity. It is limiting to ignore such changes and to write them out of the teaching and learning equation. Attempting to suggest they are not happening, are irrelevant, or can be easily managed is to limit any possibility for addressing the imbalance that the bifurcation of lifeworlds and systemsworlds causes. There is a need to link education to current lifeworld realities, as such realities are the scenarios that are normative to adult learning and to a life based in moral and principled imperatives. Such links are found in evidence-based learning and in pedagogies of critique such as that outlined above in the ECI approach. This approach is but one
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attempt to ensure that an appreciation of and a critical approach to human (lived) experience is not cast aside to the vagaries of systemsworld initiatives that are based in economic rather than educational imperatives. The locus for this to happen is in the academy, and hence it is suggested that the ECI approach can prove a useful tool for managing academic systemsworld as well as pedagogical and lifeworld initiatives. The space and time for this process of transformation is limited only by technical specification. Clearly, technology now enables the space for curriculum and pedagogy to include that of the virtual classroom. Horizons have expanded and the challenge has been cast to innovate with the known in an attempt to negotiate diverse ways of knowing and being in the current lifeworld of higher education. Such challenges oppose the limitations and pitfalls of being brought down by the systemsworld demands of managerialism and technocratic rationality. The future (major) challenge is to expand the horizons further, to continue to engage critically with learners in a pedagogical space that recognises the unique contribute of people and culture to our knowing and being in the world, and to include systemsworld administrators as genuine participants in the pedagogical arena. The virtual in many ways is as relevant or as irrelevant to this process of teaching and learning as is any other time or space. However, the virtue of the pedagogical relationship will long remain at the core of pedagogical leadership. Even though higher education in the twenty-first century is going to include a spectrum of arrangements made possible through the use of new technologies, as regards teaching in contrast to research, the singular mission of the university will continue to be the creation of an autonomous public space that fosters critical dialogue to impart cultural, democratic, and technocratic citizenship to students. (Odin 2004, pp. 160–1)
References Barnett, R. 1997, Higher Education: A critical business, SRHE/Open University Press, Buckingham. Becher, T. and Trowler, P. 2001, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines, SRHE/Open University Press, Buckingham. Brabazon, T. 2002, Digital Hemlock: Internet education and the poisoning of teaching, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney.
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Brooks, A. 2001, ‘Restructuring bodies of knowledge’, in Gender and the Restructured University: Changing management and culture in higher education, A. Brooks and A. MacKinnon (eds), SRHE/Open University Press, Buckingham. Burbules, N. and Torres, C. (eds) 2000, Globalization and Education: Critical perspectives, Routledge, London. Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M. 2000, ‘Designs for social futures’, in Multiliteracies: Literacy pedagogy and the design of social futures, B. Cope and M. Kalantzis (eds), Routledge, London, pp. 203–34. Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M. 2001, ‘e-Learning in higher education’, in Literacy Matters—Issues for new times, M. Kalantzis and A. Pandian (eds) , Common Ground Publishing, Altona. Crotty, M. 1996, Phenomenology and Nursing Research, Churchill Livingston, Sth Melbourne. Crotty, M. 1998, The Foundations of Social Research—Meaning and perspective in the research process, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards. Education Queensland 2000, New Basics Project, Technical Paper, Version 3, The State of Queensland (Dept. of Education), Brisbane, (accessed 1 August 2004). Giroux, H.A. 1985, ‘Intellectual labor and pedagogical work: rethinking the role of teacher as intellectual’, Phenomenology and Pedagogy, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 20–32. Giroux, H.A. 2003, Public Spaces, Private Lives: Democracy beyond 9/11, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Lanham, Maryland. Greene, M. 1985, ‘Consciousness and the public space: discovering a pedagogy’, Phenomenology and Pedagogy, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 69–83. Habermas, J. 1987, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and system: a critique of functionalist reason, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Hargreaves, A. 2003, Teaching in the Knowledge Society—Education in the age of insecurity, Open University Press, Maidenhead. Husserl, E. 1970, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill. Husserl, E. 1973, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a genealogy of logic, rev. and ed. Ludwig Landgrebe, trans. J.S. Churchill and K. Ameriks, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Kalantzis, M. 1997, ‘The new citizen and the new state: an Australian case for civic pluralism’, in Occasional Paper No. 9, Centre for Workplace Communication and Culture, Sydney. Lingard, B., Hayes, D., Mills, M. and Christie, P. 2003, Leading Learning—Making hope practical in schools, Open University Press, Maidenhead.
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Marginson, S. 1997, ‘Competition and contestability in Australian higher education’, Australian Universities Review, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 5–14. McNaught, C. 2001, ‘A model for staff development for using ICT in teaching and learning: the RMIT experience’, paper presented at The Power of 3 – Educause in Australasia 2001 Conference, Gold Coast, 20–23 May, (accessed 2 August 2004). Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, London. Morley, L. 2003, Quality and Power in Higher Education, SRHE/Open University Press, Buckingham. New London Group 1996, ‘A pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures’, Harvard Educational Review 66: 60–92. Newmann, F.M., Marks, H.M. and Gamoran, A. 1995 (Spring), ‘Authentic pedagogy: standards that boost student performance (Report No. 8, Issues in Restructuring Schools), Centre on Organisation and Restructuring of Schools, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Odin, J.K. 2004, ‘New technologies and the reconstitution of the university’, in Globalization and Higher Education, J.K. Odin and P. Manicas (eds), University of Hawai’i Press, Honololu, pp. 147–62. Scown, A. 1998, ‘Assisting the “Development of Professionals” through the use of phenomenological inquiry’, Reflect: The Journal of Reflection in Learning and Teaching, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 39–45. Scown, A. 2002, ‘The changing role of higher education in developing “new knowledge workers”’, in Developing Knowledge Workers in the Printing and Publishing Industries, B. Cope and R. Freeman (eds), Common Ground Publishing Pty Ltd, Altona. Scown, A. 2003a, ‘Negotiating diversity: a pedagogical design for professional development and continuing education using the E-C-I framework’, in Literacy: Bridging past, present and future— Conference proceedings, A. Pandian, G. Chakravarthy, Goon Phoii Kheng, V. Ganisha (eds), International Literacy Research Unit, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang. Scown, A. 2003b, ‘On Being an Academic—A study of lived experience’, unpublished PhD thesis, The University of Melbourne. Scown, A. 2004, ‘On-line supplementation of adult education: a change in pedagogy and a pedagogy of change’, in Adult Education @ 21st Century, P. Kell, S. Shore and M. Singh (eds), Peter Lang Pub. Inc., New York, pp. 203–20. Sergiovanni, T. 2000, The Lifeworld of Leadership: Creating culture,
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community, and personal meaning in our schools, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. Schutz, A. and Luckmann, T. 1973, The Structure of the Lifeworld, Northwestern University Press, Evanston. Treviranus, J. and Brewer. J. 2003, ‘Developing and reusing accessible content and applications’, in Reusing Online Resources: A sustainable approach to e-learning, A. Littlejohn (ed.), Kogan Page, London, pp. 119–28. Wegner, E. 1998, Communities of Practice: Learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. van Manen, M. 1990, Researching Lived Experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy, The State University of New York Press, Albany. van Manen, M. 1991, The Tact of Teaching: The meaning of pedagogical thoughtfulness, The State University of New York Press, Albany.
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List of contributors Garry Allan is the academic director of IT in the Science, Engineering and Technology Portfolio at RMIT University. He has developed and taught online courses, and has implemented educational technologies such as desktop videoconferencing, student e-portfolios and plagiarism detection in the University. Mex Butler is Manager of E-Learning Quality in the Science, Engineering and Technology Portfolio at RMIT University. She has worked in online teaching and learning for more than 10 years in Higher Education, TAFE and Adult and Community Education. Her current research is in the area of e-learning and sex difference in cognitive and behavioural function. Andrea Chester is a lecturer in the Division of Psychology at RMIT University where she teaches a range of courses in social and counselling psychology. She has been developing, presenting, and evaluating online courses for more than 10 years and has an interest in the pedagogical issues surrounding online learning and teaching. Her research has focused on the use of technology for educational and therapeutic use. Kathleen Gray is a lecturer in educational technology in The University of Melbourne’s Biomedical Multimedia Unit. She has developed and taught online courses, and held a range of leadership and management roles in educational technology and in academic development at the RMIT University. Lisa Harris is the Coordinator of Teaching in the School of Social Science and Planning at RMIT University. Her doctoral thesis explores the significance of community for students studying online; her other research interests include the social and cultural implications of new technologies and improving the quality of teaching and learning in a university setting. Abe Herzberg is a senior lecturer in the Department of Business Law and Taxation at Monash University. As well as being the co-author of 115
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a corporate law textbook, Understanding Company Law (with Phillip Lipton), he has also co-developed (with Lipton) two innovative websites on corporate law and corporate governance for use by tertiary students and lecturers. The corporate law website (www.liptonherzberg.com.au) won ‘The Australian’ Award for Excellence in Educational Publishing – Tertiary Website category in both 2001 and 2003. Deborah Jones has been an educational designer with the Online Teaching and Learning Unit of RMIT Business Online at RMIT University, working with academics and educational developers in the design and implementation of online and flexibly delivered courseware. She is now at The University of Melbourne coordinating academic support during the implementation of the University’s new Learning Management System. Deborah’s particular interests are in the processes involved in collaborative development of online learning environments, and the development of learning objects. Sandra Jones is the Associate Professor of Employment Relations at RMIT University. Complementing her research into various aspects of a global knowledge economy, Sandra has designed several virtual situated environments as student-centred teaching and learning environments. She continues to research these innovations as a means to assist learning opportunities for peripatetic managers and leaders. Gloria Latham is the Program Leader of the Bachelor of Education at RMIT University. She is currently co-writing a book and website on teacher education for Oxford University Press which will be published in March 2006. She has served as a Learning Technologies Mentor for staff in her area and has created a Virtual School which she uses in her teaching. Her research areas are literacies and reflective practice. Phillip Lipton is a senior lecturer in the Department of Business Law and Taxation, Monash University. He is co-author with Abe Herzberg of the well-known company law text Understanding Company Law, now in its 13th edition. Together with Abe Herzberg he has constructed two websites designed for use by students and academics in the fields of corporate law and corporate governance. The corporate law website (www.lipton-herzberg.com.au) won ‘The Australian’ Award for Excellence in Educational Publishing – Tertiary Website category in both 2001 and 2003.
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Jim McGovern is an Associate Professor of Computing at RMIT University and is currently seconded as Manager of the RMIT Distributed Learning System. He has a long involvement with e-learning policy development, and the implementation and management of e-learning support systems. Gayle Morris is a Teaching/Learning Specialist, Faculty of Economics and Commerce at The University of Melbourne. Prior to joining The University of Melbourne, Gayle lectured in the Educational Leadership and Management program at RMIT University, where she taught largely on-line, and from which the genesis for the monograph emerged. Her current interests include work and learning; identity and professional practice. Linda Pannan is an Education Consultant in the areas of online, offshore and flexible learning. At the time of writing this paper, and until recently, she was Associate Professor in Science Teaching and Learning and Teaching Fellow at RMIT University. She has many years of experience in leading teaching quality and staff development initiatives, directing development and research projects in offshore teaching and e-learning, and in encouraging and supporting tertiary educators to engage in research into their teaching and student learning. John Peters is coordinator of the Collaborative Learning Program in the Educational Psychology Department at The University of Tennessee. He teaches in the areas of collaborative learning, reflective practice, program planning, and action research. John’s research interests include collaborative learning and reflective practice. His service includes work with faculty in higher education and social action groups. Alex Radloff is the Dean of Academic Development in the Science, Engineering and Technology Portfolio at RMIT University. Her research interests include self-regulation of learning in university students, the development of student academic writing and professional development of academic staff, including in e-learning settings. Andrew Scown is Associate Professor of Higher Education at RMIT University and is currently the Vice President (Academic) of RMIT International University Vietnam. Andrew has worked for many years in the fields of Educational Leadership and Management and International Higher Education in Australia and Asia and has written
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widely on the application of phenomenological research in higher education and leadership. Chris van der Craats is an Educational Multimedia Developer at RMIT University. With a strong background in education, Chris has many years of experience in developing quality multimedia learning resources. He has a long-standing interest in exploring e-learning support processes that will enable educators to become as self-sufficient as possible as teachers in e-learning, providing learning experiences that enhance learner engagement and outcomes. Fiona Wahr is the Strategic Teaching and Learning Projects Manager in the Science, Engineering and Technology Portfolio at RMIT University. She has coordinated a range of organisational change projects, and led the development and implementation of program quality assurance processes for Life Sciences, in the University.
Edited by Gayle Morris and Gloria Latham RMIT UNIVERSITY PRESS
9 781921 166020
Other title in the series: Supervising Postgraduate Research: Contexts and Processes, Theories and Practices
E-learning in the University: Some Constructionist Perspectives
ISBN 1- 921166- 02- 9
E-learning in the University: Some constructionist perspectives brings together stories of research and practice concerning online learning across a large, disparate and evolving university. In different ways, contributors explore the extent to which emerging technologies engage with issues of identity, and of community. In doing so, each contributes to a broader conversation about whether we are experiencing a change in the very nature of learning, and in how we see ourselves, as both teachers and learners. The text is intended for academics and students who share an interest in exploring both the possibilities and limitations of e-learning in post-compulsory contexts. The SOLTAR series (Studies on Learning, Teaching and Research) raises issues related to learning, teaching and research of relevance to university educators, students, professional development staff and curriculum support personnel. The series provides varied instances where educators reflect on their own practices in terms of their theoretical positions. The series seeks to encourage other practitioners to reflect on their own theory and practice, with a view to pushing boundaries and extending repertoires as well as options.
E-learning in the University:
Some Constructionist Perspectives
Edited by Gayle Morris and Gloria Latham
