Socializing the Internet

University education online: can it work?

by Tom Worthington FACS, Visiting Fellow, The Australian National University

Draft version 1.1 of 7 March 2001, for the forum on Connecting Society, 7th March 2001, Canberra. Later version for the On Line Opinion journal also available.

Introduction

The Internet was developed by researchers as a socially savvy tool for communicating academic work. It was then co-opted by business and government in a not entirely successful attempt to turn it into a tool of commerce. Even after the DOT.COM crash e-business experts are still promoting a model of the Internet which is little more than a television shopping channel. This view is not only intellectually impoverished, but has financially impoverished many of those who follow it. Returning to the Internet's roots in academic discourse might provide insights in how to use it for business as well as support social and educational goals. A good place to start is with online education, which will depend on a careful social mix of academe and commerce. Australian academics had a significant role in developing the Internet. Those skills and experience can be applied to demonstrating how to use the Internet for social as well as commercial goals in education.

What is a University?

The real University is not a material object. It is not a group of buildings that can be defended by police. He explained that when a college lost its accreditation, nobody came and shut down the school. There were no legal penalties, no fines, no jail sentences. Classes did not stop. Everything went on just as before. Students got the same education they would if the school didn't lose its accreditation. All that would happen, Phædrus said, would simply be an official recognition of a condition that already existed. It would be similar to excommunication. What would happen is that the real University, which no legislature can dictate to and which can never be identified by any location of bricks or boards or glass, would simply declare that this place was no longer ``holy ground.'' The real University would vanish from it, and all that would be left was the bricks and the books and the material manifestation. From Chapter 13 of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", by Robert M. Pirsig

Pirsig was arguing why a University is more than a group of buildings. However, in the age of the Internet we can go beyond this as a philosophical concept and conceive a university as a set of social relationships not associated with buildings at all. Modern organisations, such as companies, have no physical existence. A company needs to have a physical address for service of notices, but needs to have no other physical presence. My own consulting company, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd, is such an entity. It carries out most of its activities via the Internet.

Virtual organisations have got a bad press, through the collapse of DOT.COM companies. But there is no reason why there can't be ethical, useful virtual organisations. In a sense all organisations are virtual as they are relationships between people. It is the relationships which make a political party, a university or a company. If the relationships break down, the organisation ceases to function.

University Of Australia Online

On January 24 I attended the "A Knowledge Nation" National Press Club address in Canberra by Kim Beazley, Leader of the Opposition. While he was speaking I downloaded a copy of the prepared text from the ALP web site using a wireless modem and as soon as he completed his speech I issued a brief report about it to the online community:

Rather than a general statement of principles and broad direction, which everyone (including the Prime Minister) was expecting, this was a specificdetailed proposal for a "University of Australia On-line" (UAO). I was prepared to be disappointed by a bland repetition of "Knowledge Nation" rhetoric but was pleasantly surprised by the detailed and bold proposal (without necessarily agreeing with that detail).

Labour proposes to create 100,000 new on-line undergraduate places by 2010 to be serviced by existing Australian universities. HECS for these would be halved (presumably reflecting the lower cost of on-line teaching). There will also be free university preparation courses.

One of the claimed benefits will be that academics will receive revenue for courses sold to other institutions. This will open up some difficult issues of intellectual property ownership which universities have been avoiding. UAO would commission content from existing universities and have an Institute of On-line Teaching to help design better courses. This will be needed as the average academic will not have experience in on-line content creation. Labour points out that such an UAO would provide access for low income,single parents and rural people. But this assumes these people have Internet access at an affordable price and can use it. It also assumes that Australia has the infrastructure to support this on-line access. This does create some opportunities for using Australian university expertise in networking.

One benefit not addressed in Labour's proposal is that good on-line education will benefit people with some forms of disability. This assumes that web accessibility guidelines will be addressed. This might also reduce the network requirements. assisting those in regional areas.

Labour should be commended for making a brave and detailed proposal. However, there are some questions about it: what will it cost? will resources be withdrawn from conventional courses? will on-line students be second class? will we open Australia to competition from cut rate overseas universities? Will it one big government mandated on-line university stifle innovation and entrepreneurial efforts from existing institutions?

How Not To Run a University

In December 1997 the Australian Computer Society launched a set of postgraduate IT management courses, including Internet based training. The usual assumption is that a distance education course is not as good as an on-campus one. But at the launch I talked about an unpleasant experience I had enrolled in an on-campus course at an Australian university:

Like many IT people I have no formal training in management or policy issues, although I am employed writing IT policy for the Department of Defence and the Australian Government. So, I enrolled in a part time post-graduate course in technology management at a university. While the course was claimed to be designed with working people in mind, it proved to be a time wasting, frustrating experience and I withdrew after a few weeks. With my notice of withdrawal from the postgraduate course, I sent a letter to the University detailing the problems with the course. An experienced IT professional who has a full time job is probably a pretty difficult customer for a tertiary institution to please. However, I explained to that university I would not be back there, or to any university until they had courses which suited my requirements.

What provoked this reaction? While the glossy brochure for the course said it was designed for busy part time students I found that in reality part time students were an afterthought. I had to spend half a day standing in queues during work hours at the campus to enroll in the course. The timetables of courses was not available in advance or on-line, but was posted on a notice board on the campus. After enrollment there were changes to the program which caused problems with work schedules. The course material was not available in advance and the staff refused to provide any advice for advance study, making it difficult for those returning to formal studies after decades away to prepare. Off-the-cuff lectures, using poorly prepared materials did not go down well with someone who's time was precious and was used to professional presentations.

This was several years ago and things have improved. The administrative offices of a university should be open in cyber-space all the time. Administrative staff should be available by fax and telephone, at convenient times for part time students.

Communicating with People is the Internet Killer Application

A key to the rapid growth of the Internet has been the free and open access to the basic documents, especially the specifications of the protocols. The beginnings of the ARPANET and the Internet in the university research community promoted the academic tradition of open publication of ideas and results. However, the normal cycle of traditional academic publication was too formal and too slow for the dynamic exchange of ideas essential to creating networks.
...
Email has been a significant factor in all areas of the Internet, and that is certainly true in the development of protocol specifications, technical standards, and Internet engineering. The very early RFCs often presented a set of ideas developed by the researchers at one location to the rest of the community. After email came into use, the authorship pattern changed - RFCs were presented by joint authors with common view independent of their locations. A Brief History of the Internet, Barry M. Leiner, Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel, Larry G. Roberts, Stephen Wolff, version 3.31 Last revised 4 Aug 2000

Many of the most important developments since the beginning of the Internet have been about communication. It continually surprises technologists and business people that complex applications they develop are not successful, whereas simple ones allowing people to communicate are. A current example of this is the Short Message Service (SMS) on digital mobile telephones. While the complex and much hyped WAP (Wireless Applications Protocol) has failed as a commercial product, the simple SMS has succeeded. SMS lets people send short text messages between mobile telephones. This has become a big hit with teenagers. Similarly the relatively simple iMode, which provides simplified web pages on mobile telephones has become a hit in Japan.

The Internet has a number of people-to-people communications tools which take some effort to master. The technically simplest, but perhaps most socially complex is electronic mail. There are various group-ware technologies designed to make it easier to communicate between a group of people. These technologies add technical features to take over some of the social roles in communicating. An automated mailing list maintains a directory of participants and, optionally, an archive of the conversation. It can also have a place to find out what the discussion is supposed to be about. However, there is still a role for a moderator in most automated lists, to keep the discussion on topic and help those who get lost.

A University is More than Rote Learning

The Australian National University (ANU) is a respected and established University and so is taking a cautious approach to online learning. This semester will see the first coordinated use of online instruction with the WebCT package. Thus is a web based system, which is commonly used in universities for creating and delivering computer based training material. This is the type of system envisaged for the ALP's University Of Australia Online, but there is a very great risk in assuming what it delivers is everything a university does.

Training packages, such as WebCT, run from a central web server. The course designer and students use a web browser to access it. This creates a very convenient system for those who have an Internet connection (even a slow one will do) and know how to work it. The student needs no special software, their standard web browser is sufficient. Text on screen can be resized and icons automatically have alternative text captions, making accessibility by the disabled reasonable. External course material, such as lecture notes, can either be imported to the system so it is held on the central server or linked to and kept separate. This makes the adaption of existing material easy.

But there are some problems with such a system. The course author and the students require a continuous Internet connection to use the system, so material can't be developed or used off-line. A student in a remote area on a dial-up telephone line will tie up the line while studying and may be paying by the minute for the call and for Internet access. The single central server is a potential point of failure, with a downed computer inconveniencing thousands of students.

Unless the course designer is careful to provide usable captions for images and in laying out material, there may be difficulties for disabled students. However, this may still be far in advance to the access to teaching materials which a disabled student can get in the average face-to-face course.

It is in the provision for chat rooms, where the essence of the real university becomes apparent. These create a large legal and moral supervision liability for the university, but are what will distinguish a university from a commercial training course. A University is a place of discourse, which involves talking and listening to students. While this is feasible using online technology it requires new skills from staff, new skills to be taught to students and significant resources.

The structured approach to teaching which web based systems provides will help people who are new to teaching, but might feel restrictive to experienced educators. A side effect of providing extensive on-line material is that fewer students will turn up to lectures. This is something which those used to orating at university may find hard to adjust to and they will be under pressure from students to put material on-line. Ideally universities will use this as an opportunity to reallocate resources from lectures to other teaching techniques (such as more tutors and on-line help), but might tempted to just use it to cut costs. There is also the temptation to buy in prepared courseware and not encourage local development.

Online development provides the opportunity to involve outside professionals in course development. However, the infrastructure to do this will be needed. Impediments can be as trivial as the delay in allocating staff user-ids to external course designers who are officially staff members, but not on the payroll. Some of the online systems lack simple composition facilities, such as WebCT's lack of a spell checker. Universities will need to clarify intellectual property right to courseware developed. At present universities assume they own the courses which staff prepare. This is reasonable when those staff then deliver those courses in person. However, if a course is delivered to thousands of students around the world and perhaps sold to other institutions, the author can reasonably expect a share of the revenue.

The Common Room

An online system which designs out informal communication may eliminate the most important and creative aspect of social organisations. At a university one important form of interaction is in the common room. Resources are expended on such areas because they provide a way for people to talk to each other. The same is needed in an online university. It is possible to have informal online discussion but this takes resources and deliberate work to design.

It would be foolish and shortsighted to equip the online common room like a set of food vending machines, where staff come in only long enough to put their money in a machine and get a snack bar or disposable cup of instant coffee. We need the online equivalent of comfortable chairs, where people can sit and chat. Valuable information is communicated informally in such an environment.

An example of deliberate social engineering of a discussion environment is the Link mailing list:

The link list was established in 1993 as a forum to discuss emerging issues related to the development of the internet in Australia. The impetus for this came from a meeting of the Working Group on Local Systems Interconnection, now the Electronic Libraries Forum (ELF). As a consequence the membership initially came from the library, networking and standards community. The list was established by Eric Wainwright, the Deputy Director-General of the National Library of Australia and Tony Barry then Head of the Centre for Networked Access to scholarly Information at the Australia National University. The list mounted on the main campus web server at ANU (www.anu.edu.au) supported by the Centre for Networked Information and Publishing. The support software is majordomo and the list is maintained by Tony Barry

This level of communication does not happen by accident. Just as students learn social communication skills at a physical university, they will need to learn online social skills at a virtual university. Australia's business and government workers are largely lacking in these skills and one of the major benefits of the online university may be to fill an skills gap which is impeding e-commerce.

Students (and first of all staff) will need to be taught how to read and write online. Communicating via e-mail to one person or to hundreds on an electronic mailing list is not a natural skill, just as handwriting or public speaking is not. But these skills can be taught and improved with practice.

Lead Federal Agencies Fail Effective and Efficient Online Working

While there is much that can be done online there is still the need for face-to-face communication. However, face-to-face meetings can be made more efficient with online preparation and enhancement. The very high cost of face-to-face meetings (thousands of times that of an online meeting) makes this imperative. Some new resources are needed for meetings (such as on-site network access) and some are not needed (such as urgent courier deliveries of paperwork before meeting).

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), is meeting in Melbourne from 10-13 March. ICANN is one of the bodies which governs the Internet and provides a good example of online enhanced meetings. The meetings are free to attend, open to everyone and the details are provided online. As well as the meeting schedule and agenda, it is possible to watch a webcast and participate remotely.

An example of what not to do is given by two of the Federal Government's IT agencies: the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) and the Office of Asset Sales and IT Outsourcing (OASITO). NOIE is Australia's lead Commonwealth agency for information economy issues and OASITO deals with Information Technology Infrastructure outsourcing. While NOIE has helped Australia create a world-class online economy and society, it is unable (or unwilling) to use the Internet to run its own operations efficiently. OASITO goes further by discriminating against Australian small enterprises, and those in regional areas, by not using the Internet efficiently.

One simple example is that NOIE sends out invitations to events in the text of e-mail messages, but duplicates the invitation with large proprietary word processing format attachments. This causes inconvenience for those with low bandwidth Internet connections, particularly in regional areas, who have to pay to download these long messages. OASITO invites small and medium enterprises to attend industry briefings, but holds the events in only a few capital cities. The briefing material handed out at the events is not offered online, although it is already prepared in electronic format suitable for downloading from the web. The result is smaller Australian enterprises, and those in regional areas, who cannot attend the events can have difficulty in obtaining the information.

Real Campuses for the Virtual University

It is possible to efficiently blend online and face-to-face ways of working. Students of the University Of Australia Online will still need to meet in person on a campus for some of the courses. The ALP envisages existing physical university campuses being used.

Basic structure of the UAO

However, existing campuses have been designed for off-line education. They are not necessarily located where the students need them, particular not in regional areas. These campuses will not have the facilities online students need and will have faculties they don't need.

There are already some regional micro-campuses, suitable for online students, such as the University of WA Albany Centre. This is a modest refurbished building fitted out with a dozen or so computers and video conference facilities to the main campus in Perth. It has a couple of full time staff and part time tutors. At a modest cost this could be replicated across regional Australian and in outlying suburbs of the cities, so that a university campus would be within reach of most of Australia.

In addition to providing local access to university education, such campuses could be expanded to be a resource for small scale, local high technology development. This would address a problem with the Federal Government's recent innovation statement, which mostly addressed big business in big cities.

References

Further Information



This document is Version 1.1 7 March 2001http://www.tomw.net.au/2001/sti2.html

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    Copyright © Tom Worthington 2000.