Tertiary education is in crisis; increasingly its funding is reduced and its relevancy questioned. The use of the internet in university education and the delivery of online courses is seen as a cure-all for tertiary education, allowing tailored courses to be delivered to a wide student base with unprecendented immediacy and with a minimum of cost to the institution. Tara Brabazon questions these assumptions. She shows that the delivery of quality online education requires as much input and thought as conventioanl course delivery. It is the teachers who pay, in their own time and effort to maintain standards. She also shows that there is more to teaching and learning than can ever be delivered online. From: Gleeb Books Web Site, October 2002, URL: http://www.gleebooks.com.au/gleaner/2002/Oct/education.htm
A response:
- The last time I talked about online education at a launch in Sydney:http://www.acs.org.au/president/1997/pagelnch.htm
- Online education is useful.
- Some examples of my attempts: http://www.tomw.net.au/
- Open source model from software development
- An example from MIT's Open Course Ware initiative: http://ocw.mit.edu/6/6.170/f01/index.html
- Teachers need to take ownership of their material.
About The Speaker
Tom Worthington is an independent
information
technology consultant and author of the book
Net
Traveller. Tom is one of the architects of the
Commonwealth Government's Internet and web strategy. The first Web Master for
the Australian Department of Defence, in 1999 he was elected a Fellow of the
Australian Computer Society for his contribution to the development of
public Internet policy. Tom lectures on electronic commerce and web
technology at the Australian National University and is a Visiting Fellow in
the Department of Computer Science. He is a director and a past President of
the Australian
Computer Society, a member of the Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing
Machinery.
Further Information
- Learning, Managing & Technology, Launch of the PAGE IT Management Program Tom Worthington President of the Australian Computer Society 10am Wednesday 3 December 1997
Comments and corrections to: webmaster@tomw.net.au
Copyright © Tom Worthington. 2002