WWW8: Learning Online Workshop

1. Introduction
2. Learning Online
   • Business/learning goals
   • Audience characteristics/needs
   • Social, cultural and ethical issues
   • Development process/team and institutional issues
   • Technology issues
   • Tracking effectiveness
3. Conclusion
4. Notes

Introduction

The Eighth International World Wide Web Conference, which was held in Toronto in May, saw the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the World Wide Web. To mark this occasion Tim Berners Lee in his key note address called for the development of the next generation web, the Semantic Web. The development of the Semantic Web will rectify a problem that is possibly one of the most significant limiting factors of the web in its current form, the entanglement of form and content. Through the separation of content, presentation and meaning the Semantic Web will ease the flow of information by allowing it to be shared between computers in the form of data. This is as opposed to the web in its current incarnation where the transfer of information is primarily between people in the form of documents (1). Berners Lee set the tone for the overarching theme of the conference by stressing that this vision of the Semantic Web can only be achieved by the development of open standards which will facilitate the flow of this information as metadata.

While much of the conference was taken up with detailed discussion and dissection of these standards two other related threads recurred throughout the week; the challenges and opportunities presented by the use of the web as a platform to facilitate education and the importance of implementing standards of accessibility (2). The many complex issues relating to the creation, delivery and evaluation of innovative educational materials via the Internet were raised at a number of sessions and discussed in depth at the Learning Online workshop (3).

Learning Online

The Learning Online workshop was attended by a diverse group of educational practitioners from both the academic and commercial spheres. Commercial training issues were represented by delegates from a wide range of training consultancies and multinational companies such as Prentice Hall and Fair Isaac. Representatives from the world of academia included educational web developers and technologists, subject specialists, web masters and librarians. Less targeted education was the central issue for those responsible for the public promotion of research centres such as CERN and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre and those developing online information resources such as Microsoft's Encarta.

The primary objective of the workshop was to draw on the experience of both academic and corporate educational practitioners to discuss a series of key issues related to learning online. The aim of these discussions was to attempt to identify examples of "best practise" and to define the current "state of the art" in relation to educational applications of communications and information technology (4).

Six themes were identified as key issues for debate in the run up to the Conference with each delegate submitting a position paper to outline their own perspective on these issues. The format of the workshop allowed participants to discuss each of these themes in small groups before presenting their findings to the group as a whole.

There was wide agreement between all the workshop participants that the development of online learning materials must always be driven by business and learning goals, rather than by the technology itself. At this current stage in the lifecycle of online education the production of learning materials can often be extremely time-consuming and expensive. Therefore it is crucial that educators, whether commercial or academic, who are undertaking the development of new online training materials or virtual learning environments do so with a clear pedagogical strategy in mind. Online modules will only succeed if they as appropriately situated and fully integrated into a new or existing educational infrastructure. Students quickly loose interest in courses that appear to be irrelevant or inappropriate to their topic of study and mode of learning.

The problems encountered when attempting to target educational materials to the specific needs of their learners varied enormously for the workshop delegates. Developers from many higher education institutions, and some of the more technically oriented commercial companies, often have the luxury to being able to pin point an exact audience for their materials. Perhaps an individual tutorial group or class, or a specific group of technical experts or network engineers. In contrast, many corporate trainers are in the position of having to deliver training materials to a much more diverse spectrum of learners. One delegate outlined the problems of delivering an online course on company safety and security policy to an audience that ranged from professors of particle physics to part time maintenance staff. This problem was of course exacerbated for those who had the unenviable task of creating complex information and reference resources for the general public at large.

Whether an online module is to be designed for a single tutorial group or an entire company it was generally agreed that developers would always face the problem of the "Lowest Common Denominator". Should course modules to pitched at the most basic level in order to cater for the learning needs of those lacking confidence or ability? An admiral strategy perhaps, but one that runs a real risk of neglecting or de-motivating more gifted learners. By exploiting the potential of communications and information technology educators have a valuable chance to overcome the problem of the "Lowest Common Denominator" through the creation of multi-threaded course modules. Such modules can present the learning material in a variety of different forms while the nature of hypertext allows learners to jump freely from one thread to another. Thus allowing learners to effectively tailor courses to their own needs without making them feel that they are stuck in once particular stream for the duration of their study period.

The two main issues that emerged from this discussion thread were how to make materials culturally appropriate for an international audience and how to encourage learners to socialise online.

While it is important in all educational scenarios that learning materials are culturally appropriate for their target audience this is particularly true in the case of international distance learning. Internet supported distance learning is a significant growth area, particularly in the fields of business and management. All workshop participants agreed that it was important to be aware of cultural differences when designing course modules for delivery to international learners particularly when these modules may involve collaboration, communication, debate and discussion. Internet supported international distance education gives us all an invaluable opportunity to develop global cross-cultural educational networks. It is crucial that we do not squander that opportunity by imposing western ideologies on cultures with their own rich educational traditions.

One of the advantages that Internet supported distance education offers is that it can enable students to communicate with fellow learners regardless of their geographical location. This ability to communicate should help to overcome any feelings of isolation students may harbour while at the same time enriching their educational experience through the introduction of discursive learning. An enormous variety of Internet supported communications tools are now available ranging from desktop video and audio conferencing packages, white boards, realtime chat clients, discussion forums and, most recently, ICQ. However many workshop participants related experiences of creating online modules with carefully integrated discussions topics supported by state of the art chat forums which their students consistently ignored or under-used. The challenges of facilitating and maintaining meaningful online discussions are well known and documented and it has already become clear that the problems here are not technological but educational. While the introduction of online tutorials and discussions may not seem like such a radical step it is one example of a more fundamental paradigm shift taking place in education. Learners are naturally cautious of such changes and it is crucial that educators are able to show students how these new forms of education will be of practical benefit to their studies.

Perhaps the widest ranging discussions of the Learning Online workshop took place around the theme of the development process and related team and institutional issues. Some of the predominant issues that arose were the failure of institutional infrastructures to keep pace with technological and pedagogical developments, the lack of coherent funding policies to facilitate the continuous development of C&IT in education and the challenge of globalisation.

While some workshop participants were able to give encouraging reports of educational institutions and companies that had made real attempts to develop an infrastructure capable of supporting the development and delivery of Internet supported educational materials it is unfortunate that such forward thinking establishments are not yet the norm. It still appears to be common practise for developers and academics to be expected to create innovative learning materials without sufficient financial, technical or logistical support. However the fact that so many diverse companies and educational institutions were represented at the Learning Online workshop suggests that there is sufficient will, and hopefully sufficient influence, to overcome these problems.

The issue of continuous funding was less of a problem for practitioners from commercial backgrounds than for those from academic institutions. In fact many corporate representatives expressed incredulity that some internationally recognised academic projects had been developed with minimal financial support and maintained with less. Among academic practitioners it has become apparent that there is an understated but vitally important network of good will that sustains the continuous development of innovative Internet supported educational materials. Fragmented funding initiatives frequently mean that developers are employed on short contracts which allow little or no opportunity to evaluate and support completed projects. The fact that many of these projects are supported and the valuable experience gained from them fed into new often unrelated projects is purely down to the dedication of the developers themselves. While the commitment of these individuals may be admirable their dedication is not an adequate substitute for a coherent funding infrastructure

Facing up to the challenges of the globalisation of education was one issue almost all workshop participants agreed upon. Education is increasingly moving out of the hands of traditional providers such as schools, universities, corporate training companies and in-house training units. The main education providers of the next millennium are just as likely to be global multimedia enterprises, software companies and even entertainment corporations. One workshop participant raised the spectre of the "Death Star Scenario" - multinational media players such as Microsoft, Disney, and News Corporation collaborating with leading universities to provide education and "infotainment" to a global audience (5). Of course this is not to say that such advances would completely invalidate traditional education providers. Companies and institutions that identify and emphasise their individual strengths, make innovative and appropriate use of new technology and cater well to the demands of their learners are always likely to have an important role to play in education.

Many themes emerged during the discussions of the technological issues of learning online. Some workshop participants were particularly keen to discuss the relative merits of various virtual learning environments (VLEs) such as Lotus LearningSpace, Web CT and TopClass. However it quickly became apparent that no consensus would be reached as to which was the "best" virtual learning environment. Most developers had trialed a whole range of VLEs and many had resorted to adopting a hybrid range of tools and VLEs to support the demands of the often diverse modules they were responsible for developing and maintaining. Given the limitations of many commercially produced VLEs it was noticeable that many developers, particularly from educational institutions, chose to develop their own integrated virtual learning environments or suites of tools.

It was during the discussion of technological issues that the main theme of the conference came to the fore. How can we deliver information in a standard transferable format? The introduction of standards to learning materials is probably one of the most significant challenges currently facing developers of Internet supported learning materials. If we are able to encode educational materials with standard metadata we will be able to start producing educational materials which are both re-usable and transferable from one company or institution to another. This will help to lower the cost of production in real terms and also help overcome the perennial problem of "not created here" syndrome. Developing standard encoded re-usable educational materials will also pave the way for the introduction of transferable credits which in turn will hopefully encourage the development of a truely flexible framework for life long learning.

Tracking effectiveness was the final issue debated by the Learning Online workshop and, as with the earlier discussion on technology issues, many complex themes emerged. These included the validation of user identities, the ethics of user tracking, the problems of creating secure summative assessments and the challenges of effective evaluation. As yet there is still no effective and ubiquitous method of validating user identities online. Most developers of computer aided assessments will be familiar with the question: how do we know that the student sitting the online assessment is who they say they are? The problem of validating user identities is exacerbated for practitioners delivering online learning materials to younger children of primary school age. How do we assign an online identity to a primary school child in a manner that is secure and yet meaningful to that child? And more generally, how can we effectively assess and evaluate learning when the whole learning paradigm is changing so rapidly? There are no simple answers to these questions and although educational technology is advancing rapidly it is certain that these issues will remain significant topics of debate at future Learning Online workshops.

Conclusion

To summarise the Learning Online workshop it is clear that the same range of issues were of significant concern to delegates from both the academic and commercial spheres. In addition it was apparent that all delegates were extremely resourceful and dedicated to the development and advancement of new learning materials and new forms of learning. In his opening address Tim Berners Lee suggested that the exponential growth of the web should be slowed down in order to allow time for standards to be developed. Education however is in the process of entering an unparalleled and accelerating period of change. Traditional educational paradigms are dissolving and being replaced by frameworks capable of supporting new forms of open and flexible lifelong learning. The Internet is the perfect medium for the delivery of these new forms of education. However if learning online is to fulfil its early potential we must recognise the importance of slowing down and developing internationally recognisable data standards. High quality learning materials may continue to be time consuming and costly to produce but if we can encode these materials with transferable standard data we will help to ensure that production costs will fall, materials will reach a wider audience and learning online will be able to fulfill its real potential.

1. Bob Metcalfe, From the Ether "Web father Berners-Lee shares next-generation vision of The Semantic Web" http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/metcalfe/990524bm.htm

2. "W3C issues web content accessibility guidelines as a recommendation" http://www.w3.org/1999/05/WCAG-RECPressRelease

3. The "Learning Online" workshops at the last three successive World Wide Web Conferences have been facilitated by Dave Whittington of the Robert Clark Centre forTechnical Education, University of Glasgow.

4. Learning Online WWW8 Workshop homepage http://www.cs.strath.ac.uk/~dave/www8workshop/

5. Lawrence Stedman, Vision "New Media and Borderless Education: A Review of the Convergence Between Global Media Networks and Higher Education Providers" http://horizon.unc.edu/ts/vision/1998-07.asp