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This presentation will describe and analyse the experiences of a small, specialised College located at a substantial distance from its parent university and administered by a highly reputable and well organised charitable agency, in moving from traditional teacher education course delivery mechanisms to flexible delivery of its post-graduate programs. It focuses upon the agency's vision of creating a holistic online community to stimulate and generate research and professional education and rehabilitation studies in the education of students with sensory disabilities. The challenges of experimenting with various delivery modes that enhance learner outcomes and reflect learner diversity are explored. Important issues in fostering interactivity, maximising future information access and facilitating student teachers' information and computer literacy skills are also identified.
In recent years, a significant shift in paradigms has occurred in higher education. The traditional paradigm of the university as an institution that primarily provides instruction is rapidly shifting to a new paradigm; the university as an institution that produces learning. The shift requires among many things, movement away from passive lecturer-discussion toward exciting new didactic approaches that promote student's discovery.
The role of the university is complex. Annan (2001), for example, points out that universities differ widely with regard to aims. Some aim at pursuing original enquiry, others have a departmental structure for specialist learning and act as service centres for professional, vocational and technological demands made on them by governments. Essentially, universities are communities of scholars and it has always been their aim to get students to start to take responsibility for their own learning and to develop questioning skills. Their function has seldom, if ever, been to simply to transfer knowledge. Instead their need is to create a community or an environment that prepares students to discover and build knowledge for themselves. Whatever their function, this is the original or initial concept of university. In Australia in 2002, the lecturer is not exclusively the 'sage on the stage' but has becomes the 'guide on the side' and often transfers between the two roles seeking to base conduct on knowledge (Huebner & Wiener, 2001). The lecturer has become essentially, Socrates in cyberspace. The librarian too is undergoing a metamorphosis from bookstore keeper to educator and learning facilitator. With increased exposure to information literacy endemic in academic programs as central to developing lifelong learning, librarians now seek to foster and strengthen educational partnerships with academics.
Soon to find themselves at the cutting edge of the workplace in our nation's schools, student teachers, as potential key facilitators in the educational environments of the future require new and more refined skills, as well as concepts that will enable them to perform with competence and professional confidence, not only in a discipline-based context, but in the acquisition of the generic skills of information and computer literacy. Within this nexus of academic, librarian and student resides the framework of a learning community.
How best to build learning communities is a problem that has engaged philosophers since ancient times. As Plato stated in 360 BC:
We have been long expecting that you would tell us about the life of your citizens. What is the nature of this community? For we are of the opinion that the right or wrong management of such matters will have a great or paramount influence on the State for good or for evil.
We in Australian colleges and universities are now beginning to develop our learning community and it is important to understand the balances between social interaction, or sociability, and human-computer interaction, or usability and the ways that they create the foundation for what lies ahead. (Preece, 2000).
Renwick College is a centre for professional training and research in the education of children with sensory disabilities (i.e., hearing or vision impairments). Established in 1992 through a memorandum of agreement between the University of Newcastle and the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children. The Institute is Australia's major independent provider of special education services. It provides a wide range of educational services to children who have significant hearing and/or vision loss, including children who have additional disabilities. It is one of Australia's major charitable organisations, and one of the longest established, having being founded in 1860.
The College serves three related functions. It is engaged in:
The novel organisational collaboration has created the largest and most comprehensive centre for professional training in sensory disability in Australia and one of several such centres in New South Wales. Nationally, the development of this collaboration has reversed the diminishing provision of research and professional training for this small but highly specialised field and has created a centre with a growing international reputation. The College is affiliated with the University of Newcastle and administered by the Institute.
There are currently 73 postgraduate students of the University of Newcastle enrolled in course-work and research higher degree programs within the College, which is located at the Institute in Sydney's North Rocks district. Thirty-nine of these students access their course by distance mode. There are 9.5 equivalent full-time employees of the Institute engaged exclusively in the project as academic and support staff. Several adjunct and sessional lecturers are engaged on a part-time basis.
Collaboration between the University and Institute has led to the development of Australia's most innovative mechanism for the development and delivery of a comprehensive course-work higher degree program for professional training in the area of special education for children with sensory disabilities
The Master of Special Education (Sensory Disability) is an award of the University and until 2000, students had undertaken all of their course-work at the College, which is located on the Institute's campus. The majority of students choose a sequence of subjects in either (a) the Blindness and Vision Impairment stream or (b) the Hearing Impairment and Deafness stream.
At the end of 1999, it was decided to completely reformat the mode of delivery of a number of subjects in the Vision Impairment stream. In 2000, the first subject offered in distance mode as a paper-based package, EDSD531 Sensory Systems, Perception and Child Development > had three students enrolled. The program's full-accredited sequence of eight courses may now be taken through a combination of paper-based distance learning packages and block residential courses offered during school holidays. This enables interstate students, as well as those situated outside the Sydney metropolitan area to access the degree program. During 2000, plans were formulated to offer a similar blend of subject offerings in the Hearing Impairment stream and its first subject was offered during 2001. Distance education students in both streams have significantly increased (1200%) with a total of 39 now enrolled. Students come from Victoria, South Australia, the ACT, and remote areas of NSW and internationally from Singapore and New Zealand. Some subjects have also been taught offshore in New Zealand by visiting lecturers from Renwick College in collaboration with Victoria University, Wellington and the New Zealand Ministry of Education.
At the beginning of Semester 1, 2001, a part-time Distance Education Coordinator position was created to assist with administrative, liaison and library support functions. In Semester 1, 2002, a new Multiple Disabilities strand has been added to the program.
The infrastructure for distance learning has evolved at the College within an experimental environment, seeking to emulate the flexible learning programs of larger universities, but customising them to the requirements of the College's student target group. The College does not have a dedicated information technology team and access to the Institute's information technology section has been on a specific project basis. The College Librarian has initially coordinated web development with support from the Institute's information technology section. Collaborative web projects have also been undertaken with visiting overseas sessional lecturers. To date there has been no major outlay in courseware or software, nor has there been any large financial expenditure on the program.
The evolving online community of Renwick College aims at supporting students' needs through:
Technology has been selected on the basis of its success in supporting the pedagogical needs of academic staff, the background and needs of the students and the ways in which it enhances the learning process. Distance learning content has been developed internally with the assistance of a special education consultant for the Vision Impairment stream.
A range of flexible modes have been adopted or experimented with while developing the infrastructure for the College's evolving online community. These are presented in Table 1:
Package Block Lectures Page Player Links Readings Group Vision Impairment package Hearing Impairment package Library Administration
The College has adopted a holistic approach to the evolution of its online community. It is envisaged that to build an online infrastructure that will foster sustainable relationships and learning processes, it is necessary to have a strong base that reflects (a) elements of what students require and (b) the variety of ways that technology can assist. This should become evident in the high level of personal support given to distance learners.
Evaluation to date has highlighted:
In the online environment, the needs of people with disabilities tend to go unobserved, and thus unacknowledged (Schmetzke, 2001). It is easy to overlook accessibility issues when there are numerous technical and administrative aspects involved in setting up a distance learning program. The College is firmly committed to ensuring accessibility for students with disabilities. This commitment is underpinned by the idea that even though the resultant packages may not be usable by absolutely everyone, they are usable by as many people as possible. Abilities are emphasised, while disabilities are de-emphasised and a single solution instead of multiple ones is the goal (Anders & Fechtner, 1995).
Access to education is regarded in Australia as one of our basic human rights and we must accommodate learners with special needs as part of ensuring that high quality educational experiences are available to every individual. A potential learner with a sensory impairment might, for example, need to use screen reader software to hear information instead of viewing it on a screen. Limitations in mobility might require the student to use an adapted keyboard to navigate the Web. These individuals are fully capable of participating and contributing to a learning community and the onus is on developers of distance learning programs to design material according to principles of universal Web design. The process can be as simple as, for example, ensuring that all system and documentation images having alt tags and framesets are either avoided or their functionality sufficiently described to allow access.
Course documentation created by lecturers or administrators, may be converted to a more accessible format either by the University of Newcastle's or the Institute's Alternative Formats sections in order to enhance access for students with a disability.
Blackboard courseware is moving towards making its software fully accessible. The company has developed an interim solution through the provision of assistive technology guidelines. These permit users to find solutions that optimise their access to Blackboard-based courses. A proposal to write College accessibility guidelines, which uphold best practice principles devised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in universal access, is on the agenda for 2002.
As Kriger (2001) has noted:
Technological capabilities and limitations should not be the primary factor driving the curriculum and research required of distance education students, rather than the rich interplay among research, curriculum and good pedagogy.
How do we replicate this interplay of differing points of view, presentation styles, freewheeling discussion and the benefits of academic freedom in an online learning community?
"Interactivity" appears to be a "buzz word" in distance learning circles that seems to have acquired a variety of meanings. As a core concept within the notion of learning community , interactivity is essential to the facilitation of learning and sociability. Initially, attempts have been made to create course materials that have the capacity to motivate and engage learners in activity; to allow a student to not only engage in structured activities, but also to create and share activities with other students.
Email and an online discussion forums have been used to replicate 'conversations' between students and lecturers with differing results, dependent sometimes on the number of students in the groups. This interaction also highlighted the difficulties with student's varying levels of computer literacy skills in accessing online discussion groups. The College intends to experiment and build on this particular mode of interactivity via Blackboard courseware in 2002.
Salmon's (2000) model of facilitating learning through interactivity is currently being used by the College as the model for our learning community:
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Becoming a distance student is more likely to induce feelings of isolation, little sense of being part of the learning community and a sense of unreality (Morgan, 2001). The College acknowledges the wide range of benefits from using a variety of modes of study over the course of an academic year that will permit residential block attendance to counteract the isolated nature of distance study. The students themselves benefit from meeting their fellow students at these blocks, and often share the resources they have obtained either as a group or individually, for example, photocopies of journal articles, library resources or results of online database searches, sources of information - in fact, emulating the behaviour patterns of their on-campus peers, but in a much tighter time frame. During these residential blocks the library becomes the social hub, as well as an information resource centre.
This face-to-face interaction nurtures reasonably strong bonds between lecturer/student and support services. It gives a human face to the online communication that has either preceded or follows from the residential block courses, effectively refining general sociability into an online peer support system as well as student-lecturer interaction. Residential blocks also provide a forum to teach hands-on skills for the preparation of teachers of students with vision impairments.
By fostering regular, personal contact with distance learning students, a positive relationship might be built which could result for the College in greater student retention, improved student satisfaction and motivation, and stronger bonds or sense of belonging in the student/university learning community. Obviously this approach increases the demands on lecturers and support staff alike, and is difficult to sustain. Renwick College due to its small student cohort is uniquely situated to perhaps better sustain this level of interaction than are most large universities.
The products of enhanced teacher-student contact have also been reflected in dynamic teaching and learning partnerships that have been generated between lecturers and the librarian (Peacock, 2001). The need for greater student-teacher interaction has provided opportunities for faculty members and the librarian to work together more effectively in the delivery of flexible learning programs and in the development of information literacy skills. Lecturers have also become more involved in the selection of educational software and electronic resources. Concomitantly, the librarian has become increasingly engaged with course content and planning as well as delivering tutorials and producing self-paced guides on assessment outcomes that make acquiring information literacy skills more relevant to students.
A course collaborative team approach has proved a very effective mechanism for transferring and modifying course material for distance learning mode. The collaboration of lecturers, librarian and administrative staff has in some instances lightened the burden of creating course material. From the librarian's perspective, collaborative tasks include identifying appropriate literature and networked resources to support course preparation, providing advice about networked electronic resources and internet materials for student access, and embedding information literacy components within the course structure. These several activities have led to the development of a variety of learning resources dependent on place, mode and pace of delivery. This has in turn created a healthy respect by all those involved, for the amount of time and developmental work that is required for each collaborator's contribution to course material. The inclusion of technology necessarily fosters and promotes collaboration because it usually takes so many people to make the project work!
Partnerships with the administering organisation, (the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children), have also been encouraged the following activities:
The Library contributes to distance learning in a variety of ways, including provision of self- paced, interactive learning packages that enhance the its capacity to support a variety of learning styles and learning needs. Learner support is available from lecturers and from the librarian who can assist students in the use of electronic information resources. All students receive a print Library Guide at the commencement of their studies.
The Library as well as providing individual assistance provides a wide range of training programs. These include Internet research skills and training in the use of online databases accessible via the University of Newcastle's library web page, both on and off campus. To facilitate maximum access to the training programs, a CDROM was originally created that included a virtual tour, an interactive online journal database searching demonstration and self-paced guides available. During 2001 this was complemented by an Online Skills tutorial (accessing library online resources from a distance) available during residential block attendance. In the current year, the self-paced guides have been reformatted as web-based material and two tutorials will be offered during the residential block attendance periods. The tutorials will focus on development of online skills, as well as an internet research skills. A PowerPoint demonstration of online database searching skills, available via the Library's web page is also proposed. This range of learning activities is aimed at supporting a variety of learning styles and needs.
Much emphasis is placed on information literacy activities that address the development of information skills involved in locating, managing and using information for learning, research and professional purposes. These activities are embedded in both course material and the library's self-paced guides, as well as being a light-hearted component of the Online Skills tutorial. Assessment of the extent of successful information literacy skills acquisition has been through self-evaluation, personal feedback about self-paced guides, as well as from an online feedback form (to complete which, a certain amount of computer literacy has been required!). Results indicate that the integration of information literacy within relevant and immediate learning experiences has produced high satisfaction ratings and estimates of favourable learning outcome from students.
A further important factor in distance learning is the design of online materials to foster self-directed learning. This includes activities that the most and least challenged can access and enjoy. In support of the importance of this concept, Rieber notes that expecting everyone to learn the same thing, in the same way, at the same time is not supported by anything we know about learning and cognition (Rieber, 2001).
It has also been noted that the more 'fun' an activity is or the more like serious play it is, the more motivated is the student to learn. A goal for the future design of College online materials should be to "look for ways to trigger or coax play behavior in people and then nurture or cultivate it once it begins, just as one looks for a way to light a candle followed by both protecting and feeding the flame" (Rieber, Smith & Noah, 1998, p.33)
While building a learning community to deal with the diversity of (a) students and (b) in the content of their courses, as well as (c) in the new modes of delivery using technology, it is important to make time to reflect on the practices being developed (Brennan, McFadden & Law 2001). In future, for example, it will be more effective to make online material more re-usable, not only in different applications or courses, but in format, for example, in CD, print, or online production. This strategy should not only reduce the burden on lecturer's reformatting of course material, but also allow more flexibility in sharing online resources, internally as well as, possibly externally with other universities conducting similar courses.
Adopting an innovative approach, changing modes of delivery and learning about new technology are all features of program development that absorb a great deal of time and energy. One of the major positive outcomes of this particular focus and its attendant activity is that learning communities are able to offer the benefit of mutual support for students and lecturers as they mutually reflect on and improve current practice.
The halting and painful small steps currently being taken at Renwick College have led to an infrastructure for success. The challenge for the College is to pursue processes that encourage the interactivity essential for sociability of online communities in exchanging and sharing information and ideas.
Plans for 2002 include the following:
Why Socrates in cyberspace , as the title of this brief paper? Socratic dialog has for centuries in universities, proved an effective method of generating critical thinking skills and of reinforcing experiential learning. Two examples of the powerful outcomes it generates are (a) that people will probably gain more knowledge if they have discovered its constituents for themselves than they will from knowledge merely presented to them by others and (b) that learning is more effective when it is an active rather than a passive process.
With regard to the nexus of cyberspace and the Athenian sage, it is likely that had Socrates possessed a personal computer, there is hardly any doubt that he would have mastered the nuances of the device with little reluctance. He would, in fact, have joined us in our endeavours. As he once stated, 'Let him that would move the world first move himself,' or, 'Wisdom begins in wonder'. An eclipse of the quest for knowledge and wisdom by a perceived need for technological integration would probably have been seen by Socrates as ignorance. It is evident that the Socratic view of knowledge and wisdom was situated in the activities and experiences of the moment, and as such, the collective nature of the Socratic dialog must, as Pickett (2001) has pointed out, "forever be enshrined in the principles of future adult learning communities." Technology enhanced learning via the Internet can provide a key to this end.
If the relatively rapid movement by Renwick College from a centripetal to a high-tech centrifugal model of academic program development has revealed anything to the authors of this paper, it is that change is constant and meeting its challenges requires constant adaptation on the part of those engaged in program development and delivery.
A combination of factors is necessary for any new phase of online development in order that it prove successful. Online course development requires active participants and active producers as well as sufficient resources to support it. Other key requisites include a nurturing host organisation and a solid well-organised infrastructure. Technology can augment these requirements as the vehicle for extending to new groups, opportunities for learning, making learning more efficient and flexible and through enriching the learning process. However, all of these activities can best occur within a learning community in which the technology is not an end in itself. Rather, it complements solid, substantial course content and effective student/lecturer communication.
Inclusion of academics, librarians and students as active participants within a learning community has the potential to support a wide variety of activities related to information seeking, information provision, information sharing and knowledge construction, in addition to socialising and other types of interaction. The organisational battle, should one choose to see it in this way, is against the hidden forces of entropy and the powerful destabilising effects of cybernation.
Renwick College is endeavouring to achieve a balance between technology, or usability and lecturer/student relationships, or sociability , as well as quality content and student capability . The College increasingly provides a challenging learning environment, and as well, one that presents opportunities for creativity and innovation. At Renwick, these are days full of opportunity to reflect and develop new strategies in achieving educational goals and outcomes and to adapt to exciting new developments in the technological, pedagogical and cultural areas of teacher education.
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>[1] style='font-size:10.0pt'>Research Librarian, Renwick College, cheetham@ridbc.org.au
>[2] style='font-size:10.0pt'>Senior Lecturer, Vision Impairment, Renwick College, rcms@cc.newcastle.edu.au
