online class good or bad

Distance Education Vol. 26, No. 1, May 2005, pp. 153–157

ISSN 0158-7919 (print); 1475-0198 (online)/05/010153–05 © 2005 Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia, Inc DOI: 10.1080/01587910500081459

BOOK REVIEWS AND REFLECTIONS

Web-Based Learning: Are we becoming obsessed?

Ormond Simpson* Open University, Milton Keynes, UK Taylor and Francis LtdCDIE108128.sgm10.1080/01587910500081459Distance Education0158-7919 (print)/1475-0198 (online)Original Article2005Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia, Inc.261000000May 2005OrmondSimpsonOpen UniversityMilton KeynesUK

In a recent Distance Education editorial, Naidu (2003, p. 3) noted that “much of what comes across my desk these days deals with aspects of online teaching and learning.” That seems true of both Distance Education and the Open Learning journal where rough estimates suggest that nearly 70% of recent articles are about online learning in some form.

Yet is this interest a real reflection of the place online learning will play in distance education in the future? Or is online learning over-hyped and are we heading for a “dot.edu” crash like the “dot.com” crash of a few years ago? In Distance Education recently an online student (Bishop, 2002) discussed her own experiences of online learning, many of which had been negative. In a response to that article, in a subse- quent edition of the journal, Conrad (2003) defended online learning but neverthe- less referred to “unpleasant variations in the uniqueness that we must accept as necessary to online learning.” What might some of these unpleasant variations be; are they always going to be characteristic of online learning; and, in the rush to online learning are we overlooking other technologies that might have some of the advantages of online learning with fewer of the unpleasant variations?

The problems of online learning are not difficult to list:

● Accessibility. Access to the Internet is still far from comprehensive even in highly developed countries. In the United Kingdom, more than 40% of the population still does not have Internet access at home, and although access is still growing the rate has slowed recently. Surveys suggest that a large proportion of that 40% do not see any value in becoming networked, let alone transferring to broadband which is increasingly necessary for online courses.

● It is often assumed (e.g., in the UKOU Student Services Strategic Plan, 2003) that online learning access will be possible via public sites such as (in the United Kingdom) “LearnDirect” centres and learning centres in libraries. But whilst it

*Institute of Educational Technology, Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK. Email: o.p.simpson@open.ac.uk

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may be possible to study short courses (a few hours spread over a few days) it is not obvious that more sustained study (more than an hour a day for several months) is possible this way. What evidence exists (Driver, 2001) suggests that studying via a learning centre is more difficult than studying on a home-based PC, requiring higher levels of organization than for home study with success likely to be less.

● Student success. Evidence of success rates in online learning are difficult to find but where evidence has been collected in disinterested surveys it appears that dropout in online learning courses may be higher than in conventional distance education courses (Corporate Xchange, 2002, as cited in Simpson, 2003).

● Popularity. Despite heavy promotion of online learning by providers it is not yet clear that it is popular with potential students. Recent findings in the United Kingdom (Selwyn, Gorard, Furlong, & Madden, 2004) suggest that apart from courses in IT itself, students are not attracted to online learning courses as such.

● IT complexity. It is sometimes assumed that computers are becoming easier to use and more reliable and that knowledge of them is becoming widespread as younger generations with IT experience from school enter adult learning. But there is little evidence for the first assertion—the story of the person who wouldn’t use a PC until they became as easy to use as a phone and who now no longer understands how to use his phone (Schofield, 2004) is one illustration. The increasing incidence of spam, viruses, and fraudulent Web sites is another. After all, cars have been with us for well over 100 years and they still run out of petrol, break down, and crash. Neither is it clear that students’ familiarity with computers will necessarily make online learning easier when that experience may have been largely playing computer games and visiting chat rooms.

● Cost. The amortized cost of a computer, materials and phone can be considerable; estimates of around £800 (AUS$3,200) a year, depending on how much time is spent online, have been made (Bishop, 2002). Whilst a computer may be shared between family members and used for various purposes, such costs are not negli- gible, especially if course materials are printed off in quantity. Nor is it yet clear that going online is cheaper for institutions—both Rumble (2001) and Hulsman (2000) suggest that online learning will be more expensive for institutions than conventional distance education, and the UK LearnDirect organization estimates that some of its online courses are as much as 30% more expensive to present than conventional distance education packages (National Institute for Adult and Continuing Education (NIACE), 2003).

Given these issues, it is important to ask what online learning is good for:

● Internationalizing access to learning. Online courses can be taken from anywhere in the world. But it is not yet apparent how important this is to students. In the absence of international validation agencies, students may be unwilling to gamble on obtaining qualifications which may turn out to be worthless when the awarding institution is unknown to prospective employers (Simpson, 2005).

● The Internet as a research tool. Using the Internet is an important part of online learn- ing, especially for higher-level courses. But part-time students on undergraduate

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distance education courses may not have much time for substantial research outside their course material, and entering a topic into a search engine is as likely to generate a fourth grader’s homework as a helpful article.

● E-mail and conferencing. Here there may be a success story. Students appear to value the use of e-mail for contact with their tutor and other students, particularly the ability to send messages which are less disruptive to receive than phone calls and which can be re-read both before sending and after receiving. Students place less importance on the use of conferencing but there is evidence of the value of conferencing in building accessible learning communities (see, for example, Anderson, 2004).

T-Learning

Is it possible to replicate some of the very real benefits of online learning with the telephone without some of its unpleasant aspects? For example, the phone is cheaper, simpler, accessible, and more reliable than an Internet-linked PC—can positive aspects of online learning such as access to information and computer conferencing be replicated by the telephone—“t-learning”?

Modern computer-based telecommunication systems allow sophisticated use of the phone. Such systems can be used for playing back a selection of previously recorded messages (audiotext) and for recording messages and making them accessi- ble subsequently (voicemail support—VMS). There have been experiments using the medium in both ways, some of which are discussed below.

Audiotext Services

Some years ago Simpson (1987) reported on a project which offered recorded messages on topics of current interest to UKOU students such as “Getting started” at the beginning of studies, “Exam stress” before exams, and so on. Each message was 3–4 minutes long and shared with the Internet the capacity to be accessed at any time of the day or night, but in this case through an ordinary phone. The evaluation was encouraging, with a high number of listeners (up to 400 per month), many of whom left positive comments. The system was cheap to provide and use.

Voicemail Support System (VMS)

Interest in the potential for voicemail dates back some years (e.g., Bernard & Naidu, 1990). More recently Hipp (1997) reported on a voicemail set-up that allowed a tutor to leave messages for students in his voicemail box which they could listen to at any time and then leave messages for the tutor. A similar project was reported by Dymock and Hobson (1998). Both reported positive findings in helping students overcome isolation and humanize their learning.

Most recently, Brookes and Simpson (2004) reported on a more elaborate system which attempted to replicate asynchronous computer conferencing. Students could

156 O. Simpson

dial into their tutor’s voicemail and by pressing numbers on their touchtone phone could hear new messages since they last dialled in, or review all the messages. They could then leave messages themselves which could be heard by subsequent callers. They could record or delete their own message before sending it.

Such a system had some advantages over computer conferencing:

● it needed only a touchtone phone; ● connection was fast and reliable; ● it was quicker to leave a verbal message than a typewritten one; ● the system could be accessed from a mobile phone (in the United Kingdom

access to mobile phones is greater than access to the Internet. VMS may be an example of “mobile learning” or “m-learning,” sometimes touted as the next learning innovation).

There were some disadvantages:

● it was difficult to navigate the system with no visual indication of new messages; ● it was difficult to concentrate and took longer to listen to verbal messages than

read written ones; ● it was not possible to post diagrams, and describing formulae was difficult.

Given those considerations it seemed likely that courses with high verbal content would benefit most from a trial VMS system so it was offered to students and tutors enrolled on UKOU Language and Health and Social Welfare courses in 2002–2003.

A full report is available from the author of this article but the project demon- strated that a VMS system was technically feasible. The system appealed to tutors and students with shorter familiarization times than that needed to use computer conferencing effectively. The system allowed only for audio exchanges but the value of those may still be high. In 2004, Duke University in North Carolina, USA, equipped all its new students with iPods on which they could store materials such as lectures (“ICT in higher education,” 2004). The amortized cost of a VMS system at about US$9 per student per year for 3 years may look attractive when set against the cost of iPods—US$400 each for each student.

Conclusions

Clearly, VMS or audiotext will not replace online learning. But they are reminders that there are technologies for distance learning other than the Internet and that we should approach online learning sceptically and ask in any instance whether it is the best solution to the particular teaching and learning issue we are facing. The dot.com boom was followed by a dot.com bust which in turn was followed by a more considered analysis of what the Internet does best and what it is not so suited for. The future for distance education is likely to comprise a mix of delivery methods that can support openness and flexibility (which are the identifying features of distance education), and our research and evaluation activities should reflect that.

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Notes on Contributor

Ormond Simpson has worked for the UK Open University (UKOU) for 30 years. He is the author of two books: Supporting students in online open and distance education, and Student retention in online open and distance learning—both published by RoutledgeFalmer.

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