Using the internet in teaching and learning: A U.K. perspective

Pergamon Compums & Geosciences Vol. 23. No. 5, pp. 549.-557. 1997

C 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain

PII: SUO98-3004(97)00022-t? 0098-3004/97 $17.00 + 0.00

USING THE INTERNET IN TEACHING AND LEARNING: A U.K. PERSPECTIVE

PAUL BROWNING’ and JANE WILLIAMS*

‘Department of Geology, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 lRJ, U.K., and ‘Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 lUJ, U.K.

(e-mail: [email protected])

(Received 8 October 1996; revised 21 November 1996)

Abstract-A substantial body of courseware has been produced in the U.K., but little is Internet-based. The adoption of this material is being stifled by a lack of suitably specified delivery platforms, the “closed box” nature of the modules which prevents local customization and the absence of any obvious career development benefits to staff that develop or exploit it. Courseware consortia have been slow to exploit the Internet, even for marketing and distribution purposes. The use of proprietary authoring software to produce courseware for standalone machines has polarized thinking away from networked applications. It has seeded the myth that writing courseware requires expensive tools and extensive experience. Of 42 U.K. geoscience departments, 33 now have a Web-presence. Much of the world-visible information is in the “marketing” or “administration” category. It is likely that a significant body of Web-based courseware hides behind Intranets. Locating good-quality teaching and learning resources on the Web can be time-consuming. A start has been made with a number of virtual libraries. There may be a co-ordinating role for national bodies to oversee the provision of pages of “recommended” sites, public domain “imagebanks” and “questionbanks”. The geosciences would do well to look at what other disciplines have already achieved in these areas. The future holds many possibilities for distributed and distance learning via the Internet. The arrival of low-cost “fat” Network Computers may solve the delivery problem by seeing a quantum leap in the level of student ownership. However, the rate-limiting control on future developments will be determined by human and not technical consider- ation. Currently, the opportunities offered by information technology are outstripping the ability of the higher education sector to assimilate and exploit them. Higher education institutes need to “surf the wave, not be submerged by it”. 0 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd

Key Words: Assessmentware, Courseware, Geoscience, Intranet, WWW.

INTRODUCTION

This article is “A U.K. Perspective” rather than

“The U.K. Perspective”. Keeping abreast of the ex-

ponentially expanding body of information avail-

able on the Internet is not easy-even within one’s own national borders. This article became out of

date and was incomplete the moment it was written (November 1996). By the time it appears in print, it

will be still more dated, though we hope that some of the background themes identified will have been

seen to increase in prominence.

It is also “A U.K. Geoscience Higher Education

Perspective”, which fails to take proper account of

developments in all the “spatial sciences”-our geo-

grapher colleagues will have to forgive the arbitrary and elastic boundary that we draw between these

disciplines. Lastly, it is probably a minority view. We suspect

that many academics-and university managers- are approaching the next decade unaware of the magnitude of the changes that will befall them. Some of them accept that the Internet is going to have a substantial impact on teaching and learning,

but they do not think that the changes will be so swift as to affect them. Time will tell. We suspect that the effect of the Internet on all aspects of life- working and social-is only just starting to be explored and felt.

GEOSCIENCE COMPUTER-ASSISTED LEARNING IN THE U.K.

One cannot properly review the state and status of the Internet in teaching and learning in the U.K. without first reflecting on developments that have a occurred in computer-assisted learning (CAL).

The achievements of the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP) will be reviewed

elsewhere in this issue (Boyle, Bryon, and Paul, 1997), but the substantial body of courseware produced by the U.K. Earth Science Courseware Consortium (UKESCC, Bryon and Sowerbutts, 1996, http://www.gly.bris.ac.uk/WWW/TerraNova/ ukescc/ukescc.html) demands mention as it sets a bench-mark against which other geoscience CAL products will be compared.

549

550 P. Browning and J. Williams

The UKESCC is a joint venture involving nearly 50 Earth Science departments in universities and colleges throughout the U.K. Its main aim was to produce courseware for use on Macintosh and PC computers that was widely applicable and could be integrated into existing undergraduate courses. Twenty-one modules, each intended to be equival- ent to about 4 h of conventional teaching, have been produced. The TLTP has had two 3-year funding rounds, and a third phase has recently been announced.

These CAL modules, and those produced by other TLTP consortia (e.g. GeographyCAL. C- Cubed, STOMP) were the subject of a meeting entitled “Geoscience Courseware” held in September 1996 at the University of Bristol (see http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Geol/gig/conf/ courseware.html for the virtual proceedings, which include links to a full list of courseware that was demonstrated, together with information on availability). During the final discussion session of this

meeting, a number of the problems facing the wide- spread adoption of these courseware materials were highlighted.

1. Is courseware any good?

Just because it is on a computer does not automatically make it good. Currently, there is a dearth of evaluation studies. TLTP Phase III will be concerned with integration into the curriculum and evaluation (for the latest information, see http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/tltp/). Where evaluation had been attempted, the ver- dict so far seemed to be “students did not per-

form any worse than they did using orthodox methods”.

The courseware is not appropriate here It used to be “not invented here” but the “tech- nophobic luddite tendency” is boxing clever. In fact, even amongst the learning technology evan- gelists, the comment is often.....

I cannot customize the courseware

Many of the TLTP courseware modules (with some honourable non-geoscience exceptions) are

closed boxes written using proprietary authoring tools. The UKESCC retreated from initial plans to allow local customization as the pressures to become financially self-supporting grew in the later stages of the TLTP programme. None the less, it seems that many academics wish to get their hands dirty but.....

5. The authoring package is too expensive

Authoring packages, such as Authorware Professional, are costly. One positive suggestion to emerge was the idea that courseware developers should offer “shells” into which academics

could “plug in” their own text or images. This would make the creation of courseware less expensive in terms of development time. One example already available is CALScribe (Whittlestone and others, 1995, and see http:// www.ets.bris.ac.uk/calscribe/calscrib.htm).

6. There is too much courseware

A nice problem to have (if it is any good).

Certainly, it is a time-consuming task to become

familiar with the modules that you might use as an adjunct to your teaching (but, as with text-

books and journals, you cannot exploit them effectively unless you know the material inti-

mately). Suggestions that access and delivery of such a volume of material present a technical

problem are unfounded; hard-disk storage is now inexpensive, and file servers on LANs are being

provided by many campus computing services.

7. What is the deal for staff?

“If I save four hours contact time per week for my course by exploiting courseware then I can

be sure that my Head of Department will dump another four hours of duties per week my way in lieu.“-a tricky one to deal with. “There are no

brownie points in terms of career development if

I use or develop courseware.”

So, in summary, UKESCC has produced a substantial body of learning material, but its adoption

is handicapped by a lack of evaluation studies, the

“closed box” nature of the modules and the absence

of any obvious career development benefits to staff who might exploit it. A shortage of suitable delivery

platforms in significant numbers has also stifled its growth.

It would be wrong to give the impression that only the UKESCC is developing geoscience CAL

material in the U.K. Two particularly noteworthy examples are the Open University Virtual

Microscope (Robinson, 1994, or see http:// www.gly.bris.ac.uk/WWW/TerraNova/ouvm/OUV-

M.html) and GLG-Map (Moseley, 1994, and see

http://www.glg.ed.ac.uk/glgsoft/maps/maps.html).

So, given this volume of TLTP-inspired CAL ma-

terial, is the U.K. not poised ready to burst on to the larger stage of the Internet in the next step of the development of the use of Information Technology (IT) in teaching and learning?

Within the geoscience community, the answer is “Not really”. Many TLTP-consortia have been

slow to exploit the Internet, even for dissemination purposes (Mogey, 1996). The Authorware/ ToolBook approach has polarized thinking early along the lines of standalone (rather than networked) workstations-some of the products pre-

The Internet in teaching 551

sent technical challenges to install in a network environment; not enough attention seems to have been paid to this aspect during the development of the courseware.

It has also seeded a myth that writing courseware requires expensive tools and extensive experience. Exemplars of good Internet practice from TLTP and CT1 (the Computers in Teaching Initiative, a centrally-funded programme running in parallel, but separate from TLTP) are thin on the ground; too many centres remain firmly paper- and phone- centric operations.

USE OF THE INTERNET-E-MAIL AND USENET NEWS

Although we have started this account by dwell- ing on the impact of subject-based courseware, you can (and need to) do much to develop the transferable skills of students by using computers to teach about computers. Many (all?) geoscience departments will offer courses on the use of word-proces- sing, spreadsheet, presentation, etc., applications- either in-house or via a campus computing service. A growing subset of these departments will also offer “Internet skills”.

Such generic skills seem to have a low profile in terms of nationally co-ordinated dissemination in- itiatives. This is puzzling, given the effort (financial and otherwise) that has been expended on network infrastructure in the shape of JANET (the Joint Academic NETwork). Whereas projects like TONIC (see http://www.netskills.ac.uk/TONIC/) have produced learning resources such as NetSkills, such generic materials have not been given a significant marketing push by the subject-based TLTP or CT1 centres (who have the best established lines of communication with academics), and it has fallen to individual departments to make their own way forward.

An example of what is possible is summarized in “The geology@bristol experience” (Browning and Williams, 1995, or see http://www.gly.bris.ac.uk/ www/teach/ctiss/ctiss.html).

E-mail, either on a person-to-person or a person- to-group basis, can facilitate communication between staff and students. A number of factors, however, can conspire to impede the use of this medium.

Some institutions baulk at the idea that it may be misused (overlooking that masquerading can just as easily occur with letters and fax machines). The provision of mailing lists and associated hypermail archives is well developed on a national scale (e.g. the Mailbase facility-see http://www.mailbase. ac.uk/) but have yet to be implemented widely on a campus basis. In a campus environment with many mobile users (using workstations in different lo- cations), the IMAP mail protocol (rather than POP

which is geared to incoming mail being downloaded to local machines rather than being managed on a remote server) is preferred.

The shortage of IMAP-compliant e-mail clients offering a level of functionality that can compete with the best of the POP-based mailers has also acted as a brake in this area, although there are signs that this is about to change. Some staff may be reluctant e-mail users initially, but they are easily out-flanked once they realize that they are starting to miss out on information that is only being disse- minated in this way and that students expect to be able to communicate with them via e-mail.

Although not directly relevant to student support of teaching and learning, e-mail-to-fax gateways deserve mention. TLTP and CT1 centres may argue that they need to persist in snail-mailing meeting papers and newsletters because too many of their constituents either lack the technology and/or the know-how to generate hard-copy from e-mail attachments or WWW pages, but an e-mail-to-fax gateway (see, for example, the no-cost TPCINT service, http://www.tpc.int/) side-steps these problems by allowing hard-copy to be generated on local fax machines. The Geoscience Information Group (see http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Geol/gig/ gig.html) has taken to distributing meeting papers in this way, and it is proving a real boon to both the committee secretary (in terms of time and postal costs saved) and to those committee members in the non-academic sector who have yet to gain Internet connectivity.

The cultural changes required to see e-mail take root at a departmental level are modest (but can still involve a significant activation energy) compared to those needed to see the possibilities of Usenet news fully exploited. It is true that Usenet news has an image problem, but can we afford to ignore a medium for one form of “virtual tutorial” that is on offer here?

One of the lessons quickly learned as an academic moves up the Internet learning curve is that e-mailing lists are not a good vehicle for discussion, especially if it becomes protracted. The “signal-to- noise” ratio on many of the global newsgroups is, however, too high for anyone who is short of time. However, with the co-operation of a campus computing service, it is perfectly feasible to set up a local newsgroup to support the teaching of your course, and which is not visible to the rest of the world.

The remaining problems are then twofold. First, selling the idea to your students; our experience is that they will readily take to e-mail, but the idea of having their thoughts exposed to semi-public scru- tiny makes them reluctant contributors (similar to non-virtual tutorials!). Second, providing newsread- ing software that makes reading and posting to Usenet news just as intuitive an exercise as using reading and sending e-mail. Of course, proprietary


“conferencing” software is available (e.g. First Class) but at the price of moving away from an open system and considerable financial commit- ment.

Despite these additional hurdles, we remain keen to persevere with local Usenet newsgroups for this mode of working. We are inspired by an intriguing account from the Department of Music, University of Glasgow (Duffy, Arnold, and Henderson, 1995, or see http://www.music.gla.ac.uk/HTMLFolder/ Research/NetSem.html), which, although using a

conferencing system other than Usenet news, suggests that the contributions made by students in “virtual tutorials” showed an improvement over the orthodox model for two reasons; shy students were less inhibited, and submissions were carefully crafted because of the additional time available for reflection on the topic of discussion.

Although we shall turn to the World Wide Web in the next section, it is not premature, given the obstacles to the wider and more productive use of e-mail and Usenet outlined above, to consider the prospect of the Internet “killer application”. We predict that whichever software house manages to

combine the browser component of Netscape with an IMAP-compliant mailer and a newsreader with the intuitive functionality of Newswatcher will emerge triumphant. We should add that, by our

rules. the memory footprint of such a beast must not exceed 4 Mb! Perhaps we will see our require- ments being met by a “fat” NC (Network Computer) on which a “Works-type” application suite is also bundled so that the hardware can be productively used when not connected to the

Internet? (Another of our rules: the hardware must

come in at a modest price.)

USE OF THE INTERNET-THE WORLD WIDE WEB

The potential of the World Wide Web to support teaching and learning has been outlined by Browning and Williams (1995). A snapshot of the use of the Internet by geoscience in the U.K. was provided by the Disseminating Geoscience Information meeting held in September 1995 (see http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Geol/gig/conf/diss.html for the virtual proceedings). This potential is being

partially realized. Most U.K. Higher Education Institutes (HEIs)

have now grasped what the Web can do for them in marketing terms (although it can require patient ex- planation to senior managers that “..... it is not an unfocused use of resource to distribute an electronic prospectus to Mexico because the prospective student in Mexico actually comes via the Internet to the university in the U.K. to get it rather than the other way round.....“). A measure of the impact of the Web on U.K. geoscience is the list of WWW servers maintained by the Geoscience Information

Group at http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Geol/gig/ wwwuk.html; of 42 geoscience departments in the

U.K., 33 now have Web presence.

Most of these sites offer information in the “mar-

keting” (e.g. admissions and course information) and “administration” (e.g. staff lists and contact

details) categories. Fewer offer access to teaching

and learning resources (other than pointers to ma-

terials than reside on other Web sites). This is not

to say that such resources are not held locally;

many campuses may be experimenting with what

“Intranets” can offer and building a wall round

locally-authored materials.

Such teaching and learning resources may not be

elaborate enough to warrant the label “course-

ware”; the materials may be no more than hand-

outs or lecture notes. None the less, an important

and crucial step will have been made towards mak-

ing the hypertext (rather than the word-processed)

form of the information the primary source. (Until

this happens, attempts to progress with the Web-

based dissemination of information will founder.) It

should then be a small step to a PYO (“Print Your

Own”) handout service (allowing concomitant sav-

ings in staff and consumable costs).

However, elegant (i.e. efficient and painless) print

accounting models are not well developed on U.K.

campuses. One solution is MacAdministrator (from

HiResolution, see http://www.hi-resolution.com); it

provides “print credit accounting”-students can-

not use a laser printer unless they are “in credit”.

They must purchase “print credits” in advance and,

as they print, their “balance” is automatically deb-

ited. Analogous systems for PC and UNIX environ-

ments are needed if a PYO approach is to flourish.

Although possibly unrepresentative (but they are

the only statistics available to me), of the 50 del-

egates to the recent Geoscience Courseware meeting

at the University of Bristol, only ten were already

using Internet resources to support their teaching.

However, and we find this significant, over half

confessed to “having played around with HTML”

(HyperText Markup Language is used to construct

WWW pages). In the above account of the meeting,

two points that also emerged from the discussion

were omitted:

1. Authoring courseware is hard/easy.

No consensus was reached on this, although

most will accept that writing robust, attractive,

well-designed and interactive courseware is time-consuming. Figures of 40 h of develop-

ment for 1 h of courseware produced would

probably be at the low end of the range.

2. I need an imagebank.

Many staff attempting to author their own courseware would benefit from access to libraries of copy- right-free images. This would cut development


times substantially and see the sharing of high-quality materials.

As already noted, another positive suggestion to come out of the meeting was the idea that courseware developers should offer “shells” into which academics could “plug in” their own text or images. However, it seems to us that there is a pretty good “shell” out there already. It is called the World Wide Web. It is free, open, platform- independent and eminently networkable and, if the crude statistics reported above are, indeed, repre- sentative, HTML authoring is within the grasp of a substantial body of academics (C. E. Ford, unpublished, http://www.glg.ed.ac.uk/people/academic/cef/ gigsep95.htm1, 1995).

In view of the pressures on academic staff time, it is important to explore all avenues for the authoring of WWW-based teaching materials. One approach is to exploit one of our most important resources-students themselves. Using an award under the University of Bristol’s Teaching and Learning: Excellence and Innovation Fund, a team of students has been working during vacations under the editorial guidance of academic staff to produce (or convert existing) materials (“virtual lectures”) for delivery via the Web.

For one course of first-year lectures on Earth Materials, an abbreviated version (reduced to bullet points of text interspersed with illustrations) of the virtual lecture was used live via Netscape and a data projector (dispensing with the need for over- head and 35-mm projectors). The response from students to this style of delivery was positive; they welcomed being able to consume the virtual lecture at their own pace, whenever they want, wherever they want. Some queried why they should bother attending the lecture at all if it was all available via the Web. We do not have a problem with this-we would much prefer our contact time was used in tutorial mode rather than information transfer mode-but many of our colleagues remain wary about being “replaced by a computer”.

One example of student-authored courseware is Minerals under the Microscope (see http://www. bris.ac.uk/Depts/GeoI/opmin/mins.html). Minerals under the Microscope provides a bridge for students between two existing computer-based learning tools-the UKESCC Optical Mineralogy Module (OMM) and the Open University Virtual Microscope (OUVM). Why was a bridge required? Both OMM and OUVM are closed boxes and not customizable locally. OMM includes much material that is beyond the scope of a first-year course. It also suffers from poor navigation within the module. OUVM is a prototype and, although an excel- lent simulation, lacks any supporting dialogue. Minerals under the Microscope was written to help students exploit these two valuable-but imperfect

or incomplete-learning aids to the full. (This is, of course, completely analogous to what already occurs with book-based resources; academics exploit the good bits and link them with their own materials. Students may still read the poor chapters just as they may visit bad WWW sites.)

It is said that a 22-year-old will face an average of six career changes in the next 42 years (J. Butler, pers. commun., 1996). A range of transferable skills and the ability to self-learn will be one of the hall- marks of the student who will thrive in the future. In order to tap into the resource that students themselves represent, and at the same time equip them with an additional transferable skill, we are considering the introduction of an “Internet pub- lishing” component to our computing courses. Assignments for the course would consist of authoring chunks of WWW-based courseware under the editorial guidance of an academic. In this way, a substantial body of WWW-based material might be built quite quickly and at low cost. Such a model has already been used successfully in the veterinary sciences (Garvin and Carrington, 1995).

Other approaches to the provision of WWW- based courseware are also underway. Examples are the W3 Lessonware (see http://www.comp.it. brightonacuk/w3lessonware/), the Marble (see http://www.marble.ac.uk/marble/), and Microcosm (see http://wwwcosm.ecs.soton.ac.uk/) projects.

Delivering courseware via the Web is definitely possible but what about closing the loop and moni- toring how students are progressing with such materials? Staff may be sceptical of the value of courseware, but the prospect of “assessmentware” relieving them of the chore of marking tends to get them quite agitated. A number of Web-based assessment systems are now being piloted; the one with which we are most familiar is TML-Tutorial Markup Language (see http://www.ets.bris.ac.uk/ ets/resource/tutorial/tutorial.htm).

TML is essentially a superset of HTML and is based on work originally undertaken by Neil Holz, Carleton University, Canada. It allows anyone with an elementary knowledge of HTML to construct multi-choice and short-answer questions that can be delivered via the Web (complete with user authenti- cation if required). TML is a generic tool of the widest possible application. It costs nothing and is potentially platform-independent. It requires a WWW server that supports CGI-scripts and a PERL compiler. Currently, it has been implemented on a number of UNIX hosts at the University of Bristol, and there are plans to port it the Windows NT environment. TML is open, easily modifiable and offers the potential to deliver low-cost student assessment and (especially) student self-assessment in any networked computer environment. The hard- est thing about TML (or other assessmentware systems) is thinking up good questions to deliver-


another opportunity, as with imagebanks, for co- ordination of effort.

One of the attractions of the Web-based assessmentware is that feedback to students can point

back to the original learning materials. The learning

materials can cross-link to each other or to other resources like on-line journals. In a U.K. context,

mention should be made of the Electronic Libraries

Programme (see http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk/elib/) and on-line journals such as the Journal of Glacial

Geology and Geomorphology (seehttp://boris.

qub.ac.uk/ggg/) and Electronic Geology (see http:// www.electronicjournals.co.uk / electronicgeology.

html). Whereas the future will undoubtedly see a

growth in the availability of electronic literature,

what is to be done about the key references from the past? It is to be hoped that publishers will con-

sider “re-engineering” selected papers into an elec-

tronic form-the Science Citation Index could provide a guide on where to start on the backlog.

As mentioned in the introduction, and elabo-

rated by Castleford (unpublished, http://www.bris.

ac.uk / Depts / Geol / gig / conf / courseware .abs.html#castleford, 1996) we are faced with the

problem of finding the “good stuff’ amongst the exploding volume of information that is the Web.

Attempts are already being made to provide Virtual

Libraries (e.g. http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/VL-

EarthScienceshtml and http://www.uh.edu/-jbutler/

anon/anon.html), but there is no obvious scheme of

quality control. Perhaps there is a co-ordinating role for professional bodies like the Geological

Society (see http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/) or subject-

based centres like CTIGGM (see http://www.geo- g.le.ac.uk/cti/) to act as clearing houses for such

resources. As well as overseeing standards, such an

initiative might also guard against wheel re-inven-

tion. The case can also be made for the co-ordinated growth of imagebanks using one or more of

the JISC-funded technology programmes (see

below) in this area. Such a scheme also might be

extended to databases of short-answer questions (“questionbanks”).

Various organizations are starting to exploit the

possibilities offered by the Web. The Geological Society’s WWW site went live in July, 1996. The

U.K. Earth Sciences Personal and Career Development Network (see http://www.soton.ac.uk/

“cabl/) is also using this medium. A attempt to co- ordinate the dissemination of research studentship

information via the Web has been mooted by the Geoscience Information Group. As yet, though,

none of these offerings have matured to the level of

other U.K. subject-based gateways like Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG, see http:// sosig.ac.uk/), Organizing Medical Networked Information: information, OMNI, see http:// omni.ac.uk/) and Business Education on the Internet (biz/ed, see http://bizednet.bris.ac.uk:8080/).

USE OF THE INTERNET-THE FUTURE

The Web clearly promises much in terms of infor-

mation delivery, but the growth area for the future will be interactivity (especially secure credit card transactions). It is likely that much of this sort of functionality will be provided by “plug-in” technologies. Examples already available are those that allow courseware authored in non-HTML applications (e.g. Authorware, Supercard, Hyperstudio) to be delivered, none the less, over the Web (via Shockwave, Roadster and Hyperstudio plug-ins, re- spectively).

Remote interaction between users via the Web is

also heralded by plug-ins for Timbuktu and it cannot be long before video conferencing capability

becomes available (a la CUSeeMee). Whether Java achieves much penetration at the level of the academic (or student) author rather depends on the provision of tools to hide the gory details. Too many of our colleagues already baulk at the sight “of all those horrid fishtail brackets” when con- fronted by HTML; we suspect that the demands of object oriented programming might bring a new meaning to the term “killer application”!

One could spend much time crystal-ball gazing over the technical issues (we have not even mentioned the bandwidth problems), but it is our firm belief that the rate-limiting control on future devel-

opments will be determined by human consider- ations. The rest of this account confines itself to these.

Two pressures will drive the development of the Higher Education (HE) sector in the U.K.-“massi- fication” and globalization (Ford, 1996). U.K. Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) are already reel- ing under the impact of increased student numbers and a declining level of resource; they have yet to feel the full brunt of the pressures of a global market. As in the industrial sector, HEIs are going to have to become more cost-efficient to maintain their

competitiveness. As Ford (1996) makes clear, information technol-

ogy (IT) has a crucial role to play in underpinning this competitiveness:

Senior general management must first align.... strategy and then reposition IT from its historical support function to where it can play a critical role in strategy formulation and implementation.

The shape that this realignment of IT is going to take within the U.K. is unusually easy to predict. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) published a Five Year Strategy in July 1996 (the full document is available via http://www.niss. ac.uk/education/jisc/pub/strategy.html).

JISC facilitates the cost effective exploitation of information systems within higher education. It does this in partnership with the institutions and other bodies such as the Research Councils, by providing a pervasive network infrastructure and cen-


tral information services. The key actions of the

JISC strategy fall under the following headings:

Networking,

Electronic Information,

Technology Opportunities, and

Human and Support Issues.

A strong message in feedback to the earlier JISC

Issues Paper “Exploiting Information Systems in

Higher Education” (see http://www.jtap.ac.uk/JISC/

JISC-Issues.html) was that the opportunities pre-

sented by IT are outstripping the ability of the sec-

tor to assimilate and exploit them.

We find it revealing that the area of Human and

Support Issues, listed last in the Executive

Summary, finds itself promoted to the first of the

bullet points of the key elements in the Chairman’s

Preface to the strategy document. For us, it remains

a puzzle as to why the principal subject-based sup-

port agencies (TLTP and CTI) have lain outside the

direct remit of JISC (and will continue to do so),

and yet the strategy document proposes the for-

mation of JISC’s own Awareness Unit under a

Committee for Awareness, Liaison and Training

(CALT).

It is one thing to criticize the failure of TLTP

and CT1 to tackle the generic issues (the list is long

and includes everyday matters like the security of

computers and users in general access rooms; laser

printer accounting; software maintenance, metering

and distribution; allowing access to interactivity on

the Web via CGI scripts without compromising

security) that underpin the successful adoption of

IT at a departmental level, but was it part of their

brief in the first place? If not, whose responsibility

was it? If it was simply meant to fall to local cam-

pus computing services to solve then, an opportu-

nity for economies of scale has been missed, and

the probability is that wheels have been re-invented.

It seems that until proper co-ordination of the

“awareness issues” is reached, then assimilation of

the technological opportunities at local level will

continue to falter.

None the less, the JISC Five Year Strategy paints

a glossy picture of the future in which the Internet

will be the crucial element. The technologies of

video conferencing, whiteboarding and virtual en-

vironments (for example field trips, such as Unwin,

unpublished, http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Geol/gig/

conf/courseware.abs.html#unwin, 1996) will deliver

distance- and distributed learning. (It is important

to recognize that the “distance” involved need not

be great before substantial benefits in the flexibility

of learning provision accrue.) More mundane activi-

ties, such as marketing, registration and student ad-

ministration, will also use the Internet as the vehicle

of choice.

SOME CONCLUSIONS

U.K. HEIs have experienced a wide variety of

funding programmes that have allowed many flow- ers to bloom. There has been much innovation, but its benefits have yet to be embraced on a wide scale at the grass roots level-technology is not yet embedded in the U.K. geoscience curriculum.

Part of the problem has been the lack of evaluation studies; heads of department, who hold the purse

strings, are reluctant to channel resources into technology-based teaching and learning unless they can be confident of a return on their investment.

Exploitation of the scope offered by the Internet has been delayed by the concentration of TLTP resources on proprietary authoring systems to the

exclusion of other approaches. For those staff who have embraced technology in their teaching, a pressing need exists to convince them that there is “life beyond Powerpoint”. The geoscience commu-

nity would do well to emulate its chemical brethren in this regard (e.g. the Sheffield ChemDex, see

http://www.shef.ac.uk/“chem/chemdex/and Rzepa, Whitaker, and Winter, 1994 or http://www.shef.

ac.uk/‘chem/www-publications/4_02963A.html). The new Teaching and Learning Technology

Support Network (TLTSN, see http:/iwww.icbl. hw.ac.uk/tltsn/) seems to address the problems of evaluation and the need to exploit the Internet, but the generic issues (see previous discussions) that

need to be resolved before technology easily embeds in the curriculum remain orphans. Perhaps this net-

tle will be grasped by JISC’s “Awareness Unit”?

The new technologies are causing information

overload. Life has speeded up; we struggle to do just enough, just in time. E-mail and the Web have

not replaced the telephone, fax machine or internal memo but have added to the inward Bow of information; they have yet to be properly integrated.

Personal information management must now be high on any staff development agenda.

There is now the prospect of two societies. the in-

formation-rich and the information-poor. Unless the staff development issues are addressed, we will see members of the information-poor working

within institutions where the new technologies exist

but remain untapped. The Economic and Social Research Council have announced a funding programme called The Virtual Society (see http://

www.esrc.ac.uk/). It aims to shape policy and practice through a better understanding of electronic technologies and information infrastructures. It will

examine the role of electronic technologies over a range of human and social activities: are fundamen- tal shifts taking place in how people behave, or- ganize themselves and interact as a result of electronic technologies?

Contributors to this special issue were challenged by the editor to address four questions about the preparation of educational content for the Web.


1. Who will prepare it?

Everyone will-academic staff, students and educational publishers. We are about to see a plethora of easy-to-use WWW authoring tools; anyone can become an Internet publisher.

2. Who will pay for it?

Students, ultimately. The Information Superhighway may have toll booths on it. Modularization will see students moving freely between institutions, taking courses that suit them best from here and there. They may not even physically attend the institution, even if it is in their home town. An increasing number will be mature students who will have embraced life- long learning but, because of existing professional or social commitments, need the flexibility of distance and distributed learning.

It would, however, be a blow to the demo- cratic anarchy that has spawned the Internet if the toll booths arrive in large numbers. The Internet is the international treasure that it is because people have given freely of their time and expertise to share their knowledge. If too much material ends up hidden behind Intranets then the quid pro quo will be broken to the det- riment of all.

3. Why will the effort be made?

The pressures on HEIs will be unrelenting as they enter a global market. If academic staff are to retain their research function, then they will need to preserve time to do it. Teaching quality will need to be sustained in the face of increased numbers and less resources but contact hours need to be saved. This has to be achieved against a background of more students entering science degree programmes knowing less about math- ematics and the foundation sciences than they have traditionally done. Gaps in prerequisite knowledge will have to be plugged, and those gaps will differ from student to student. Individualized schemes of learning will need to be devised to even out the difference in students’ earlier academic careers.

Courseware is the vehicle by which this sleight of hand will be achieved. The future will see the rebirth of the academic tutor (as a guide through the available self-learning resources, and as a “shoulder tapper” who monitors progress) and the decline of the “lecturer”.

4. Where is it going?

We have attempted to give our vision of the future here.

The problem of delivery platforms will not go away. Static computers in 24-h access rooms do not provide a scalable model. HEIs are waiting for someone to grasp the nettle and investigate imagi-

native financing solutions that will allow each student to have a portable computer. Perhaps a “fat” Network Computer with a price tag of $1000 and campuses on which RJ45 sockets are as abundant as 13-amp power points hold the key to solving this conundrum.

A strong steer that HEIs should “surf the wave and not be submerged by it” has been provided by the JISC Guidelines for Developing an Information Strategy (see http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/jisc/ pub/infstrat/). A National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, chaired by Sir Ron Dearing, will concentrate minds further (see http:// www.timeshigher.newsint.co.uk / NCIHE / dearing. html). It is the first review of higher education in the U.K. since the early 1960 s and will influence the development of universities well into the next century; IT is firmly on its agenda (with a dedicated working group and a number of IT luminaries on its committee).

The next decades will see many profound changes in teaching, and learning and the Internet (or her granddaughters) will have a profound role. Top- down approaches will attempt to manage the infrastructure within which this change occurs. However, we are confident that the rate-determining step will be bottom-up; the osmotic pressure for change that will be exerted by students themselves is something for which we have high hopes.

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Documents

Using the internet in teaching and learning: A U.K. perspective