elearning_label_learning_and_society

Special concerns for this course include:

· It is directed towards an international audience;
· It accommodates a large number of participants (100-600 people);
· It has diverse student profiles, i.e. a mixture of students and people already working in their profession (a mixture of university and continuing education);
· It actively integrates all participants;
· It utilises collaboration as a vital part of the course concept;
· It is transparent to the public in all activities;
· It allows constant evaluation;
· Keeping the course concept as flexible and open as possible.

One advantage of on-line courses is the potential for communication, collaboration, and the constant exchange of knowledge between students and educators, which brings them closer to (and perhaps supersedes) "real life" teaching. The On-line Seminars have opened up new possibilities for students and teachers, and permit interdisciplinary and international collaboration, but have also proven to be far more time and personnel intensive than regular courses. Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) therefore becomes an important research area for education.

Designing collaboration and learning

These issues are complex and varied. Among the requirements for designing and developing effective on-line courses are attention to motivation and the fact that it must afford interactivity. A vast investment of time and energy during the design, development and the realisation of such on-line courses is necessary to ensure organisational and support activities to ward off potential problems. On-line VLEs present technical, transitional and pedagogical concerns. Our goal was that course design and development would reflect a commitment to high quality, and be based on state of the art research for teaching and learning. Hence, active learning and a focus on the communicative process; between and among students and teachers were considered to be essential as we investigated the design of rich on-line learning communities. Since it is a virtual environment, which is implemented on the Internet, it was clear that quality could be enhanced if the potentials of the Internet could be exploited. Those potentials include: the information and communication potential; the flexibility of time and space of learning; and access for everyone without the need for additional financial investments in equipment or tele-communication. Therefore the design of a flexible learning environment needs to take into account:

· Openness in design with respect to: user-groups, to address teaching and learning needs(cultures, disciplines, professions, number), the media that are being integrated, implementation of pedagogical features and feedback from learners and other participants.

· Flexibility with respect to: applied educational concepts and their evolving updates, the content to be delivered, applied pedagogical modes and methods for teaching and learning, duration of courses, application of (and changing) technologies and evolving design.

· The facilitation of active participation of all participants by: supplying and integrating the communication tools needed, and integrating motivational features for improving/enhancing interaction.

· Ease-of-use for learners and instructors, in the form of low technical barriers, motivational atmosphere and the provision of administrative tools.

· Existing technological, personal and financial resources with a clear perspective for future continuation (no project status!).

· The integration of a platform for pursuing research interests and improving education (e.g. via evaluation).

There is a tension between pedagogical needs and resources, and efforts relating to finances, organisation and technology. Therefore a compromise must be found for defining the requirements, taking into account economic and technical issues as well as specific legal regulations in formal education that define obligations related to privacy, fees, etc. when running an on-line course.

Organising collaboration

The On-line Seminar is a co-operative international venture. The roles of each of the co-operating institutions depend on the focus, resources, personnel, and disciplines of these institutions. Currently this collaborative venture involves the participation of Higher Education institutions in Germany, Sweden and Spain, supported by research institutions in Greece and Austria. Each of these institutions may in turn collaborate with other local institutions. Co-operative decisions are based on common educational and research interests, competence, persons in charge, technical resources and the cultural background. Educational interests can therefore be implemented in ways not known before ICT (Information and Communication Technology) and the Internet were available. On a broad scale, collaboration takes place among students, between students and teams, and among team-members. Student collaboration needs to be organised and co-ordinated too. Taking a closer look at the role of collaboration leads to a series of considerations that can be viewed on four levels; on the students level within the course, on the team level within the course, on a local level and finally on an institutional level: i.e. collaboration between international universities.

The On-line Seminar environment teams consist of individuals from many different countries. These team members constitute an international community of lecturers, agents, volunteers, former seminar participants and students doing research work. Many of today’s volunteers in the moderation of group discussions are former students of the seminar. Several tightly bonded groups have been formed as a result of the seminar on varying levels. Learning processes are also encouraged for the team - currently we are developing training for moderators. The design is complex and multi-faceted. Learning within the environment is structured to be multi-levelled and complex. Learners are learning from the team, but also from other learners. The team is learning from learners and other team members and participating institutions are learning from learners, teams and other institutions.

These complex webs of different learning levels are intimately related to the collaboration taking place across all these levels. Meta-learning is built into the design. Feedback has shown that learners rate this collaboration structure highly. Group work is central to the On-line Seminar. Given that the requirement is to collaborate with “strangers” this requirement becomes embedded in the strategy of the course design to promote active learning. Given this social dimension, it is critical that design supports this framework for building learning communities. As already stated (Hermes 2000) students learn “to take responsibility in their hands and work in groups as autonomous learners”. They build ‘virtual teams’ and follow strategies in completing their tasks by developing and transforming their ideas.

A lot of planning and creativity has gone into the design of the tasks for participants. Special care has been given to developing questions that require the active use of the Internet, and facilitate extensive co-operation between group members. This deliberate design opens up the possibility of meta-learning, i.e. changed knowledge regarding how to act in online group work. And it is interesting to find out that the students, in general terms, are grading their improvements higher in these areas. Almost half of the respondents (44,7 percent) graded their improvement as high as 5 (on the 5-point scale) and another 34,2 percent graded the improvement as high as 4. Additionally, when participants are asked if the seminar should be offered in the future, 68% of respondents have rated this response with a 5.

Technical environment

An on-line environment was needed which is open and flexible as possible, so that it could be adapted to the contextual needs of the course. Therefore an open source software was chosen. Moodle is a software package for producing internet-based courses and web sites. For our requirements (achieving high motivation and interaction by providing a stimulating environment) special attention was given to the design of a friendly, easy-to-use environment with communication-rich features that could be implemented. New tools were added (Who is on-line", quiz modules, various chat and group work facilities, including the internal access to on-line resources ("library") which are inter-linked) in order to just provide the right tools for each work phase and context. Additionally a special tool for supporting the interaction between students and teachers on an individual level was integrated.

Conclusions

Active learning needs to be encouraged and facilitated through supportive design. This design needs to have structure and clearly demarcated support; the learner, especially within the current education system, cannot provide this alone. But there needs to be guidance for teachers as well, in order to ensure that they get acquainted with, and used to new methods and attitudes of learning.

The future of learning is still to be found in the exploration of the connection between organisation and collaboration. Organisation will be facilitated through carefully constructed collaboration. There are still questions to be answered. How are media selections for communications viewed and preferred by participants – and why? The research related to administrative functions is scarce. Collaboration needs to be organised on three levels: institutional, conceptual, and on an individual level. Investments of time, money, and effort need to be considered.

What has the On-line Seminar accomplished so far? It is believed that progress to date has produced a very good test bed for investigation of the following aspects: the organisational methods for this kind of activity, methods of training teachers in online teaching, and how to use available resources more effectively.

Future work

Of course there is much still to explore, the On-line Seminar is also a learning process for the organisers. The project, now called IKARUS, has funding from the European Commission under the Minerva programme, and over the next years we will be using it as a test bed to further explore the ramifications and implications of the approach and systematise it for possible use in other contexts. Particular areas we will be exploring include organisational aspects, teacher training for this kind of collaborative approach, and how to make more effective use of available resources.

OR-World aims to respond to today’s need for continuing and flexible learning and develop a Web-based framework for sharing high-quality learning material between universities, educational institutes, self-learners, and interested companies in different countries. It will also support individualised post-secondary education for young learners and support lifelong learning for adults within a flexible virtual university context.

The framework will encourage learning through user-friendly tools for constructing interactive media elements such as animations, simulations, text, video and audio, as well as their hyperlink structure. These learning objects can be combined in various ways to create learning hyperspaces as a web of networks according to a metastructure defined within the project.

One of the long-term goals of the project is to develop a digital network offering flexible courses, based on standardised electronic contents that can be adopted by all universities involved. This environment will encourage just-in-time and just-in-place learning. The framework has been configured and tested with contents of the interdisciplinary subject Operations Research/Management Science (OR/MS), but it is generally extendable to cover other knowledge domains as well.
An innovative approach to learning

Furthermore, interactive learning is facilitated by the use of case studies, offering an innovative virtual learning technique. The project OR-World has generated tools for building interactive case studies for distributed use and facilitate their solution. Learning with case studies is supported by computers, but ideally involves face-to-face interaction between students and instructors as well.
OR-WORLD

The framework encompasses an interactive component for self-assessment and grading. It will be possible for an instructor to collect self-assessment results, and thus be able to judge the status of a given student or a group of students.
Creating a flexible learning framework

OR-World works on different hierarchic granularity levels, facilitating the construction of a personalised learning environment through the re-use of existing materials. The levels are defined as follows, according to the type and size of learning object:

- Media element (typically one third of a computer screen of text);
- Learning element (typically one to two computer screens of text);
- Content module (typically about two to six learning objects belonging to similar content; flexibly combinable);
- Thematic network as a final learning environment, combining content modules in a flexible way into a kind of learning hyperspace, such as a course about a certain topic.

The framework provides a structured environment to input new (structured or semi-structured) learning materials. Objects at each level are tagged with metadata to facilitate their flexible use in different contexts. This framework is usable in a multilingual environment and supports networked communication between instructors and learners outside the classroom. Teachers will be able to use the framework in creating their own specific learning environments where they can combine their own learning objects with those generated by others. As a result of this framework, there will be a metastructure above the hyperspace of learning objects, allowing the user to approach the same subject from different angles.