Many educational and training organisations in Australia and overseas have tended to see ‘flexible delivery’ as a panacea for the problems facing education in the late 1990s. There are many explanations given for its recent rise to prominence in educational and training contexts. Some say it is a response to mass education and the need to cater for more diverse student groups; others argue it is a response to industry needs for ‘on-the-job training’ or champion its value in promoting ‘lifelong learning’, while others link it to emerging educational theories concerning teaching and learning, particularly those who support constructivist approaches.
This report is about the introduction of online education in higher education. Specifically, it is a case study of one University’s approach to offering postgraduate courses totally online—the University of Southern Queensland. As such, caution is needed in extrapolating the findings from this study to other educational settings; nonetheless, the authors believe that the experiences of staff at USQ will have relevance to all institutions that have either begun to offer programs online or are contemplating doing so.
The report was commissioned by the Department of Education, Science and Training, as part of its Evaluations and Investigations Programme.
Research Team
Contributors to case study
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Online lecturers in the Department of Further Education & Training, Faculty of Education, USQ
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Selected online lecturers in Faculties other than Education
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Staff of USQ involved in the introduction of online education at USQ
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Senior administrators at USQ
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Students in selected online courses in the Department of Further Education & Training
Contributors to data interpretation
The purpose of the study
This study involved an investigation of the practice of online teaching and learning in the Faculty of Education at the University of Southern Queensland. It examined this context at a particular point in USQ’s history, namely at a stage where it is grappling with the emergence of online education. The purposes of the study were to assess the applicability of online education for higher education institutions, to document the issues with which teachers have to come to terms in the online environment, and to determine whether there might be a ‘pedagogical framework’ that is unique for online education in higher education. The study is unique in that it draws upon quantitative statistics concerning the number and types of interactions that staff and students have with the online platform as well as qualitative data designed to elaborate upon those interactions. It should be cautioned, however, that the study focused on only one institution, only one discipline area (although views from other Faculties were collected and have been reported in this report) and only on postgraduate students.
The general theoretical framework that guided this project centres on how change occurs in organisational settings. This involved a focus on more general literature concerning the implementation of innovations as well as use of a specific theoretical approach to the issue of changing teaching/learning paradigms, developed by Imershein (1976). The Imershein theoretical framework, which is described in the Theoretical Appendix, was used to determine whether a ‘paradigm shift’ had occurred at USQ as a result of the move from on-campus and print-based distance education to online education.
The research method employed in this research is case study. One university’s approach to online education and, in particular the approach taken in one Faculty of that university, is the focus of the case study. Eight courses delivered totally online were selected for detailed analysis. The rationale for their selection, other than being totally online, was that they had different purposes (graduate seminars, projects, and the like) and they reflected a range of different content structures— from theoretically based courses to skills-based courses emphasising core skills needed to work in an online environment.
A number of data-gathering techniques were used in the study:
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Document analysis/literature review/historical account.
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Quantitative analysis of course statistics available from the Blackboard platform.
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Questionnaire sent to staff and students requesting them to respond to an ‘issues paper’ prepared by the authors.
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Questionnaires sent to experienced, ‘totally online’ practitioners in the Faculty of Education, USQ.
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Questionnaires sent to other online practitioners/administrators across the university.
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Interviews with senior administrators.
The responses to the questionnaires sent to staff and students suggested that the introduction of online education had produced anomalous conditions, that is, a violation of their expectations surrounding teaching and learning. These related to three major areas: curriculum design, curriculum implementation, and teacher and learner roles.
Staff and students expressed concern that pedagogical imperatives might be taking second place to commercial interests. They also raised the issue of whether a textbased approach to both content and communication was the only way to approach online education.
When online education began at USQ with its communicative emphasis, it was seen as a potentially powerful tool to overcome some of the perceived weaknesses of traditional print-based distance education. Staff acknowledged the power of the tool, but have become aware that it has brought with it issues that have to be resolved; the quantity of interaction that online education generates, at least in some quarters, has imposed demands and possibly unreal expectations on staff and to some extent students. The interactive focus of USQOnline has caused concerns about the commercial viability of this type of operation. Unlike face-to-face delivery, USQ, or individual sections of the University, are not at this point in time imposing constraints on the way lecturers approach delivery; there are no set times for ‘lectures’ and ‘tutorials’ and no set student-staff interview times—it is a 24hour x 7day delivery mode.
It was acknowledged that online education provided a powerful pedagogical tool—its communicative capabilities—but this same tool had increased demands and expectations on staff and students that focused on the appropriate role of the teacher and learner in the online environment. Students have questioned whether their flexibility is being violated by ‘forced’ communications and a predominance of text and staff were unsure if the quantity of interaction was sustainable. The issue touched on appropriate levels of ‘teacher control’ in any teaching setting.
The very high teacher and student communicative engagement, in particular in the case of students, compared with content engagement (accessing study materials), suggested that a significant percentage of course content was generated through communicative interaction.
It was suggested that ‘content-heavy’ courses may not be appropriate for the online environment if communication is viewed as a crucial component of the pedagogy. It was also suggested that, because there was no obvious relationship between content heavy courses and other types of courses with regard to final student grade, and as students had an ambivalent reaction to the advantages and disadvantages of print-based material, it might be the case that content heavy courses are more suited to independent learners.
The data indicated that students and staff working in the online environment operated outside of traditional temporal norms. The 9 to 5 day, Monday to Friday was replaced with a 24 hour day Monday to Sunday. The pattern of interaction between staff and students revealed a common trend; interaction was very high at the beginning of the semester and up to mid-semester and then tapered off.
While asynchronous communication was heavily utilised in the courses, usage was variable for students and teachers. Some students seized the opportunity for interaction with staff and their fellow students while others did not. There were the beginnings of informal protocols emerging that controlled the extent of interaction that a lecturer was prepared to manage.
Levels of communicative engagement for gender and different cultural groups were similar, indicating that the relative anonymity and the asynchronous nature of online education might remove barriers to participation.
A consistent response from the staff in the research, not just those from the Faculty of Education, concerned a lack of flexibility in the learning management system (Blackboard) that is used to frame USQ online courses. It should be noted that this inflexibility might not lie in the platform’s inherent capabilities, but in how those capabilities have been adapted for use by USQ in conjunction with its commercial partner. What this response appeared to demonstrate was that there was a clear intent on the part of lecturers to let pedagogy drive the technology, but to some extent they were unable to do so because of the constraints in which they worked.
The Faculty of Education online courses were deliberately structured with a focus on the communication capabilities of online education, operating in a text-based manner. The predominance of text created its own set of issues; it would be fair to say that these were being addressed in an individualistic way, but it would also be true to say that the issues had not been resolved and certainly strategies had not emerged that might form the basis of a shared understanding of the way forward. There had been spasmodic progress made with concepts such as visual grammar, vicarious learning, intelligent tutoring, reflective writing, and communication conventions and protocols.
The analyses also uncovered themes that require further research. For example, the effect of what has been referred to as the ‘body-less realm’ of written communication online deserves study, in particular a lack of paralinguistic cues in the online environment.
With regard to how social identities are constructed through written text and associated issues, such as netiquette, masking and flaming, it was found that staff were dealing with these issues in an individualistic manner, but a shared approach had again not yet emerged.
Similarly, it could not be claimed that a common view on what comprises effective online pedagogy had emerged; there was, however, agreement about a range of pedagogical strategies that were considered effective in achieving a range of learning outcomes.
Online teachers in the Faculty of Education at USQ were in ‘change mode’; they were not trying to re-interpret teaching and learning around traditional structures, principles and practices.
The physical space defined by a classroom has, in an online environment, been replaced by a ‘virtual’ space defined by a ‘learning management system’. Teachers had developed considerable insights into how to use the ‘Discussion Board’ to their advantage and had made progress in establishing learning communities as a fundamental element of their online teaching and learning experience.
Teachers had become managers of learning and they seemed comfortable with the notion that they had to combine this role with another one that defined them as learning partners.
In order to benchmark the progress that USQ teachers had made towards the adoption of different teaching/learning principles and practices, a paper by Hung & Chen (2001) was used as a framework. It was demonstrated that a lot of what teachers were doing could be linked to specific components of each of the principles in the framework. Progress had been made in getting the best out of the online environment; nevertheless, many of the difficulties that teachers continued to raise focused on ‘teaching skills and information’. With regard to what Hung and Chen considered were more substantial questions relating to ‘facilitating structures’, the USQ experience was perceived to be somewhat lacking.
One of the most important issues that emerged from the analyses was a fundamental paradox. Staff accepted that the move to online delivery had brought with it a need for differing levels of expertise that suggested the need for a team culture, but they expressed concern over losing control of what they perceived to be their roles and even their rights.
There was one element of online education that was accepted as crucial—its interactive capabilities that are available through email, discussion, chat and the like. It was here, however, where a second paradox emerged. This interactive capability was viewed as a powerful pedagogical tool, but staff had not yet come to terms with the demands that were being placed on them through the 24 hour a day x 7 day a week capabilities of online education.
The analyses raised a third paradox. The Department of Further Education and Training had tried, as far as possible within USQ rules and regulations, to be flexible in dealing with adult learners. The practices adopted had until recently almost universal support but, coupled with the interactivity demands that online education had created, flexibility (however defined) was emerging as a problematic issue. In other words, the person culture was emerging and could take precedence over the team culture.
It was clear that the Department of Further Education and Training had not embraced a totally new paradigm with shared assumptions about how that paradigm operated, but there were indications that changes had occurred that were supported by staff.
One of the clearest findings to emerge from the study is that there does not exist at this time a shared pedagogical framework for online education. There was a belief amongst some that an online pedagogy supported by appropriate online instructional design existed, at least partly distinct from face-to-face or traditional distance education, but what it was has not been articulated. It remains, to those who believed that such a pedagogy exists, the ‘holy grail’, an elusive, but cherished prize that might solve the dilemmas and contradictions of online education.
While online teachers in the Faculty were adopting some components of each of the principles in the framework that Hung & Chen (2001) considered appropriate for online education, they had not made the radical transformation from traditional approaches to teaching for online education.
However, we are not suggesting that the Hung and Chen framework is that elusive ‘holy grail’ referred to above that once achieved might solve all the problems associated with online teaching and online course design. In fact, we are not even convinced that the search for such a grail is constructive; it might well be that the challenge for online teachers lies not at the conceptual level of a pedagogical framework, but at the procedural level that deals with strategies and tactics that enable online teachers to cope with the new learning environment in which they are placed. This becomes even more critical if the hope of university administrators is to use online delivery to attract a global and extensive student market, especially given what we had to say in Chapter 5 about the communicative demands that the USQ approach to online education entails.
At no point in this study have our respondents suggested that online education is inappropriate for higher education. While there are doubtless some discipline restrictions that limit the extent to which a totally online delivery mode can apply at this point in time, the interactive capabilities of online education and its capacity to make use of extensive and current resources, especially in comparison with traditional print-based distance education, provides educational experiences that we would suggest are ideally suited to higher education.
We would argue, however, that success in introducing an innovation such as online educational delivery does require a shared philosophical vision. It does not have to be shared across the whole university community but, if it is not, adoption is likely to be regionalised.
We make no claims about the relative merits of online teaching and learning compared with face-to-face teaching; rather, we hold the view that ‘good teaching is good teaching’. We hold that the main difference between the different delivery modes lies in the strategies and tactics available to achieve good teaching. Among the strategies that Faculty of Education staff have used to further their pedagogical aspirations and to ‘manage’ their new environment are:
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The use of concept maps.
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The creation of different forums to meet different needs (student lounge, technical support, sharing information).
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The use of what Jonassen (1998) refers to as cognitive tools, for example, problem/task representation tools (such as graphic organisers), static and dynamic knowledge modelling tools (such as databases and spreadsheets), performance support tools (such as spreadsheet templates or notetaking) and information gathering tools (for example, Webliographies or electronic library resources such as Ebscohost).
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The use of ‘Group Pages’ to assist in collaborative learning tasks, for example, problem solving and project management.
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Similarly, the following represent some of the more specifics tactics used:
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Placing challenging questions into discussion forums to stimulate debate about key concepts in the course.
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The use of what has been called ‘reflections’ in order to situate learning.
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The distribution of regular and brief online evaluation forms to gauge learner responses to aspects of the course.
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Netiquette and interaction guidelines.
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Protocols for synchronous chat.
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Copying discussion items or threads from one semester’s offerings into another where that item or thread appeared to be successful in generating productive interaction (a move into Fifth Generation Technology).
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Developing pre-structured responses to assessment items that might assist in reducing workload when providing feedback to student (a move into Fifth Generation Technology).
Despite the strategies and tactics used by online lecturers, the experience at USQ has revealed the resource intensity of a highly interactive approach to online education. Whether this model is economically sustainable without tighter management controls is also an open question at this time. We make no claim that an interactive approach to online delivery is the only effective delivery approach, but we are strongly committed to the belief that pedagogy must be placed before technology and before simplistic economic beliefs.
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