At 10:17 PM 20/08/2001 -0700, Peter Chen wrote:
>It occurs to me that, in many cases, online university courses will tend
to leverage off (ie recycle) existing materials developed for
traditionally-delivered courses, and there will be a tendency for lecture
notes and recordings to be placed online. At present many universities
tape lectures for students to access from the library, but I have not yet
seen a university that would systematically place a lectures online as
either a audio file or a video files.
And I hope that you never see an Australian university systematically place
materials in those formats online. That definitely ISN'T what online
education is about.
Where I work the predominant philospohy is now to re-engineer units within
a course for use in the online paradigm, rather then simply recycle the
"chalk-and-talk" or "print-based distance education" formats. Admittedly,
early on some lecturers simply mounted their existing handout notes up as a
series of graphically enhanced HTML files (some even just pushed up a
folder full of PowerPoint slides), and some played around the edges with
RealAudio and Quicktime.
Most of those that are serious about it now specifically rework not only
their content, but also their delivery methodology, using a mixture of HTML
resources, mail-out multimedia CDs, bulletin-boards and real-time chat,
amongst other things. Mind you the resource drain of reworking not only
existing resource materials, but delivery methodologies has caused
considerable angst.
Geoff Muldoon
Software Engineer
Online Information Systems
Information Technology Directorate
Southern Cross University
Lismore NSW Australia
Email: gmuldoon@scu.edu.au
Telephone: +61 2 6620 3097
Facsimile: +61 2 6620 3033
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.1 : Fri Aug 31 2001 - 03:10:04 EST