Distance education via the web is becoming big business these days 1, and is one of the major deliverables of the web in general 2. Online education is already a part of the North American educational establishment 3, and the applications in corporate training are here 4. What's stopping your CEO from reading the paper and deciding that its time the library got involved? Or better, what's stopping you from going up to the top floor with a plan of action? The web and education: the old, the new, and the communicative Distance education was once a difficult and lonely road for the student, and was also seen as distinctly second-rate. This perception has faded and will soon vanish entirely in face of the flexible and convenient learning experiences that are becoming available online from authoritative sources 5. Last year in the Courier Karen Melville, Director of Continuing Education at FIS, pointed out some of the real advantages that online learning presents to students 6, but as Helena Merriam also pointed out in this journal, the need to establish communication with and between students is perhaps the major challenge facing educators 7. Why communication? Isn't it enough to supply the information and let the students be responsible for learning it? The argument for a traditional, presentation-style educational approach might be made with some success in the corporate world where the students are professionals, and can be expected to take responsibility for their own learning. But in fact the traditional classroom approach, while it can seem like a one-way street, relies on all sorts of verbal and non-verbal communication from the student to the teacher. High drop and incomplete rates have been the main symptom of the insufficient level of communication in distance education courses. While establishing effective communication may be the main challenge facing instructors, advances in communications technologies over the web are certainly one of the main factors in the current success of distance education. There are three main technologies that have enabled this success. Web boards Well known to web surfers, electronic bulletin boards are an essential aide to educators. They permit asynchronous (time-delayed) communications, which generally encourage thoughtful posts, and which can provide threading and other tools to make reference and reading easier. E-mail allows for private communications between the educator and students, and among students. This adds to the communications picture by accommodating the need to keep some communications apart from the general class discussion. MOOs Moo stands for Multi-user Object Oriented environment (it also is said to stand for MUD, Object Oriented, which amounts to the same thing). Most strongly associated with chatrooms, MOOs in this form offer synchronous (real time) communications, which is a great way to facilitate group interaction. Naturally there is some learning required, both in terms of getting used to the environment, and regarding appropriate language and topics. In recent years MOOs have come to offer users a wide variety of communication avenues: "In a MOO participants can create virtual representations of people, places and things and share them with others. MOOs are polysynchronous environments. Users can create things and talk… synchronously with people (real time), and also have the ability to work and communicate asynchronously by creating and describing objects, sending MOO mail, posting notes to discussion lists, using note taking transcribing devices, or 'robots' that interact with others in your absence. Asynchronous communication is also in the form of the web pages that are created automatically in the MOO." 8 The main advantage for educators is stable communications that require very little bandwidth, making them accessible to almost all computer users. For more information see Athena University's information site http://www.athena.edu/campus/moo.html, and Berkeley's Café MOOlano, an online meeting place for educators and students with a good introduction http://moolano.berkeley.edu/Intro.html. While the combination of these three technologies covers a lot of ground, there remains the problem that, though a chat room or bulletin board may be available, it is not enough simply to direct students to the technology and expect them to begin an ongoing and mutually constructive exchange. The relevance of the technologies has to be made clear, and the impetus for using them has to be built into the course, either as an assessment element, (students are marked partly in the basis of their participation) or as a tool for completing group projects.9 There is a body of educational approaches that is well suited to adaptation to the online environment. Constructivism (aka student-centred learning) starts from the conviction that what educators do is facilitate the students' active creation of knowledge in relation to their own personal life experience and priorities. This approach supports activities that engage students in relevant, meaningful learning activities, rather than merely presenting information and modeling its use 10. The constructivist approach focuses on communication and, with innovative ideas for course structure and learning tools, meets the needs of online educators 11 (see sidebar). Effective communication with the students, including appropriate course design, is essential to successful online instruction, but it is not the whole thing. Course centres or homes, especially in the form of websites, as well as accessible online reference and research materials are the other main developments that have enabled the new distance education. These last two technologies are well known to Information Professionals, but what may not be so well known are the educational products that have been developed for the online education market. These products combine capacities for communications, online course homes, and research materials. WebCT, Blackboard, First Class, and others are widely available, and each has its own advantages and drawbacks. Some of these products and other online education systems are reviewed in "Course Delivery Systems for the Virtual University" by Peter Brusilovsky and Philip Miller. 12 The Future: Undoubtedly the next big thing in online education will be widespread and stable access to real-time and archived video images. Some of the best cutting-edge application of video along with other media can be experienced at the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) at the U of T (http://www.kmdi.org/ieindex.html). KMDI puts their weekly lectures online at http://epresence.kmdi.utoronto.ca/.
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