Distance Education on the WWW

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To communicate or retrieve more information about DE on the WWW, try these buttons:

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Use of the WWW for distance education purposes

To build these pages, we have navigated thought the WWW in order to find interesting existing on-line courses. We found less than we expected but things are moving fast. What we aim to do here is to give some information about what's going on with distance education on the WWW for people who wish to design courses with this new tool and those who are willing to learn with interesting teaching materials.

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Contents

• What we found
• Main European Distance Education Institutions
• An exemple of Virtual University: GNA
• Some on-line courses already available on WWW
• Some elements of discussion

We invite you to go further using some communication tools (see our buttons above):

• list of conferences and meetings on MOOs;
• some newsgroups and mailing lists;
• find also actual conferences information;
• and of course, references (on-line papers, databases, other interesting pages).

What we found...

We can say that there are four major kinds of WWW services:

• there is an enormous amount of information regarding courses given by Colleges and Universities but these are often lists or pratical information about site access or registration procedures. Indeed the WWW is really acting like an Information Desk.

• There are a lot of pages that provide support and services for schools, teachers and students to fully utilize the Internet, and its underlying information technologies. (e.g. The Internet in the Classroom: a NASA K-12 Internet Initiative).

• WWW is also much used in actual classrooms: The course is taught in the classroom but the use of the net is required. (e.g. Computer Science Class at the University of Idaho.

• Eventually, there are on-line courses that are to be delivered at a distance (e.g. Art 122 at Penn State University).

Main European Distance Education Institutions

Distance Education Institutions are present all over Europe. For the west part, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal and United Kingdom have the most well-known.

There are also some European organisations for higher education like the huge European program named DELTA, that deals with the use of new technologies for distance education or the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU). EADTU is a strategic level organisation whose European activities and projects support and advance goals towards achieving its mission: to promote and support the creation of the European Open University based on an existing Network of open and distance learning provision.

We have chosen to describe here some European Universities. As far as we know, WWW course materials are designed at the Open University (UK) (courses are available from GNA course catalog) and at the Open Universiteit (NL) Short description of the Open University The Open University is the UK's largest University and also its largest publisher ; their specialty is multimedia distance teaching.

Short description of the University of Twente Twente University is situated in The Netherlands ; one of their division has specialized in media research.
An interesting European learning environment is available at the University of Twente: Virtual Campus

To find more information about European Institutions, consult the Distance Education Database.

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An exemple of virtual university: Globewide Network Academy (= GNA)

GNA is a worldwide consortium of educational and research organizations.

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Some on-line courses available on WWW

on-line courses:

• French history course: Les Capetiens
• Hindi multimedia course
• Spanish lesson
• Greek Mythology
• Writing for modern technology course

other interesting teaching stuff

• French grammar test
• Psychology examination text
• The WEST environment an interesting educational shell
• A frog dissection course project

Other interesting courses at:

• the Virtual Media Lab of the University of Pennsylvania : a virtual language laboratory;
• the Virtual Hospital of the University of Iowa : a lot of medical knowledge : references, textbooks, patient simulations, conferences, lectures...;
• the Yahoo server;
• the University of Illinoy pages : some classes that are using the World Wide Web to augment the traditional instructional materials;
• the Language page : page devoted to bringing together information about the languages;
• the World Lecture Hall of UT Austin Web Central : some links to pages created by faculty worldwide who are using the Web to deliver class materials.
• the Virtual courses on the Web : a list of virtual courses proposed by Mark Dalton

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Some elements of discussion

The Virtual Education Environment

A growing development in education is now being called the Virtual Education Environment (VEE). VEEs combine the academic environment of a physical world university, the wide reach of the Internet and the creative environment of the Multi-User Dimension Object Oriented (MOO). MOO, first used as gathering places for individuals, gradually become places where real-time classes are held. English and creative writing classes have found much success in this type of environment, for the natural reason that one develops their writing skills by default.

At TECFA, in the STAF postgratuate courses, we have such an environment.

• have a look at STAF (in French) WWW pages
• visit our TECFAMOO (telnet to tecfamoo.unige.ch 7777 and connect guest)
  It's partly dedicated to educational technology : go to UC and choose EduTeck (under construction) or go to TECFA.
• we also have a newsgroup and a mailing communication system.

WWW relevance for distance education

Compared to a traditional distance education system, here are the points we have found avdantageous for the use of WWW

1. The training centers can distribute the knowledge on a large scale (to the entire world)
2. The reduction of mailing costs: Internet allows distribution of pages without the overhead associated to printing costs and transport.
3. All information can be corrected and updated in one go for all users from only one server site.
4. Interactivity allows several teaching technics such as text, images, communication between teachers and learners and between learners.
5. Internet allows for collaborative writing.
6. It allows for students to give feedback more easily.

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M. Lintz et S. Tognotti