The Internet is a popular information network, but its use for distance education is largely unexplored. In 1994, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the Health Sciences Communications Association (HeSCA) offered an experimental, online, "Virtual Workshop" that used several Internet information services to offer a learning experience entirely online. The workshop was developed to introduce participants to developing multimedia, hypertext documents for the Internet's World Wide Web. Participants completed a personal biography with images and links using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Two of the authors were primarily involved as workshop developers and coordinators, while one participated as a student. This paper describes the workshop's rationale and resources and lessons learned from the experience. Factors affecting Internet resource use are identified and the implications for using the Internet in distance education are discussed.
The Virtual Workshop was offered for practical, technological, philosophical, and intellectual reasons.
Workshop organizers were interested in exploring new ways of using Internet technology. In the past, distance education via the Internet consisted predominantly of email between instructors and
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students. With the advent of the World Wide Web (WWW), distance education on the Internet chiefly had become accessing "pages" of multimedia information. The idea behind the Virtual Workshop was to use several Internet information services in a coordinated way. In addition to email, mailing lists, and offering multimedia on the Web, the potential services included Gopher and telnet remote login to information resources on Internet servers, file uploads and downloads to and from selected FTP (file transfer protocol) server sites, and newsgroups. The latter are bulletin boards letting individuals post messages and view responses to follow conversation threads.
Workshop organizers were interested in investigating Internet use for autonomous learning. Existing distance education applications, whether by email or Web pages, usually assume information flow outward from a central source. Yet, the Internet has multiple information services, some of which provide two way, multipoint to multipoint communication. Consequently, learning experiences might be configured to allow information flow among all participants in ways obviating the need for instructors. Members on an Internet mailing list often share problems and advice, for example, and it was thought that incorporating this technology into a distance education program might have the potential for developing online learning communities similar in many respects to "invisible colleges" that form among academics.
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Organizers wanted to see how people would respond to an ad hoc, collaborative, communal, online learning experience and to monitor how Internet learning resources and communication services might be used. The workshop was designed without constraints on time, and in a way that let participants access multiple online information resources at their own pace and in any order. Moreover, it was intentionally "instructorles," providing online communication services for participants to help each other.
The workshop syllabus explains the workshop's philosophy and goals and contains information about resources. Each workshop participant uses digital multimedia and the hypertext markup language to produce a biographical sketch that other participants can view and critique. Except for providing a name and address in the biography, there are no other restrictions or requirements. Participants are encouraged to be creative. The syllabus initially had instructions for entering a logo contest and now has a display of the virtual plaque awarded the winner. It also has a "gallery" with links to completed participant projects.
The Virtual Workshop uses three Internet services: WWW, listservs, and FTP. World Wide Web is used to electronically publish the syllabus. The Internet Uniform
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Resource Locator or URL for the syllabus is:
http://mmm.dartmouth.edu/pages/visual-media/vwsyl.html
The syllabus has links to other Web information sources and indicates whether they are geared specifically to the workshop's objectives, are prerequisites to the objectives, or go beyond the basic skills learned in the workshop. The syllabus contains information for subscribing and unsubscribing to the workshop mailing list and instructions for accessing its FTP server to upload files.
Web links are used as an electronic means of "photcopying" and "distributing" "handouts" and "learning materials," while the mailing list is used as a mechanism for "classroom discussion." The FTP server is used as a place where students can electronically "turn in" their projects or "homework." Privately emailing questions to "instructors" is not even implied, although the email addresses of workshop "organizers" are provided along with a request for suggestions and feedback. Although projects could reside on any Web server, an FTP site is provided because some participants lack server access or permission to post personal biographies online.
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Use of workshop resources varied depending on the Internet information service employed -- WWW, Listserv, FTP site.
The workshop was announced to four mailing lists, including HeSCA's. During the first month, the workshop syllabus was accessed (hit) almost 1200 times and it currently is visited about forty times weekly. While this use does not compare with that of the Sports Network Web site, it is respectable, considering it was advertized to relatively small mailing lists. There were just forty subscribers to the workshop's mailing list, and while no one has unsubscribed, less than a dozen messages have been posted, mostly by workshop coordinators. Only six projects were completed and uploaded to the FTP site, including two by workshop coordinators and one by a workshop organizer who agreed to be a student. The low listserv use and number of completed projects by no means indicate the workshop was unsuccessful, since the syllabus was visited frequently and continues to be used. More interesting, however, are the possible reasons for the striking contrasts in utilization of different Internet services.
While several general factors affected Internet resource use, perhaps the greatest was that each requires different degrees of knowledge, effort, and commitment. For those with Web browsers, accessing the syllabus can be as easy as
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pointing and clicking or entering its URL. List subscription is more involved and presumably requires at least a tacit time commitment. Using the FTP site also is involved and imposes the further requirement that users not only complete the assigned project, but share it publicly.
There are more specific reasons for varied resource use concerning content, tasks, technology, audience, tradition, design, and incentives.
The primary subject matter of the workshop, HTML, may have been too narrow for many would-be participants. In addition, information about HTML can be accessed from several online and offline resources. Moreover, the basics (and even the advance aspects) of HTML are relatively easy and could be learned by accessing the Web information alone, without participating in a mailing list. Many people can ask their colleagues for help. Workshop coordinators were personally contacted by colleagues in their own organizations who were using workshop materials and they also received private email help requests from outsiders.
The project task may not have been relevant. While creating a biography is something everyone might do, it probably is not their primary reason for learning HTML. Consequently, the materials might have been accessed and the
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content applied to create a project, but not the artificial one specified in the workshop syllabus. Indeed, this behavior was observed by workshop coordinators in their own institutions.
Those familiar with the Internet often develop attitudes and apprehensions about using certain services. Subscribing to mailing lists can be loathsome because they generate too much junk mail, and messages posted to lists sometimes engender flaming, personal responses. Moreover, not all questions or comments have to be publicly posed in real classrooms and students are sometimes shy about asking questions in class. These conditions may be exacerbated by having unknown, anonymous classmates on a listserv.
The audience for educational programs on the Internet is diverse and heterogeneous. It is a far cry from the audience that might enroll in formal courses or the select groups of individuals comprising invisible colleges. Invisible colleges tend to evolve slowly as individuals identify others with similar interests and start to communicate. Moreover, becoming part of these communities sometimes involves "initiation rites," where one has to first show, through their own work, that they have valuable knowledge to contribute. Developing a sense of community takes time and nurturing and does not happen automatically by providing an electronic mailing list.
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A Virtual Workshop founded on communal sharing is different from the way most people learn or use Internet services. Most learning is instructor centered and most people may use listservs, for example, for requesting advice or publicizing specific information rather than engaging in extended scholarly discussion. The Virtual Workshop demanded that participants view both the learning experience and the technology in unfamiliar ways.
The three Internet services used at the time the Virtual Workshop started were not all supported by most Web browsers. Consequently, they were uncoupled. Users had to access separate mail and FTP programs to subscribe to lists and upload files. Today, subscribing and sending messages to list could be built into the syllabus and some browsers are capable of file transfer. In addition, although there were links to information prerequisite to participating in the workshop (especially on Internet email, listservs, and FTP), little information was provided about using multimedia. The markup needed to reference these files was discussed as well as the use of .gif files for inline images and, later, a reference was added to companion "viewer" programs that browsers use to display different file formats. Ways to capture source materials, however, were not covered. These aspects of course design could have affected use.
There were no rewards or incentives for Virtual Workshop participation, other than intrinsic ones from applying the content. No course or continuing education
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credits were offered and, presumably, credit might have engendered greater project response.
Developing any learning experience involves accounting for such things as content accuracy and integrity, instruction and assessment methods, and so forth. But experience offering the Vitual Workshop suggests additional factors may have to be accounted, especially when trying to foster learning communities on the Internet that comprise people at distant sites. These include possibly limiting access; providing common content, unique information, meaningful tasks, awards, and incentives; and giving advertizing more careful attention.
The Internet is open to everyone, but it can be used privately. One decision is who will have access to course materials and learning experiences. There may be financial and legal reasons for limiting access to certain groups in cases where tuition is charged, continuing education credit is granted, or confidential information (e.g., about patients) is conveyed. But there may be other reasons as well. A sense of community and a willingness to communicate may be more likely in cases where participants have common backgrounds, goals, and concerns or when they already know each other.
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A communal-communicative learning environment might be fostered by providing common, structured learning experiences. In the Virtual Workshop, learners could access diverse resources and no common experiences were provided that learners could discuss. Its format can be contrasted with televised distance education courses or online courses with regular weekly assignments. Online bulletin boards are used in these contexts for discussing weekly program content and homework.
General interest content may attract the general public, but the response to specific content will be less. Neither type of content may generate much response, particularly if it can be readily learned from other online or offline resources. Content may be attractive only if it is truly unique, particularly if it concerns a special subject.
Online learning experiences must be meaningful, particularly in the absence of external incentives. The Virtual Workshop's project was contrived. The high number of syllabus hits, low number of completed projects, and observations of how certain people used the materials and applied the content, indicate that workshop resources were probably used to complete more personally or organizationally relevant tasks.
Incentives may be needed. Credit may have to be given, even when courses and programs are only accessible to
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certain groups. External rewards even may be important when activities are open to everyone. There are now cases, for example, where contests are being sponsored online, but cash awards are offered as inducements. Advertizing and drumbeating may be needed, as with any educational endeavor, to publicize its availablity and make people aware of its benefits.
The Virtual Workshop via the Internet experiment indicates the Internet's obvious distance education advantages, the difficulties in using this rapidly changing technology, the technology's current limitations, the present lack of design/evaluation knowledge and experience in using Internet for distance education, and the need for "holistic" design when using Internet as a distance education resource.
Using Internet for distance education has obvious advantages -- information can be updated instantly, new audiences can be reached, and learning experiences can be offered world wide. Designing these experiences is not so apparent, especially when they involve creating autonomous learning communities that attempt to diverge from traditional models of education and patterns of using technology. Internet technology itself is unique and rapidly evolving. It currently is limited in presenting multimedia and communication is largely asynchronous. In
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the future, greater bandwidth and synchronous communication are likely.
If very little is known about designing learning experiences for the Internet, even less is known about evaluating them. For example, the most popular metric for Web server popularity is hits, but hits indicate number of information requests, not individual users. They are affected artificially by browsers that ship with default startup settings accessing certain sites, and they offer no indication of how long individuals interact with material, how the material may fit a user's overall information searching and browsing strategy, or what users do with the information accessed.
While the Internet is a rapidly evolving tool for which there is little educational experience, it cannot be looked at as a single medium or as a collection of separate services. Information technologies are converging in general, and Internet's information services are becoming increasingly integrated. Those using Internet for distance education need to conceptualize the technology this way.
Craig Locatis is Educational Research Specialist at the
Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communication, National
Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.
MC Journal: The Journal of Academic Media Librarianship
November 1995
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Keven Siegert is Production Coordinator, Department of
Visual Media at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, New Hampshire.
Karen Adsit is Director of Instructional Development at
the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas.
V.3#2, Fall 1995
ISSN 1069-6792