By Kay Mills
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
Geography has long
challenged Canada's vast provinces
to come up with creative
ways to educate far-flung populations.
Long before computers and the Internet
created the current boom in online learning,
universities, government and other
organizations in British Columbia were
combining to produce innovative distance
education programs. Now they have developed
a synergy among their efforts that
is leading to development of new programs
and companies.
For example, the University of British
Columbia, which offers 100 distance
education courses, spawned the software
WebCT that gives universities and
professors the tools to develop online
courses, without extensive programming
ability and great expense. Just last spring
the instructor whose work led to WebCT,
Murray Goldberg, started a new company
called Silicon Chalk. Goldberg, who said
he remains fully involved with WebCT, is
working with Silicon Chalk to produce a
"fairly comprehensive set of tools" to enhance
wireless technology in the classroom,
for example, by allowing students to
work collaboratively through their laptops.
British Columbia is also home to extensive
distance learning efforts at Simon
Fraser University, Royal Roads University,
the University of Victoria and the new
Technical University of British Columbia.
The Open Learning Agency, based east
of Vancouver in Burnaby, offers the fully
accredited BC Open University as well as
access to educational programs for kindergarten
through high school students,
college training (the equivalent of U.S.
community colleges), and specialized
training for jobs and career transition. It
also evaluates academic credentials from
other countries and workplace-based
training programs for higher education
credit. The TeleLearning Network of
Centres of Excellence, a national agency
that sponsors research about online
learning, is headquartered in Vancouver.
"The geography of the province forced
British Columbia universities to look beyond
their campuses," said Tony Bates,
University of British Columbia's director
of distance education and technology and
one of the leaders in the field. "There has
been political pressure to ensure that
students not on the lower mainland have
access to courses." Bates said the synergy
among the various distance education programs
that have developed in the province
is "probably one of the best kept secrets.
There's a long history of collaboration
here."
Serendipity created some of this
cooperation, said Walter Uegama, UBC's
former associate vice president for
continuing education, "but a lot of it was
planned." He credited Patrick McGeer, a
former senior education minister in the
provincial government who had been a
UBC faculty member, and his UBC
colleague Walter Hardwick, with being the
architects for the system in the 1970s.
"They had the grand ideas. There was a
vision."
These planners also saw to it that the
three universities involved in distance
education at the time (UBC, Simon Fraser
and the University of Victoria) had funds
to develop courses and create a consortium
to plan complementary-and not
duplicative-programs. "There was a great
spirit of the thing among the people at the
table," Uegama said.
The coordination group still exists but
on a loose voluntary basis. "The boom (in
distance education) happened here quite a
lot earlier before it happened elsewhere,"
Uegama added. It was driven more by
geography and holistic ideas about education
than by the online technology
fueling the current growth in the field.
Many other Canadian universities have
major distance/online education programs,
including the Teleuniversite du Quebec,
serving French-speakers, and the largest,
Athabasca University in Alberta.
Other provinces have some of the same
cooperative action found in British Columbia.
In Newfoundland, for example,
distance education received a major boost
in the 1970s when Memorial University
started offering courses for medical staffs
in remote areas. That led to formation of
the Telemedicine and Educational Technology
Resources Agency for delivery of
health and education services, and then
the Marine Institute, to offer a range of
courses for the fishing and marine transportation
industries so key to Newfoundland.
Making sure that people in rural areas
as well as the cities could get the training
and the information they needed was the
spur to what Erin Keough, director of the
Open Learning and Information Network
in St. John's, Newfoundland, called "a real
Canadian way of doing things."
Early distance education efforts were
basically correspondence courses. Students
typically would receive a box of books and
other class materials, read the assignments,
send in their work and wait for a response
from the instructor. Using the postal
service didn't allow swift interchanges.
Eventually, more media were used:
audiocassettes, videocassettes and now the
Internet, which allows interaction among
students and between student and
professor.
 | |
| The Open Learning Agency in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia,
offers distance education courses, evaluates credits earned at other institutions, and
works with employers to determine what job experiences should receive college credit. | |
The University of British Columbia offered
its first four correspondence courses
for credit in 1949. Since 1997, the Internet
has been the primary means of delivery
for the new courses that UBC's distance
education and technology division has
developed. More than 5,600 students, most
of them undergraduates, took its distance
education courses in the 2000-'01 school
year. Enrollments have increased by 54
percent in the last four years. The
university does not allow students to earn
a degree entirely at a distance, and most of
its faculties limit the courses undergraduates
may take at a distance.
Tony Bates pointed out that the vast
majority of UBC distance education students
are not truly distant. Almost half live
within Vancouver and another 39.5 percent
are also on the lower mainland of the
province. When asked in a UBC survey
last year why they had enrolled in distance
education courses, only 17 percent of the
students said that they lived too far from
campus or would have difficulty getting to
class. Most distance education students are
working, so the flexibility distance
education offers appealed to them.
Distance education moved more easily
into the Internet age with the help of
WebCT, the software product that
emerged from the efforts of Murray Goldberg,
the University of British Columbia
senior instructor in computer sciences who
was exploring ways to enhance learning
through technology. Using money from
several UBC course development and
teaching enhancement funds, Goldberg
wrote a program to put a class online. The
second time he prepared an online course,
he decided to build the tools so that others
could develop such courses.
People at other universities wanted the
tools, too, and for a while Goldberg gave
the software away as a service to colleagues,
said Angus Livingstone, UBC's
managing director of the university industry
liaison office. Goldberg later
decided to go commercial with WebCT, to
provide support for its users and to
develop the software further. In May 1999,
Universal Learning Technologies in
Boston bought WebCT, which now has a
staff of 350, about half of whom work in
Vancouver.
"It's a good place to do research,"
Livingstone added. "You don't have to sell
anybody here on distance education.
We're just trying to figure out how to do it
better."
Simon Fraser University, established in
1965, is another major player in the province's
distance education efforts. SFU
opened its doors during a period of some
ferment in higher education, in Canada as
in the United States, and SFU "wanted to
break new ground, be an innovative place
where things were done differently," said
Joan Collinge, director of the university's
Centre for Distance Education. "People
here hold on to that tradition." By 1975,
SFU was offering five courses by distance
education-one on opera, several on political
science and one on chemistry. Criminology
and kinesiology-studies in health
and fitness-adopted distance education
early on, she added.
Today Simon Fraser, a public university,
offers 80 to 90 distance courses a semester,
many with online components
such as e-mail contact with professors and
fellow students, online conferences and
Web page links to relevant sites. Its Centre
for Distance Education provides pedagogical
support for the professors-called
"content experts"-who write the courses.
"It's important that the technology
does what the print cannot," Collinge said.
Asked how expert students would need to
be with computers, she replied ,"You can't
assume that just because students have
computers that they are fully capable with
them-so we pitch our courses at a comfortable
mid-range." The Internet also has
made it possible to expand students' research
capacity, Collinge said.
| |  |
| |
The University of British Columbia’s Walter
Uegama credits his own university and the
British Columbia provincial government for
early encouragement of distance education. |
Typically, SFU will have 3,500 to 4,000
registrants for distance education courses
in any given semester-about ten percent
of the university's undergraduates. Some
students take two or more courses. The
distance education students pay the same
amount as on-campus students-$77 per
semester hour for Canadian citizens and
permanent residents, $231 for international
students-and their transcripts give
no indication whether they took a course
online or on campus.
Richard Smith, an associate professor
of communication at Simon Fraser, who
has studied the subject for some years, said
distance education has flourished in
British Columbia because the province
had both the demand and the capability.
"You had two pretty strong universities so
you had the intellectual capacity," said
Smith. There were consumers for the
courses, and computers were becoming
cheaper. "It's an example of what can
happen when there's a mature cluster," he
explained.
Other areas have the demand and the
capability but haven't developed this
cluster of groups and individuals working
in the same field, so there was "a bit of
magic" going on in British Columbia,
Smith added.
The Open Learning Agency, located, as
is Simon Fraser, in the Vancouver suburb
of Burnaby, may offer perhaps the most
extreme of these alternative approaches to
higher education. Its president, Jaap
Tuinman, is fond of saying that
"knowledge is knowledge. Skills are skills.
Either individuals have mastered a certain
body of knowledge-or are skillful in a
definable way-or they have not." He
believes it should not matter where or how
knowledge is obtained, and that learners
should have mobility.
The Open Learning Agency seeks not
only to provide the courses that enable
people to develop knowledge and skills
but also to knock down some of the
barriers that keep people from earning
credit for what they've learned. For
example, OLA has an
international evaluations service
that compares credentials earned
in other provinces or countries
with their comparable levels in British
Columbia and Canada. It also
has a credit review service that
works with employers to evaluate
workplace training programs comparable
to postsecondary study, so
that employees can apply whatever
credits they earned either at OLA
or its partner institutions.
The British Columbia government
created the Open Learning
Institute in 1978 to try to provide
greater access to higher education
for people living in the province's
rural areas. Resistance to the
"open university" concept was
fierce from some academic quarters
at first, with more traditional
universities feeling OLI would
waste money on a suspect delivery
system. Some of the same institutional
critics are now firmly in
line, online. The institute merged in
1988 with the province's public
educational television system, the
Knowledge Network, to become
the Open Learning Agency.
 | |
| Tony Bates, of the University of British Columbia, says distance education can be
cost-effective if there is good financial management, technical support for faculty,
and a team approach to course development and delivery. | |
One-third of the agency's university level
students are enrolled at traditional
universities, said Tuinman. "For example,
they're in a UBC program but the course
they want is not offered for another year,
or it's full or it's offered at conflicting
hours so they can't graduate." OLA
enrolls 14,251 university-level students and
has 250 courses of its own and another 300
from other British Columbia universities.
Students can register for all of these courses
through OLA.
Surveying the distance education scene
in British Columbia, Tuinman believes it
benefits students because it provides them
with a lot more options. Community college
students can move more easily into
universities. There's no residency requirement.
And because there's so much distance
education going on, he said, students
can manage their time better. "It's heaven
for part-time students in comparison with
other (geographic) areas."
A former military college, Royal Roads
University was established in 1995 as what
Canada calls a special-purpose university
and has embraced distance education and
online learning.
It is located in a scenic spot-Hatley
Park, a national heritage site on Juan de
Fuca strait in Victoria, British Columbia.
Royal Roads considers its "client market"
to be primarily mid-career professionals
who wish to advance and need to schedule
their education around work and family.
Most courses combine short stays on
campus with Internet-based distance
learning. Last year the university served
2,028 people-with an average age of 36-
and plans to grow to 3,475 by 2004-'05.
The University of Victoria, located on
Vancouver Island, enrolls about 17,000
undergraduate and graduate students and
13,000 continuing education students. As a
distance education provider, the university's
division of continuing studies
specializes in developing and delivering
diploma and certificate programs for professionals in such fields as adult education,
business and management, cultural resource
management, environmental and
occupational health, English as a second
language, and information systems management.
It also seeks to aid the professional
development of teachers.
Adding to this mix are the Tele-
Learning Network of Centres of Excellence.
In Canada, the federal government
has established a number of networks of
people working in various fields nationwide.
This one, focused on telelearning and
based in Vancouver, was established in
1995. A network of universities, its
principal mission is research about effective
telelearning approaches for kindergarten
through high school, within postsecondary
education, in the workplace and
for teachers. In the postsecondary field, for
example, Linda Harasim of Simon Fraser
University has led a team exploring how
people learn best online.
Tom Calvert, who is active in the Tele-
Learning Network, is also vice president
for research and external affairs at a relatively
new institution, the Technical University
of British Columbia. Established in
1997, the university enrolled its first
students in 1999 and should double its
enrollment to 400 students this fall.
While its campus is under construction,
the university is temporarily located in
Surrey, south of Vancouver, and it offers
courses in such fields as information
technology and interactive arts. All of its
courses are at least partially online because
of the school's emphasis on accessibility
and innovation. Calvert views
the creation of Tech U and its outlook as a
major outcome of the TeleLearning Network
and another example of the collaborative
action occurring in British Columbia.
The promise of distance/online learning
"is incredible," Calvert said. "People are
looking for more flexible access to
learning throughout their careers," and
online learning helps fulfill that need. "It's
a hot topic now and hasn't peaked yet.
You're going to see places all over the
world where innovation is occurring-
hotbeds of activity. BC happens to be one.
The (San Francisco) Bay Area is another. I
look forward to BC being a leader in
lifelong learning," he added.
How effective is distance education? To
find out, the TeleLearning Network has
been supporting Tony Bates' research on
potential benefits and limitations of
investing in online learning. In a 1999
article published in the Canadian Journal
of Communication, Bates and associate
Silvia Bartolic-Zlomislic concluded that
"under the right conditions, online learning
can be cost effective and
even profit-making. However,
financial management, technical
support for faculty, allocation of
revenues to those units that take
the risk, professionalism, and a
team approach to course development
and delivery are all
critical factors for success."
The researchers looked at
three institutions-University of
British Columbia, the Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education
at the University of Toronto,
and a two-year community
college, Kwantlen University
College in British Columbia.
Kwantlen found that it was able
to continue offering a creative
writing program that otherwise
would have been dropped because
it did not draw enough on-campus
enrollment. It "tapped
into a whole new market-
single mothers, people with
disabilities who were unable to
get to campus," Bates said in an
interview about the study.
As for UBC, the research indicated
that there had been a number of startup
costs, some of them unanticipated. The
bookstore, for example, had to figure out
how to handle international orders, Bates
said. The finance office wasn't equipped to
do international funds transfers. The university
had difficulty registering graduate
students online, although it could do so for
undergraduates. The university staff spent
a great deal of time, which translated into
money, sorting out these glitches. Now
students can register, order books, take
courses and pay for them, all online.
Virtually everyone associated
with online learning agrees that
simply transferring face-to-face
lecture notes onto a computer
and posting these on the Internet
does not constitute an effective
online course. The instructor for
the Kwantlen creative writing
class found that much of the
course content came from online
discussions and student writing
samples that could be shared
easily among class participants.
The research found several
educational benefits to online
learning. The quality of writing
improved, and students reported
that their computer and time management
skills also improved.
In addition, shy students participated
more in the classes. "The
lack of visual cues allowed the
instructor to treat all students in
the same manner," the researchers
wrote, and that led to greater
participation by all students.
Most of all, online discussion
allowed students an interaction
that they had not had in print based
distance learning.
In summary, this study found
that online learning provides the
opportunity to reach new markets,
particularly lifelong learners;
it can be of great value to mature
adults trying to balance work,
family and study requirements; it allows
students to work collaboratively with
colleagues across the world; and it gives
small-enrollment programs a chance to
attract more students.
| |  |
| |
In 1988, the British Columbia government merged the Open Learning Institute with the
provincial public television network, creating the Open Learning Agency (above). The agency
now enrolls more than 14,000 university-level students. |
Bates and Bartolic-Zlomislic cautioned
that institutions might need substantial
startup funds and should develop new
administrative procedures to meet the
needs of online students; their faculty
members will need time to learn how to
use the technology; and their students
have to be psychologically and financially
able to embrace this method of taking
courses.
If an organization "values collaborative
learning, increased access for lifelong
learners, and the internationalization of
the curriculum, then an online program
may be of value, even if the costs are the
same or slightly more than those for a
conventional course," the researchers
concluded. They also warned that "young
students without good independent study
habits" would find an online course
particularly challenging.
Distance education is not universally
beloved. It raises the often-debated questions:
Who owns the courses-the professors
who help create them or the
universities for which they are created?
Are professors fairly compensated for
extra workloads created by the increased
pace that the Internet allows? Underlying
these questions are concerns about how
best to educate people.
One of the most outspoken critics of
distance education is David F. Noble,
history professor at York University in
Toronto. In a series of articles about what
he calls "digital diploma mills," Noble has
blasted distance education as "the commodification
of higher education," almost
entirely profit-driven in his eyes.
Noble's articles are posted online at
www.communication.ucsd.edu/dl/. In one
of them, Noble reminded readers that
whenever people recall their educational
experiences, "they tend to remember
above all not courses or subjects or the
information imparted but people, people
who changed their minds or their lives,
people who made a difference in their
developing sense of themselves." The
relationship between people, he wrote, "is
central to the educational experience."
Distance educators, Noble added,
"have always insisted that they offer a
kind of intimate and individualized instruction
not possible in the crowded,
competitive environment of the campus...
To make their enterprise profitable,
however, they have been compelled to
reduce their instructional costs to a minimum,
thereby undermining their pedagogical
promise."
 | |
| Murray Goldberg, a University of
British Columbia computer sciences
instructor, has developed software that
enables faculty members to place their
courses online. | |
Noble recently has been involved in a
dispute with Simon Fraser University,
which recently declined to hire him because
its officials said that he provided
insufficient references and that there were
flaws in the hiring process. Noble has said
that he was denied a humanities professorship,
for which he had been recommended
by a faculty committee, because
of his anti-technology views.
Critics and misgivings notwithstanding,
distance/online education doubtless will be
a factor in higher education for years to
come. Has it peaked? What lies ahead?
"It's a ten-year process of change," Tony
Bates said. "The technology changes
faster than individuals are able to adapt,
and individuals change faster than institutions
do." Universities must respond to
change more quickly than they have in the
past, he added, noting that their program approval
processes do not move quickly.
Some businesses are competing with
universities in the field of for-profit online
learning. "The university's edge over business
is its accreditation-its quality control,"
Bates said. "If you don't maintain
that, you shoot yourself in the foot. You
lose your reputation. Yes, the faculty has to
agree to what it is asked to do. The senate
needs to look at how it's being done. You
have to be true to the process, but you
have to find better, slimmer ways" of
accomplishing those tasks.
There are some real blocks to development
of sound online learning programs
at universities, Bates admitted.
"When you have a rewards system that
focuses more on research than on teaching,
why should someone want to innovate
in teaching when it's not rewarded?" he
asked. "It will be interesting to see what
happens as we lose the older staff. They
are the ones that we've used to develop
courses, because the younger staff has
been warned off and told to do research-
'get your tenure.'" But universities and
their faculties need to be involved in distance
education-even in areas such as
teaching that don't seem as though they
would be lucrative, Bates said.
| |  |
| |
Simon Fraser University, founded in
1965, embraced distance learning as part
of an effort "to break new ground," says
Joan Collinge, who runs the university’s
Centre for Distance Education |
Businesses are especially interested in
competing to provide corporate training
and to sell courses to people interested in
lifelong learning. "One of the big areas for
universities to look at is continuing professional
education," Bates said. "I think
universities will be very foolish to leave
that to commercial companies. If they
don't serve that market, they will lose faculty
who've developed the research for
higher salaries to those companies."
Enough money will flow into this field,
Bates believes, and sooner or later big
companies will get it right. He predicted
that universities have about three or four
years before successful businesses develop
the quality control necessary to capture
the big potential market. "Then I think
universities do have to worry," he said.
State universities may feel more pressure
than research universities because the
latter have the brand name, the expertise
to sell, he added. "If your big item is
English 100, I would be worried. If you can
go to Oxford (online), why take it (from a
state university)?"
