Changing Horizons in Geography Education - HERODOT Network ...

Designing and teaching the distance education courses in geographyThe idea of using modern techniques for exchanging information is old enough aswell as that of distance education, which permits learners to receive information andknowledge without known limits of the usual forms of teaching. So it isn’t strange thatthis type of education is most popular among the working population, who have nopossibilities to attend regular lectures, this is effectively tuition by correspondence.In this case the decision was to employ technology for achieving different tasks. Theapproach meant more to break the constraints of space rather than these of time.It was decided to try to develop international collaboration, to exchange experienceand learning without expensive travelling costs.The next step was to find “hot” topics that would be interesting for all parties and ofcourse these courses had to fit to the whole curriculum of bachelor studies in each of thedifferent universities. Finally the development of a course in urban geography “Transformationof Urban Space” was chosen to be the first to be prepared. Later another coursein regional geography “Region Development and Region Policy” was produced.Organisational aspects involved team meetings in Finland where all participatingpersons from each of the universities involved were presented with the idea and mainprinciples of distant learning and audio conferencing. Some practice of audio lecturingwas given for tutors. Also the course content was discussed and established (agreementsconcerning main topics that were to be studied were made). However later experiencehas shown that these meetings were not critical, particularly if there is one leadingdepartment, whose experts prepare the course content and takes all the organisationalresponsibilities and the other university partners accept this content and the design ofthe course. On the other hand collaboration happens more smoothly if all the personsinvolved know each other through face-to-face meetings and not just virtually.Design of the course was prepared both by the experts of distance educationand geographers. Though the main initiators of the course were distance educationcentres, later their involvement in course development was not so dominant and therole of the geographers increased.Departments of distance education in the universities were responsible for thetechnical aspects of the project – they provided the equipment necessary for audioconferencing and web based tools. The general ideology of the course was determinedby the ideas and theories then dominating in distance education. Audioconferencingwas seen as a very good opportunity, because of five reasons mentioned by MichaelG. Moor: “Audio conferencing is a learner – centred, relatively inexpensive, robustand flexible medium, that can be well integrated with other media in a distanceeducation program” (Moore, 1994). It was perceived then that adoption of high costdelivery systems was giving way to a new trend towards an appropriate selection ofa delivery systems based on course content, course design and intended audience.(Hardy and Olicott, 1995). So it was decided that audio conferencing should just bean additional learning tool, while the main accent was related to active self-educationand communication via the Internet. Later experiences showed that the proportionof audio lectures could have been reduced even further.114