Changing Horizons in Geography Education - HERODOT Network ...

The learning processThe learning system of the course was rather complicated and involved many typesof learning processes. The main processes involved were:• Tutoring (not lecturing, just helping students);• Audio meetings:• Independent learning;• Internet based learning.• Group work (preparing common projects)Every University formed a group of students wishing to learn the subject. It ofcourse was not a compulsory discipline and a good knowledge of English was a necessity.Hence the formation of the group of 6–12 persons, the recommended studentgroup size in every university, was not an easy task bearing in mind the rather smalltotal number of students in our department.Promotion of the idea of the course among the students played an important roleand this was one of the tasks of a tutor. Among the other tasks of the tutor were, tolead conversation during audio conferences, assist students with their assignments,to present study material, to explain Internet-based learning environment but notto give lectures. Notwithstanding that tutor doesn’t have to give lectures their roleremained very important and active, requiring a lot of time. Though there were nolectures planned, in reality meetings with the student group took place every secondweek and sometimes they held very strong resemblance to the usual lectures orseminars. Actually good tutoring was essential in this case and the tutor involvedneeded to be a well motivated person interested in new technology like the Internetand the subject, urban geography in this case.Independent learning was the main way of that the students gained knowledge. Itwas based on study materials, which were provided for the students. Generally theseinvolved copied articles, relevant chapters from different issues of full textbooks, whichplayed the role as a main source of information for students. In our case learning materialwere collected by experts from the leading university and sent to the tutor via mailor sometimes by fax. Experience has shown that in some more complicated cases, likecontroversial, more difficult topics, lecturing would have helped students to better understandthe subject. So lecturing could also be involved in this learning system. Anyway, thecourse requires independent work from students collecting additional information on thecourse subjects and especially preparing project work. The given material concentratedon general theory, main trends in the urban or regional geography, so students had tofind information concerning their own city or region to supplement it.The number of audio meetings varied from 7 in 1999 to 4 in 2004. Firstly audio conferencesused to take place every two weeks, lasting two academic hours, but it becameevident that the attention needed for this type of learning was too great. Two hours oflistening to even very interesting topics in English was too difficult for the students andin general audio conferences became more a tool for discussion and presentation thanfor delivering lectures. At the beginning five audio meetings were devoted for lectures(including of course some discussion on related topic) and there were two for the presentationof projects prepared by different student groups. Finally there were only two short115