Distance Education in Transition - Master of Distance Education ...

The Pedagogical Flexibility of the Virtual University
Items 5 and 6 show that Schulmeister identified more complex and demanding approaches
aimed at new forms of virtual teaching and learning. However, his conclusion was that
learning software which exploits the interactive possibilities of the new medium was
extremely rare. With regard to the virtual university that is aimed for we should like to
stress that most of the pedagogical factors, and not merely one or two of them, should
be represented.
At this point the aim is to reach a consensus that a virtual university can never simply
consist of a group of digitised teaching and learning functions, or of a single project, or
two or three isolated courses, or a virtual seminar of four or five weeks’ duration.
Likewise, we cannot even call a university a “virtual university” simply because every
faculty member and every student is provided with a laptop, or because a number of
universities form a consortium in order to develop a small number of special courses.
Rather, a real virtual university should be defined as an “infrastructure for providing
students with a learning experience and related support services to complete a degree
program (...) totally online and for providing faculty members with resources for
teaching and doing research effectively online” (Aoki & Pogroszewski, 1998). In
addition, we might hope that a virtual university also consisted of an adequate number
of departments.
Measures Taken by Institutions of Higher Education
The possibility of delivering teaching programmes at a high speed to external students
everywhere in the country or in the world is a tempting one. Even for many experts this
seems to be the main objective of using the Internet. In the USA many protagonists
believe that “delivery” is the main and quite often only function of a “virtual university”.
In this country there are university presidents urging their faculty members to have their
lectures digitised and presented on the Internet as well in order to increase the number
of students and the income of the university. The idea of “delivery” may even have
inspired Michael Saylor, the owner of the software company MicroStrategy, to invest
US$ 100 million in founding an online university which is to offer courses of the Ivy-
League universities at no cost to everyone in the world who is eager to learn (cf. Remke,
2000, p. 3). It is obvious that protagonists of online education believe that delivering
learning material to many students means teaching. But presenting content is certainly
not teaching. John Daniel (1998c, p. 11) has characterised this approach by saying:
“Much of the commercial hype and hope about distance learning is based on a very
unidirectional conception of instruction, where teaching is merely a presentation and
learning is merely absorption”. He calls it “an impoverished notion of distance education”
and predicts that it will fail.
Web-based education is distance education and must also embrace teaching and learning
activities other than just delivering, namely virtual tutoring, virtual group work, virtual
seminars, virtual practice in simulated companies, laboratories and excursions. A virtual
university must be able to provide for these support services. And even more: it must
develop new pedagogical approaches which exploit the unique potential of online
teaching.
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