Introduction and Guide to the Documentation

of the Virtual Seminar for Professional Development in Distance Education

 

The Virtual Seminar in Distance Education is an on-line, World Wide Web-based asynchronous discussion forum that was designed to provide university faculty and administrators with professional development in the field of distance education.

 
This documentation contains all of the components of the project’s Website (except for the listing and photos of the participants), including all of the discussion and participant projects, as well as the formal evaluations of the project and the web server statistics.

The purpose of this documentation is fourfold:

  1. To provide the project’s institutions, the International Council for Open and Distance Education and the AT&T Foundation with a final report of this project within the "Global Distance Learning Initiative" in the form of a complete annotated documentation of the Seminar.
  2. To provide the original participants and teaching experts with a complete set of documents as a record of their participation in the Virtual Seminar.
  3. To provide researchers and others with the basic data (discussions and participation data) and evaluation results of the Seminar so that they can view and analyze the data and learn from the results.
  4. To provide others with the basic design and pedagogy of the Virtual Seminar so they can use this model for their own professional development efforts. This documentation should not be seen as a basic textbook on distance education or virtual learning environments, but should be viewed as a potential "learning by example" opportunity.
The project started in 1995 with an idea that there was a pressing need for professional development for distance educators. This idea of the Seminar came from the belief that while distance education was in a very rapid period of growth within higher education institutions throughout the globe, there seemed to be very little attention being paid to the training and development of faculty and administrators. In fact, it was the view of the leaders of the Seminar that the vast majority of faculty were being asked to teach in this (for them) new environment without any background. While there seemed to be a variety of technical training available to faculty (particularly in the areas of interactive video and web-based development), this rarely included any of the history and theory of the field, or even reference to any of the basic literature of the field. It was perceived that faculty development (as opposed to technological development) might well be a serious stumbling block for the rapid proliferation of distance education in many institutions. Institutions seem hesitant to significantly invest in distance education faculty development until they are assured that their market is really there. So the leaders also had the belief that the Seminar should aspire to be a model for large-scale faculty development. That is, it should be able to be appropriately scaled for delivery to faculty anywhere in the world, regardless of geography, time zones, or nationality, and it must also be of moderate cost, so as to be affordable by a broad cross-section of higher education faculty. In this manner, institutions could afford to train their new distance faculty without a significant investment in internal faculty development resources. Given this goal, the leaders were interested in aiming the Seminar not only at individuals, but also at potential groups (observers) at each institution where there was a registered individual.

Given this global scope, the leaders realized that it would be necessary to utilize a more technology-based communication system than was in general use within distance education. The World Wide Web seemed to be a natural medium, but there were few, if any models to guide us. No one else was attempting this and few had any experience to guide us. We had already had some limited experience using the Internet utilizing an e-mail-based Listserv and we were anxious to expand this using web-based computer conferencing. While such web-based conferencing had been in use for a while, its use for worldwide faculty development was unknown. Thus, the Virtual Seminar was a true experiment, not only in its use of technology, but also in the design and management of the course.

When the authors of this report first conceived the Virtual Seminar, there were several general ideas that were viewed as central to the overall concept, and critical for its success:

  1. Faculty are busy professionals. They must fit their own training in among their other responsibilities. There is little toleration of activities that are not perceived as relevant and useful. Therefore, the Seminar had to be motivating and viewed as relevant to their work.
  2. Professional development in distance education too often is focused on technique and the technical aspect. Often faculty get involved in distance teaching without any historical or theoretical perspective, and as a result, fail to understand the larger context of their work, fail to learn from the past, or cannot relate their teaching techniques to an overall view of education and learning. It was felt that an understanding of the broad historical, theoretical and cultural influences on distance education, particularly in reference to modern information and communication technologies, would better prepare university faculty and administrators for work within the field of distance education.
  3. Distance education is rapidly becoming a global enterprise. Distance education did not begin with the Internet, nor does the expertise belong primarily to one single national or cultural group. Cross-cultural understanding and sensitivity are critical aspects in distance education and there are valuable things to learn from other cultures and nations in the area of distance education. We felt that this should be an important area of this Seminar.

The Curriculum of the Seminar

 
The curriculum of the Seminar was conceived as being a mix of both theory and practice. The concept of "theory" was a broad one, which encompassed the foundations of distance education (its history and formal educational theories), a broad conceptual look at national, cultural and institutional structures, and an overview of the effect of technology on the field. These were broad categories of discussion, and represented an attempt to get new distance educators to appreciate how distance education evolved and to identify the important influences and issues of the present. The idea was to ask a different top expert within the field of distance education to act as an expert mentor in each of the four areas of "theory" (see the curriculum below). It was argued that the presence of such a distinguished mentor would act not only as a direct source of information and opinion within each topic area, but it would also act as a "motivator" for the continuing involvement of the participants. It was assumed that participating faculty and administrators would need a strong reason to continue in the Seminar and it was thought that the presence of these top "name" experts would be such a motivator.

Added to this theoretical base, were a series of specific topics that more closely related to the actual practice of distance education. It was hoped that in these discussions, the participants would talk and learn about the day to day logistical issues of being a distance educator.

It was also clear that it would be necessary to have several planning and summary periods throughout the course of the Seminar. Therefore an introductory session was planned at the beginning and a summary and conclusions session was planned at the end of the Seminar. In addition, a summary and planning session was placed in the middle, which logically separated the "theory" from the "practice" aspects of the Seminar. The total number of sessions (modules), each of which lasted one week, added up to 10.

The curriculum looked as follows:
 
Module Topic Expert 
1 Introduction to the Virtual Seminar on D.E. Bernath / Rubin
2 Foundations (History) of Distance Education Böerje Holmberg
3 Institutional Models of Distance Education Gary Miller
4 Theories in Distance Education Otto Peters
5 Technology in Distance Education Tony Bates
6 Preferred Application Topics & Project Proposals Bernath / Rubin
7 Student Support and Assessment Issues Ulrich Bernath
8 Instructional Design and Course Development Eugene Rubin
9 Technology Applications Bernath / Rubin
10 Summary and Conclusions - Projects Bernath / Rubin
 

Requirements for participation

The Seminar was free to a maximum of 45 participants. 15 places were reserved for potential German participants, 15 for Maryland participants, and 15 for various participants from around the world. Within each category, participants were accepted on first come, first served basis. The design was chosen so that the first two groups served the geographical area of each leader as well as created natural geographical groupings that would allow for easy later evaluation, and the third group provided an international and cross-cultur.

In return, each participant was required to commit to:

  1. Completing the entire Seminar
  2. Completing a project
  3. Attending a face-to-face evaluation session following the Virtual Seminar (this requirement was only for those participants who were located in Maryland, USA or Germany.)
Projects

Each participant was expected to work on a project during the course of the Seminar. This could occur in a team (that is, in conjunction with other participants), or as an individual project. The planning for the project occurred after the first five modules (Introduction plus all of the "theory" modules). This allowed the participants to get a perspective on the field and to develop some ideas for their projects. They then had only 3 weeks to complete the project and submit a report for the others to read.

 

The Structure of the Virtual Seminar

In order to understand how the Virtual Seminar operated, it is necessary to look at:

  1. the physical structure of the Seminar (the Website and its various components)
  2. the pedagogical structure of the Seminar
  3. the management strategy of the Seminar
and see how these three things interacted.

 

The physical structure of the Seminar

The Seminar lasted 10 weeks. This was viewed as the maximum length that could be fit into the participants schedules as practicing faculty. It was designed to start after the majority of participant’s classes had begun (so as to not interfere with the beginning of their teaching responsibilities) and end before the beginning of examinations (which is also a work intensive time for most faculty). However, the length of the Seminar was experimental since we did not know the ideal length that would result in maximum learning, as well as maximum attendance.

The Seminar consisted of a main page, from which all other areas were reached. This page was designed to fit on one single screen and to be of minimal size to facilitate downloading. General announcements were posted on the page. From the main page, the following pages were accessed:

In addition, there was a module which Seminar participants visited after three months, that discussed the evaluation report, the results of the face-to-face evaluation meetings, and the further activities of the participants.

Special note should be made of the web-based computer conferencing software that was chosen for the seminar discussions. After exploring a variety of tools designed for web-based communication, the software HyperNews was selected. This was a software tool that ran on a Unix operating system. UMUC had already had some experience with this tool and so it was relatively easy to adapt. HyperNews allowed for "threading", which meant that one could follow the logic and flow of the conversation. This was considered an important capability of the software. The fact that HyperNews was free was not irrelevant to our decision. It should be noted, however, that HyperNews is not the only appropriate software for such use. The documentation of the various Seminar discussions clearly show how "threading" and messages are displayed for the users.
 

The pedagogical structure of the Seminar

As stated previously, the Seminar was divided into two main sections: "Theory" and "Practice". Each Module (other than the organizing modules 1, 6, and 10) was structured so that participants were assigned a reading(s) on the Friday of the week before, and the participants were expected to begin to discuss that reading beginning on Monday of the next week. On Tuesday, the expert came into the discussion and responded to the questions and observations of the participants. Back and forth discussion occurred through Friday. The Seminar Leaders summarized the discussion on Friday, thanked the guest expert, and assigned the reading for the next Module. This structure, along with a few other organizing principles, allowed us to achieve some additional goals:

The Seminar Leaders planned the discussion topics of each Module, but this was, in practice, somewhat experimental. In the second Module of the Seminar - Foundations of Distance Education, we began the discussion without any structure, and quickly found out that this appeared to result in an explosion of ideas and comments with no clear focus. Since we knew that we only had one week for the discussion, we added discussion topics at the end of the second day to try to focus the discussion into several specific conversational threads. In the third and successive weeks, we began the week with pre-specified discussion topics.

The experts came into each week ‘s discussion on Tuesday and stayed until Friday. None of the experts were experienced with web-based teaching and thus each "learned while doing." Each expert had a unique way of dealing with the discussion. Some were expository, and occasionally gave mini-lectures. Some were consolidative, grouping various participants’ comments and questions together, and then responding. Some responded individually to each participant on a more personal level. Each of these strategies seemed effective in their own way, and usually resulted in continuing conversation.
 

The management strategy of the Seminar

The Seminar Leaders planned and executed the Seminar at a distance from each other. This, in fact, turned out to be one of the hidden objectives of the Seminar; to test whether this kind of Internet collaboration was feasible. The two leaders were in almost constant communication via e-mail and would call each other by telephone once a week or so to discuss strategy and resolve problems. Introductions and Summaries were usually drafted by one leader and sent for editing and additional comments to the other. The result was then posted to the discussions.

As each expert’s week approached, they were contacted by e-mail or telephone to ensure their connectivity and preparation.

In practice, each of the Seminar Leaders needed to check the Seminar discussions and monitor their e-mail several times a day. Problems such as slow or balky web servers, participant connectivity, and browser problems needed to be solved regularly.

General messages were posted to the main web page each week, and links to each new discussion and readings needed to be activated. In addition, occasional formatting errors in the messages as well as message placement in the discussion tree needed to be corrected.

A considerable amount of time was invested at the beginning of the Seminar in verifying which participants were committed, connected and on-line. There were several drop-outs at the beginning, and these "places" needed to be refilled. In addition, participants were asked to submit a biography, send in a photo and take a pre-Seminar questionnaire. The administration and monitoring of this required a lot of time, but resulted in a more close-knit community among the participants.
 

The Contents of this Documentation

The reader should note that the transcripts of the various discussions in these documents are not verbatim transcripts. In principle, nothing was changed with reference to the overall content of the discussions. However, each participant was allowed to edit their own contributions (which consisted mostly of changes in grammatical structure, spelling, punctuation, etc.) The participants eliminated only a very few contributions, and this did not substantially change the meaning or flow of the conversations.

Occasionally a participant’s contribution was placed in an incorrect position within the threaded discussion. There are very few of these, and they have been moved to their "correct" placement in terms of the flow of the discussions.

Finally, a few words have been removed from many messages. These words were usually greetings to specific fellow participants. At all times, the participants acted with what we call "web civility". This means that all conversations were polite and, in general, of a positive tone. We never had to remove a message because of the tone or content.

This documentation of the first Virtual Seminar includes:

Conclusions from the project

The formal and informal evaluations of the project, as well as additional post-project analyses are presented in this documentation. Most of these were presented on-line, either as a separate document or embedded in the Week 11 discussion (an extra week of discussion that was offered to the participants approximately three months after the conclusion of the project.)

The reader might wish to directly reference these conclusions.

Of particular interest are:

Finally, the reader should note that the Virtual Seminar that is reported in this documentation is but the first of several. Two further seminars have been run and more data has been collected and experiences noted. These data have been summarized, and the comparisons of the three Seminars will be reported at the 19th ICDE World Conference in Vienna, 1999. Further articles and papers are planned that will share our conclusions with other interested professionals.
 

Ulrich Bernath and Eugene Rubin

January, 1999