Teaching, Learning and Collaborating at a Virtual Summer School

Abstract

The effect that advances in telecommunication will have on education is currently a prominent topic in the media. With the advent of computer mediated conferencing, interactive video, multimedia and the like, many new educational scenarios become possible. It is now commonplace to hear about courses conducted using email to share information, facilitate student-tutor communication, and submit assignments (e.g. Veasey D’souza 1991; Ellerman et al. 1992; Wild and Winniford 1993). There have been numerous discussions concerning the use of more advanced technology to facilitate group work (e.g. Stefik et al. 1987; Eraut and Hoyes 1989; Merritt 1991), and the problems that communication and collaboration with this type of media pose. Increasingly, courses are being delivered using satellite broadcast, desktop video, advanced telematics, and the World Wide Web (e.g. Utsumi et al. 1990; Filo and Yang 1994; Speh and Wang 1994). With the advent of true high bandwidth Information Superhighway capability, the potential will be even more profound. For this reason we wanted to explore what might be possible in the near future by pushing existing technology as far as we could in order to test the water and examine the pedagogical implications. We wanted to integrate computer conferencing with live lectures over the Internet, virtual meetings, live video link-ups, talking head agent guides, and computer movies of software tutorials, to see how these could be made into an experience for students where they could both learn and collaborate.