Journal of Geography in Higher Education
ISSN: 0309-8265 (Print) 1466-1845 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjgh20
Virtual Development and Virtual Geographies: Using the Internet to teach interactive distance courses in the global South Janot Mendler , David Simon & Paul Broome To cite this article: Janot Mendler , David Simon & Paul Broome (2002) Virtual Development and Virtual Geographies: Using the Internet to teach interactive distance courses in the global South, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 26:3, 313-325, DOI: 10.1080/0309826022000019891 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0309826022000019891
Published online: 03 Aug 2010.
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Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Vol. 26, No. 3, 2002, pp. 313– 325
Virtual Development and Virtual Geographies: using the Internet to teach interactive distance courses in the global South
JANOT MENDLER, DAVID SIMON & PAUL BROOME [1], Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
This paper evaluates the delivery and learning outcomes of an interactive postgraduate geography and development MSc programme taught partially over the Internet, to students living in some of the most connectivity-poor regions of the world. It focuses particularly on the experiences of course developers, tutors and students, with the distance strand of a Master’s Programme pioneered by Royal Holloway, University of London, and IW:LEARN (International Waters Learning Exchange and Resource Network), a UNDP-implemented project of the Global Environment Facility. Issues of design and implementation are discussed, with particular reference to pedagogical and nancial questions and the considerable technical and personnel dif culties encountered. Comparability of experience between distance and residential students forms a central concern. ABSTRACT
Distance learning, distance MSc, Internet-based teaching, North– South cooperation, ICT. KEYWORDS
Introduction The recent explosion in the provision of distance learning represents a sea-change in the orientation of higher education. No longer is distance learning the preserve of a handful ISSN 0309 – 8265 print/ISSN 1466– 1845 online/02/030313– 13 Ó 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/030982602200001989 1
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of specialist universities like the Open University (UK) or the University of South Africa. The advent of widely available Internet access has created new opportunities to enrol increasing numbers and types of students without incurring commensurate institutional overhead costs in constructing new halls of residence, expanding libraries and so forth. Moreover, information and communications technologies (ICTs) have opened the way to new overseas recruitment strategies, enabling universities and other higher education institutions to tap into new domestic and international income streams (Newnham et al., 1998; Reeve et al., 2000; Reed & Mitchell, 2001). The USA took the lead, but has been followed by many other countries (Johnston, 2001). Thus, the design and delivery of distance programmes in geography and development studies that utilise ICT to some extent is not particularly innovative (e.g. Castleford & Robinson, 1998); the aspirant learner can choose from a growing number of programmes worldwide. However, the vast majority of these exploit ICT to a surprisingly modest extent—usually comprising a collection of static web pages with some kind of text messaging facility and a reliance on email attachments for consultations with tutors and to distribute study guides and other learning materials. Given the dramatic advances in the sophistication of available ICTs for more interactive communication—and hence learning and teaching—this is surprising. The pilot MSc scheme reported and evaluated here attempted to deliver audio-based seminars in a predominantly interactive programme, in terms both of tutor– student and student – student communications. In particular, we sought to test the practicability of targeting in-post professionals in poor and transitional countries, so as to contribute to postgraduate-level human resource development and skills acquisition that is of high quality, appropriate and less expensive in nancial and opportunity cost terms than residential programmes requiring a year or more in the UK or elsewhere. The close relationships between the enhancement of human skills and development, not least in terms of technological capacity, are well known, as re-emphasised in the Human Development Report 2001 (UNDP, 2001, pp. 43– 47) and elsewhere (Moore, 2000). Context and Background This pilot distance MSc degree was conceived in response to a survey conducted in the late 1990s by UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) within its portfolio of GEF (Global Environment Facility) transboundary waters projects in poor countries and those undergoing politico-economic transition (www.iwlearn.net GEF project document: Strengthening Capacity in International Waters). Education and training are broadly acknowledged as crucial to meeting a universal need for individual and institutional capacity building. GEF support for specialised Master’s level training in International Waters is predicated on an expanding market for local specialists in environmental management worldwide (Sklarew et al., 2001). There is a concomitant need for expertise in integrating economic and environmental considerations in the development of policies and legislation, and, as Haas (1990, 1992) has argued, leaders and policy makers must increasingly be able to understand the language of empirical scienti c researchers—and vice versa—to address effectively the complexities of problems related to environmentally sustainable development. The establishment and networking of ‘epistemic communities’ is central to the success of transboundary environmental regimes (Young, 1989, 1994, 1998; Broome, 1999). Environmentally sustainable development is a fundamentally interdisciplinary eld, encompassing the spectrum of human and physical geographies, as well as a range of specialised and cognate disciplines. Indeed, if complex 314
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environmental problems are to be successfully mitigated, geographers and others are going to need to adopt a far more integrated approach (Stoddart, 1987; Unwin, 1992). The GEF IW:LEARN (International Waters Learning Exchange and Resource Network—www.iwlearn.org) initially proposed that a broad-based Master’s level development course, delivered in an Internet-mediated distance learning mode, could potentially model a new means of increasing access to high-level specialised degree training in the environment and development eld. With funding from UNDP-GEF and the World Bank’s infoDev programme, IW:LEARN partnered with the Centre for Developing Areas Research at Royal Holloway, University of London (CEDAR-RHUL) to formulate, modify and test-deliver a distance MSc programme based on the existing Geography of Third World Development degree offered by CEDAR-RHUL. This joint pilot project sought to evaluate the viability of Internet-mediated distance learning in respect of the hypotheses summarised in these three questions: (1) Can students achieve as good, or better, learning outcomes through distance learning, than they can from a traditional residential programme? (2) Can students gain high-level specialised training via distance learning at a lower cost than via a traditional venue? (3) Is distance learning a more economical means of teaching? In spring 1998, recruitment by means of nominations from GEF-funded International Waters projects in the East Asia seas, Mediterranean, Red Sea, Black Sea, Tumen River Basin, Danube River Basin, Gulf of Guinea and East Africa lakes regions, resulted in eight students being accepted as ‘guinea pigs’ in an experimental distance MSc programme (www.iwlearn.org/GEF Project Documents). The costs of developing and delivering the pilot programme were funded by IW:LEARN under a ‘ringfence’ agreement with CEDAR-RHUL, whereby all grant and fee income to the programme was recycled to cover expenditures, at no additional cost to the hosting institution. Distance students were to varying degrees supported academically and nancially by their sponsoring GEF projects, with the understanding that participation was an experiment to ascertain whether ICT-based learning could be demonstrated to be technically feasible, academically worthwhile, and affordable for students in developing countries. The IW:LEARN/CEDAR-RHUL pilot, which was concluded in October 2000, pioneered and largely successfully established a precedent for future students in developing and transitional regions to pursue advanced degree programmes via ICT-mediated distance learning. The one-year programme was to be completed with the submission of dissertations in September 1999. However, in response to unforeseen technical and personnel problems, the pilot programme became a part-time, two-year undertaking. Technical Issues: the delivery platform The overall goal was to replicate as far as possible the level of staff – student and student – student interactivity inherent in a comparable residential degree programme. The teaching structure of the existing residential programme was analysed and characterised as a set of teaching components. The learning interactions of each component were then matched with virtual mediation systems. The most appropriate available suite of software was selected to (re)construct each course in the virtual mode (see below). This approach afforded us exibility in tailoring the resultant structure of each course to individual 315
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teaching styles. Students therefore gained experience in a variety of learning formats within a consistent overarching framework. The initial plan was, rst, to record tutorial sessions delivered on the residential programme for simultaneous broadcast (or subsequent relay) over the Internet to the distance audience and, second, to provide for ‘on-demand’ playback (audio streaming) should distance students become unable to connect to the Internet for any reason at the time of the original broadcast. Unfortunately, most students’ Internet connectivity was inadequate to access live broadcasts, thus this strategy was dropped early on. The theory of the ‘digital divide’ became apparent in practice as we continuously struggled with pervasive and intractable connectivity constraints. Many students did not have stable Internet connections or adequate bandwidth to enable us to use our real-time, synchronous virtual classroom (Centra’s Symposium package), which forced a complete restructuring of the delivery platform (www.cedarweb.rhul.ac.uk). Research and comparative analysis of individual students’ home institutional connectivity formed a key part of their initial coursework assignment after arrival at RHUL. Many of these connectivity problems re ect historical legacies in terms of the relationship between infrastructural development and ex-colonial ties (see for example, Brown, 1999). Whilst all continents’ connectivity is improving, and even most African countries are now online to some extent, Southern countries still lag substantially behind the North (Panos, 1995; Jensen, 1998; Jeffrey, 1999; Main, 2001; UNDP, 2001). In response to this situation, tutors recorded sessions identical as far as possible to those used in residential tutorials, and these were processed for audio streaming using the Real Networks Basic Server. Recording a second set of Real Audio format les proved to be time-consuming for tutors. We also found that Internet connections less than 56 Kbps/sec provide unsatisfactory results for video and audio broadcasting; even for audio streaming, a bare minimum of 28.8 Kbps with a very large data buffer is necessary. A positive nding was that, by recording each tutorial (or part tutorial) as audio les in .RM format, these data les can be stored, manipulated and delivered in a variety of ways. For example, when periodic Internet connectivity failures occurred, we were able to transfer the sessions concerned to CD-ROM for delivery to students by post or courier. This inspired our working motto for distance delivery with developing country students: ‘Backup is the Backbone’. Decisions regarding the types of technical delivery platforms to cater for have far-reaching rami cations in the design and implementation of distance programmes, with special signi cance in the eld of development studies. As Marshall (2001) and Bowers (2000) suggest, implementing ICTs in Southern countries while ignoring the need to develop locally appropriate solutions is nothing more than a new technologically driven imperialism. A related problem is that, although the Internet, and speci cally the World Wide Web, was designed with an open architecture by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, it has since become increasingly commercialised and proprietarised, as companies such as Microsoft and Netscape have eschewed open standards in order to secure intellectual copyright in seeking to gain control of the Web’s development. An example is the debacle of the British government’s e.Gov Initiative whereby users remain unable to access the key functions of the portal unless using the latest Microsoft Internet Explorer Browser. Berners-Lee’s chastisement of his own W3C organisation (the very people entrusted with policing open standards on the World Wide Web) over their consideration of ‘web patents’ is also noteworthy (Duvall, 1999). Addressing the World Bank’s infoDev symposium in December 2001, Tony Stanco of the Cyberspace Policy Institute at George Washington University provided an in uential endorsement of open-source 316
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software, which requires everyone to use the same source code base; this is crucial to the developmentally important task of facilitating the creation of autonomous software industries, especially in the global South (Stanco, 2001). What this means for aspiring Internet-enabled educators is that, if there is no standard, different browsers will rarely display the same web page correctly. Whilst not an issue in the UK or the US, in the global South where older browsers (which may not even display the pages at all) are still common, this poses a signi cant problem. Programme designers are thus faced with two choices: either use old technologies that will display on all browsers correctly, or use cutting-edge technology and supply requisite hardware and software to the students. We chose the latter, although in part because the laptop computers supplied were to be retained by the students’ sponsoring organisations for use in a wider GEF/UNDP initiative. However, for future delivery of the programme, students will need to supply their own equipment, meeting minimum hardware speci cations and probably using open-source software, despite the fact that, like many other educational institutions, Microsoft software predominates on the RHUL campus. Financial Considerations Cost containment and planning for nancial sustainability from the perspective of teaching institutions relates directly to the question of fees and cost containment to reduce barriers to access for many students from poor countries. Budgeting in this innovative area is inherently dif cult, especially in view of the novelty and rapidly changing nature and costs of hardware and software. One objective of the pilot scheme was to test and evaluate some of the most potentially appropriate technologies. Cost containment was dictated by an agreement to ring-fence all revenues to the programme, which were in turn utilised to underwrite all development and delivery expenditures. An implicit waiver of charge-back for CEDAR staff time devoted to the distance programme or for overhead expenses incurred constituted an in-kind contribution on the part of the geography department and the college to this predominantly donor-funde d pilot programme. Development Funding IW:LEARN partnered with the Concord Consortium, a Massachusetts-based educational technology consultancy, to negotiate the donation of a one-year licence (with an estimated value of approx. $50 000) from the Centra software company to experiment with its Symposium software. This was originally envisaged to be linked to a website to create a customised central platform for the distance-learning delivery system. Cost Ratio Hypotheses In line with the objective of piloting an affordable, high-quality degree programme that could be undertaken in service by young professionals in Southern countries, an initial postulate was that it would be cheaper in terms of institutional delivery costs to provide a distance programme as a parallel stream to an existing residential mode of instruction, than to bring the students to RHUL for the traditional one-year residential programme. Accordingly, the college agreed to experiment with a fee level of £5500, set midway between (the government-subsidised ) UK ‘Home’/European Union and full-cost Overseas Student rates. 317
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In retrospect, this assumption was not substantiated from the delivery cost standpoint because distance students demanded an unanticipatedly high level of staff time for troubleshooting as well as academic support. This turned out to be equivalent to, if not greater and more demanding than, contact time with residential students. Accordingly, full RHUL Overseas fees will be charged in future. This is generally consistent with fee structures for distance-learning programmes emerging from other institutions, although our research revealed that a number of prestigious institutions, especially in the USA, have opted to set signi cantly higher fees for distance students. However, charging higher fees would be incompatible with CEDAR’s intent to target candidates in poor and transitional countries and to pass on to the students, or their sponsors, the bene ts of projected cost savings to be realised through economies of scale in distance learning. Nevertheless, it became apparent over the course of the pilot that the opportunity cost of not interrupting employment signi cantly during the period of the MSc programme represented a signi cant bene t to a majority of the students (Mahmoud & Mendler, 2001). In addition to the obvious economic bene t of continuing to draw income while simultaneously working on a degree, an additional social spin-off was acknowledged in that students continued to advance professionally in their careers; 50 per cent of the cohort received job promotions while still completing their academic programmes. Business Plan Issues We have participated in considerable discussion at the departmental, college and University of London levels, as well as elsewhere in the UK and abroad, regarding the role of distance-learning programmes in expanding the mission of this and other institutions. Distance learning is an attractive alternative, or complement, to traditional residential programmes for a variety of reasons. Potential positive impacts include: · increased enrolment of overseas students; · creating curricula tailored to new job markets or other needs-responsive situations; · generating new income streams without the infrastructure expansion that accommodation of residential students would require. Clearly, the means to realise the most ef cient reduction in per student delivery costs would be in a solely coursework- and examination-based degree programme, eliminating the need for intensive one-to-one dissertation supervision. The economies of scale that could be achieved with larger student numbers—in the realm of hundreds as opposed to tens—in a ‘dissertation-free’ distance MA/MSc programme could conceivably constitute an important new revenue stream for the department and college. Student assessment indicated that the provision of independent research training was one of the most valuable assets of the pilot programme. The programmatic objective of empowering students in developing areas to analyse the complex interactions between human and physical geographies pertaining to development and development management was thus achieved. Residential Component In keeping with the distinctive tutorial nature of CEDAR’s programmes, it was resolved in the planning stage to bring the students to RHUL for an intensive, seven-week immersion period, in which to: · address the need to train students in the use of novel technology; 318
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· provide exposure and access to academic library and related resources not available in, or near, many distance students’ home locations; · expose overseas students to the British academic system and institutional environment, to help them orient their work and goals; · nurture personal bonds among the distance cohort, between the residential and distance students, and with teaching and support staff. During the residential period, CEDAR taught the compulsory double-credit core course and most of one additional optional course. Although extension of the residential period to the full 12-week autumn term would increase the accommodation and subsistence costs somewhat, it is now clear that this would provide at least commensurate bene ts in terms of longer exposure, somewhat less intensive instruction, and—crucially—the ability to take English and study skills courses for a full term. More experience in how to write and argue critically, to read faster in English, and to understand the objectives of Northern educational systems and their expectations of the students will undoubtedly accrue to the bene t of future cohorts. The ability to undergo extensive training in ICT and to become pro cient in use of the suite of hardware and software utilised during the distance phase will also greatly enhance students’ ability to work smoothly when back in their home locations. Such transferable skills are also of great use in other facets of their professional lives, and can even be passed on to non-participants by peer-to-peer learning among their colleagues. Duration of Programme On re ection, the unanticipated necessity of shifting from a full-time, 1-year programme as originally conceived, to a 2-year, part-time programme revealed several important advantages to the students: · more time for acculturation, not least in the educational system and its approach; · longer immersion for acquisition of English-language and writing skills; · distribution of workload over a longer period, important in situations where students are unable to negotiate suf cient time off from professional work commitments to study at anything approaching full-time levels; · more time and exibility for scheduling and carrying out dissertation research projects; · enablement of re-sits of any rst-year failed exams during year 2, thus reducing the chances of having to prolong the process beyond two years. It is still felt to be feasible for most students to complete the programme successfully within one year. A two-year, part-time commitment could make it more dif cult for some students to maintain focus with fewer hours per week involved in coursework over a longer period of time. Hence it would be desirable to offer students either a full-time or part-time option based on individual situations, which should be explored as part of the application process. Comparability of Opportunity/Experience with Residential Students With the best will in the world, it is impossible to ensure narrow comparability of experience between cohorts of distance and residential students, because the former are 319
living at home in overseas countries, working part- or near-full time, and are embedded in their local institutional, professional and domestic environments. Many do not use English as they would if based in the UK, and do not get the same exposure to British culture, academic traditions and practices etc. Yet they are implicitly expected to make the same adaptations, progress and attain the same goals as residential students from abroad who have the bene t of full immersion during a whole year in the UK.
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Separating Apples from Oranges The experimental phase was carried out as a parallel distance stream of an existing CEDAR MA/MSc. If successful in the pilot programme, the long-term goal from the outset was progressively to introduce new sustainable development curricula with an emphasis on environmental issues. Thereafter, we would revalidate and fully launch the distance MSc as a separate and discrete degree programme, with a new title re ecting a broader environmentally sustainable development focus. This would obviate problems arising from the necessity of holding two very different streams of students to an identical, as opposed to an equivalent, standard. Since residential and distance students work under distinctly different conditions and in some cases in differing media, the teaching and examining staff concurred, on the basis of the experience gained, that alternative means of assessment should be explored further for future cohorts of distance students. It would remain possible for residential students to participate in distance courses using campus computing facilities, thereby promoting interaction and cross-fertilisation among student cohorts of diverse backgrounds and experience. This contributes to more robust North– South and South– South peer networking among distance and residential students. Assessment Procedures and Mechanisms As acknowledged when commencing the pilot scheme, traditional, unseen and timed exams were likely to present formidable challenges to many of the distance students wholly unfamiliar with these assessment norms, and potentially requiring logistical gymnastics to write the exams at designated examination centres (usually the nearest British Council of ce or Embassy). This proved to be the case, and the resultant re-sits for students who failed examinations were modi ed to take the form of assessed essays. The problem has dual aspects: · students coming from very different educational systems, especially those where critical evaluation is not encouraged, encountered great dif culty in making the transition from description and narrative to critical analysis and evaluation; · the effect of this is magni ed by virtue of the students having only a limited residential period in the UK, and because they are operating in their home linguistic and institutional environments for the remainder of the study period, not having sustained exposure to, and practice in, the critical analytical skills expected of them. Their written and spoken English may well also not improve at the same rate as for most residential foreign students. The latter can be addressed by lengthening the residential period, and embedding relevant term-long Language Centre courses into the programme. In addition, the methods of assessment will require redesign to give students more practice in non320
assessed writing, and to shift the balance of assessment towards a variety of types of assessed coursework, and either partly or wholly away from unseen, timed exams. Institutional Support and Dissertation Supervision in Students’ Home Locations
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The pilot experience entailed varied levels of support provided by the scienti c advisers and directors of the GEF International Waters projects that nominated students. In situ supervision is vital, on account of: · local familiarity and expertise; · specialist expertise, especially where students opt for topics of local importance beyond the areas of specialisation of RHUL staff; · day-to-day accessibility and practical assistance in the eld; · ensuring effective feedback from the dissertation results to the wider work of the students’ employers or sponsors. For future intakes, rmer arrangements will need to be ensured with sponsoring organizations or institutions, although—as we discovered—plans and eventual outcomes are often rather different, especially in situations where staff may turn over and travel frequently. Tutorial Support for Students Regular and assured access to tutors and teaching staff (both at RHUL and elsewhere) proved very important. Distance students require frequent interaction, reassurance, information and feedback. Some contacts were short and factual, others necessarily more substantive. When a tendency was encountered for certain students to demand more and more, to the point where it became an intrusion on staff time, some limits had to be imposed. By instituting an electronic equivalent of of ce hours, for which the students had to use ICQ or other synchronous discussion media freeware, time with tutors outside formal class sessions could be scheduled. Use of email was also encouraged, which can, of course, be answered when convenient to either party. Specialist Technical Advising for Dissertation Research We were interested in experimenting with virtual supervision and assistance to those students researching in specialized areas. By soliciting experts in the students’ dissertation disciplines to communicate using ICTs from locations in other parts of the world, virtual advising could potentially be formalised and expanded as a means of using the Internet to create in-depth expert advising in technical areas not covered by departmental expertise. These electronic communication methods proved effective when one of the domestic MSc students had to cancel his research trip to Lake Victoria in East Africa owing to health problems, but was still able to undertake the research with experts on the GEF Lake Victoria Environmental Project by using a combination of ICQ messaging and text-chat ‘interviews’, audio-conferencing with iVisit, and email. Virtual advising enabled a student in Uganda researching the use of information technologies for library science in the development context to obtain assistance in formulating her research thesis from a GEF project of cer in the Philippines, and she also received thoughtful personal feedback, advice and referrals from a member of Harvard University’s library technology teaching staff. Another student undertaking 321
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baseline mangrove research in Djibouti was able to receive technical advice through consultation with an Australian mangrove expert, at the time engaged in eld research in Thailand. A number of specialists associated with UN-sponsored environmental activities in sheries, persistent organic pollutants and other international waters issues generously agreed to be ‘on call’ via email to eld questions from students in the pilot programme. It must be said that a huge debt of gratitude is owed to these advisers, as experimentation in virtual advising was possible due to their largesse. If it were to become a formal asset offered by the programme, the matter of compensation to the providers, possibly as an honorarium or token award of some sort, would need to be addressed. Lessons Learned On the basis of experience on the pilot programme and student feedback, it is clear that distance students can achieve learning outcomes comparable to residential students, as we had hypothesised. However, a number of disparities between distance and residential students emerged in terms of their respective access to information and services. In future, we expect to be able to overcome many of these by requiring distance students to: · · · ·
spend the full initial term on campus; participate in Language Centre and Computer Centre programmes; become fully familiar with the distance delivery systems prior to their return home; have reliable remote access to the distance platform and college electronic library resources.
Achievements Participating under some of the world’s most varied, limited and poorly Internet-connected conditions, students hailed from the Philippines, Sudan, Turkey, Uganda, Romania, China, Croatia and Djibouti. The degree of interactivity which was achieved via the technical delivery platform developed by CEDAR-RHUL and IW:LEARN is, by any standard, among the most dynamic offered in a university degree programme anywhere, and all students undertook relevant dissertation research that contributed substantively to the goals of their sponsoring regional environmental organisations. The academic and professional achievements of several of these graduates attest to the effectiveness of the approach utilised. A distance student was awarded the departmental dissertation prize in ecology and related subjects in the developing world, and gained admission to a PhD programme at the University of Western Australia. Another subsequently completed a postgraduate programme at Princeton and is continuing in a doctoral programme at Harvard. Conclusions and Prospects The analysis presented here is not intended as an exhaustive review or evaluation of the programme as a whole. It is, however, an attempt to draw succinctly together some of the key non-technical lessons learned from the distance MSc experiment. The learning process is ongoing. The lessons discussed here were taken into account whilst planning for the independent launch of a full distance programme as a new CEDAR-RHUL 322
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degree programme. It is expected that these lessons will also be useful for other academic departments at RHUL with new distance programmes under preparation and, as the role of distance learning continues to expand, the horizons of educational systems worldwide. The virtual medium offers multiple means to build interdisciplinary exibility and depth as both distance and residential programmes adopt the use of proliferating distance-learning tools. More existing course options could be delivered in a distance format if tutors so choose. However, it is the integration of virtual tools such as a course website, electronic submission of assessed assignments, threaded discussions, etc. into all university teaching which will increasingly and substantially begin to blur the boundaries. This is signi cant in terms of reducing the set-up time, learning curve, and costs to instructors and departments in the generation, or conversion, of curricula to a fully distance-deliverable format. Another possibility that could be explored is to draw upon expertise existing in other departments, such as Geology, Biology, and quite possibly Management, to create an increasingly exible, robust and relevant interdisciplinary environmental sustainability programme allowing for the proliferation of sub-specialisations, while retaining a general core programme under the aegis of the Department of Geography. For this programme to operate on a full cost-recovery basis, it is estimated that, even with distance student fees set at a level comparable to that of residential students, a minimum enrolment of 25– 30 will be required to break even. It is painfully clear that the single largest obstacle to Master’s level training for large numbers of high-calibre applicants from poor and transitional countries is the lack of access to adequate means of nancing the costs of their desired education. Students from these regions—who are excluded from the bene t of UK government educational subsidies—require signi cant support in pursuing individual nancing solutions. It would be unfair to create expectations for students regarding the advantages of distance learning without associated efforts to provide assistance in obtaining nancial aid, through a variety of mechanisms. These include help identifying and applying to scholarship programmes, provision of guidelines to assist in the negotiation of employer and other sponsorship arrangements, and the development of a dedicated scholarship fund tied to the distance programme. Sponsorship relationships with employers, GEF projects and their local partners will also need to be established on an ongoing basis in order to sustain recruitment. Finally, it is important to re ect that the proliferation of even well-tailored and appropriate programmes of the sort reported here does not represent a panacea. The technical problems faced, which will continue to arise in new forms as hardware, software and connectivity evolve, suggest that euphoria would be misplaced. Greater use of open-source or free software could address some of the current copyright/patent, intellectual property and cost restrictions. However, short of invoking some sort of subsidy mechanism, the development costs of high-quality programmes are considerable, and can be recovered only with substantial numbers of fee-paying students. Although distance programmes are well suited to the use of self-access and asynchronous methods, large classes—as with residential programmes—impose some restrictions on the format of teaching and learning. There is considerable scope to build upon and enlarge the small-scale foundations established by this experiment, both in expansion of the curriculum with a greater emphasis on the environment– development interface in a developing country context, and in expansion of the geographical regions and institutions wherein such a programme 323
could be marketed. CEDAR’s pilot programme illustrates that opportunities exist in ICT-mediated provision:
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· to institute a novel programme which responds directly to the needs of poor and transitional regions; · to increase geography enrolment; · to mutually enrich the learning experience of residential and distance students; · to open a new revenue stream for the department; · potentially to create adjunct short-course or certi cate programmes based on modularised distance programme components. The approach discussed here would not be suitable for every student or any institution and we certainly are not advocating that distance programmes should replace traditional residential learning. Rather, they have great potential to complement existing provision by widening the educational options available and—via high-quality provision at reduced cost—to broaden access to postgraduate education, especially in poorer countries. The way forward, in terms of local appropriateness and North– South partnership, is likely to involve joint provision of programmes by institutions based in the North and the South, although even here great care and effort will be necessary to avoid inequitable relations, particularly in view of the profound problems besetting higher education institutions in most poor countries. Acknowledgements We thank CEDAR colleagues for their support and involvement in this experience. Correspondence: David Simon, CEDAR, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK. Tel: 1 44-(0)1784 443651. Fax: 1 44-(0)1784 472836. Email:
[email protected] NOTES [1] This paper is dedicated to Paul’s memory; he died suddenly and prematurel y on 24 January 2002, as we were discussin g revisions to the version presente d in Belfast. His unique blend of technica l expertise and active engagemen t with developmen t studies will be sorely missed.
REFERENCES BOWERS, C. (2000) Let Them Eat Data: how computers affect education , cultural diversity, and the prospect s for ecological sustainabilit y (Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press). BROOME, P. (1999) Regional Epistemic Communities and Environmenta l Regime Formation: The problemati c infestations of the oating aquatic plant, the Water Hyacinth Eichhornia crassipe s (Pontederiaceae ) on Lake Victoria, East Africa, and riparian efforts on controlling them, unpublishe d Master of Science Dissertation, Royal Holloway, University of London. BROWN, R. (1999) Global Computer Networks and Geographies of Development in East Africa, unpublishe d PhD Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London. CASTLEFORD, J. & ROBINSON, G. (Eds) (1998) Arena Symposium: Evaluating IT-based resource s for supporting learning and teaching in geography : some case studies, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 22(3), pp. 375– 423. DUVALL, M. (1999) Berners-Lee warns against Net patents, Interactive Week, ZDNet News, 16 May 1999 [available at: http://zdnet.com.com /2100– 11– 500938.html?legacy 5 zdnn]. HAAS, P. (1990) Saving the Mediterranean : the politics of internationa l environmenta l co-operatio n (New York, Columbia University Press).
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