ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 explores the use of online education delivery at the level of the institution or organiza tion. The chapter draws upon examples from both formal and nonformal education to illustrate how institutions are involved in the design and implementation of the online delivery of certifi cate and degree programs. Attitudes toward online education employed by schools, colleges and universities, or train ing institutions and continuing education providers have shifted dramatically over the past few decades. During the 1980s and early 1990s most online educational delivery of courses was the initiative and responsibility of individual teachers and professors, rather than an undertaking by institutions. The decision to create and implement online courses was left to the initiative and responsibility of teachers (Harasim et al., 1995). Teachers, instructors or professors who sought to offer courses online had no alternative but to do so using their own time and resources. They had to create the online pedagogies, access and structure the technological environments to support the learning pedagogies, and teach the courses. They represented the so-called “lone rangers” in the field (Bates, 2000, pp. 59-64). Online educators were on their own; they were individually responsible for designing the course, developing the curriculum, organizing the resource and finding and obtaining access to online forums for the course activities. All this in addition to learning how to use the technology, creating online IDs and passwords for each student, establishing the conference or forum space for each course seminar or activity, organizing the group discussion or projects, training students in how to use the system, providing technical support and problem solving for the students, posting or emailing the training manuals and course materials to each student, implementing the course and grading the activities. There were no institutional policies, funding or resources allocated to assist the teaching of online courses. In fact, in the 1980s and 1990s (and even today) educators adopting online education might encounter collegial or institutional resistance from those who perceived online education to be a threat or insult to traditional “chalk-and-talk” teaching. However, while it was the individual teachers and faculty who moved forward as the primary motivators of online educational innovation, it was the institutions, through their resource allo cations and policies that were able to mainstream online education. The institutional adoption of online education was central to changing educational and social perception. As educational institutions and organizations incorporated online education into their integral mission, the resources and policies shifted to reflect these new priorities. Most of the courses and programs offered online during the 1980s used a collaborative learn ing approach that became a framework for online education (Mason & Kaye, 1989; Harasim, 1990a; Hiltz, 1994; Harasim et al., 1995). The early examples of online education (as discussed in Chapter 6) anticipated Online Collaborative Learning (OCL). In 1989, the Open University (OU) in the United Kingdom-an internationally renowned distance education university-offered a distance education course with a significant “online” component that featured group discussion. The OU was one of the earliest institutional adopters. Approximately 1,500 students were involved in this particular course (Mason, 1989). It attracted significant attention to online educational modalities and to online collaborative learning. Also launched in the late 1980s, a far smaller endeavor but one that ultimately had a major impact on the field of online and higher education was the University of Phoenix’s online degree program, known today as the University of Phoenix Online (UPXO). UPXO was launched in 1989 with around 40 students and was the first university to offer online degree programs. Both of these online education “firsts”—the OU mass course and the UPXO online degree program-employed the technology of computer conferencing for group communication and
collaborative learning. Students who participated in these programs dialed a proprietary, univer sity modem phone line using modem speeds of between 300 to 1,200 bytes per second (bps). Public access to the Internet in 1989 had a major impact on online education, and was instru mental in the tremendous expansion of online education applications, initiating a sea change in how online learning would be viewed by schools, universities and training organizations. Many traditional educational institutions began to support the use of online educational activities and/or group discussions by providing an online environment, such as computer con ferencing or forum software. Among the most innovative institutions were those that provided, in addition to the technology, a systematic approach to faculty training and support, student support and a vision of how the technology would link with the pedagogy to advance the learning mission. Institutions that specialized in distance education and those that offered distance education in addition to their face-to-face (f2f ) courses soon became aware of the potential of the Internet and integrated it into their distance delivery approach. It is important to recognize, however, that while most distance education providers adopted the use of the Internet, the majority has not yet transformed their pedagogical approach. They retain a correspondence model of education, substituting email for postal mail to send and receive educational materials or assignments more efficiently and inexpensively. The correspondence learning model simply went online, to become Online Distance Education (ODE). The situation is the same among courseware providers. Largely as a consequence of public access to the Web in 1993 and graphical browsers, which improved access to and posting of multi media content online, nonformal training organizations began to post their multimedia content on the net. Training companies, which utilized individualized learning, self-study pedagogies and multimedia courseware, were able to relatively easily upload and deliver their multimedia content via the Web. And internationally many universities and colleges began to develop individualized courseware for Web delivery. Here, too, as in distance education, the courseware pedagogy was not significantly changed from its original format, but remained based on individualized learn ing; that is, interaction between the students and the computer software, without access to an instructor or tutor. The Online Courseware (OC) approach was thus initiated.
