Betty

In this report, the author defines "pedagogical reengineering" in terms of the balance of instructional methods used within a course, what the author calls the "profile" of the course.
Also indicated is the view of how tele-learning can bring about enrichment or reengineering in the pedagogical profile of a course. She illustrates these ideas through her own experiences with four cycles of a particular course (Collis, 1994, 1995, 1996A, 1997). Via this particular case, she suggests a general approach for deciding where and how to integrate WWW-based functionalities into existing courses. The article concludes with an indication of how the author intends to proceed with the course in 1998, in both practical and research-oriented terms.

The author contends that World Wide Web (WWW) functionalities offer an instructor flexible and powerful tool for enriching or changing the pedagogical profile of a course in ways which can lead at least to more efficient and flexible education, but also to more effective learning. Before taking about using WWW-based functionalities within a course, one should first focus on pedagogy, not on technology. It is helpful to have a convenient way to think about the reorganization of one's own courses. There are many ways to do this, discused by theorists and researchers over decades of instructional design experience. However, the author believes that a simple approach, based on the different sorts of instructional settings a learner is intended to experience in a course. Figure 1 shows the categories used by the author.

Figure 1:
Course Component as components of the total time a student spends in connection with a course.

Profiling a course
After a series of investigations with graduate students, the nine activities listed here have been identified as common "events" that the student can expect to encounter in a course.
(While Category 1 is not pedagogical in itself, it is nonetheless a definite time investment for the student.) Of course, not every event is included in every course profile, but from a student's point of view it is a fact that a finite amount of time is spent on a course, and that time can be roughly experienced in categories such as those below. Most of the categories are generally self-explanatory. For exemple, "presentation" includes time spent at lectures or demonstrations or watching a video or similar events: the student attend to something that an expert (generally the instructor but perhaps someone else) has prepared and is presenting. Group discussions refer to structured discussions, those that occur in seminars, not casual question-and-answer exchanges that may occur during a lecture or presentation. By self-production, the author means activities where the student, working alone, must write an essay, produce a report, or carry out a study or similar activity differentiated from self-study of preset text readings or preset exercises. Every course has its own pedagogical profile, as experienced by the student, which can be expressed in terms of percentages of total time spent in the course. Figure 2 shows the same nine categories, but with typical percentages for (a) a traditional lecture-based course, (b) a graduate seminar, and (c) a course thaught via traditional print methods in a distance-teaching university (Collis, 1996b, 1996c).

PEDAGOGICAL ENRICHMENT AND PEDAGOGICAL REENGINEERING

Given this framne of reference, we can define the ideas of "pedagogical enrichment" and pedagogical reengineering". Pedagogical enrichment occurs when the profile of a course does not change, in terms of the balance of percentages of intended pedagogical events, but within an event, the instructor finds a way to carry out the event in a different way that previously. The difference may relate to more efficiency, enrichment, or flexibility.

When communication technologies are involved in this extension, we define this as "pedagogical enrichment via tele-learning". A simple exemple would be that the instructor is available for personal communication via email. A student may end up spending no more time in communication with the instructor that earlier when the only way of communication was to make an appointment for a meeting during the instructor's office hours, but the time may be divided into many smaller and more spontaneous exchanges between the instructor and student, made possible through email. This is an increase in effficiency and flexibility and may become an enrichment if it allows more reflective and personal communication that takes place in an office-hours visit.
Pedagogical reengineering, is defined as actually changing the profile of a course. Tele-learning is often involved. Communication technologies may allow the instructor to build some group discussion (via computer conferencing) and a collaborative project (supported by a project-oriented WWW site, as we will see in the upcoming exemple) into the profile of a course - two events that were not possible before with a relatively large class of students with very different schedules and personal agendas.

In this brief report, the author focuses on one of her particular courses and how it has envolved over four years, both in terms of pedagogical enrichment and pedagogical reengineering. Central to the evolution is not technology for its own sake, but technology as a tool to make concrete an educational philosophy. This philosophy is that collaborative learning, and in particular, group-based project work involving participants interacting as a team to solve a problem but reflecting on their experiences as individuals, is an appropiate form of instruction for her students and courses.

The course was called On-Line and Distance Learning in 1994, 1995, and 1996 and tele-Learning in 1997. (For convenience, the course will be referred to as Tele-Learning 94, Tele-Learning 95, et., in the following discussions). The course is a senior (fourth-year) elective for students majoring in educational technology. It meets in the third trimester (March-June) and is worth 3 credit points which, at the University of Twente, equals 120 hours of time investment. The course, like all of the senior electives, is scheduled for eight face-to-face presentations, each of 2 hours. The general expectation for such courses is that the rest of the time is split between self-study and an individual project. Tele-Learning is a popular course and always has a waiting list. There are about 30 students each cycle, representing not only senior students but also exchange students from other European countries and students from the university's master's programme. The language of the course is English. The WWW sites in which the course has occurred can be visted at

1994: Pedagogical Enrichment via a Collaborative Project and the WWW For many years the author has used email communication with her students, both for course organisation (notices, sending the syllabus by email, etc.) and for personal communication. Also students are required to use a Bulletin Board System (BBS) and access on-line databases of various sorts for small-class assignments, and to use email to send their comments and reflections to her and to reset of the class. Thus at the start of the 1994 cycle of Tele-Learning, the author changed her pedagogy by making a collaborative group project, experienced over the Internet and published on the WWW, as the major assignemnet for class. The need for a textbook that fit specific course objectives was realized (see these for the 1997 course at http://www.to.utwente.nl/ism/tlearn/info/info.html, so the class project was that instructor and students would begin such a textbook, writing it collaboratively but leaving it for the students in the following cycle of the course to revise and update. Thrirteen chapter topics were determined and students chose the chapter they wished to write, working in pairs or groups of three. Not only did they have to collaborate with their groupmates, but also with each of the other groups, as the chapters needed to have a flow and common style. In addition, in order to enrich and deepen what the students could write, the author invited colleagues from around the world to work collaboratively with each chapter group, helping them with their ideas and writing. All of this, organisationally and pedagogically complex process occurred without problems using the Internet, email, and file attachments. But how to make the final book available? There were appropiately 45 people involved, and moreover, the intention was that students in the following year would continue the work. In addition, the students in the 1994 class were interested in their final product as a whole. A long stream of email representing the final 13 chapters plus an introduction written by the author were sent and photocopied printouts were mailed.At about this time (May-June 1994), the author became aware of the WWW and decided to put the book "on the web". This not only solved distribution problems at the time, but also means the book is still available as a resource (see the 1994 site noted above). Thus the author asserts that in 1994, the Tele-Learning course was both an exemple of pedagogical enrichment and reengineering. Figure 3 shows its differences compared to previous similar courses taught by the author.

Figure 3:
Pedagogical enrichment and pedagogical reengineering via a colllaborative writting project

It can be seen in figure 3 that the collaborative writing project, with distant experts over the Internet, resulted in a change in the proprotions of some of the course components.
This is not to say that students studied less, instead their studying was in the context of their writting task. In addition, they also had to pay considerable critical attention to aech other's writing, and some sharp and deep discussion arose about content as they worked to harmonise their chapters. They had to communicate in English to an expert they had never met and decide how to handle the comments and suggestions of this expert in their writting: an experience they had never had before. Thus the reengineering also brought about a qualitative difference in the course experience, and tele-learning made it possible.

1995: Pedagogical Enrichment - Making Full Use of the WWW
After just one year, the explosive growth of the WWW compared to its status in spring of 1994 had a number of important effects on the Tele-Learning course. First of all, the major class project, to rewrite the book from the previous year, became not only an exercise in updating the content of the chapters, but also a comprehensive experience in discovering how to make use of the WWW functionalities for study materials. The students got into serious debates, both in the face-to-face sessions and also via computer conferencing, as to the comparative nature of writting a book as alinear set of chapters and writting an hipertext. This debate included quite different opinions among the students as to how much or how little structure should be in the materials. A computer conferencing environment and email were used for communication, but the students themselves evolved the idea of using the WWW environment not only for the dissemination of their final product, but also as a working environment for themselves as the course went on. They suggested that they use a course WWW site as a "campus", and they selected the metaphors of a "living room" (via which they each attached a home page), a "workshop" where their chapters were placed, and other such rooms as parts of the course environment. The project turned the course into a social-constructivist experience, in which the instructor worked and learned with the students to build not only a new book, but their own course. The URL given above for 1995 shows this environment at the completion of the course. Within it, the links to the 1995 hyperbook and the 1994 book on which it was based are directly available. (A report by three students about the experience o particpating in this course was presented at ED-MDIA/ED-TELECOM 96; Bos, Morgan, & Kikstra, 1996). The profile of the course was only slightly different from the year before (see figure 3) in terms of perecentages (The final examination was dropped and a personal reflection paper was written instead: theses are still available in the WWW site), but qualitatively the experience was richer because of the ability to combine process and product via a group-made WWW site for the course.

1996: Integrating the Course Within a WWW Environment
Because of the growth in the author's own experiences with the WWW and because of the powerful benefits of integrating process and product within a single course environment, the major difference in the 1996 cycle of Tele-Learning was that the whole course was experienced trough one WWW site (see the URL above), designed by the author and a student assistant before the course. In order to integrate all aspects of the course, the author wrote specially developed study materials for each week (still referring to the collaborative work of the previous two cycles of students).

Thus in terms of the profile of the course, more attention was given to the first category, Curse Organisation, and certainly more time was spent on it by the instructor, although its result was an effciency gain for the students on that all course materials were available in the same place. Instead of a separate computer conferencing environment, the class tried to communicate through a shared-work-space environment, but that did not prove to be effective for discussions (although very handy for the instructor, allowing her to give on-going feedback to the group as they worked on their projects). In the Week-by-Weel component of the site, the instructor developed the approach of using a matrix, with a row for each week of the course and cells in a row for Preliminary Reading, Face-to-Face Session Notes, a Follow-Up Assignment for the students after the face-to-face session, and a Feedback comment from the instructor to all of them, after receiving their assignments. This meant a shift in the nature of the written study material for the course. A rather considerable amount of reflective comment from the instructor went to all of them each week and was posted on the WWW site under Feedback for that week. Wether this should be classified as study materials or personal communication or both is not clear - an exemple of pedagogical reengineering again changing the traditional boundaries of an instructional component (for a longer discussion, see Collis, 1996a, 1996b; Collis, Andernach, & Diepen, 1997). In terms of the profile of the course, Figure 5 shows the evolution between 1994, 1995, and 1996.

Tele-Learning-Integration but Also Media Variation
And so, the 1997 class, again with a fully integrated course environment, rolled around. What was new? We used a printed book again because one had been written specially with this type of class in mind (Collis, 1996c). A WWW Board again allowed conferencing to be a structural part of the class (see http://130.89.40.213/TO/project/teletop/collis/), and the author used what she had learned over the years to make the conferencing as structured as possible for the students. (The students were in groups, and each had the responsability of being moderator for a week within the group.) There was a balance between group projects and individual projects, but with a connection as well: students completed a group project before the end of the course, linked al their projects to te course WWW site, and then wrote reflective essays on each other's projects for their own personal report. (To see all of these, go to the 1997 URL above and click the icon with a globe of the world to enter the assignment component of the course.) Added in 1997 were more "special learning events": videotaping one of the face-to-face sessions and reworking it as resource material for the WWW site; conducting two of the face-to-face sessions so that there was real-time interaction with two students in the class attended entirely from a distance (we used RealAudio and screen sharing), and giving the students the experience of videoconferencing and desktop conferencing. Thus the course profile had been reengineering again, now with less time proportionally spent on the group project an more time spent on "learning events" and the individual projects.

The next evolution of the tele-Leraning course will take place in a larger innovative context. The faculty is now commited to redesign its courses for tele-learning. We have launched an ambitious project, TeleTop (see http://130.89.40.213/TO/project/teletop/), to stimulate and steer this redesign process so that as much help as possible is available for satff. At least four themes are running: the "Virtual University" and how to manage it, improving the efficiency of group-based collaborative lerning projects using project management tools, helping to scaffold students' professional development as they learn with WWW environments, and developing a model to predict instructors' acceptance or rejection of tele-learning in their on-going process. Each of these research themes, and the experiences of the TeleTop initiative, will further stimulate the 1998 cycle of Tele-Learning course. Check the TeleTop home page for the URL of the 1998 course and for the URLs of other WWW-based courses within the university's faculty.

Bos, E., Morgan, C. & Kikstra, A.(1996). Multiple levels of use of the Web as a learning tool. Paper presented at ED-MEDIA/ED-TELECOM'96, Boston, MA.

Collis, B. (1994). On-line and distance learning. Course materials (WWW Document). URL http://www.to.utwente.nl/ism/online/home.html

Collis, B. (1995). On-line and distance learning. Course materials (WWW Document). URL http://www.to.utwente.nl/ism/online95/campus/campus.html

Collis, B. (1996a). On-line and distance learning. Course materials (WWW Document). URL http://www.to.utwente.nl/ism/online96/campus.html

Collis, B. (1996b). Pedagogical Reengineering. Invited speaker presentation at ED-MEDIA/ED-TELECOM '96, Boston, MA

Collis, B. (1996c). Tele-learning in a digital world: The future of distance learning. London:International Thomson Publications.

Collis, B. (1997) Tele-learning. Course materials (WWW Document). URL http://www.to.utwente.nl/ism/telearn/home.html

Collis, B., Andernach, T., & Diepen, N. van. (1997). Web environments for group-based project work in higher education. International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, 3 (2/3), 109-130.

PEDAGOGICAL REENGINEERING: A PEDAGOGICAL APPROACH TO COURSE ENRICHMENT AND REDESIGN WITH THE WWW

PEDAGOGICAL REENGINEERING:
A PEDAGOGICAL APPROACH TO COURSE ENRICHMENT AND REDESIGN WITH THE WWW