Rethinking academic practices: Meeting some challenges of online delivery

Online delivery of education is both similar to and different from what has gone before. From the perspective of dealing with students remote from the campus, online education can be viewed as an extension or variation of distance education delivered through print and other media. However, unlike traditional distance education, the online medium permits frequent and immediate interaction among students and teachers. This lends it some of the qualities of face-to-face teaching. Depending upon whether an institution is making the transition to online teaching from face-to-face or traditional distance mode the challenges to be faced may differ. This paper considers some of those challenges and alternative ways of addressing them. Introduction The context of discussion for this paper is that of a regional Australian university with a significant distance education profile. The University opened as an institute of technology in 1967 and became a university in 1992. During its period as a College of Advanced Education the university established a strong tradition in distance education at both undergraduate and graduate levels. It currently enrols approximately 20 000 students of whom more than two-thirds study in distance mode with around 4 000 of these being outside Australia. Its leadership in distance education is recognised both nationally and internationally and it has been the recipient of international awards for excellence in distance delivery. Prior to 1996, the university's distance education degree programs were delivered almost exclusively via print using audio-visual, CMC and telephone tutorial support. Since 1996, the university has moved increasingly to online delivery for its graduate programs and in 1999 it embarked upon an ambitious partnership to expand online offerings across a large part of its curriculum. The university would not claim to have definitive answers to all (or even any) of the challenges inherent in online delivery. However, its experience in distance education, its early entry into online offerings and its recent substantial expansion of that offering to over 70 units of study available entirely online do provide a unique perspective on those challenges. It is against that background that this paper is written. This paper also draws substantially for its theoretical framework upon previously published work (McLendon & Cronk, 1999). The Evolution of Online Education Many, if not most, universities are developing approaches to online education. However, they may be commencing from significantly different perspectives. Taking a course from traditional face-to-face delivery into the online medium typically entails the packaging of course materials into formats that can be efficiently delivered online.