abstract
i will discuss the practical experiences of teaching and administrating a web-based distance course in business administration distributed from örebro university to both campus students and students from other parts of sweden. the project also involves the cooperation with twenty community learning centres. the presentation will be practically oriented and therefore beneficial to teachers and administrators who are interested in introducing it as a tool for both distance education and campus courses. i will discuss topics such as the technical and pedagogical challenge teachers are likely to be faced with, including the issues of teamwork, student activity and student feedback.

keywords
streaming video
videoconference
computer conference
synchronous
asynchronous
teamwork
learning centre

1. introduction
there is a great demand for higher education among people in sparsely populated areas in sweden. both young people and people in their most active phase of life are forced to move to places where the universities are located. this is a great problem for many communities where the ageing and less educated population can be an obstacle that leads to no incentives for new enterprises. the declining population leads also to a situation where the whole district comes to a standstill with the closing down of services such as schools, shops, and post-offices.

many communities have realised that the possibility of higher education for the citizens serves as a magnet to people and as a lever for the local economic development. in an attempt to change the negative development they have established learning centres in order to bring university courses closer to the inhabitants. the learning centres are all equipped with modern technique like videoconference equipment and computers with access to the internet. the localities are also available for students both on weekdays and on holidays. most of the learning centres serve as a distributor for university courses and do not arrange any courses of their own. even if it is possible to reach students who otherwise would not have been able to attend university courses individually through the internet these learning centres have an important role to play in the aspect of life long learning.

because of this demand for higher education the department of business administration at the örebro university, six years ago, started a project of distributing a one-year basic course in business administration to community learning centres. since then both the number of students and the number of learning centres has grown and much experience can be made from this course that started with comparatively very little planning and a small staff

2. technical challenge

one of the first issues to consider is what technique shall be used for the course. when i started this course six years ago there was only the option of videoconference combined with telephone, fax and post. so videoconference became the main communication technique during the first two years. the students got together once a week at the learning centre to attend lectures and lessons brought to them via videoconference from the university. the lectures were quite traditional in the sense that they prepared the students for a certain item or problem. there were of course some practical things that have to be taken into consideration. videoconferencing using isdn (a technique for transmitting sound and picture in ordinary telephone cables) at low speed (128 kb) gives no television quality and there was a problem to illustrate models and methods to the students through a comparatively small television screen. my solution to that problem was to make all illustrations that would be used at the lecture in advance using a presentation program (microsoft powerpoint). the illustrations could then be miniaturised and copies could be sent to the learning centre where the person in charge distributed the material to the students before each lecture. this service proved to be very appreciated by the students.

one of the advantages of videoconference is that it is possible interrupt the lecture for questions and discussions in real time. unfortunately this possibility is not used very much by the students according to my experience. i believe that the reason for this is both technical and psychological. technically there are some problems when many different brands of videoconference equipment are connected at the same time through a bridge. the problems are mostly concerned with the sound, like echo and weak microphones at the learning centres. when using video conference the technical limitations makes it hard for the teacher to improvise and for example using the whiteboard and moving around in the classroom while lecturing. most of the material must be produced ahead and presented computerised or on the document camera. the technical difficulties are not insurmountable though and with a little training and routine it is possible to handle the problems. the psychological problems are more difficult to handle. there is always hard to make most people talk in front of a camera and a microphone. there are always just the same few students who take part in the discussion while the majority remain silent

besides having lectures, i also had lessons on videoconference. these lessons were in time directly connected to the lectures. the object of the lessons was to further discuss and clarify problems that were the topic of the preceding lecture. the students were divided into groups, one for each learning centre. these groups were then divided into lesson groups with five learning centres in each one. this arrangement was made in order to increase the interactivity between the students and i still think that for small groups videoconference can be a good tool for real-time interaction needed at lessons and seminars. one common opinion among the students in the evaluations of the course was that the lessons were too slow because of the technical limitations of videoconference. the problem could of course be less if there were fewer students attending the same lesson. this was unfortunately not possible because of economic reasons.

during the first two years i combined, for economic reasons, campus students and distance students by having lectures together. this meant that the technical equipment for videoconferencing had to be brought to the auditorium where the campus students normally get their lectures this was very well accepted by the distance students as they didn’t expect anything else and knowing that the technique even with its limitations and drawbacks was the very prerequisite for attending the course. the campus students on the other hand felt that the technique and the way it limited the lecturer’s way of communicating with the class in the auditorium made the lectures rather static and rigid. after two years i found that it was not possible to develop the methods of distance education more when combining distance students and campus students. this coincided with the establishing of a new multimedia lab at the university, which also included a new studio for videoconferencing. the course was then divided into two separate courses for the benefit of both the campus students and the distance students.

after having used the videoconferencing technique for five years i have now shifted to streaming video through the internet. this is made possible because the number of computers in households is rising rapidly in sweden. technically there are many advantages by using this technique. when using videoconference to transmit lectures to many learning centres you must connect through a bridge, which should be booked ahead. this is rather expensive and can also be a source for technical malfunctions. this third part involvement is not needed using streaming video as the files are accessed from a server at the university. streaming media can also be produced and broadcasted in a number of ways. a lecture can for instance be broadcasted either as a slideshow with sound or as a streaming video synchronised with a slideshow through smil programming. with the use of small digital camcorders it is also very easy to keep the content of the course up to date with interviews and reports from industry or society. the technical quality of the streaming media is dependent on the speed of the connection of the target group. even if there is a great activity in increasing the bandwidth in sweden one can not expect that the ordinary student can have more than 56kbps modem speed at present. that is of course a limitation especially for the picture quality of streaming video. for that reason i have continued to give the students all material for each lecture as a pdf file on the course web site. if the student don’t have an internet connection that is goodenough it is always possible to go to the learning centre to watch and listen to lectures and get print outs.

3. technology and pedagogic - the pedagogical challenge
when taking into account the learning objectives of a course one must also match these objectives with some suitable instructional model. if the objective of a course is merely to transfer information there is less need for more than one-way communication. radio and television courses broadcasted nation-wide are mainly built on one-way communication.

when students also have the possibility to learn by experience and elaborative exercises new knowledge and skills can easier be created. learning by experience can be achieved by using computer-based training and cd-roms. this interactive technology allows the student to progress at his or her own pace through exercises and self-assessments. the limitation of this technology is that it does not provide for interaction with other students or an instructor. there are also great costs and long production time involved in developing an interactive course based on cd-roms. mainly because of these drawbacks i decided not to use cd-roms.

if the objective of a course is to learn by developing new ways of thinking and establishing a change in behaviour it is essential that the students can use a platform that enables them to communicate and collaborate with each other. i have the belief that especially in distance education the creation of teams is essential to get a higher quality of the learning process. even if the students cannot meet on a day-to-day basis the knowledge that you can contact your team and discuss problems are something that prevent the students to end their studies prematurely. the students may experience problems both from the course material and from the situation of combining work and studies. i thus think that teamwork increases the rate of throughput, which has been a problem for distance courses in general.

to make teamwork possible you need to have computer communication with a platform that enables the students and the teachers to participate in discussions and share material with each other. there are a lot of programs that can be used as computer conference but my belief is that there is a tremendous advantage by using a web-based system with its possibilities of integrating different multi-media applications.

when setting up the course it is possible to decide if the students should be able to have private discussions or if all discussions should be public. for the first course i choose to allow private discussions between students and teams, but looking back i don’t think this was the right thing to do. the behaviour of the distance student is much the same as that of the student at campus. if the students want to put a question to the teacher there are not many that will do that in an auditorium where they think that this “silly” question will reveal their “stupidity”. the students often stay behind and ask the questions privately after the lecture. the idea of a computer conference is that if you start a discussion or pop a question publicly this can lead to answers from other students or from the teacher. the point is that everybody else can see both the question and the answer. when there is the possibility of private discussions the students act just as if they were campus students. not many questions are put publicly and some students even use e-mail for questions to the teacher. one way to solve this problem is of course to allow only public discussions and no questions directly via e-mail. private discussions within a team should be allowed though as team communication is one of the most essential factors to make distance education successful.

teamwork, not only at student level but also at the level of course administration, is one of the elements that are crucial in order to make a distance course function with a high quality. as a distance course administrator you need help from people with special skills in a much higher grade than for regular campus courses. when i started the course development i formed a team that consisted of two teachers, one secretary and one technician. because of the teachers lack of knowledge from the various technical platforms the technician became a very important person in the planning process and in the first phase of the course itself. gradually the technique has improved and the development of better computer programs has made it easier for the teachers to accept the new way to work. the close informal teamwork together with the technical personnel during the first planning phase has resulted in a mutual understanding of pedagogical and technical needs and problems. the same argument can be applied to working close together with the administrative staff. many problems that could arise from lack of understanding one another’s working conditions can be eliminated through this spin-off effect.

as i pointed out earlier, if you want to reach a higher level of learning for the students you need some form of collaboration among the students. this can be done synchronously or asynchronously. i have for many years combined these two methods by using video conference for lectures which means that the students have to go to their respective learning centre at a fixed time every week for the lecture. videoconference allows same time interaction so the students can put questions and get answers directly. in the time between the weekly lectures on videoconference all communication took place asynchronously on a web-based platform.

the idea of same time communication is theoretically good but in practice it is difficult to get this kind interactivity in a course with hundreds of students. first there are the general problems with cameras and microphones. in their presence many students feel rather uncomfortable and for some that feeling does not end during the course. knowing that a lot of people, whom you are not able to see yourself, can see and hear you make your comments very focused and definite. second there is a problem with illustrations. it is not a very good idea for the student to use the white board because of technical problems regarding visibility for the fellow students. there is of course the document camera, which should be used in situations where you want to illustrate a model, clarify a discussion and so forth. even if the document camera is a good tool it requires a lot of training to get used to. the result of a student’s effort to illustrate a problem is therefore often very poor visibility for the other students. the time it takes when shifting cameras between different learning centres is also a problem.

i believe therefore that, on a web-based platform, asynchronous communication combined with streaming media for lectures and other forms of video presentations is the best way to make flexible learning most effective. asynchronous communication makes the freedom of time and place for the studies greater but it also brings another problem. when the students are forced to go regularly to a learning centre for lectures it is also much easier to form study groups than if they study al alone with communication just on the computer screen. i believe that these study groups are essential to prevent dropouts and make more students finish the course. there are ways to establish these study groups and still keep the flexibility for the students. one which i have found works very well is to start the course with a pm that is compulsory and has to be written in a group of 3-4 students. many of these students don’t meet physically but have their discussions and complete their work over the internet. others who don’t live too far from each other or the learning centre do much of their work at the learning centre. so even if there are no regular meetings for the students at the learning centre these centres still have a very great function to fill. it is therefore important to establish such a contact with the learning centre that they will see themselves not as a passive part but as an important link in delivering the course. my belief is that much emphasis has to be made to bring about a person-to-person relation between the university and the learning centre. there has to be one person locally that feels a personal responsibility for the students at each learning centre. for many of the students from these areas this is their first contact with higher education and at this starting stage they need a lot of information and support. i also feel that in order to get a high quality course from the start it is important to have a quick local feedback. in practise this means that as the overall responsible for the course i can have a fast access to each learning centre through one person that has the local responsibility for administrating the course. there is of course aformal element in this co-operation between the university and each learning centre as a written agreement is signed that regulates each parts rights and obligations. the most important element though is the informal contacts and relation between the person who is locally responsible and myself. this informal relation is achieved and strengthened by regular evaluation meetings.

one result of this feeling of responsibility from the learning centres is that even if there are no regular meetings for lectures by videoconference many learning centres arrange a computer and an lcd projector for the students so that they can come and watch and discuss the lectures every week. this is of course a great advantage with streaming video that the students can go back in the course and see lectures from any course module as many times as they like. especially these students who choose to meet at the learning centre once a week appreciate the possibility to stop the lecture at certain parts and discuss the content in a study group.

working with internet courses is a challenge also for the teacher. those teachers who get involved in a project of teaching on line must be prepared to change their role in a number of ways. first there is the need for a longer planning horizon and a very accurate preparation. a teacher standing in front of the students can always improvise and alter the lecture in accordance with the reactions of the students. when teaching on line you must try to think ahead, put yourself in the position of the student, and anticipate his/her reactions. the material that is presented must therefore be more detailed and well prepared. if streaming video is used for lectures and reports much of the presentation technique can be learned from television newscasts. second the teacher must act more as a supervisor in the communication with the students. it is important to watch the course site everyday to assist the students with answers and take part in discussions. third the teacher must also be ready to learn new technical skills to be able to use the full potential of the tools of the internet. i think that the teacher should have an understanding of the process of bringing a course to the internet. if you have a total picture of both the process and of the course itself there is a higher guarantee for quality.

4. conclusions
the number of computers in households are rising rapidly in sweden, mostly because of the possibility to rent computers at a low cost from the employers. this easy access to computers combined with the internet revolution makes it possible to use new learning methods in order to bring education closer to groups of the society that would otherwise not have this possibility. my belief is that by using asynchronous communication on the internet this new technique and a new pedagogy it will make it possible to make knowledge accessible to new groups both on a global basis and locally within a community. streaming video is one of the tools that make it possible to personalize a course when using asynchronous learning techniques. for the students it will give a feeling of nearness and to a certain degree compensate for the physical absence of the teacher. the asynchronous communication gives more freedom regarding when and where to study but for some students the support of group members is essential. the community learning centre gives the possibility for those students to meet others for discussions and assignments. for the teacher the learning of new techniques and a new pedagogy can also have a spin-off effect for the regular campus courses.