Learning Asian Languages Online

The last presentation I chaired at Moodle Moot Au 2010 was "Moodle and the flexible delivery of small enrolment languages" by Dr. McComas Taylor (Australian National University). He gave an inspirational presentation about how he teaches Sanskrit in blended and pure e-learning modes.

McComas humeriously described the problem that there are only about five students for Sanskrit in a typical city. To make a viable course he uses a blended course technique, with Moodle for the content delivery. Because Sanskrit has not changed for the last thousand years, much of the course content can be recorded and provided to the student unchanged each year. This frees up the lecturer from delivering the same lecturer over and over again. This time can be spent with students individually.

This I believe will be the essence of how to apply e-learning at leading universities, such as the ANU, and I have described as "e-oxbridge" style.

administrators who have difficulty with a format which breaks the boundaries between on and off campus students, local and overseas. The on campus students meet in a physical room and the off campus students meet using McComas asserted that the impediment to this style of education is not the students (who like it) or the technology (which works fine) but the university adiministration.

In addition to Moodle, McComas uses tools such as Wimba classroom and also prerecorded audio lessons, with accompanying notes. The audio can be downloaded to an MP3 player for practice. Also the assessment is aligned with the course material, which McComas claimed is not the case for many courses. Students are required to record their own voice and upload it for assessment. Live tutorials are also videoed using ANU's own DLD and Podcast.

One thought which occurred to me with this and the previous work, these courses neatly break into a traditional textbook, media additions and then the interactive components. These might be done using separate tools, such as an e-book for the text.

McComas argues this techniques can be applied to Asian languages important to Australia's security. As an election is about to be called I have suggested to McComas that he prepare a short proposal to create an online institute to teach languages important to Australia online. Such an institute would be much cheaper than one fighter aircraft and much more effective in protecting the nation: by being able to talk to people in our own language we can turn enemies into allies.

Oxford University Online Courses

Oxford University's Department for Continuing Education appears to provide the equivalent of the Cambridge University Online Courses. There are short introductory courses of 10-weeks for undergraduates, advanced diploma and postgraduate courses, as well as specalised professional development courses. An example of the undergaduate program is the one year Advanced Diploma in Data and Systems Analysis. One interesting professional development course offered is in Effective Online Tutoring (a problem with providing online edcuation is where to get trained tutors and one solution is to use the system itself to tran them).

Unlike Cambridge, Oxford provides an online demonstration of how their courses are presented. Oxford uses the same Australian developed Moodle Learning Management System, as I have used for developing courses at the Australian National University and the Australian Computer Society. They use the same structure of giving the student a summary of a topic, have them do some further reading and then report what they have found and discuss it in a forum online.

One limitation with the Oxford courses is that while the University of Oxford offers short undergraduate and postgraduate coruses, it does not offer undergraduate degrees or MBAs via distance or online learning. Perhaps this limitation will disappear over time, as the University gains experience and confidence in online education.

Cambridge University Online Courses

After suggesting to my colleagues at the Australian National University School of Computer Science (SoCS) we use an e-Oxbridge educational model, I thought I should check to see how Oxford andr Cambridge apply e-learning. A quick web search found the Cambridge University Institute of Continuing Education, which offers online courses specialising in adult and non-traditional learners. The Institute clims: "unparalleled level of online support and direction from experienced and enthusiastic tutors", whichfits with the Oxbridge model of education. However, these are short general interest and proessional devlopment courses, not full degree programs.

An example is "The global climate challenge: policy technology and the future" (COV007), an 11 week course costing £165.00 and offering 10 credits at level 4 of the Framework for higher education qualifications. The award requires participation in online discussions, a Personal Statement of Learning (e-Portfolio) and assignments. Six such courses would be required for an undergraduate "Certificate of Continuing Education" (Postgraduate courses are at FHEQ Level 7).

Propose an e-Oxbridge education

Having spent some of the week discussing the future of higher education, with Professor Paul Ramsden and my colleagues at the Australian National University (including my contribution on "Forums and Feedback for e-Learning"), I felt it was time to suggest a way forward. I have proposed an e-Oxbridge educational model for the ANU School of Computer Science (SoCS) .

SoCS has ambitious goals set for "unique", "advanced", "interdisciplinary" and "research lead" undergraduate and masters courses. To achieve this, I have proposed a computer enhanced version of the "Oxbridge" model of education. With this approach at Oxford and Cambridge Universities (where I have given the occasional seminar) students are part of a community of scholars, write and discuss material with their peers and their tutors each week. This can be adapted to the 21st century:

1. Human communication: I suggest teaching all students how to research, write and report. While most undergraduates will not go on to postgraduate research and therefore not need to write a scientific paper, they will have to write technical and business reports which require similar skills. Therefore I suggest teaching how to write and present an argument in the introduction to undergraduate and postgraduate programs. I have done some of this in Green ICT, where I get the students to research and discuss issues online and write a reports about a real problem.
2. Self motivated work: In each course I suggest setting the students a task, giving them the tools and then helping them with the work. In practice this would be done by providing learning materials in traditional written form, as well as multimedia, as used by the "Hubs and Spokes" project. This would then free up staff time to work with the students in small groups and individually. This would also force a discipline on staff, who would need to carefully design course materials in advance. Also this would allow administration to be greatly simplified, with less need for timetabling of classes and resources. This would aid social inclusion, with full and part time students could in the same class, along with domestic, international and remote e-learning students.
   
3. Interdisciplinary skills: I suggest designing SoCS programs to fit in with ANU wide programs and those of partner universities. In this way students will be able to study subjects outside Computer Science in other parts of the university.

Instead of developing whole, self contained undergraduate and
postgraduate programs which are exclusive to SoCS, I suggest SoCS have modules which can fit with other disciplines and can be used by other disciplines. A student should be able to do a standard undergraduate or postgraduate program at the ANU which incorporates SoCS education. While the SoCS programmes might have fancy names, such as Bachelor/Masters of Advanced Interdisciplinary Computing", they should underneath be made of ANU standard components. Ideally the courses should be able to be tailored by the students themselves, as is done with ANU Graduate Studies Select.