III. Comment on the headline and say if you share the idea expressed in it.

How to Study on a Virtual Campus?

Log on and learn: An online university course means students can do classwork whenever and wherever they please. It’s more flexible for the teacher, too.

As more settlers arrive on the cyberspace frontier, schools are springing up. Capilano Collage, where I teach, is establishing a modest virtual campus with – so far – just one online course. Mine.

One section of my course on computer writing, Communications 145, has no classroom and no set meeting time. Students register whenever they like and can take up to 16 weeks to complete the coursework at their own pace.

The organization of online courses depends largely on the software required and the level of computer skill expected of students. At Capilano we’ve set up a bulletin-board system called The Hub. The system uses Canadian-made software, First Class, which can run on both Macintosh and Windows computers. First Class is easy to learn and allows even novices to navigate comfortably, using a mouse instead of typing in long commands.

Until we set up an Internet gateway, The Hub will draw students chiefly from the Vancouver area. Once we’re on the Internet, student can come from anywhere in the world.

If you are one of those students, when you log on to The Hub you see a “desktop” on your computer monitor with icons representing different areas of the bulletin board. Most of them deal with the college’s information technology program, which has set up the board for its students. Double-clicking on the “Infotec courses” icon takes you to Communications 145, and then to individual folders that contain your text material and assignment.

As a new student, you read the course online and instruction files. Then you open the Assignment folder and download the file for Writing Assignment #1. This means you copy the file onto your computer’s hard drive. You can then convert it to a file in your own word-processor program, store it, or print it out.

The assignment gives you a choice of essay topics and tells you to read all the files in the Style folder. These are excerpts from a text our communications department has developed, and they offer advice on how to organize an essay or article and how to write clearly. Again you download them, read them off your monitor, or print them out.

When you’ve finished writing your assignment, you e-mail it to me. In my reply I can include your original draft with my own comments and corrections inserted. You get your graded assignment in your Hub mailbox, and of course you can e-mail me back to complain about your grade. If you want comments from your classmates, I can place your assignment in a discussion area where other student can read it and respond. Enlightened by all this commentary, you go on to your next assignment.

None of this happens at a set time or place. You may do all your classwork after midnight or on your workplace computer; I may grade it at home on a Sunday morning. You can proceed as fast as you like (allowing time for feedback from me and your fellow-students). You can keep your work strictly confidential or share it with others – and, of course, you can benefit by comparing, say, your first writing assignment with the way your classmates have done it.

Online courses are an important development in distance education, but they’re not going to make classrooms obsolete. For one thing, online coursework demands at least some skill in telecomputing and word processing. Administration can be awkward. The teacher can’t depend on deadline pressure to encourage student productivity and students at a given moment are likely to be anywhere from drafting their first assignment to polishing their last one.

Perhaps the biggest drawback is that the medium conveys non-verbal communication very poorly. In class, a teacher’s facial expression, body language and tone of voice can all enhance a lesson – and the students’ non-verbal responses show how well the message is getting across. Online, the only message is the text plus those silly “emotions” that supposedly let you show that some ugly remark is really a joke – J.

This narrow expressive range challenges teacher and student alike, which is why computer writing is our first online course. Students need to outgrow the technobabble that dominates computer culture, and to learn how to write simply, clearly and briefly. Reading off a monitor is awkward at best and piling masses of text onto the screen only makes matter worse.

The medium, for all its drawbacks, can foster a surprisingly close relationship between teacher and student. A detailed written comment somehow carries more authority and impact than spoken remarks do. Some students are eager to start a real dialogue, sharpening their writing skills further as they argue their points.

One welcome irony of computer-based “interactive” writing has already emerged. While computer lovers are supposed to be socially challenged geeks who don’t relate to other people, successful computer communication demands a great deal of empathy between writer and reader. If you can’t put yourself in your reader’s shoes, and anticipate what they need, you’re better off using your machine to play solitaire.

With experience and improved technology, online courses will become far more sophisticated. Texts and student work will include video clips and full-colour graphics. Teacher feedback will include voice annotation, restoring some non-verbal communication. Teachers will also be able to attach supplementary material – an exercise in conciseness, perhaps – right where the problem appears in a student’s work. Improving access to the Internet will enable students all over the world to enroll wherever they like (and, of course, to risk flunking out of schools they’ll never see).

Online courses won’t save money or provide a “secret weapon” for troubled schools. If anything, they’re much more labour-intensive than regular classroom teaching. Whatever the subject, they require strong skills in writing and course design. But they will offer new opportunity to many students, and they may even create a kind of tutorial intimacy that most students and teachers have never known.

Crawford Kilian

/The Globe and Mail, November 14, 1994/

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