Online education requires more than technological innovation

Nevertheless, there are some problems with such a system. The course author and the students require a continuous Internet connection to use the system. A student in a remote area on a dial-up telephone line will tie up the line while studying and may be paying by the minute for the call and for Internet access. The single central server is a potential point of failure, with a downed computer inconveniencing thousands of students.

Unless the course designer is careful to provide usable captions for images and in laying out material, there may be difficulties for disabled students. However, this may still be far better than the access to teaching materials that a disabled student can get in the average face-to-face course.

It is in the provision for chat rooms, where the essence of the real university becomes apparent. These create a large legal and moral supervision liability for the university, but are what will distinguish a university from a commercial training provider. A university is a place of discourse, which involves talking and listening to students. While this is feasible using online technology, it requires new skills from staff, new skills to be taught to students and significant resources. Electronic mail, for example, is technically the simplest, but perhaps most socially complex Internet technology to master.

The structured approach to teaching with a web-based system will help people who are new to teaching, but might feel restrictive to experienced educators. A side effect of providing extensive on-line material is that fewer students will turn up to lectures. Those used to orating at students may find it hard to adjust to change. Ideally universities will use this as an opportunity to reallocate resources from lectures to other teaching techniques (such as more tutors and on-line help), but might be tempted just to cut costs. There is also the temptation to buy prepared courseware and not encourage local development.

Online development provides the opportunity to involve outside professionals in course development. However, the infrastructure to do this will be needed. Impediments can be as trivial as the delay in allocating staff user-ids to external course designers who are honorary staff members, but not registered on the computerised payroll. Universities will need to clarify intellectual property rights to courseware developed. Now universities assume they own the courses which staff prepare. This is reasonable when the same staff deliver the courses in person. However, if a course is delivered to thousands of students around the world and sold to other institutions, the author can expect a share of the revenue.

The Common Room

An online system that designs out informal communication may eliminate the most important and creative aspect of social organisations. At a university one important form of interaction occurs in the common room. Resources are expended on such areas because they provide a way for people to talk to each other. Having informal online discussion is possible but this takes resources and deliberate work to design. We need the online equivalent of comfortable chairs, where people can sit and chat. Valuable information is communicated informally in such an environment.

An example of an effective online discussion is the Link mailing list, which has been operating since 1993 and has had a role in the development of national policy:

... Link developed over the years into the key mailing list for IT and Internet-related issues. While Internet content regulation was never the sole focus of the list, it fostered a great deal of debate and information exchange on the subject of government Internet regulation (Higgins, 1999), especially during the legislative debate of 1999 and in the pre- and post implementation stages of the legislation.

From Australia's Online Censorship Regime, Peter Chen, ANU, 2001

Just as students learn social communication skills at a physical university, they will need to learn online social skills at a virtual university. Australia's business and government workers are largely lacking in these skills and one major benefit of the online university may be to fill a skill gap that is impeding e-commerce.

Real Campuses for the Virtual University

Blending online and face-to-face ways of working is possible efficiently. Students of the University of Australia Online will still need to meet in person on a campus for some courses. The ALP envisages existing physical university campuses being used. However, existing campuses have been designed for off-line education. They are not necessarily found where the students need them, particular not regional areas. These campuses will not have the facilities online students need and will have faculties they do not need.

There are already some regional micro campuses, suitable for online students, such as the University of WA Albany Centre. This is a modest refurbished building fitted out with a dozen or so computers and video conference facilities to the main campus in Perth. It has a couple of full-time staff and part-time tutors. At a modest cost this could be replicated across regional Australian and in outlying suburbs of the cities, so that a university campus would be within reach of most of Australia.

Besides providing local access to university education, such campuses could be expanded to be a resource for small scale, local high technology development. This would address a problem with the Federal Government's recent innovation statement, which mostly addressed big business in big cities.