The World Wide Web has not only the potential to expand our conceptions of
the processes of teaching and learning, it also has the power to help
overcome some of the physical limitations imposed by the standard approach
to classroom based learning. This "poster" addresses issues of web delivery
in remote access locations, specifically in Northern British Columbia,
Canada. Examples from online course pilot projects at UNBC will be used to
illustrate both advantageous and problematic areas related to instructor
delivery, the WWW as a financial and time saving device, and more recent
developments in web based delivery at UNBC.
Location:
In order to explain why the use of computer based instruction is particulary
important to teaching and research in our own institution, we should give a
short introduction to the physical situation of The University of Northern
British Columbia. Prince George, the location of our main campus, is in the
central interior of British Columbia. Although the city has over 70,000
inhabitants, the area served by UNBC is - on the whole - sparsely populated.
Prince George is about 700 kilometres from the nearest city of any size:
Vancouver to the south and Edmonton and Calgary to the east. Our mandated
area covers an enormous physical space; larger than some European countries.
UNBC was created, in part, because the inhabitants of Northern British
Columbia petitioned the provincial government to establish a place for post
secondary education which would not require the youth of the area to move to
the south. In 1994 this political pressure resulted in the opening of a
University in Prince George.
Distance Education:
Distance classes at UNBC are delivered to communities as far as 700
kilometres away from the central campus (Prince Rupert on the coast).
Courses have been, and continue to be, successfully delivered by means of
simple conference type telephone hook-ups, digital video transmission, and
even some early courses delivered in part by means of video tapes sent by
courier. In addition some departments have hired instructors to live in
these areas to convene courses.
WWW at UNBC:
Through a government grant in 1995-96, the English Department at UNBC was
able to launch three pilot web-based courses. The package developed for our
English Web courses used a database structure to create virtual web pages of
manageable size and transmit these on demand to the student. This greatly
reduced the load on web connections and increased the load on the server.
The package included monitoring software to allow instructors to have some
idea of the time that students spent in various sections of the material as
well as a web conferencing system which was designed to replace classroom
discussion.
Design and Format:
At the time that this project started there were very few efficient web
authoring packages, so it was assumed that instructors would write their
class notes in simple word-processing form, convert them to ASCII text and
these would be converted to the database format for delivery to students.
Web page design was to be standardized and instructors could focus on the
traditional business of writing up lecture notes. By the time the project
was half-finished, commercial web design software had advanced far enough
that all of the instructors in the pilot project rejected the standardized
format and began to customize the look and feel of their lecture notes. We
were able to accommodate this with some radical modifications of the
software package, but there was never a comfortable interface between the
commercial web design packages and the database software that was supposed
to deal with the special problems of teaching over northern networks.
Instructor/WWW Conflicts:
At UNBC web teaching has always been considered to be a good way to overcome
the logistic problems of our geographical location. Most people at our
institution understand that teaching distance courses is going to be more
difficult and expensive than teaching in our central location. However,
there is the assumption that a web course is an automated one and that once
created, the students can dispense with the instructor until it comes time
to mark papers; for a variety of reasons, this is simply not the case.
New WWW Developments at UNBC :
In 1998 Dr. Stan Beeler received an Industry Partnership Grant with Ross
Niebergall, a Mathematics Professor, to develop a software package to
deliver science and technology courses in a northern environment where we
launched a new project called W.I.D.E. WIDE concentrated on all of the above
issues and its goal was to implement a successful teaching package that
could be used over the world wide web with ease for both instructors and
students.