名古屋高等教育研究 第２号（2002）

Is On-Line education the future
for universities?
David J. ROBINSON*
Terumasa IKEDA**＜Outline＞
The growth in access to the Internet and to electronic resources ingeneral has changed higher education. Not only has it changed not
only the student experience but appears to offer for the future a newenvironment for learning. Students could, potentially, study for adegree anywhere in the world and study without leaving their homes.
There are profound implications in this for higher education: there areadvantages and there are risks. In this paper we look at the potentialof On-Line education and assess the benefits and risks for both the
distance education and conventional university sectors. We consider
the financial implications for students and for universities and assess
the access issues that are raised by the use of On-Line teaching.
Finally, we consider the implications of globalisation of Higher
Education. We conclude that the developments in technology are a
powerful driver for the development of On-Line education and that
On-Line has a role to play but we express doubts about the wisdom ofplanning for the complete presentation of entire degree programmes
On-Line.

1. Introduction
Change is the main feature of university education today. The concept ofa ‘learning society’ has now been embraced by governments, for exam* Science Faculty, Open University** Centre for the Studies of Higher Education, Nagoya University

131ple by the labour government in the UK (DfEE, 1998), with the avowed
aim of freeing education from the traditional boundaries of school, college
or university and making it available to all through the use of information and communications technology (ICT). However, the wholesale adoption of ICT within education could change the role and nature of a university substantially. The attractions of ICT are obvious, the risks to
educational values less so. Neither the perceived advantages nor theapparent risks are well researched. Should universities be investing in
On-Line courses and how far should they go in replacing traditional
methods of teaching? We review here the potential for On-Line education and attempt to answer this question.
1.1 Recent developments
Internet-based learning has enormous potential for automating educationand this has raised concerns amongst the academic community about
the breakdown of the academic links between staff and students. These
concerns have been articulated by Noble (1998), in an oft-cited paper,
who links the process of automation to commercialisation, with the familiar drivers of mass-production, standardization and commercial imperatives. Certainly there are large commercials firms involved in the delivery of educational material and WebCT, for example, has links with publishers who provide pre-packed course content for sale. On the other
hand, MIT has recently announced that it is to make course materials
available, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world through its
OpenCourseWare initiative. So, the prospects for the commercial
exploitation of On-Line educational material look less certain now.
The term ‘virtual university’ has an anomalous meaning, at least in historical terms. A university is a physical place devoted to education andscholarship and much of the value that members of the university getfrom its physical existence is the intellectual environment that is created
and the direct contact with others that sparks ideas and provides inspiration. Virtual universities can only prosper if they can reproduce thesefeatures. Indeed, using the name ‘university’ is only valid if the features132

Is On-Line education the future for universities?

that define a university are present. The issue of what the culture ofhigher education should be in the new, technological world is reviewed
by DeLong (1997), who outlines the three parts required to form a convincing structure for a university in the new age. These can be summarised as:1.

developing both the pedagogy and the means to produce quality
material;2.

developing the institutional policy and practice such that students
are enabled to study on-line and the academic staff are properly
rewarded;3.

developing collaborations with other institutions to ‘scale-up’ accessto expensive resources.

All of these imply fundamental shifts in the way higher education institutions provide for their students and a failure to recognise the technological trends and adapt is seen by DeLong (1997) as opening the door toothers. He probably had commercial publishers, media companies andsoftware houses in mind. Certainly these newcomers are unlikely to preserve the educational values that universities have cherished for hundreds of years.

2. What is On-Line education?
On-Line education is teaching and learning delivered via a network,
which could be a local network on a university campus, but increasingly
it is taken to mean education via the internet. The internet is a very versatile medium and while it can be used to deliver teaching material tostudents, it can also be a source of information or a means of communication. As it is a relatively new educational medium, there is little experience to build on and useable models are still being developed. With thepossible exception of WebCT, which is increasingly a standard in web133

based courses, robust educational models have yet to be properly developed and validated. The idea that the internet is, by its nature, educationally effective, has been taken as a truth by some educators, leading
to the idea that simply transferring material directly from paper-based
to web-based delivery is an educational advance. This is inherently
unlikely. Each medium has different requirements and different
strengths and the web is no exception .
We have yet to develop fundamental principles for designing On-Linecourses, but there is already a body of experience and there are examples of good practice. The use of the internet for education is wellreviewed by Ryan et al. (2000) and a handbook on On-Line learning has
been produced for educators, promoted by a leading educational journal,
the Times Higher Education Supplement (Jolliffe, Ritter, & Stevens,
2001).
The web and its content can be accessed from most parts of the world
and the value of the web is often seen purely as a way of providing distance education. That this concept is flawed has been argued by Davies(1999) who distinguishes between the distance learning (outreach) modelin which a central group of teachers use the internet to make available
central resources to students and the distributed learning model which
has students and teachers at the centre using the internet to access distributed resources. Davies (1999) has developed a further model, the collaborative one, in which geographically separate centres of distributed
learning combine to form a web of distributed collaboration. The Virtual
School of Biodiversity at the University of Hong Kong is an example ofthis. So On-Line education is not just a tool for distance educators. It hasvery real uses in the conventional university setting. However, the techniques of distance education are increasingly relevant to academic staff
who are teaching students at conventional universities - a student in acomputer laboratory can actually be learning ‘at-a-distance’. Clearly
there is a blurring of the distinction between distance and conventional
university teaching and it is probably more helpful to regard all students134

Is On-Line education the future for universities?

using ICT as independent learners, regardless of the place in which they
are learning.
The key to using ICT effectively in education is to embrace the conceptof resource-based learning (RBL). This is far from being a new idea since
it is merely a modern articulation of a traditional role of a university providing students with the resources necessary to ‘read’ for a degree.
When reading for a degree, in the traditional sense, students would have
had 8 or 9 contact hours in a week and would have spent the rest of
their time reading, studying, using the library and, in practical subjects,
working in laboratories.
RBL is now so prominent because it describes the way in which theinformation and communication facilities of the internet can be best harnessed to enhance the educational effectiveness of courses. In its modern
form, RBL is more focused on the independent learner than on the traditional relationship between a lecturer and the students. However, highquality RBL must include support from a teacher, for example by computer mediated conferencing (CMC) or face-to-face contact. The advantages and disadvantages of RBL are reviewed by Rowntree (1990) and
Ryan et al. (2000) and it is interesting that some of the main disadvantages of RBL are to do with cost to the institution (see Section 4).
On-Line teaching and learning can enhance existing courses or, at theother end of the educational spectrum, it can be used to deliver a complete degree course from a virtual university, for example the Universityof Phoenix and Kentucky Virtual University. The delivery of a complete
degree electronically challenges our view of what a university education
is. The Open University in the UK, which was one of the pioneers of distance education, went to great lengths to offer a university education,rather than a correspondence course. The University built up a networkof local tutors, a residential schools programme and student self-helpgroups to ensure that the atmosphere of university learning was createdfor distance education. Creating this atmosphere is the greatest chal135

lenge that faces the virtual universities and there are certainly doubts
about whether electronic communications can ever substitute for thesocial interactions with teachers and students that have been central touniversity education over many centuries.

3. Influencing the costs of education for students
On-Line education has a high capital cost for students, particularly ifthey work off-campus. A computer is essential, together with access tophone lines. The costs of maintenance and software are also significant,but a student who selected a virtual university to register with might
have lower fees and would have no additional residential costs or travel
costs. Additionally, they might also be able to fit their study periods
around part-time work. From a student point of view the chief attractionof a virtual universities might well be the lower cost.
Students in some countries are able to transfer credit from one institution to another. In Europe, the European Credit Transfer System(ECTIS) is being adopted by universities in many countries and in the
UK the Credit Accumulation and Transfer System (CATS) has been
operating for some time. So, students could with advantage use a credit
transfer system to mix and match courses, making up a degree from,say one year at a residential campus and two years On-Line from homewith a virtual university. This may well be an attractive option and it
might be one that a single university might offer its students, as a wayof keeping down both student costs and institution costs.

4. Influencing the costs of education for higher education institutions
For a conventional Higher Education Institution (HEI) there could be
advantages in investing in On-Line courses, even though the students
are on campus. For first year (freshman) courses, which are by theirnature large population courses, providing a substantial number of On136

Is On-Line education the future for universities?

Line modules could free staff time to provide more face-to-face small
group tutorials. Providing the courses via the local network in student
residences, or via a dial-in service, could reduce the amount of spaceneeded on campus for computer laboratories and reduce the number oflecture theatres required. Furthermore the investment in these On-Linemodels might generate Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) for the institution, in that modules produced for internal use could be marketed
through external publishers, which could provide a new revenue stream.
On-Line courses can be expensive to produce but when used for large
classes, generate savings overall through economy of scale. It has to besaid, however, that lectures to large classes also show economy of scale.
In the provision of On-Line modules, universities have to manage expectations of both teachers and students. In conventional courses the lecturer is not available all the time and students do not expect anything different. However, experience with On-Line has shown that in the virtualworld students expect that queries will be answered instantly and that
‘office hours’ will not apply. Teaching staff, on the other hand, expect toengage in teaching and do not, quite properly, see themselves as either
managers or administrators of a virtual education. The problems of
expectations are well reviewed by Brabazon (Brabazon, 2001).
The use of ICT has been seen as a way of expanding higher education
while making efficiency savings. The UK Committee of Enquiry into
Higher Education, The Dearing Committee, advocated the use of ICT toprovide resource-based learning as both an alternative to existing methods and as an enhancer of the educational experience. The report provides a possible scenario for the future (Table 1) in which resource-basedlearning, with a substantial ICT component, forms the major componentof a course.
The time taken to prepare study material and present it is difficult toestimate. There will be large differences that are dependant upon thesubject area and the degree to which the subject lends itself to the use137

of highly graphical media. In Table 2, some typical figures are given andthese have been used to make the estimates of the costs for the different
models in Table 1. These costs are shown in Table 3.
Table 1 Changes in proportion of teaching time for four methods, following fromthe increased use of ICT (based on Dearing (1997).
Methods

Traditional course
study time/hours

Current course Possible future course
study time/hrs
study Time/hrs

Lectures

30

60

10

Group work

50

5

30

RBL (resources
purchased fromoutside suppliers)

15

15

50

RBL (produced
in-house)

5

20

10

Table 2. Comparative costs of different teaching methods (partly based on
Dearing (Dearing, 1997). Laboratory work in Science, Technology andEngineering is not included in group work, but the staff time would besubstantially greater.
MethodEstimate of staff time required to produce one hour of
student study time

Lectures3 hours preparation + 1 hour presentation = 4 hours

Groups

1/2 hour preparation + 1 hour presentation = 1.5 hours

RBL (external)

2 hours preparation for use of existing resources

RBL (in-house)

20 hours for developing in-house

Interactive media

50 - 200 hours for developing in-house

Table 3 Changes in cost as student numbers double, for each of the models
shown in Table 1. (Figures from Dearing (1997).
Student numbers

Traditional course
staff time/hours

50

700

820

600

100

1100

980

790

138

Current course Possible future course
staff time/hrs
staff time/hrs

Is On-Line education the future for universities?

These figures are at best an indication of the real costs, but they dohighlight the possible savings in staff time that might accrue from theintroduction of On-Line modules to a course. For universities with an eye
on their research output, the possible savings in staff time might welllook attractive. However, adding interactive media to the resources for acourse is very expensive in staff time. If done in-house, this may well be
only a realistic option if a suitable software shell is available (Hall,
Robinson, Tucknott, & Carlton, 1998) or the production is a collaborative
effort, for example with a group of institutions or a publisher.

5. Access to education - access to technology
There are two distinctive types of inequality of access to technology(Gorard, Selwyn, & Williams, 2000; Toulouse, 1997). Individuals or groups
may not have access at all. Amongst those who do have access, there isa hierarchy that depends on the quality of the access that they do have.
A further source of inequality is derived from the pace of technologicaldevelopment and therefore the ability individuals or groups have toretain access despite change. At the World Technology Summit in 2001
(WTN, 2001), speakers reviewed the state of their area of technological
specialisation. Many recognised that Moore’s law (Moore, 1965) still influenced their area of technology, that is the number of transistors that canbe placed on a silicon chip still doubles every 18 months. This indicatesthat the pace of technological advance has not changed. A consequencethat eudactionalists have to keep constantly in mind is that the replacement cycle for computers is short and it is possible for software applications to be designed for the latest machines, thus denying access to
those unable to keep pace. So, as Gorard et al. (2000) argue, the ability toconnect to the internet is not a measure of access. From the point ofview of education, this is certainly true. Resource based learning
requires students to have access to resources, which may often mean
mixed media that require fast connections to view or download. Accessto libraries and to their holdings of journals is easy using the internet,
but it comes at a very high cost to universities as licences for student
139

access to electronic journals are not cheap and often only available if apaper copy subscription is paid for as well. Furthermore, access may be
restricted to on-campus networks.
It is worth noting an obvious further limitation to access: the telephonesystem. It is possible in many parts of both the developed and underdeveloped world to have the equipment to access the internet, but tolive in an area where the telephone network does not support connection. The technological limitations on access militate against the spreadof On-Line education to the very people who both need it and would be
most anxious to benefit from it. But, conventional educational institutions
may not be able to meet demand. For example, India is unable to educate the growing population through its college system. Distance education mediated with ICT would be one solution and this has been pursued
energetically in the Indian state of Andra Pradesh (Overland, 2000)
where fibre-optic cables already link 90% of towns and will shortly link
all villages too. Every village will shortly have at least one computer.
Exciting though this development is, it demonstrates the gulf that stillseparates the idea of virtual universities and global education, from reality.
On the positive side, if technology is available, then On-Line education
widens access and brings study ‘any time, any place’ to people who cannot easily study conventionally. For example, many muslim women live
in seclusion (purdah) and cannot attend traditional education because
they cannot mix with men. In some places, of which India is again an
example, On-Line and distance education are now providing educational
opportunities for them that were not there before (Overland, 2000).

6. Can Higher Education be globalized?
The G8 group has established a Digital Opportunity Task Force to foster access to, and use of ICT. In a paper to the group, the Global
Knowledge Partnership (2001) refer to the advantages of generating local
140

Is On-Line education the future for universities?

content for education and distance learning, seeing this as more relevant
than material created in developed countries and re-packaged for thedeveloping countries. This highlights the problems posed by global education. The internet has the potential to deliver educational material toany part of the world but much of the teaching material currently available or planned for On-Line delivery is English language, western culture and northern hemisphere. The problem is not simply one of language, solvable by translation. It is a problem of differing educational
methods, differing cultures and differing environments. In the related
subjects of biology and health, for example, case studies and data used toillustrate teaching material must be relevant to the students. The ecology of an English oak wood is not the best example to use for students intropical countries.
On-Line education available globally has to contend with the apparently
trivial problem of time. If a virtual university is to make its courses
available globally, then synchronous interactions between students andteachers cannot be part of its On-Line teaching package because different time zones provide a barrier. Furthermore, asynchronous interactions between students and tutors may have an intrinsic delay built in asa consequence of a time-shift between student and tutor. These time
problems become significant if a virtual university wants to offer interactive lectures, for example those piloted by the Knowledge Media
Institute in the UK, or real-time question and answer sessions. It is ironic, but probably inevitable, that virtual universities offering global courses will have to have regional centres.
Globalisation raises two further, inter-related issues, those of standardisation and uniformity. The UK has assessment of teaching quality for university courses. Japan is introducing quality assessment (Lewis, Ikeda, &Dundar, 2001) with performance indicators, but it will be some years
before it is in place. If courses are to be offered globally by existing universities, or virtual universities offer global degrees, who validates theawards, sets the standards and monitors the quality? At present these141are rhetorical questions for there are no answers. Nor have HEIs yet
formed a view on whether it is advantageous to have uniformity developing in education across the globe. Is not the strength of the education
systems in many countries the diversity of the offerings available?
These are very large, high-level questions, but they urgently need consideration as at present the concentration is on the technology and thecontent of On-Line courses, rather than the educational philosophy thatshould be guiding their development.

7. The future of On-Line education
It is difficult to predict the future for On-Line education and the virtual
universities. The decision by MIT to make On-Line materials freely
available is one route that On-Line education might take - the open
source route. The ‘e-University’ initiative in the UK is another.
Corporate e-colleges are developing, for example the British Aerospace
virtual university. However, the present financial gloom over internetcompanies does not bode well for the immediate future of commercially
viable education on the internet. This may, however, be a good thingfrom the educators point of view, since the risks to educational values
that commercialisation threatens (DeLong, 1997) would be diminished.
The future for On-Line incorporated into existing educational models isbrighter. It looks set to enhance teaching and learning and give greater
access to scarce resources. There are hidden costs in On-Line that wehave yet to understand, including staff development for a new teachingenvironment. There are highly complex rights issues to resolve as highquality On-Line education requires large amounts of illustrative media,
little of which is freely available. Solutions to these problems willundoubtedly emerge. It is becoming clear that no one model for higher
education is going to sweep the board in the future. The prediction that‘most communicating and learning will be done at a distance’ (Stallings,2001) is unlikely to be fulfilled. Instead, universities will become increasingly diverse, education will become more widely available and On-Line142

Is On-Line education the future for universities?

will be embedded in higher education as a major, but far from the only,
method of teaching and learning.
On balance, the future looks good for the quality and variety of education in the existing university system. The new ideas of e-universities
look less promising as a long-term alternative to the present pattern - asa component of a varied and highly flexible education system they
undoubtedly have a role to play. However, delivering a protected educational environment that is the exact equivalent of a campus university issomething that a virtual university may never be able to do. In the end,
learning is not dependent upon any one technology or, indeed any technology at all. Throughout the history of universities, learning has takenplace in an invigorating atmosphere of scholarship, debate, commitment
and collegiality. Technology may not be able to deliver that same atmosphere. It has a place in education; it may transform education; it will nottake over education totally.

8. Summary
It is clear that there is a revolution in education that is being driven bytechnological advance. This revolution is bringing the ideas of independent learning and resource-based learning education into conventional
universities, driven by the increasing use of ICT. The revolution is also
spawning new models of global education.
The technological solutions that would enable virtual colleges and universities to deliver their degrees and courses to students anywhere in
the world at any time now exist. There are two principal barriers to be
overcome. The first is the need for a technological infrastructure thatwill enable potential students to connect to their virtual educational institutions. The second barrier is the incomplete nature of the educational
philosophy that should inform the development of On-Line education. We
do not know yet whether in the virtual world we can re-create the atmosphere of learning that a conventional university creates. If we can’t re143

create that atmosphere, then virtual universities may be second-best andthe future of On-Line education lies in the addition of RBL and other
ICT models to campus universities, together with the development of amixed economy where students study partly On-Line course and partly
at local centres.
References
Brabazon, T. (2001) “Internet teaching and the administration of knowledge”,
First Monday, Vol. 6(6).
Davies, P. M. C. (1999) The Virtual School of Biodiversity. Paper presented at
the 5th Hong Kong Web Symposium e-Education: Challenge andOpportunities, Hong Kong.
Dearing, R. (1997) Higher education in the learning society. Report of thenational committee of enquiry into higher education. London: HMSO.
DeLong, S. E. (1997) “The shroud of learning”, First Monday, Vol. 2(5).
DfEE. (1998) The learning age: a renaissance for a new Britain. Report by the

UK Department for Education and Employment. London: HMSO.
http://www.lifelonglearning. co. uk/greenpaper/
Gorard, S., Selwyn, N., & Williams, S. (2000) “Must try harder! Problems facing
technological solutions to non-participation in adult learning”, British
Educational Research Journal, Vol. 26(4), 507-521.
Hall, M. J., Robinson, D. J., Tucknott, G., & Carlton, T. (1998) “A multimedia
tutorial shell with qualitative assessment in biology.” Charman, D. & A.
Elmes (Eds.), Computer Based Assessment (Volume 2): Case Studies inScience and Computing Vol. 2, pp. 33-38 . Plymouth: SEED publications,
University of Plymouth.
Jolliffe, A., Ritter, J., & Stevens, D. (2001) The online learning handbook.
London: Kogan Page.
Lewis, D. R., Ikeda, T., & Dundar, H. (2001) “On the use of performance indicators in Japan's Higher Education Reform Agenda.” Nagoya Journal of Higher
Education, Vol. 1, 67-98.
Moore, G. E. (1965) “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits.”
Electronics, Vol. 38(8).
Noble, D. F. (1998) “Digital diploma mills: the automation of higher education.”First Monday, Vol. 3(1).
Overland, M. A. (2000) India uses distance education to meet huge demand for
degrees. The Chronicle of Higher Education. (14 July 2000).

144

Is On-Line education the future for universities?

Partnership, T. G. K. (2001) Recommendations to the Digital Opportunity Task
Force on issues of bridging the digital divide.
http://www.glocom.ac.jp/dotforce/whatis.html
Rowntree, D. (1990) Teaching through self-instruction. London: Kogan Page.
Ryan, S., Scott, B., Freeman, H., & Patel, D. (2000) The virtual university.
London: Kogan Page.
Stallings, D. (2001) “The virtual university: Organizing to survive in the 21st
century”, Journal of Academic Librarianship, Vol. 27(1), 3-14.
Toulouse, C. (1997) “Introduction”, C. Toulouse & T. Luke (Eds.), The politics ofcyberspace. London: Routledge.
WTN (2001). The World Technology Summit 2001, London.
http://www.wtn.net/summit/summit2001/summit2001.html

145