Technology assisted teaching and learning: Design implications for communication courses on the internet
Authors: Oliver Sandra M. 
Published: January 2008

This paper considers the relationship between pre‐ and post‐technology assisted teaching and learning (TATL) based on models of learning, the learning context, programme design and the establishment of evaluation criteria. It hypothesises that current communication management theory and practice faces an opportunity and a threat but that the subject discipline can meet the challenge of the internet through ongoing academic/professional partnerships. The purpose of this paper, in raising awareness about current research issues being debated in colleges over course planning and design, is to see where to go from here and what contributions can be offered by academics, practitioner consultants and students. The medium is not the message and delivery must be learner‐centred, allowing for reflection and adaptation at all times. The technical aspect of subject‐based criteria‐setting through benchmark design is outside the scope of this paper and can be revisited. Nevertheless, benchmarking per se is standard validation practice for all academic courses and the author's hypothesis points to the dangers of underestimating the difficulties associated with this element of distance learning for new and evolving interdisciplinary studies such as public relations, where even semantics are problematic. For example, in this post‐technological era, multinational companies are renaming their public relations departments ‘corporate communications’ or ‘corporate relations/corporate affairs’, to better reflect reality and the functional role played in terms of integration, monitoring and evaluation of and within corporate strategy. Those companies in which the dominant focus for public relations was marketing in the recession driven 1980s are finding the 1990s paradigm shift more complicated than envisaged. They are finding that meaning and message is more than a clichéd slogan or soundbite, especially where corporate policy is still driven more by customer relations than, say, employee or government relations. As a consequence of technology (medium/multimedia) and human networking (message/meaning) via the internet, the pressure of a new world order affects everyone in one form or another. The race is on for global corporate and cultural domination, what some sociologists call the ‘new imperialism’. This inevitably brings conflict, along with a range of developmental arguments about context, consensus and other issues. The implications and range of arguments surrounding the sample of models selected here are vast. The models themselves are therefore presented as concepts rather than analytical tools or techniques. However, with the subject so topical at the moment, no doubt this and other journals will see the publication of a debate in future issues around technology assisted teaching and learning for business communication and public relations and the emergence of some valuable subject specific aids to lifelong learning for students, teachers and trainers alike. Teaching is a ‘rhetorical activity … it is mediated learning, allowing students to acquire knowledge of someone else's way of experiencing the world’. The British qualification to date has been the Communication, Advertising and Marketing Diploma (CAM). Now that some of the tools of public relations are taught to marketing students under the auspices of the UK Chartered Institute of Marketing, the UK's Institute of Public Relations, in its 50th birthday year, recognises that the profession must get to grips with the changes wrought by this and the growth of the digital arts industry, although it has placed its own diploma squarely within the management discipline for purposes of future professional membership. Regardless of student background, so long as candidates meet university entry requirements and universities abide by national quality assurance criteria, professional partnership programmes in this field, delivered by distance learning mode through the medium of the internet and other techniques, will mirror the strengths and weaknesses of those in more established fields. Novices become experts through a combination of knowledge and skill in all professions and all professions are struggling with the impact of technology. Differences between theory and practice are justifiably losing their deterministic significance through mutual respect, understanding and accessibility to and from a wider reach via the internet.