International
Journal of
Educational
Technology

Will MANs and SuperJANET dominate educational technology in the UK?

Mike Thelwall, Ph.D., University of Wolverhampton

A large amount of computerised material is currently used in education, some of it on the Internet but much on other media such as the CD-ROM and Local Area Networks. This paper surveys some of the tools and methods that can be used to produce computerised information of educational value in the light of the ever-increasing bandwidth available to UK HE institutions from the SuperJANET and MAN network infrastructure projects. A number of issues are identified to be considered when planning a resource and deciding which medium and which software tools and methods to use. Arguments are then presented to predict the continued use of non-internet tools and techniques for courseware, even in universities connected to MANs.

Introduction

Higher Education organisations in the UK are linked to each other and the rest of the Internet by a variety of types of connections. The standard connection is to the Joint Academic Network (JANET), a network connecting HE institutions and related bodies such as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. The connection speeds are typically in the range of 2Mbps - 10Mbs. A subset of these are connected by the broadband part known as SuperJANET, an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) based service connecting 13 JANET sites at 155Mbs or 34Mbs (http://www.ja.net). There is also an increasing number of Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), which are 155Mbs ATM connections between institutions in a geographic region. These include MANs based in London, the Midlands, South Wales, and Bristol as well as four interlinked MANs covering the whole of Scotland (http://www.use-of-mans.ac.uk). The SuperJANET links to MANs create a new very high bandwidth network reaching much of UK Higher Education.

The hundreds of MAN based projects that have started so far have a variety of aims, technologies and subject focuses. The main infrastructure projects have the objective of aiding research or business as well as teaching but the first two will not be discussed here. Most teaching projects are subject specific, such as MathPool, Functional Anatomy and Biomechanics, and Philosophy Web Server, but some such as Clyde Virtual University and staff development initiatives including MARBLE (MAN Accessible Resource Based Learning Exemplars) and TALiSMAN (Teaching and Learning in the Scottish MANs) are cross-discipline. Most initiatives are focussed on providing resources for students, but the staff development initiatives are aimed at helping the academic community use MANs for teaching and learning, and there are also other staff centred initiatives such as MathPool for maths lecturers to share electronic 'written' teaching resources (Beevers, Prince, Maciocia, & Scott, 1996; Maciocia & Scott, 1998). Some projects are also concerned with a particular type of technology, such as TASCMAD (Training and Support for Communication using Multimedia Applications from the Desktop) with videoconferencing, whereas others such as MANTCHI (MAN Teaching of Computer-Human Interaction) and SUMSMAN (Scottish Universities Mathematics and Statistics across the MAN) use a variety.

In addition to high bandwidth dependant activities, MAN projects often include traditional Internet solutions such as text-based conferencing and standard web pages. New solutions have also been tried that do not need high bandwidth but benefit from collaboration. One example is the vicarious learning tool Answer Garden (Ackermann & Malone, 1990) used in MANTCHI where student questions and tutor answers are posted to a structured site which future students will be able to access and benefit from.

Apart from the actual resources created, the practical skills developed and increased knowledge from evaluation studies, one major benefit from many projects is an increase in collaboration amongst teachers. Often the creation of a MAN has caused a number of academics in the same discipline at different universities to come together and discuss and compare their syllabus and teaching with the others in order to discover appropriate areas for collaboration. In the case of MANTCHI for example participants have described it as very valuable.

The primary aim of SuperJANET and the MANs is to enable the sharing of resources between universities for research, collaboration and teaching. An important question for academic and commercial producers of various kinds of education related computerised information is whether this steady increase in bandwidth is tipping the balance in favour of using exclusively Internet solutions to educational technology problems. This paper will attempt to answer this question, a serious one for the UK because MANs can duplicate much of the functionality of CD-ROMs and all of that of the Internet in addition to enabling new educational experiences.

The issue of which medium to use for a particular resource is a complex one depending on pedagogical and technological considerations for the type of resource to be created and the needs of the students and organisation creating it. There are many different software tools for creating or managing resources both on and off the Internet and an understanding of their capabilities is important for evaluating their effectiveness in these contexts. The Internet excels at some tasks such as simple text messaging with email, whereas it is be poor at others such as delivering big multimedia presentations to remote users. There are nevertheless many types of resources that have both online and offline adherents, possessing advantages and disadvantages in each case.

In this paper we will survey the types of software tools available and then examine a number of types of resources in the light of these tools' properties and a consideration of bandwidth, quality and related issues.

Internet based software tools

There are a number of types of resource creation tools and methods available for use over the Internet and the Web in particular. They vary from simple descriptive languages such as HTML to full-blown programming languages such as Java. Differing levels of complexity are offered, from a simple web page to a complete software application. Each tool has a niche with greater functionality generally coming at the price of longer development times. We describe a number of key Internet tools here before discussing their non-internet counterparts.

HTML HyperText Mark-up Language (http://www.w3.org). This is the document description language that is used to code web pages. It is an application of the Standard Generalised Markup Language, SGML (ISO 8879). There are a number of different versions of HTML with later versions offering enhanced functionality. With the inclusion of Cascading Style Sheets in version 4 it is easier to control the appearance of groups of web pages on a site, but it is not as powerful as a standard word processor in controlling the layout of a document.

DHTML Dynamic HTML is HTML with embedded program code, usually in JavaScript, that enables a Web page to interact with the user. For example a DHTML page could display a multiple-choice question and tell the user whether they had answered it correctly or not. DHTML can also be used to enhance the appearance of a page by techniques such as highlighting a clickable link when the mouse pointer is over it, the 'rollover'. The inclusion of DHTML does have an impact on the accessibility of a web page because old browsers do not support it and users may disable it to stop malicious JavaScript programs from crashing their machine. Although JavaScript requires programming knowledge to use, some web editors such as the WebWriter II system (Crespo, Chang, & Bier, 1997) and Microsoft Front Page can generate simple scripts automatically.

XML The Extensible Markup Language (Bray and Sperberg, 1997) is a proposal by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) working group on SGML. It is essentially a simplified version of SGML. The aim of XML and similar proposals such as displets (Vitali, Chiu, Bieber, 1997) is to allow more control over web pages for specialist applications.

Java (Gosling, Joy, Steele, 1996) This is a programming language that can be activated from a web page and often occupies a rectangular area in the referencing page on the monitor screen. It differs from JavaScript in being powerful enough to be used to develop full-scale interactive applications such as a three-dimensional model viewer or a chat facility. The advantage of Java over other programming languages is its relative platform independence: Java programs can be written that can execute on many different platforms, but not all Java programs have this property (Tyma, 1998). Its disadvantage as a programming language is its relatively slow running speed due to the way that it runs in a virtual machine. Not all web browsers support Java and those that do allow the user to disable it. This facility is used by corporations and individuals for security or other reasons and so Java must be seen as a less universal solution than a standard web page.

Server-Side coding This is used to generate web pages (HTML or DHTML) from programs on the web server, often in response to data sent by the user. A classic example of this is a keyword search using search engine, where the user's keywords are examined by a server side script that checks them against a database and creates a web page of links to pages containing the keywords. Server-Side coding can be written in any programming language using the CGI Common Gateway Interface mechanism, but C, C++ or Perl are usually used. Server Side Scripting can also be achieved by having web page templates on the server containing programming code that is executed when the pages are requested. This is the method used by Microsoft's Active Server Pages and a version of JavaScript, but both do not work on some web servers.

Linked or embedded applications Web pages can also link to and call resources that need additional applications to run. For example a program could be written in Macromedia Shockwave (http://www.macromedia.com). It would only work if the user accessing web page linking to it had already downloaded and installed the Shockwave player. This gives extra functionality to a web page at the cost of restricting its full use to those able to or prepared to download and install the necessary application program. Many applications are designed to run in this way over the Internet and are commonly used for interactive games, audio and video. In a similar way a web page can link to an application on the user's machine and send it information. For example a web page could contain a link to an Excel spreadsheet and when activated Excel would be automatically started with the spreadsheet loaded to it. The application itself does not need to have any Internet capability for this to work.

Applications enabled by the Internet In addition to the above examples, all of which can live on the web, there are application programs that must be installed on the user's machine, but use the Internet. Web browsers, email and newsgroup clients are common examples of these but there are a lot of others used in education. GroupWare is an important category with programs like FirstClass being used to facilitate group communications.

The various techniques discussed above all have different bandwidth implications, but none are inherently small or large. For example a small text only web page may be under 1k in size whereas another with embedded audio may be over 1.5M. More complex web sites will however tend to use more bandwidth, for example due to increased file sizes of web pages with JavaScript or due to more frequent server accesses with Server Side coding.

Other software tools

There is a wide range of tools and techniques available for creating educational resources that do not use the Internet. They fall into three categories: Authoring tools; programming languages; and application environments.

Authoring tools  These are programs written to provide environments to facilitate the production of informational or didactic material. They typically offer some of the functionality of a programming language but are much easier to use for educational applications. Examples include Asymetrix Toolbook (http://www.asymetrix.com), Macromedia Director (http://www.macromedia.com) and HyperCard (http://www.apple.com/hypercard). It is typically not difficult to produce a very simple authored product but additional complexity requires mastery of the supporting programming language. Authoring tools are a common choice for a product such as a CD-ROM, most being capable of delivering a high quality interface and controlling any multimedia elements.

Programming languages Many of these are capable of doing everything that a modern authoring tool can. Their advantage is in having more complete control over all aspects of the product but they require more time to program (Marshall, Samson, Dugard & Scott, 1994).

Application environments  Many software applications offer facilities to turn themselves into educational environments. For example Visual Basic for Applications can be used to create an Excel workbook that interactively teaches a topic. This could be used to teach how to use the application itself, for example.

Applications of the above three types do not live on the Internet and will require installing on the user's computer. This has implications for accessibility, depending on affordability as well as availability over a sufficient range of platforms. If an affordable, appropriate version is available, installation may still be a hurdle. Java solutions do not have to suffer from this problem, an important part of their attraction.

We will now examine the tools discussed in this and the previous section in the context of various types of resources, starting with communication facilities.

Communication technology

The Internet excels as a facilitator of communication within groups and between individuals. Email use is widespread in education as outside. Apart from plain text, more complex information is also exchanged using email attachments, including images and data files and even more exotic resources such as formatted mathematical problem files (Crow & Zand, 1997). There are also a number of web applications allowing groups to communicate, written with server side programming or in Java (Thomas, Carswell, Price, & Petre, 1998). There are also GroupWare application programs such as FirstClass (http://www.firstclass.com) that facilitate group and individual communication using the Internet.

High bandwidth communications applications such as Interactive Remote Instruction are a problem for Internet users away from a fast link. Broadcast satellite technology is an example of a non-internet solution to this problem (Maly, Wild, Overstreet, Abdel-Wahab, Gupta, Youssef, Stoica, Talla, & Prabhu, 1997). Multicasting of web pages (Liao, 1997; Parnes, Mattsson, Synnes, & Schefstrom, 1997) or other resources using the M-bone (http://www.mbone.com) is a scalable Internet solution and can solve bandwidth problems for the server but not for the client, which still has the same amount of data to transfer.

On the edge of current Internet capabilities is videoconferencing. With both parties having a good quality Internet link, at least ISDN, this is viable with reasonable quality, but also of course requires the purchase and installation of the video equipment (Jacobs & Rodgers, 1998). Audioconferencing, perhaps in conjunction with application sharing software, is often possible with a standard Internet connection provided that reasonable speeds can be maintained.

A number of initiatives including MANTCHI, SUMSMAN, the National Learning Network for Remote Sensing (NLNRS) and TASCMAD involve the use of videoconferencing to allow a lecturer to deliver a live teaching session to students at one or more remote locations. MAN - connected universities use a specially equipped classroom for this, and each Scottish university has at least two. The technique has been used with satellite and with ISDN in other projects to allow lecturers to teach classes simultaneously in different campuses or to reach students in geographically remote locations (Donert, Brady, & Clarkson, 1998; Marshall, 1998). For most of higher education, this is not applicable or appropriate because of the cost and complexity of setting it up in addition to the difficulty and resource implications of using anything except small class sizes. Two interesting uses that have been tried in the Scottish MANs are the use of remote experts and the pooling of small option classes. As part of MANTCHI, individual tutors take responsibility for ATOMs (Autonomous Teaching Objects in MANTCHI) wherever they are delivered (Draper, 1998; Draper & Brown, 1998). This gives the students access to a higher degree of expertise than would normally be the case, often a recognised expert in the field. Students from universities with widely differing entrance requirements use the same study materials but have different assessment requirements. These ATOMs are often a single week of study, but because of their self contained nature and the permanency of MAN connections, are easy for lecturers to drop in to their weekly programme, and in this context also provide a change of learning environment for the students. The SUMSMAN project has used videoconferencing in a different way, for short interactive keynote lectures introducing maths courseware (Davidson & Goldfinch, 1998; Maciocia & Scott, 1998b; Pitcher & Wild, 1998). Again the sessions were lead by experts, this time courseware authors, and the student evaluations were generally positive. Interestingly, this is an example of the integration of media, with the MAN being used to help students to use a CD or LAN based product.

A common problem for higher education is that option classes for final year students are often small and sometimes this causes them to be dropped or seen as wasteful of staff time. The MAN solution to this is videoconferencing to run the course at more than one university. This is an ideal videoconferencing application, adding value to degrees but being manageable because of the small numbers involved. In this context videoconferencing is more appropriate than the time consuming creation of good quality CAL material. NLNRS has combined videoconferencing with application sharing software in order to give a much richer environment (Duncan, Morrey, Bayne, MacLaren, McQuillan, 1998). Each student sees three screens: the remote lecturer; their own class as seen by the remote lecturer; and presentation slides or a software demonstration controlled by the remote lecturer on their own PC. The technology involved in this requires increased lecturer preparation time, even when the videoconferencing and application sharing software has been set up and is running smoothly but again student reactions have been positive in the majority.

Information technology

Standard web pages are excellent as repositories for basic information. A web page written in basic HTML and placed on a web server is available to almost anyone with a computer connected to the Internet. Other applications are used when more control over the formatting of the information is needed. In this case a document format such as Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat is used. The resulting file could still be downloaded over the Internet, possibly via a web page link, but users would also need an appropriate viewer program to read the document. Since web pages tend to be small and fast to download, unless they contain large graphics or multimedia elements, they are excellent as information resources. Of course the Internet itself is also a valuable research resource (Barron & Ivers, 1997).

Some electronic resources are essentially databases in the broader sense of the term, containing information intended to be accessed selectively rather than in entirety. Examples include multimedia CD-ROM encyclopaedias, glossaries and library book catalogues. In all except the smallest case a programming language is needed to help the user search through the information. If the information is media-rich then the size of the information sent will be a problem for the restricted bandwidth access of most Internet users and a MAN or SuperJANET type fast connection would be needed. Nevertheless, authored or programmed CD-ROMS remain the choice for even quicker access times and the advantages of programming and authoring tools discussed above. For information that is primarily text based such as a library catalogue or indeed a web search engine, an Internet solution with server-side coding or a Java solution would often be appropriate. It would maximise Internet access and allow the information to be kept up-to-date in a way that is not possible for CD-ROMs.

Two MAN projects that provide fast access to resources are PEARL (Providing Ethnological Archives for Research and Learning) and NetMuse. These are collections that are of common interest to a number of universities and need high bandwidth for efficient use. The PEARL project for example includes a large archive of sound recordings of Scottish Gaelic together with software for delivering them to students in real time. The source files are large but can be delivered simultaneously to whole classes using streaming technology. NetMuse uses similar technology to deliver music and related information.

Teaching technology

Courseware attempts to teach rather than just inform and as a result usually needs more resources than standard HTML can produce. Examples include marked multiple choice or short answer questions, hands on practice with a piece of relevant software, the presentation of a navigable 3D model of a relevant object, (for example a chemical molecule), or simulations of real world situations. Dynamic HTML and/or server side coding can provide some extra functionality to manage web page interactivity and so the web provides a comparatively simple solution for some types of resources. Its main drawbacks are bandwidth limitations for and lack of control over multimedia and a limited range of options for controlling the overall appearance of a page. Web pages do however have the advantage of modularity because pages on different sites can be seamlessly interlinked. Another advantage is the ease of updating and expansion (Star, 1997). Web courseware can be augmented by Java programs to provide a simulation or other educational tool, used embedded in a web page (Reed & Afjeh, 1998). Java normally forms only a small part of a unit of the instructional material, rather than a complete unit by itself.

Most well-resourced products are team efforts written in programming or authoring languages, due to pedagogical design benefits over HTML (Benyon, Stone, Woodroffe, 1997; Bieber, Vitali, Ashman, Balasubramanian, 1997). They normally appear on CD-ROM or as a local network solution with considerable use of multimedia and interactivity. They typically have high production values including an artistic interface design, and often a specialist production team to develop video and audio components. There is an enormous amount around already, for example the government funded UK Mathematics Courseware Consortium alone had produced 50 maths modules in Toolbook and HyperCard by 1996 (Harding, Lay, & Quinney, 1996).

Many MAN projects produce courseware, often in the form of web pages supported by additional resources such as multimedia or Java applications. Clyde Virtual University is one such example. This is "a test bed for exploring, developing and evaluating techniques for delivering learning materials, supporting collaborative learning and carrying out assessment over the Internet" (Whittington & Sclater, 1998). As part of its remit, CVU converted CD-ROM CAL material to run over the Internet as standard HTML linking in places to resources such as video files. CVU also hosts its own resources, making use of programming languages in their creation. Its collaborative base allows it to create resources of common interest to a number of connected universities and to embed these with a higher technology level than might otherwise be possible. The FAB project takes a similar approach, using basic web pages with many images but also uses animations, video clips and self-test sections.

The Broadnet virtual university has attempted to produce attractive online training modules to take full advantage of ATM bandwidth. They are written in DHTML and are based around 'presentations', each of which is a series of slides on a high quality background with an embedded professionally created voiceover for each one. With this degree of effort in the creation of resources, they must reach a large enough audience to justify their existence and continued maintenance. Another project, the Wolverhampton University School of Computing Virtual Campus (http://virtual.scit.wlv.ac.uk) has produced modules that are deliverable with any level of technology, MAN, CD-ROM, floppy disk or standard Internet. It does this by having two versions, one with an audio voiceover for CD-ROM and MAN, and one with a text version, for floppy disk and Internet. These versions are automatically produced from a set of master files, making control over changes easy. Basic HTML is used with some DHTML and the cascading style sheets of HTML 4 to improve appearance, but its appearance falls far short of what would be expected from a CD-ROM, although it does have the advantage of being relatively easy to modify, except for the voiceover soundtrack files.

Assessment technology

Assessments for online courses can take the form of computer assisted assessments or more traditional assessments such as essay writing, delivered by email (or even post). A key issue for assessments is security and this is the reason that historically very little summative assessment has been done over the Internet. The situation is currently changing. Recent web browsers have built in encryption to hide questions and answers from prying eyes whilst they are being transmitted. There are now commercial products for the production of secure web-based tests, for example Question Mark Perception (http://www.questionmark.com/perception). In fact this product allows test banks to be shared between web and non-web tests. One project also uses tests installed on a network but saving security coded data over the Internet. This allows the students to sit the test anywhere connected to the Internet once the program has been installed (Thelwall, 1998). Another issue holding back web based tests is reliability. Unless the test methodology allows for retaking a test, a lost Internet connection could be a disaster for a student taking a web test.

MAN bandwidth would not significantly contribute to the success of most assessments because by their nature they tend to be text intensive or with simple graphical images. Clyde Virtual University has however created some much more sophisticated assessments, for example a Java program based upon three-dimensional visualisations of chemical molecules (Whittington, 1998). Collaboration is much more important for this than bandwidth in order to enable much effort to be put into a single resource for common use. MAN success depends on sharing resources, but this is more problematical for academics in the region of assessment than in most other aspects of teaching and learning. Most MAN projects producing common resources allow individual universities to set their own assessments. An exception is MANTCHI ATOMs, which normally include an assessment that is general enough to allow different types of students to reach different standards. It is nevertheless not difficult to envisage projects to create at least common pools of resources to facilitate assessment creation, perhaps similar to the Internet based MedWeb (http://medweb.bham.ac.uk/http/caa/), having has banks of questions from which assessors can make their own selection to form an assessment. There is in fact a move to make question sharing across platforms easier with the creation of a proposed open coding standard (http://www.qmark.com/qml/). MANs would also allow the questions to contain large images or audio and video files in subjects where they would be useful.

Virtual Courses

There are many education organisations that offer the opportunity to study electronically for a qualification or part of a qualification. This can take the form of a Virtual University, where there is no physical campus or a virtual campus, where many of the aspects of a virtual university are attached to one based at a physical campus location (Barnard, 1997).

A virtual course will need to combine didactic material and information resources with some means of electronic communication, at least email but in a lot of cases electronic discussion forums as well (Spitzer, 1998; Trentin, 1998). The communication needs are a strong incentive to base a virtual course on the Internet and a virtual course could have all of its resources available from a single point of access on the web. This gives usability benefits from having a single point of access and potentially a common interface design of all the component parts, but does have drawbacks. It may be that high quality multimedia CD-ROMs are needed for the didactic element for example, so a concession to the unitary point of access may have to be made by providing them to the students. The desire to keep a virtual university purely electronic without any paperwork or physical electronic media also does not necessarily provide an optimal educational environment. Printed materials for example are still an important medium for communicating large quantities of text, due in part to the well-known problems of reading large amounts of text from a computer screen.

There are a number of products that aim to make it easy to produce pure integrated web learning environments such as WebCT, TopClass and Web in a Box, but there are still worries that these necessarily simplify education and in particular discourage innovation (MacKnight, 1998; Merrill, 1997).

The object of creating an entire virtual course is normally to improve access but MAN technology does not allow this in most cases because the students at home connects only at standard Internet speeds. The Broadnet project at Wolverhampton sought to get round this by using the cable network to reach out into local businesses but this has not been attempted on a large scale elsewhere in the UK. With MANs and SuperJANET it may be possible to create small media-rich specialised courses for the whole of the UK HE community. This would improve choice inside HE but not access to it.

Bandwidth, Access, Choice and Educational Value

It is possible to create resources of educational value with a wide variety of media, but not all media are capable of, or suitable for, all roles. CD-ROMs or LAN based 'copies' are in widespread use for teaching and learning at all levels of education. Their advantage lies primarily in the potential richness of content made possible by their large storage capacity, typically in the region of 650M (and currently up to 17G for the similar Digital Video Disks) and fast data reading rates. Another advantage is the potential flexibility of student access derived from the ability to operate away from an Internet connection. There are however inherent limitations stemming from a CD-ROM being delivered to the user as a finished product, they are more difficult to amend and keep up to date than Internet resources. Making a change normally means releasing a new version and recalling the old one. This is a time consuming process, particularly because each new version would need to be fully tested before going to press. A more critical educational problem is the lack of ability to communicate with a lecturer or other students unless it is part of a larger educational package. On a good CD-ROM such things as formative assessment with constructive feedback, a glossary and a type of frequently asked questions list will ameliorate this. These do not however fully substitute for the ability for a student to trial their own individual ideas against their peers and tutors, particularly in non-scientific subjects. For this reason CD-ROMs are often best used in conjunction with other resources such as tutorials, seminars, online bulletin boards or videoconferencing.

Internet resources designed to be accessed over standard speed connections are also in common use in education. These typically consist of just text and graphics and are very useful as a source of reference. Indeed the Internet itself is a huge source of reference and a means of access to resources, such as buying books or finding books in libraries. The Internet can be effective at facilitating communication, even for low bandwidth users. Text based bulletin boards and conference facilities supplement email as fast and effective messaging facilities and can provide the interplay of ideas that in many subjects is an essential component of learning. As the main means of teaching it is nevertheless limited. Internet-based primary exposition at standard access speeds would be of necessity text and graphics based, similar to a book. Its advantages over a book could come from animated graphics in some cases, for example engineering diagrams (http://www.howstuffworks.com), from embedded programs such as Java simulations, and from automatically marked questions created with DHTML or Java. Despite this, the lack of audio in particular, but also the visual finish make this an unappealing medium for students to use for long periods of time.

MANs can in some respects have most of the best of both worlds: the communication and access to information of the Internet and the richness of content of CD-ROMs. This comes at the expense of the restriction of access to those able to reach a MAN. This is an important concern if some target students are missed but also for projects with expensive deliverables where there is an issue around being able to produce a marketable product for sale to a wider audience. A related concern is that Internet based techniques such as DHTML and Java do not give the power and control of authoring and programming languages, resulting in what would be by commercial CD-ROM terms a substandard product. Some commercial authoring tools do however allow their products to be delivered over the Internet automatically through the browser, but this requires additional software to be installed by the user, and is a proprietary solution. In addition to Internet and CD-ROM type facilities, MANs offer their own unique services such as videoconferencing and instant access to a large collection of high bandwidth electronic information, such as video on demand, resource banks of courses and audio libraries. Videoconferencing can be used to deliver local lectures to more than one geographic location or for interaction between students, each other, their tutors and remote experts. It provides a more human environment for communication than a text based one and is also routinely used by many businesses and private individuals using ISDN for this reason. MAN based high bandwidth instructional material, for example a collection of resources on a connected server, has the advantage over similar CD-ROM based material of being instantly accessible to a wide range of users. It is also easier to modify and keep up to date, there being only one centrally stored copy. Creators can also get away with less testing with errors and faults being immediately correctable when identified.

With the advent of MANs and SuperJANET it has become possible to envisage realistic high bandwidth solutions, allowing the creation of a number of such projects and giving greater scope for collaboration and sharing of resources. At least 69 projects have been funded in Scotland alone. The balance of power seems to have shifted so far in favour of the Internet that Clyde Virtual University had as the main of its first year aim the conversion of CD-ROM based material to run over the web, and similar work has been going on in Portsmouth for internal university use (King, 1998). There is also currently great interest in Telematics: using electronic technologies to create a seamless information retrieval, manipulation and communications system. Despite this, problems still remain for high bandwidth Internet solutions. Objective summative evaluation or cost-benefit analysis and comparisons are even more problematic than is normal for educational technology (Collis, in press; Hawkridge, 1998; Rumble, 1997), due to the collaborative nature of MAN projects and the sharing of infrastructure. Nevertheless, some general points can be made.

Firstly, as soon as the student goes off campus and away from a fast link they are faced with a bottleneck created by their own modem. This is precisely the problem that caused one virtual campus to be designed to be delivered from either CD-ROM or Internet (Thomson, Lathan, & Homer, 1998), although its group discussion forums need an Internet connection. Reliance on MAN level bandwidth therefore has implications for accessibility at a time when many UK universities are trying to widen access. The types of students that could find access to a campus a problem include disabled students, those with dependants, and those in remote areas. A less fundamental problem is that some universities have in fact very few PCs equipped to deliver multimedia, so a personal PC would be the logical platform for a multimedia product. Home ISDN connections for students would ameliorate this problem but would be costly (Jacobs & Rodgers, 1998) and much slower than ATM. MANs are likely to exacerbate these problems rather than solve them because of the increased resources that will go into high bandwidth solutions as a result of their creation.

A second problem is that many non-Internet tools produce better quality finished products for some tasks than their Internet counterparts. In the fields of authoring languages and programming languages there are still significant advantages of performance and control for well-resourced developers. A commercial reason for the continuation of CD-ROMs is that they can be sold to the general public and schools in addition to academic usage. It is therefore highly likely that some of the best resources will continue to be delivered on CD-ROM and DVD rather than over the Internet. This problem may have a potential technological solution in the shape of authoring tools that allow their products to be delivered over the Internet using software pre-installed by the user. For this to work, a standard would have to be agreed upon by MAN-connected universities in order to configure their computers correctly.

A third problem is the recognised unwillingness of many teachers to use software 'Not Invented Here', which seems to be happening despite the initial co-operation at the start of many projects. This can be a particular problem for courseware developed for MANs because of its higher development and maintenance costs and relatively restricted target area. Many MAN projects have started with central funding and would need a continued source of funds to maintain their products.

MANs have already resulted in the increased creation and use of educational resources using Internet solutions, as well as making quality videoconferencing and some other high bandwidth technologies easily accessible. MANs have the potential to become a platform for the integrated educational Telematics solution of the future but the problems of accessibility and the commercial and design quality advantages of non-Internet solutions for courseware will nevertheless see their continued existence as part of an expanded educational technology toolbox for some time to come.

References

Ackermann, M., & Malone, T. (1990). Answer garden: A tool for growing organizational memory. In Luchovsky, F. H. (Ed), Proceedings of the conference on office information systems. Cambridge, MA: ACM Press.

Barnard, J. (1997). The World Wide Web and higher education: The promise of virtual universities and online libraries. Educational Technology 38(3), 30-35.

Barron, A., & Ivers, K. (1997). An internet research model. SIGCUE outlook 25(1,2), 16-20.

Beevers, C., Prince, A., Maciocia, A., & Scott, T. (1996). Pooling mathematical resources. Active Learning, 5, 41-42.

Benyon, D., Stone, D., & Woodroffe, M. (1997). Experience with developing multimedia courseware for the World Wide Web: The need for better tools and clear pedagogy. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 47, 197-218.

Bieber, M., Vitali, F., Ashman, H., Balasubramanian, V., & Oinas-Kukkonen, H. (1997). Fourth generation hypermedia: Some missing links for the World Wide Web. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 47, 31-65.

Bray, T., & Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. (1997). Extensible markup language (XML) W3C working draft. [online] Available at: http://www.textuality.com/sgml-erb/WD-xml.html.

Collis, B. (in press). Telematics-supported education for traditional universities in Europe. Performance Improvement Quarterly.

Crespo, A., Chang, B., & Bier, E. A. (1997). Responsive interaction for a large web application: The meteor shower architecture in the WebWriter II Editor. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 29, 1507-1517.

Crowe, D., & Zand, H. (1997). Novices entering mathematics-The impact of new technology. Computers & Education, 28(1) 43-54.

Davidson, K., & Goldfinch, J. (1998). How to add - VALUE.  [online]   Available at: http://www.use-of-mans.ac.uk/reports/VALUE.HTM.

Donert, K., Brady, S., & Clarkson, J. (1998). The design, implementation and evaluation of mass conferencing. Alt-J, 6(1), 32-40.

Duncan, C., Morrey, M., Bayne, G., MacLaren, I., Walder, P., & McQuillan, J. (1998). Shared teaching with multimedia-enhanced video-conferencing. Alt-J, 6(3), 4-15.

Draper, S. W., & Brown, M. I. (1998). Evaluating remote collaborative teaching in MANTCHI.  [online] Available at: http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/mant/mantchiEval.html.

Draper, S. W. (1998). Reciprocal Collaborative Teaching.  [online] Available at: http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/mant/altj.html.

Gosling, J., Joy, B., & Steele, G. (1996). The Java Language Specification. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Harding, R. D., Lay, S. W., & Quinney, D. (1996). A consortium approach to courseware design in mathematics. Computers & Education, 26(1), 171-178.

Hawkridge, D. (1998). Cost effective support for university students learning via the Web? Alt-J, 6(3), 24-29.

International Standards Organisation, (ISO 8879). Information processing - Text and office systems - Standard generalised markup language (SGML).  International Standards Organisation:  Author.

Jacobs, G., & Rodgers, C. (1998). ISDN-based distance learning: tangible costs, intangible benefits. Computers & Education, 31(1), 41-53.

King, T. (1998). Towards a strategy for the re-use of legacy teaching materials in web based courses. Active Learning, 9, 9-14.

Liao, T. (1997). WebCanal: A multicast Web application. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 29, 1091-1102.

MacKnight, C. B. (1998). Electronic Learning Materials: The Crisis Continues. SIGCUE Outlook, 26(2), 8-16.

Maciocia, A., & Scott, T. (1998a). Interdepartmental and cross university collaboration in the delivery of mathematics. [online] Available at: http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~ama/data/jiee.html

Maciocia, A., & Scott, T. (1998b). SUMSMAN - A project for the mathematics community in Scottish higher education. Proceedings of Multimedia Engineering and Education 98, Hong Kong.

Marshall, I. M., Samson, W. B., Dugard, P. I., & Scott, W. A. (1994). Predicting the development effort of multimedia courseware. Information and Software Technology, 36(5), 251-258.

Marshall, J. (1998). The Emerging Agenda for the South West Area Network.  In JISC Assist Workshop, Metropolitan Area Networks: Management and Organisational Issues. [online] Available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub98/assist7.html.

Maly, K., Wild, C., Overstreet, C.M., Abdel-Wahab, H., Gupta, A., Youssef, A., Stoica, E., Talla, R., & Prabhu, A. (1997). A Virtual Classrooms and Interactive Remote Instruction. Innovations in Education and Training International, 34(1), 44-50.

Merrill, D. (1997). Instructional transaction theory (ITT): Instructional design based on knowledge objects. [online] Available at: http://www.coe.usu.edu/it/id2/ddc0997.htm.

Parnes, P., Mattsson, M., Synnes, K., & Schefstrom, D. (1997). The mWeb presentation framework. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 29, 1083-1090.

Pitcher, N., & Wild, D. (1998). Keynote lectures in mathematics by video conference. Proceedings of implementation, management and provision of videoconferencing, University of Nottingham.

Reed, J. A., & Afjeh, A. A. (1998). Developing interactive educational engineering software for the World Wide Web with Java. Computers & Education, 30(3/4), 183-194.

Rumble, G. (1997). The costs and economics of open and distance learning, London: Kogan Page.

Spitzer, D. R. (1998). Rediscovering the social context of distance learning. Educational Technology, 38(2), 52-56.

Starr, R. M., (1997). Delivering instruction on the World Wide Web: Overview and basic design principles. Educational Technology, 38(3), 7-15.

Thelwall, M. (1998). A unique style of computer assisted assessment. Alt-J, 6(2), 49-57.

Thomas, P., Carswell, L., Price, B., and Petre, M. (1998). A holistic approach to supporting distance learning over the Internet: transformation not translation. British Journal of Educational Technology, 38(2), 149-161.

Thompson, D. M., Latham, A., and Homer, G. R. (1998). Matching technology with organisational needs. Active Learning, 8, 45-48.

Trentin, G. (1998). Computer Conferencing Systems as seen by a Designer of Online Courses. Educational Technology, 38(3), 36-43.

Tyma, P. (1998). Why are we using Java again? Communications of the ACM, 41(6), 38-42.

Vitali, F., Chiu, C. and Bieber, M. (1997). Extending HTML in a principled way with displets. Computer Networks and ISDN systems, 29, 1115-1128.

Whittington, D. (1998). There's more to the Web than Multi-Choice.  In Wade, W. & Danson, M. (Eds). Second Annual Computer Assisted Assessment Conference, 117-123, Loughborough University.

Whittington, D.C., & Sclater, N. (1998). Building and testing a virtual university. Computers & Education, 30, 41-47.

IJET Homepage | Article Submissions | Editors | Issues

Copyright © 1999. All rights reserved.
Last Updated on 11 July 1999
For additional information, contact IJET@lists.ed.uiuc.edu