The Educational Environment

Effective educational use of the global World Wide Web depends on awareness of instructional aspects, the subject of this page, but also of the cultural contexts in which learners will use it.

Instructional Aspects

Realising the full potential the Web as a learning environment involves much more than the simple transmission of existing courses using a new technology. Relan and Gillani discuss some of the changes in learning styles and strategies which the medium enables. Bostock examines the development of active learning on the Web from a constructivist viewpoint.

Traditional Learning and Web-Based Instruction

In their chapter (Relan and Gillani 1997), the authors compare and contrast 'traditional' and web-based instruction. They note that most classroom instruction is 'traditional' in the sense that it is teacher rather than student centred, dominated by information derived from textbooks, confined in space, time and conceptual structure, involves little collaborative work in small groups and is not concerned with solving problems identified by students. They quote Cuban's view that the way in which schools are organised in space and time constrains the use of alternative learning strategies.

By contrast, they define Web-bsed instruction as:

"the application of a repertoir of cognitively oriented instructional strategies implemented within a constructivist and collaborative learning environment, utilizing the attributes and resources of the World Wide Web."

They suggest the Web may be used as a:

• resource for identification, evaluation and integration of information
• medium for collaboration and communication of ideas
• platform for expression of understandings and meanings
• medium for participating in simulated experiences, apprenticeships and cognitive partnerships.

These uses exploit the release of learning from the constraints imposed by traditional modes of delivery while changing the roles of teacher and learner and the way in which knowledge is structured.

The authors illustrate some of these approaches with a range of examples showing how WBI can free students from the constraints of space and time, facilitate collaborative learning and enable access to an unbounded hypertext-linked store of information to which the learner can contribute. They stress the provision of 'authentic' learning experiences and the development of 'learning communities' in which knowledge is created.

In their chapter, Relan and Gillani make a convincing case for a collaborative, constructivist use of WBI. They do not claim that such an approach cannot be implemented in the traditional classroom, but do assert that WBI must be based on it. This seems a more questionable proposition, given that 'traditional' education usually emphasises acquisition of a defined body of knowledge and its accreditation. A transition to a the model favoured by Relan and Gillani implies radical changes in the social role of an education system and the motivation of learners. Such changes tend to occur over generations, a very much longer time scale than that required to develop new technologies. The wealth of linked information on the Web and its accessibility will lead to widespread Web use as an information source relatively quickly. Integration of constructivist, collaborative instructional strategies into education systems is likely to be a long-term process, proceeding at different rates in different sectors of education and cultural contexts.

Active Learning on the Web

In his chapter on Designing Web-Based Instruction for Active Learning (Bostock 1997), Stephen Bostock contrasts the use of the Web for transmission of information to passive learners in a traditional framework with an active, collaborative learning approach.He offers an excellent summary of the nature of active learning from a constructivist viewpoint. He quotes a list of features identified by Grabinger and Dunlop (1996):

• Student responsibility and initiative to promote ownership of learning and transferable skills
• Intentional learning strategies, explicit methods of learning, reflection on learning processes, metacognitive skills
• Goal-driven, problem-solving tasks and projects generating products of value
• Teachers as facilitators,coaches and guides, not sources of knowledge, requiring discussion between teachers and learners
• Authentic contexts for learning, anchored in real-world problems
• Authentic assessment strategies to evaluate real-world skills
• Cooperative learning

Bostock realistically notes that instructional design should involve "assessment methods which will motivate active learning".

He identifies five ways in which networked computers can be used to implement active learning on the Web:

1. Data resources providing access to global, current, real world information
2. Tools enabling students to publish work on the Web, facilitating collaborative work on shared documents
3. Simulations enabling direct student interaction with content
4. Tutors running branching computer-assisted instruction applications which automatically reporting the results of student activities to human tutors who can provide feedback
5. Communications, by integrating e-mail, conferencing and newsgroups with the browser.

These uses can enable learners to participate in the active learning process. At the time of writing, Bostock noted that the use of the Web for conferencing was still at the experimental stage, and that Web use of video was being developed. Technological change has proceded rapidly since then, extending opportunities to exploit the Web as an active learning environment.