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Case Study

Australia

External Studies at Murdoch University

Prepared by: Patrick Guiton

Brief description of the programme

Murdoch is a dual mode university where external study is a viable alternative mode of study that is available to all students rather than a substitute mode of study to accommodate the disadvantaged needs of those who cannot get the ‘real thing’. Because more than 70 percent of the university’s credit offerings are available for study either on- or off-campus, students exercise their choice of mode on a unit-by-unit basis and many study concurrently in both modes.

Problems encountered

Planning and managing distance education

Maintaining university commitment to a Centre for Off-campus (External) Studies in

the face of policies favouring devolution of managerial and financial responsibility

to individual schools of study.

Allocating systematic workload release time for academic staff engaged in the

development of a second (distance education) mode of learning resource materials.

Implementing quality assurance

Involving academic staff in dual mode teaching to adopt the view

that assuring a common curriculum regardless of study mode demands flexibility

not identity in delivery method or style.

Establishing a consistent house style across a large range (250 units per annum)

of courses despite a relatively small enrolment (average 30 units).

Gaining acceptance by staff of quality assurance as a standard course design

improvement procedure not as a punitive measure.

Using and integrating media in distance education

Deciding the point at which it may be assumed that a technological innovation

(audio or video cassette; personal computer; and e-mail)

has become sufficiently widely diffused to

justify its use as a compulsory component of course materials.

Getting to the point at which academic staff involved in dual mode teaching

recognise the value to themselves of modifying their face-to-face teaching

by integrating the use of guided independent learning resources

into the classroom mode.

Addressing staff development needs associated with integrating

new communication technologies into course design.

Instructional design and production

Justifying the annual update and production of print and audio resource materials

for all courses as a means of ensuring parity of curriculum content

both ‘on-campus’ and ‘off-campus’.

Maintaining a course development and production pattern spread

throughout the calendar year rather than bunched around the peaks and;

troughs of the standard academic calendar.

Developing and disseminating new instructional design techniques

for on-line publication.

Learner support systems

Gresham’s Law of Organisational Life -

‘Work drives out avoidable work regardless of its relative importance’

translated to the dual mode context, means getting academic staff to give;

equal attention to the external student’s mailed assignment or telephone call as to

the internal student’s knock on the door.

Providing realistic and consistent support for isolated students in a geographic

context that regularly places a student 200 kilometres from the next student and

up to 1,000 kilometres from another enrolment in the same unit of study.

The most important issue: Maintaining university commitment

In calling these issues ‘challenges’ rather than ‘problems’, I suggest that all except maintaining university commitment are, in fact, challenges that anyone setting up and running a Centre for Distance Education in a dual mode university will have to deal with if the enterprise is to succeed. Maintaining university commitment is of a different order in that it reflects the influence of broad economic rationalist thinking from beyond the arena of academic policy and university politics. For that reason, it must be the most important issue.

In dealing with all the other challenges, we argue for acceptance of the distance mode as a viable alternative and equivalent mode not as a poor substitute: in short, we claim it as part of the mainstream of university life. When times get tough and resources get short, those whom we have spent our time convincing are tempted to ‘hoist us with our own petard’.

If distance education is a mainstream function, it is argued, then why does the university need to spend significant resources maintaining a specialist organisational centre to handle the distance mode and the needs of its students separate from the mainstream university structures provided by the schools and the registry?

In these hard economic times, a highly professional centre for external or off-campus studies in the dual mode system can all too easily become a victim of its own success. But it is evident enough that success in coping with all the other challenges has always depended on the vigilance, persistence, and single-mindedness of professional distance educators working from a visible and well-recognised centre. So a challenge translates into a problem.