Institutions in the United Kingdom seeking to diversify into distance learning, are keen to adopt Computer Mediated Communication, (CMC) to improve course delivery and facilitate collaborative learning through simulation of face to face meetings. They want to understand how best to integrate CMC into their courses. The Open University (OU) has taken teaching on-line to home based students very seriously and has found that the perceived benefits include: sharing of experience, knowledge and expertise; being a member of a community; having reassurance and support; facilitating on-line self help groups; and a feeling of using a modern medium, (see Wilson and Whitelock (1997)). As a result of many pilot projects making successful use of CMC (see Mason, (1989); Alexander, and Mason (1994)), this method of on-line teaching has been adopted wholeheartedly by course teams at the OU. In 1998 this means that at least 33,000 users will be registered on the First Class conferencing system. Some 1,500 of these users are tutors who are engaged in course related activities with approximately 25,000 students. The remainder of users are students without a course specific requirement, who still want to make use of the conferencing system.

The introduction of CMC to course presentation raises the expectations of those involved whether they are the course providers, tutors or students. This paper will report on how a CMC environment transformed the typical OU students practice of study. The emphasis will be on longitudinal data with respect to student ease or difficulty with their computer science course and investigate how they made use of the CMC environment to support their course work.

Before CMC could be adopted on a large scale at the OU, projects investigated best practice in how to proceed. One of the projects which has helped to influence current usage was M205-STILE ('Students' and Teachers' Integrated Learning Environment'). This project included four universities in the United Kingdom. The OU’s implementation used a CMC environment (in addition to the World Wide Web) with one hundred and ten students and nine tutors, Nation-wide and in Europe over a period of ten months in 1995. This analysis of the M205 - STILE project will highlight the problem areas on the course and whether the students found that CMC provided a source of help with these problems and hence encouraged them to stay on the course. CMC provided a new form of communication between students and tutors and we discuss how they adapted to it and took advantage of this new medium. We will go on to discuss how the system was useful when a study period became very intense ie before the exam.

In order to assess how the CMC environment changed students work patterns and whether it was a tool that afforded pedagogical benefits, a range of empirical measures were collected. These were taken in order to understand :

1. Problem areas during the course and whether CMC alleviated these difficulties,

2. How students took advantage of this new form of communication, and

3. How CMC helped during periods of intense study.

In order to collect relevant data pertinent to the above issues, four questionnaires were sent out on-line to the students at staged intervals throughout the course. Questions from three of the four questionnaires are analysed here. The first questionnaire was sent out on-line two months after the course start date. Of the 94 students still on-line, 66% responded. The second questionnaire was sent out on-line after six months, to the 58 students who were still using the system. Of these 84% responded. A questionnaire sent out on-line just before the end of the course (after nine months) to the 58 students who were still on-line, received a response rate of 83%. As would be expected, student usage of M205 _ STILE did drop with time, however students who left the system did not leave in droves but gradually trickled away. On average seven students left the system per month but 53% of the student participants were still on-line in September 1995, before their exam, see Wilson and Whitelock (1998a).

The students were asked about the types of problems they encountered as they proceeded through their computer science course. Not surprisingly the majority of students did not hit any problems at the start of the course, with 60% reporting that they found the course easy, see table 1. In fact students at this point were busy socialising on-line with their peers, as reported by Wilson and Whitelock (1996). As we would expect however their perception of problems on the course changed as they proceeded through the material. After six months 67% of the students reported finding the course moderately difficult while only 20% described it as easy, see table 1. Similar responses to the latter were received when we asked the same question nearer the end of the course. Looking at students difficulty with the course, we had an unexpected result with less students reporting difficulties midway and at the end of the course as compared to the beginning, see table 1. In fact the percentage finding difficulties with the course dropped from 18% at the start of the course to 12.5% at the end. It could be that the students found that the CMC environment supported their study and were able to make more use of it as they proceeded through the course. In fact students have stated that they would have abandoned the course if 'M205 - STILE' was not providing support for their study. Previous to the M205 - STILE presentation of the course, students had had to rely on either the telephone or Royal mail to describe their programming problems. With 'M205 - STILE' they felt they could see electronically whether other students were experiencing the same difficulties as themselves, see Wilson and Whitelock (1996).

Table 1 Problem areas on the computer science course.

The M205 - STILE environment enabled tutors and students to avail of electronic communication. Therefore it might be expected that students would use their on-line tutorial to ask their tutor for help. Approximately 1/3 (27%) of the students who responded confirmed that they had asked their tutor for help in their tutorial conference. What perhaps is more interesting is the fact that 72% of the students did not feel the need to contact their tutor for help. Perhaps this is related to how easy or difficult they were finding the course. Certainly three quarters of the students who found the course easy did not contact their tutor. But what is surprising is that more of those students who were finding the course moderate to difficult did not contact their tutor for help either, see table 2. More students asked their peers for help rather than their tutor. When asked, a higher proportion of students rated their on-line interactions with their tutors as more important than with other students. However when they were asked who helped them more with their learning a higher proportion said other students rather than their tutor, see Wilson and Whitelock (1998b). Although they gave more status to the feedback they received from their tutors where they were looking for approval, they did not want to expose their lack of knowledge to the tutor but only to their peers. This was a new development in communication for OU students who could normally only quiz each other at face to face tutorials or self help groups which not all students attend.

Table 2 Students who asked their tutor for help

The fact that more of the students who found the course moderate to difficult did not ask their tutor for help is an interesting finding. They may have been afraid of appearing foolish in front of their peers Personal email to their tutor may have worked better if this was the case. Perhaps they felt that they could not describe their difficulty in this medium. These students had not met each other nor their tutor before using the on-line environment and therefore their tutor may have seemed less approachable than in a face to face situation. If this was the case it would have been difficult to build up a rapport with their tutor. One wonders in fact if these students would have raised their query in a face to face session either but the specification of their problem using the textual nature of the CMC may have proved too difficult for them. Although the students opinions differed about whether they should contact their tutor or their peers for help, they were still able to use the environment to communicate. What is more important is that they did communicate and solved problems through the medium with the people they felt most comfortable with.

The vast majority of students responded that they were interested in using the M205 - STILE environment for their revision, see figure 1. If we take the categories 5, 4, and 3 together, we find that 67% of the students who responded anticipated using M205 - STILE for their revision. This is a high percentage of students considering that no extra material pertinent to revision was supplied. This suggests that the students felt that the environment itself created an atmosphere were they were able to revise with their peers, seek help from their tutor and use the search facility to locate messages relevant to their revision. In fact seventeen students ie 15% of the total students involved in the project left M205 - STILE for varying lengths of time during the year, but returned to use the system at a later date. Six of these students ie 5% who left the system in March and April, came back on-line in the period August to October 1995 when their exam was approaching, see Wilson and Whitelock (1998a).

Figure 1 Student interest in using M205 - STILE for their revision

One student who did not answer this question made the comment that because they were in the Royal Navy they were not able to avail of M205 - STILE to help with their revision. This comment of a lack of time was echoed by another student who rated the use of M205 - STILE for revision at ‘2’. This is not surprising since the use of the on-line system was in addition to the normal presentation of the course. A third student in this category commented that he was ‘not really interested’ because he liked to do his ‘own thing for revision’. He did suggest however that ‘a list of suggested revision topics would be useful’ in the M205 - STILE environment.

When we analysed how students rated the CMC environment to solve their revision problems we found students in the moderate range, ie with categories 5 and 4 taken together, that 61 % anticipated that M205 - STILE would help with their revision, see table 3.

Table 3 How the students rated the CMC for revision as against the problem areas of the course.

However when looking at the spread of responses between 5 and 1, in the easy and difficult categories of table 3, it was obvious that the students appeared indecisive about how M205 - STILE would help with their revision. Students difficulty with the course and ability to cope with the added technology is echoed by some of the tutors who said that those who were struggling with the course material ‘were also struggling to be able to use the system successfully’. This and other tutor comments suggest that even though these students were studying a computer science course they struggled to use the conferencing medium, see Wilson and Whitelock (1998c). Some 67% of students (see figure 1) however had reported that the M205 - STILE environment could facilitate their revision and all but 2% of these students had been finding the course moderately difficult.

At the start of the course 18% of the students reported finding difficult problems to solve in their course materials. this percentage dropped to 12.5% at the end of the course. There could be a number of reasons for this. For example some of these students may have left the course, but Wilson and Whitelock (1998d) reported that retention rates on the M205-STILE version of the course were almost identical to those for the traditional version of the course. Indeed some students reported that M205 - STILE helped them to remain on the course. Although smaller numbers of students contacted their tutor than might be expected particularly in the group experiencing the most difficulties, students were using the on-line facilities to socialise and also ask their peers for help rather than their tutor in some cases.

The M205 - STILE environment was constructed to facilitate student interaction in three different dimensions, these were the social, motivational and knowledge dimensions. Students did report using the environment in ways that can be accounted for, by this three dimensional system of analysis. For example students were very keen to use the on-line facilities to communicate with their peers and their tutor, they also anticipated using the system to help with their revision. Indeed some students who had stopped using the system earlier in the year came back on-line in time to revise for their exam. The CMC sustained and motivated students who would otherwise have been studying alone, through it’s facilitation of social contact. Students were able to use the on-line environment to overcome certain difficulties with the course content therefore it could be said that CMC offers the promise of playing an active role in the future of distance education.

Alexander, Gary, and Mason Robin (1994). 'Innovating at the OU: 'Resource-Based Collaborative Learning Online'. Open University CITE Report, paper No 195.

Mason, Robin (1989). Use of CoSy on DT200, 1989. Internal Open University CITE Report, Paper No. 99.

Wilson, Tina, & Whitelock, Denise (1996). 'Piloting a new approach; Making use of new technology to present a distance learning computer science course'. Association for Learning Technology Journal (ALT-J), Volume 4, Number 1.

Wilson , Tina & Whitelock, Denise, (1997). ‘Facilitation of on-line learning environments: what works when teaching distance learning computer science students’. Presented at the 2nd International Symposium, on Networked Learner Support, Sheffield, England, June 23rd-24th, 1997.

Wilson, Tina & Whitelock, Denise, (1998a). 'Monitoring the on-line behaviour of distance learning students’. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning JCAL, Vol. 14 pp 91 - 99.

Wilson, Tina & Whitelock, Denise, (1998b). ‘What are the perceived benefits of participating in a CMC for distance learning computer science students’. To be published in the Computers and Education Journal.

Wilson, Tina & Whitelock, Denise, (1998c) 'Facilitating electronic communication; Evaluating computer science tutors' and students' interaction using computer mediated communication at a distance learning University'. In eds Richard Cornell and Kathy Ingram report for ICEM entitled: "An International Survey of Distance Education and Training for Organisations: From Smoke Signals to Satellite III".

Wilson, Tina & Whitelock, Denise, (1998d). ‘Is it worth it? Outside influences which affected participation in a CMC environment created for distance learning computer science students’. Internal Open University CALRG report, paper no. 178.