This review was published in Headlines No. 3, July 2004 - a Newsletter distributed by the European Association for Distance Learning. The review is made available online with permission from the editor and the author.
Online Education. Learning management systems.
By Morten Flate Paulsen with contributions concerning online education in Denmark and Sweden by Soren Nipper and Carl Holmberg. www.studymentor.com
www.nkiforlaget.no
This a very interesting and a very unusual book. It is available on the Net and in print. It contains a series of scholarly chapters on various aspects of online learning as well nine short personal comments by the book author and three other writers, one of whom is Torstein Rekkedal, the well-known Norwegian distance-education specialist. The other two are Line Fjellvaer and Bjorn Helgeby. There are also two forewords (by Erwin Wagner of Hildesheim University and Ingeborg Bo of the Norwegian Association for Distance Education, past and present Presidents of EDEN) as well as a preface by the author, Morten Flate Paulsen, and informative chapters on Danish and Swedish online education, the former by Soren Nipper, the latter by Carl Holmberg, and also a final chapter by Dominique Abrioux, the President of distance-teaching Athabasca University in Canada.
It is evidently the author’s intention that those using the electronic version should read selectively, i.e. choose parts of particular interest and make use of web links indicated. Unfortunately the online text is so small in its original form as to be almost illegible; when magnified, only part of a page is visible on the screen. For selective reading and printing of selected pages the electronic version is nevertheless practical. Much up-to-date information on e-learning is collected and presented. This includes reports on principles and practices applied by a great number of universities, schools and commercial organisations. After an illuminating discussion of terminology, theory, methods, functions and techniques, a chapter is devoted to international Web-based education, strategic recommendations for decision makers and fairly detailed reports on European experiences, followed by a critical analysis of online education in the Nordic countries including a comparative study of Scandinavian and Australian support systems. The work done in the field during the last two decades by NKI, the organisation where Paulsen himself works, is given a chapter of its own, testifying to the high quality and advanced approaches characterising it. Today’s trends and plans for improvements and the author’s views on future online education are developed at the end of the book, which finishes with a ’Canadian Postscript’ by Dominique Abrioux.
The author makes a clear distinction between online learning and e-learning, in the latter
of which ’communication with real people may or may not be included’ but learning content rather than communication is in focus, whereas online learning is defined along the lines of Keegan’s well-known description of distance education with the specifying characteristics ´the use of a computer network to present or distribute some educational content’ and ’the provision of two-way communication via a computer network so that students may benefit from communication with each other, teachers and staff’ (p. 25). This makes it clear that online teaching and learning represent distance education.
A long series of terms and abbreviations are presented and interpreted in a special chapter
Ironically enough, the abbreviation LMS (learning management system), used already in
one of the forewords and then in the introduction, is not explained until p. 30.
A theory of ’cooperative freedom’ is presented. It is based on the possibility to combine ’freedom for the individual with group cooperation’ (p. 43) and causes the author to analyse the concepts ’freedom of time´, freedom of space´, ’freedom of pace’, ’freedom of medium’, ’freedom of access’ and ’freedom of content’.
The book includes a thorough discussion of online teaching methods, by which the author
primarily means the one-to-one, the one-to-many and the many-to-many approaches probably first identified by Harasim (1989). It presents online teaching devices, by which media and CMC devices such as information retrieval, e-mail and computer conferencing systems are meant, and a number of teaching techniques, all serving the Harasim functions.
A very detailed description of current practices in online learning with data about a great number of systems available and applied is integrated with the discussions referred to, which makes the book a very practical work of reference. These (with web addresses) represent North American, European and other commercial initiatives as well as no less than thirty-five LMS systems created by individual teaching organisations.
Much attention is paid to possible improvements of LMS systems, and Paulsen also contributes a personal view on the future of online education, discussing such things as trends towards standardisation, systems integration, bandwidth, globalisation and mobile learning.
While all imaginable applications of online learning are looked into, the present reviewer would have liked special stress to have been given to asynchronous conferencing as an extremely useful procedure in distance education. One of the very few desirable book references that is missing concerns this. Reflections on teaching and learning in an online master program, edited by Ulrich Bernath and Eugene Rubin (Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Universität Oldenburg 2003) would have been worth mentioning as reporting on the practice of handling the possibilities and problems of asynchronous conferencing.
From what has been said it is evident that this book is not only of great interest but also a kind of thesaurus of information on online education of very great value to distance educators and others who are interested in the status of online education today. Full lists of references and of online-education journals included in the book further contribute to this practical usefulness. While everything concerned with online learning is up to date, the references to general distance education, although perfectly to the point, are somewhat old. Thus both Otto Peters and the present reviewer are represented by writings from the 1980s rather than by later relevant books and articles.
Morten Flate Paulsen’s Online Education is an extremely useful book. Readers may have
critical opinions on the editing, perhaps adapted more to the electronic presentation than to
traditional book reading, but there can be no doubt that with its wealth of information it is
a most valuable handbook.
Börje Holmberg
