Abstract

The European tradition in higher education is built on the authority of professors appointed to a chair undertaking research as well as teaching their students. This medieval structure of universities still operates, so that the university represents one of the few European institutions which can trace its roots back to the twelfth or thirteenth century. Lecturers and their students came together at real places at real times to undertake scholarship. These crucial conditions have determined universitas litterarum, the university. Over time this basic structure has developed a wide variety of institutional forms. The European sector of higher education consists of a complex of institutions operating within different academic traditions and different national policy guidelines for education. Organizational differences between institutions are considerable and reflect dissimilarities in staffing structures, student recruitment, course assessment, programme validation and even the very language of instruction. Add commercial and industrial organizations to the equation and the differences are compounded. In principle these fundamental conditions have to be considered when we are talking about collaboration in Europe. Collaborative projects and knowledge networks that fail to take into account the traditional self-image of universities as well as the fundamental differences in the institutional cultures of partner organizations are not very likely to get off the ground. When the potential of virtual learning environments is added, the traditional university system faces new challenges such as student-centred, personalized and flexible learning combined with inter-cultural approaches to provide adequate structures of transnational collaboration. All in all we are witnesses of developments towards a new quality of universitas litterarum, namely a step towards a new way of collaboration among European universities in which resources are shared, different ways of thinking about a topic are confronted, trans-national and comparative studies are supported and learners add a European dimension to their learning experiences. This paper examines the potential of the new learning environments - in particular in the area of the Humanities - in the light of a number of current projects [e.g. the Coimbra Humanities Model; the CEFES project etc.] utilizing European networks and considers the way that the application of new technology is beginning to blur the distinctions between traditional universities and distance education providers. It also offers an assessment of the pedagogical, professional and technical conditions required for the mainstreaming of collaboration in the university curriculum.

Collaborative Course Development

The notion of institutional collaboration between different educational providers in the university sector is inherently attractive. Pooling resources for the joint development, production or presentation of courses offers the prospect of enhancements in quality through the sharing of expertise and operational economies in the sharing of costs. Add a European context to the process and the benefits can be multiplied.

It was thinking along these lines which led to the creation, over a decade ago, of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU) and the formation, within this association, of a number of programme committees charged with the task of providing a European dimension in the university curriculum through the mechanisms of joint course development, transfer and exchange.

Ten years on these ambitious Europe-wide schemes have become tempered by the harsh realities of institutional practice. While there have been some small-scale successes – e.g., a programme in European law, a diploma in European business administration and, in the humanities, the appearance of What Is Europe?, the first jointly developed ODL course in European Studies to be offered on a pan-European basis -–we are still a long way from the goal of a distinctively European university curriculum.

Some of the tensions surrounding the issue of academic collaboration are nicely illustrated by the What Is Europe? project cited above. Under the aegis of the Humanities Programme Committee of the EADTU five institutions from Denmark, France, Germany, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom co-operated in the development of a course on European identity. Even though the five partners all belonged to the same association, the differences in respective methods of working, in the use of educational media, in the length and assessment of courses and in the structures for student support were so significant that it took more than a year to develop a mechanism for collaborative course development that was sufficiently attuned to the different institutional cultures within the partnership. This model – course agenda-setting at an inter-institutional level; decentralization of responsibilities for constituent modules; pooling of separate institutional contributions to form a master-set of course materials; production in different formats; and autonomy in the presentation of the finished product – has been elaborated elsewhere (Bang, Baumeister and Wilson, 1995). While it offers an essentially practical approach to the task of joint course construction the model has not been widely deployed by other practitioners. More to the point, the course itself, which was awarded the Daimler Benz prize in 1994 for its contribution to the integration of European education systems; which served as an agenda for an international conference on European Studies in 1995 attended by almost one hundred academics from all parts of Europe (Baumeister 1995); and which is highly regarded by students for the way it enhances their understanding of contemporary Europe (Chambers and Winck, 1996; Clennell and Proctor, 1997) has made little headway into curriculum provision in the traditional university sector in Europe, though the four course texts published by Routledge in 1995 have made their way onto European Studies reading lists for undergraduate students.

Prima facie it might be expected that a ready-made course on European identity drawing on different academic traditions and different national perspectives and itself the subject of a highly satisfactory peer group review would prove an attractive proposition for hard-pressed academics in the humanities and social sciences coping with the demands of ever-increasing student numbers and the pressures of time for their own research output. Such expectations have not been realized.

The reception of the What Is Europe? course – and by extension the out-put of other collaborative projects - within traditional universities reflects an understandable scepticism about the utilization of teaching materials developed in an extra-institutional context. Apart from the reluctance of individual academics to relinquish control of their own lecture and seminar programmes there is the question of accommodating established teaching structures to new arrangements, particularly when this involves the deployment of open and distance learning materials in conventional teaching situations. Rigidities of this kind often impede experimentation even in cases where the additional costs of buying in materials can be borne by departmental budgets.

New teaching initiatives need to work with and not against the grain of established practice. As the HUMANITIES project developed by the Coimbra Group demonstrates, the closer that ODL methodologies and new technology can mesh with standard mainstream teaching provision the greater their chance of success. (SCIENTER ed. 1998, pp.12-16) Lectures and seminars are the dominant teaching instruments in universities and if new developments such as those involving the application of new technologies are seen as a means of challenging rather than supporting existing arrangements then resistance will be the order of the day.

The use of e-mail and computer conferencing for educational purposes is a case in point and again this can be illustrated from the experiences derived from the What Is Europe? project. This course was developed in the early 90s before electronic exchange began to open up new possibilities in the area of course collaboration. Since then the widespread use of new technology has begun to shift the emphasis from joint course development and production for separate institutional groups towards trans-national teaching arrangements involving students and tutors from different institutions. At least these are the conclusions being drawn on the basis of the CEFES project.

Creating a European Forum

CEFES is an acronym for Creating a European Forum in European Studies. Building on the platform of the What Is Europe? course it uses computer conferencing to provide a series of Europe-wide seminars in European Studies that can be geared to mainstream teaching provision in associated institutions. The context, involving academic discourse in seminar situations, is traditional; the delivery mechanism, utilizing computer conferencing and the Web, is new.

The CEFES project is grounded on the following assumptions:

that European Studies, because of the nature of its subject matter, can be enriched by trans-national exchanges between students and tutors

that new technology can be successfully deployed in facilitating such trans-national exchanges providing there is an awareness of cultural differences in approaches to teaching and learning and a differentiated learning environment is constructed

that flexibility is crucial in order for the partner institutions to ensure that the European seminars can be structured within existing courses/programmes

that tutors involved in promoting trans-national and inter-cultural dialogue by means of new technologies would benefit from a skills-based training programme.

In essence new technology can facilitate academic discourse between students and tutors of different institutions providing that the procedures are integrated within established structures and frameworks.

Learning Environment

Based on the FirstClass^®-software a web-based virtual learning environment has been established for the CEFES seminars with the following main goals:

- to facilitate on-line communication between all participants in the academic discourse (mainly computer mediated conferencing, but also individual e-mailing),

to allow the integration of other media into the conference exchange (texts and documents, web sites, pictures and graphics), with the intention, eventually, of harnessing the full power of new technologies for bringing new qualities into the academic discourse,

- to provide clear orientation for students and academics to enable both groups to follow the discussions and to contribute to them,

- to support the administration of the project.

A tested and uncomplicated technical platform was considered vital for the support of the kind of academic discourse envisaged.

At the outset, the partners opted for a clearly structured virtual learning environment to facilitate the transition of students from face-to-face seminars to CMC.

Six CCs have been established (sometimes with sub-folders):

(1) National CCs for students and tutors to facilitate internal discussion/orientation

(2) European Forum CC(the European virtual seminar)

(3) International CC for tutors to exchange teaching experiences

(4) CC for the evaluation team

(5) CC for the steering committee

(6) CC for students (chat facility)

Content of the CEFES Seminars

Academic discourse within CEFES has focused on European identities.

In the first year (1997-98) three seminars were offered, viz:

- The Identity of Europe: A Historical Phenomenon

- The Europe of Identities: A Political Phenomenon

- Globalisation and European Identity

The seminars have a common structure. After brief general information on CEFES and its virtual learning environment, the objectives, themes/questions and student tasks are introduced. A list of obligatory and optional readings as well as useful URLs completes the structure. In particular the reading list includes texts from the ODL-course "What is Europe?". In this way CEFES is directly contributing to the further development of this existing curriculum - a welcome by-product.

Each sequence lasts for eight weeks; four of these constitute a European Forum whilst the participating institutions run a national conference of (as a rule) three weeks in advance for preparation, reading etc. and one week for evaluation afterwards (as far as the institutions' study schedules allow).

The content of the seminars revolves around the term "Identity" and its different implications for Europe. This gives the sequences a coherence which enhances the flexibility of the whole model, namely, to offer each sequence separately but also as a series of related seminars. The CEFES formula sketched above is also flexible enough to respond to new requirements from within the partnership. Thus in the second year of presentation (1998-99) the ordering of the sequences has been changed and new teaching personnel introduced.

Programme for tutors' professional development

Operating as a tutor in an inter-institutional, electronic environment requires a distinctive set of skills. It is therefore not surprising that a programme for the professional development of tutors is an integral part of the whole project. The project offers face-to-face seminars for tutors as well as on-line training.

Major topics for the seminars are:

- reports on experiences with on-line learning in the participating European countries

- teaching and learning attitudes in the participating European countries

- introduction of the software capabilities

the Internet as a resource for teaching/learning material

conferencing techniques

- practical exercises – protocols and procedures for generating on-line discussion

- discussion of experiences within the project.

Apart from the upgrading of tutor's on-line skills, the seminars also provide an opportunity for participating tutors to build working relationships which facilitate the ensuing on-line exchanges.

Interim Evaluation

At the time of writing the CEFES seminars are part way into their second year of presentation and evaluation is on-going. (Chambers and Winck, 1998) Inevitably in an experimental project there have been hiccups. There have been a number of technical difficulties with the installation of the software, particularly in the first year. Some students whose first language is not English have been inhibited about participating in the European Forum. There are problems in recognizing CEFES seminar work for credit purposes. However on the basis of an interim evaluation of the first presentation in 1997-98 it is worth stressing two findings.

1. Communication among students and tutors in different European countries via the new electronic technologies is not only feasible but is also a highly appropriate teaching/learning strategy to adopt in the field of European Studies.

2. Participating students believe that such a European Forum, in enabling them to expose their knowledge and beliefs to those in other national/cultural groups, and to challenge one another, has the potential to transform their understanding of the subject.

Further Perspectives

In a wider perspective the CEFES model, understood as a virtual seminar model, is little by little changing European universities in a more radical way than ambitious centralised ideas for distinctively European university curricula or mega-institutions.

Virtual seminars or discussion fora respect the close integration of education in everyday life and take advantages of these differences in local/national cultures by making the differences the starting point for exchange of ideas and discussion of viewpoints. Open dialogue is a challenge to chauvinism and narrowness and carries the best of the old qualities from universitas litterarum into the digital age. New technologies reanimate the old university tradition in which dialogue is the proper way to acquire knowledge.

By offering a Euro-wide dialogue between students and teachers/tutors from different European universities studying similar topics on relevant issues in a cross-cultural European perspective, the model enhances trans-learning outcomes.

As an essential feature the virtual seminar model is based on joint collaboration on equal terms among European academics and institutions, rather than on export of already produced courses or course units. The autonomy of the institutions and the characteristics of national curricula are respected, but also challenged in academic discussions.

Over the years collaboration among institutions may extend into sharing of educational materials and academic expertise. But this should be done in an open and flexible way, leaving each participating institution with the option to adapt the course materials for local use by adding to or selecting from a common resource bank. On a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural basis academics could, within their fields of expertise, develop new learning materials in dialogue with each other. They do not have to agree, but they should disagree in a discursive way to the benefit of the students/learners.

Each institution should still apply its own evaluation standards and examination formats. Further collaboration in this respect is an institutional policy issue to be developed over the years.

In this way the collaborating institutions may in the future create virtual departments – or even virtual faculties – sharing resources and expertise and adding a European dimension to national curricula.

References

Bang J, Baumeister H-P and Wilson K (1995) ‘Models for joint course and curriculum development: the ‘What Is Europe?’ experience in D Sewart (ed.) One World Many Voices: Quality in Open and Distance Learning, The UK Open University/International Council for Distance Education, Milton Keynes, vol. 1, pps 485-488

Baumeister H-P, ed. (1996), What Is Europe? – Revisited: New Contexts for European Studies, International Conference, Warsaw 29/30 September 1995. Conference Report, Tübingen, 1996

Chambers E A and Winck M (1996) Same Difference? Experience of a European Distance Education Course in Two Cultures, Tübingen: Deutsches Institut für fernstudienforschung

Chambers E A and Winck M (1998) Evaluation of Trans-national Telematic Teaching and Learning: The CEFES Project, in Universities in a Digital Era: Transformation, Innovation and Tradition eds Szücs A and Wagner A. Proceedings of the 1998 EDEN Conference Vol 1, pp 104-08

Clennell S, and Proctor P, eds, (1997), Studying Europe: Perception and Experience of a Group of Adult Students, The Open University

SCIENTER, ed (1998), Research Perspectives on Open Distance Learning: Collection of Research Papers from the Four Projects supported by the EU Joint Action on Open Distance Learning, Bologna
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Note: The partners in the CEFES Project are:

Danish Association of Open Universities/DAOU, DK

Deutsches Institut für Fernstudienforschung/DIFF, D (co-ordinating institution)

The Open University/OU, UK

Universidade Aberta/ UA, P

Universidad Nacional de Educación/UNED, E

University of Surrey/UoS, UK