The Open University of the United Kingdom

NKI, Norway

TecMinho, Portugal

The courses on the Internet: Surveys, Analyses, Evaluation and Recommendations (CISAER) project set out to demonstrate that:

This has been aptly demonstrated as the following findings show:

At 1.1.2000, the end of the CISAER project, there were about 1,000,000 courses on the internet, 30,000 which could be said to conform to a scientific definition of online education, with 17, 313 of these courses being listed on the most comprehensive portal, that of TeleEducation in New Brunswick, Canada, with many of these courses making didactic use of the World Wide Web.

The CISAER project accepts the position of Collis, of the University of Enschede, in the Netherlands, that the new field of training on the World Wide Web commenced in 1995. The CISAER project demonstrates that it was a mature field by 1998 with complete theoretical and practical structures, and a range of experts globally represented.

In 1998, the Open University of the United Kingdom reported that 50,000 of its students were online and that they sent 70, 000, 000 emails on mainly academic matters, and these were read 700,000,000 times.

Goldberg of the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada, the designer of the world's most visible kernel and the founder of WebCT, states that he commenced work on his kernel in 1995 and that by 5.1.2000, WebCT had 5.1 million student accounts, in more than 123,000 courses developed by 33,000 university faculty members, at over 1,100 institutions in 48 countries around the world.

CISCO Systems, one of the world's most influential and most authoritative multi-national telecommunications companies, in March 2000 predicted that more than half of all technical training, in European terms Vocational Education and Training (VET), the central theme of the Leonardo da Vinci programme, will be done by e-Learning by the year 2003.

In March 2000 Riverdeep, the Irish based e-Learning company, was floated on the Nasdaq Index in New York, with a floatation value of $1, 000,000,000.

This made the Irish schoolteacher, Pat McDonagh, one of Europe's richest industrialists with a personal holding of e 1,000,000,000.

E-learning has become big business and is now central to VET in the EU.

In press release DP: IP/00/234 in early 2000, Viviane Reding, the Commissioner for Education and Culture, launched an e-Learning initiative, which she said would enable Europeans to make up much of the ground on the United States.

The findings of the CISAER project make it completely clear that training on the World Wide Web is a mature field of education and training provision, globally represented, central to vocational education and training (VET), in the European Union (EU) today, and in which the European Union is seriously underrepresented.

E-Learning or electronic learning includes online learning, web-based training, virtual classrooms, digital collaboration, CBT and technology assisted distance learning. In one or other of these forms, it has now become an essential part of most corporate training and campus education programmes.

In Ireland e-Learning is represented by some of the world's leading players in the field including SmartForce, formerly CBT Systems; Global Knowledge, one of the largest CISCO-certified training partners and leading Microsoft-authorised technical education centres; EMC (Educational multi media corporation) who provide easy reference guides to today's most popular IT applications; E-Smart, the leading provider of soft skill e-Learning for corporate employees;. WBT systems, the leading kernel provider, presently challenging WebCT for world leadership in the field, and Riverdeep, the provider of e-Learning materials to the US K-12 school system. The market capitalisation of these Irish companies would be little less than 2,000,000,000 euros.

Chapter 1 of the CISAER final reports is entitled Survey of courses on the World Wide Web.

The CISAER survey of courses on the World Wide Web was begun in the first year of the project and the results were successfully disseminated, so that well before the project was finished, the CISAER findings were listed on two of the world's most important portals, that of TeleEducation, New Brunswick, Canada and that of the International Centre for Distance Learning of the Open University of the United Kingdom.

Chapter 1 of the CISAER final reports presents readers and policy makers with an indispensable tool for addressing the phenomenon of e-learning. It does this by providing a meta-survey of all surveys of courses on the World Wide Web, listing and analysing every single survey instrument so that planners and government officials can be certain that all the data available in all the surveys is available to them.

Chapter 2 of the final reports is titled Analysis of courses on the World Wide Web. It deals with types of provision classification of World Wide Web structures; server provision; kernel provision; listing of leading kernel providers; design of kernel; typical kernel solutions; buying a kernel system; running a system, and ends up with the query of Collis in her Telelearning in a digital world: the future of distance learning "is the World Wide Web the 'killer application' for distance learning worldwide?"

This analysis provides the reader and policy makers with authoritative definitions and analyses of vocational education and training on the World Wide Web

Chapter 3 is entitled Online Education: an international analysis of web-based education and strategic recommendations for decision makers.

This is a 137 page study, using the unique data of the CISAER project, which has already been accepted by the German Open University, Fern Universitat, for publication in its well known ZIFF-Papiere. This series is distributed free of charge to decision makers and researchers in distance learning and electronic learning worldwide. This major study is based on the work of the CISAER project in its first year.

In its first year, the CISAER project set up a methodology for surveying courses on the World Wide Web, which enabled it to identify global leaders in countries throughout the world who had advanced theoretical and practical knowledge of e-Learning. The CISAER project then set up a new methodology for interviewing these experts and carried out in-depth international interviews with them, mainly by long range telephone calls but in some cases by email and some cases face-to-face, to produce the unique CISAER data by experts in e-learning. Chapter 3 submits this data to professional analysis providing an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of training on the World Wide Web throughout the world.

Chapter 4 of the final report is entitled Analysis of courses and sites: an analysis of courses on the web.

This chapter takes the investigation further to an analysis of course materials and sites of virtual universities and training centres on the World Wide Web. The report highlights the difficulties of the CISAER type of analysis for the CISAER report because many of the institutions refuse access to their courses or sites, saying either, that the researchers have to pay the course fee to enter the course site, or that the site contains sensitive student interactive data, which the researchers will not be allowed to access.

The authors of this chapter present these limitations thus:

Here is an extract of some of the reasons (name of contact person/course provider omitted):

One of the reasons for not getting access to a course is the fact that course providers regards student privacy as an important theme. Other problems were typically that courses still were under preparation and would not be available until January/February 2000. Some recipients argued that the course they could offer would be in a language not spoken by the group members and therefore of no interest for us. For one of the courses, we were requested to pay the tuition fee to gain access in the same way as ordinary students.

Nevertheless, Chapter 4 contains in-depth analyses of selected courses on the World Wide Web and valuable information about the sites that it was possible for the researchers to visit.

Chapter 5 entitled The CISAER project and evaluation deals with educational evaluation, distance education evaluation and online education evaluation giving an extensive overview of educational evaluation and its application to distance and electronic education with balanced judgements and balanced authoritative evaluations on this new form of VET.

Chapter 6 takes the question of evaluation further and does a comparative evaluation of courses on the World Wide Web in North America and Northern Europe, especially the United Kingdom.

The chapter asks questions about the use of the web for higher education and is subtitled, Is Europe a serious player?

The conclusion of this chapter indicate the strengths and weaknesses of European readiness for using the web and presents the challenges for policy makers, institutions, and educators faced with the competition in this form of VET from North America, especially the United States of America.

Chapter 7 is entitled Evaluation of the use of the web for educational purposes in Southern Europe and Southern America.

This chapter, again, presents a comparative study between South America and Southern European countries and collects data that is not generally available from Southern Europe and Latin America. Again, the conclusions of this chapter are disturbing, showing a major deficit when the use of the web in education and training in Southern Europe is compared with progress made in South America.

Chapter 8 is entitled Evaluation of courses on the World Wide Web and presents a balanced evaluation of the World Wide Web as a sector of educational provision. It emphasises the need for evaluation because it is now clear that nationally and internationally recognised university degrees, college diplomas and training certificates, are already being offered by universities and by governments on the World Wide Web.

The chapter gives guidelines for the evaluation of the extensive coverage in the North American media of the advent of courses on the World Wide Web, dealing specifically with the syndication by Reuters of a report by Professor Jerald Schutte, from the University of California Northridge, that students do better on the World Wide Web than in conventional universities.

It presents, also, an evaluation of the academic excellence achieved by the Open University in the United Kingdom, distancing itself in the achievement of university excellence from more than a hundred face-to-face universities in the rest of the United Kingdom and doubtless from similar universities in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the rest of Europe.

The chapter continues with an evaluation of the WWW courseware evaluations by Boshier, the well known professor of adult education, from the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver and draws attention to some well-publicised and over-hyped collapses and failures of attempts to launch virtual universities. It draws attention to the decline of the influence of distance learning in Europe because of its failure to harness the technologies of the Electronic Revolution of the 1980s to distance learning, just at a time when e-learning has become a major global business.

So important did the organisers of the CISAER project, in their submission some years ago for approval to undertake the project with Leonardo da Vinci funding, consider the importance for European trainers and European training institutions to get up to speed in this sector of vocational education and training, that they proposed to include a course on how to put courses on the World Wide Web within the final products.

This course is provided as chapter 9 and is entitled How to put courses on the World Wide Web: a course for European trainers and training organisations. The course is divided into eight modules, which deal respectively with:

• an overview of education on the World Wide Web
• design and development of World Wide Web courses
• students, their needs and characteristics
• teaching methods and techniques for the World Wide Web
• teaching functions and facilitation on the World Wide Web
• assignments and assessments
• incentives and barriers for staff moving to the World Wide Web
• administration and student records on the World Wide Web.

Chapter 10 presents the recommendations of the CISAER project. These have been grouped under twenty headings, each with a brief explanation from which the reader is referred to the text, which justifies and underpins the recommendations. These recommendations are:

1. There can be little doubt that the World Wide Web is the most successful educational tool to have appeared in a long time. It combines and integrates text, audio and video with interaction amongst participants. It can be used on a global scale and is platform independent. While largely an asynchronous medium, it can also be used for synchronous events. It is not surprising therefore, that trainers, lecturers, distance education providers and teaching institutions at all levels are increasingly using the Web as a medium for delivery.
2. Training on the WWW at the start of 1999 was a mature well-developed sector of VET provision
3. Web-based education is best treated as a subset of distance education. The rules for training at a distance are well known and the CISAER enquiry shows that they are applicable mutatis mutandis to Web-based education. Web-based education is considered in this report as an electronic form of distance education.

The rules for the development of effective course materials for students studying at a distance are therefore applicable mutatis mutandis to web-based education.

The rules for the provision of student support services for students studying at a distance are therefore applicable mutatis mutandis to web-based education.

4. The CISAER enquiry has shown that web-based education is a sector of training provision that is of the greatest importance worldwide.
5. The CISAER enquiry has shown that web-based education is a sector of training provision that will be of central importance in the 21^st century.
6. The CISAER enquiry has shown that web-based education is a sector of training provision dominated by US university, government and corporate providers - with considerable achievements in Australia and Canada.
7. The CISAER enquiry has shown that VET in the European Union has a large backlog to recoup if it is to compete in this form of training provision with American providers.
8. The CISAER enquiry recommends that comprehensive funding be allocated by the European Union in Brussels, and by national governments, in an attempt not to be left behind in this vital VET sector.
9. The experimental nature of this field at the start of the project only 12 months ago, has been replaced by confidence, competence and maturity today, especially in America, Canada and Australia.
10. It is recommended that in the European Union the cost of telecommunications for access to the internet be evaluated from the aspect of its creating a bar to training on the www. For training purposes the rate of a simple local access call, at all times of the day for any length of access, needs to be introduced in all 15 member state.
11. that the European Commission provide funding for web migration projects (as the Sloan Foundation in North America has).
12. that these projects should include both subject specific developments and train-the-trainer initiatives.
13. that a workshop on European web-based teaching be held for cross fertilisation, dissemination and awareness-raising.
14. that a virtual network of leading edge web developers and teachers be set up to collect, research and disseminate best practice in online teaching.
15. that the CISAER web catalogue be extended to include more value-added information, links (e.g. to open courses, to support tools) and to online articles about web teaching.
16. To implement a global/local policy in the Education and Training Sector which considers on-line education as a sub-set of Distance Education, with the same rules. In particular, to develop a set of measures at local and global level enabling the field professional to take part in the emerging knowledge society ( to fill the existing gap between Europe and the US).

The recommendations are integral to the CISAER study and cannot be read separately. They must be studied in the context in which they are presented in the chapters which follow.

The final reports conclude with a revised version of the CISAER catalogue of courses on the WWW.

Desmond Keegan

Dublin

1.1.2000