Virtual educational organisations

Washington State University and the Globewide Network Academy are exploring the conditions under which an educational enterprise can thrive in cyberspace. This work involves several levels. Rada (1997a) surveys courseware, virtual classrooms, and school information infrastructures. A virtual educational organisation is necessarily an intimate linkage among all three of these levels. Also, a delicate mapping among tools, people, and educational problems must be determined for an array of possibilities. Earlier work studied the relationship between such entities as a paper textbook and a hypertext — this was research at the courseware level. This study of courseware was compared with a study of how students interact with one another with the support of computer networks. These classroom studies focused in part on the nature of computer-mediated student-student and student-teacher communication (Warren & Rada, 1998) and included the administrative issues of efficiency in the classroom (Rada, to appear). By requiring students to make many small work submissions and to evaluate one another’s submissions, a manageable process was created which requires computer support. Each student transaction is recorded in a database. Semiautomated methods of quality control are implemented to monitor the transactions of students and to notify the teacher and students when abnormal patterns in student behaviour are manifested. In this way, peer-peer interaction can become a cornerstone of student feedback and the teacher can monitor selectively. The long-term interest is how the school can exploit the information superhighway so as to establish new market niches for education. A content analysis across many universities and disciplines of what they are doing on the Web (Rada et al., 1996), found that the only discernible pattern was that high technology disciplines were more inclined to use the Web in education than less technological disciplines. The lack of a pattern across institutional types was as surprising as the dominance of certain high technology disciplines was unsurprising. The explanation for the increased usage of the Web in high technology disciplines was that tools must fit into the work flow of those who are to use them. Current work combines engineering, theory-building and experimenting with the challenge of working with a virtual educational organisation. Washington State University led an effort to create a Virtual University and