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Distance Teaching by Cyclops: an educational evaluation of the Open University's telewriting system
Author(s) -
McConnell David,
Sharples Mike
Publication year - 1983
Publication title -
british journal of educational technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.79
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1467-8535
pISSN - 0007-1013
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8535.1983.tb00454.x
Subject(s) - cyclops , open university , graphics , computer science , mathematics education , face (sociological concept) , distance education , psychology , sociology , computer graphics (images) , social science , oceanography , geology
The trend towards courses with low, widely scattered student populations in the Open University makes the provision of face‐to‐face tutorials difficult. Telephone tuition is being used as an alternative. One major drawback of this is the lack of a graphics facility for communicating writing and drawings. To help overcome this the Open University has developed a graphics telewriting terminal called Cyclops which allows for the live transmission of writing and drawing by telephone. This paper describes the Cyclops telewriting system and explains how it has been used in a two‐year trial project, funded by British Telecom, for tutoring Open University students in the East Midlands region of England. Preliminary findings from the evaluation of the trials are discussed and suggestions for setting up similar distance‐teaching systems are offered. The two‐year trial of Cyclops is proving that telewriting tutorials are both educationally effective and acceptable to a large number of students and tutors.