From R&D Project to Virtual Universities

Background

Four Norwegian higher educational institutions—the University Colleges at Agder, Stord/Haugesund, and Sør-Trøndelag, and the University in Trondheim (NTNU)—had all participated in a European collaborative project on open learning, that is, JITOL (Just-In-Time Open Learning, 1992-1994) under the Delta program of the European Community. Building on experiences from this and other related projects, representatives from the four institutions decided to propose a national experiment along the same principles. Support was granted from a governmental agency, SOFF, and NITOL (Norway-net with IT for Open Learning) was established in April 1994.

NITOL was in the beginning an open learning project for the training of students, teachers, IT professionals, and others. Research and development activities, particularly focusing on distribution of courses and learning material, required some “guinea pigs” to gain experience in the field. The project group therefore invited a group of around 30 students to participate in the experiment—and found that there was possibly a large potential for business, expanding the experimental group and perhaps demanding student fees for participation and examination.

Learning material was initially distributed through different electronic network systems, covering topics from informatics/computer science, educational applications of IT, and a few other subject areas, at introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels. The institutions collaborated in the development of goals and objectives, strategies, courses, course material, and evaluation tools for the project, as well as in the online contact with students.

The series of courses from the four cooperating institutions gave credits that could be part of degree programs. Central to the R&D project was the combination of several types of media and the development of methods for presentation, with emphasis on the use of IT and electronic networks. Hypertext and hypermedia were at the time under development, parallel to the project.

At the time, open learning (OL) was a frequently used phrase, indicating:

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  Open with regard to availability, independent of time, place/geography, economy/social situation

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  Open with respect to methodologies, like computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), project-based learning (PBL), inductive learning, discovery-based learning, problem solving, and the classic, academic lectures in the form of electronic “lessons.”

To incorporate experiences and traditions from distance education, the expression was frequently extended to open and distance learning (ODL), or open and distributed learning. In all cases the focus was meant to be on learning and the learner, not teaching and the provider.

Experiences from the initial part of the project, that is, pre-WWW existence, covered areas related to the learning process, such as:

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  The establishment of an open network making higher education available to students, groups, and individual participants from business, schools, administration, SMEs, and so forth;

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  Production of joint learning/training materials;

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  Distribution of educational materials through electronic networks;

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  Development of an extensive, dynamic, and creative electronic learning environment based on local and wide area electronic networks;

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  Development and application of assessment tools; and

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  Evaluation of open and distance learning/training.

Hard experiences were also gained in the field of technology, where networks were unstable, students had difficulties with downloading and decoding of formatted documents from news conferences, e-mails had different standards for attachments, and our particular set of Norwegian characters (æ, ø, å) caused extra problems in transfers of texts.