HONG KONG COUNCIL FOR ACADEMIC ACCREDITATION
NEW MILLENNIUM: QUALITY AND INNOVATIONS IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Hong Kong
5 December 2000
TOWARDS THE GLOBAL E-UNIVERSITY: QUALITY OR MEDIOCRITY?
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor, The Open University, UK
President, The United States Open University
Introduction
It is a pleasure to be with you in Hong Kong for this important conference. I have been coming to Hong Kong for almost twenty years on business related to higher education. At the time of my first visit I was vice-rector of Canada’s Concordia University and came here to meet some of our many Hong Kong alumni. At that time I had my first contact with Shue Yan College and its remarkable leaders, Dr Henry Hu and his wife Dr Chung. Later, as president of Laurentian University I came again as a Canadian member of the Council of the Hong Kong Open Learning. I was here in 1989 when HKOLI launched its first prospectus and the queues of people who came to get copies stretched around a whole block.
Then, when I moved to the UK to be vice-chancellor of the Open University I helped to nurture the important link between that institution and the HKOLI. Later in the 1990s I again joined the Council of HKOLI and experienced the satisfying moment in 1997 when it was accorded university status. From that same year I also have excellent memories of an outstanding conference on the future of universities hosted by the City University of Hong Kong at the time of the reversion of sovereignty. It is very good to be here again.
I can think of no better place than Hong Kong for a conference on New Millennium: Quality and Innovations in Higher Education. Hong Kong has historically combined a remarkable ability to innovate with a strong framework for quality assurance. Over the years, seeing Hong Kong as flagship for the principle of free markets, institutions from all over the world, good, bad and indifferent, have come here to offer courses and you have had to come to terms with that phenomenon and protect your citizens from unscrupulous and disreputable providers.
Your home-grown institutions have been remarkable for their diversity. From the University of Hong Kong, through the Chinese University of Hong Kong to the newer University of Science and Technology and the Hong Kong Open University, each institution has its niche. Your institutions are very different in style and mission and in the way they have drawn on the public purse. I am very proud to be associated with the Hong Kong Open University, which is now almost entirely supported by fees and which, in recent years, has won a succession of international awards for the excellence of its work.
This is therefore, an ideal environment to discuss quality and innovation in higher education in this new millennium.
Scope of this paper
I have taken as my title Towards the global e-university: quality or mediocrity? In these remarks I shall focus on three trends that seem to me significant.
The first, obviously, is the phenomenon of e-learning that I see as a particular manifestation of the growth of distance learning and the use of the new knowledge media for educational purposes. The second is the development of new organisational and constitutional structures and arrangements for higher education and in particular, the emergence of a group of new for-profit and corporate universities. The third is the notion of the global university, an institution that takes its teaching to other countries around the world instead of receiving students from around the world on the campus in its home country.
I shall ask what contribution these trends seem likely to make to higher education around the world and whether there are things we can do to see that these contributions reinforce quality rather than mediocrity. My method will be to start from a notable innovation in higher education in the last century that has already had to come to grips with these three trends in different ways.
That innovation is the Open University of the UK. Some have hailed it as the most significant innovation in higher education of the second half of the 20th century. Certainly it has had a major influence on developments around the world, not least in the creation of open universities in many countries, including here in China. Five years ago I made a study of the largest of these open universities for my book Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education. I found then that twelve institutions, each enrolling more than 100,000 students, accounted for nearly three million students between them. That number is even bigger now.
However, today I am not going to engage in a comparative study of open universities. I shall focus on one open university that I know well, the Open University of the UK – which I shall simply call the Open University or the OU meaning no disrespect to the many other national open universities. In relation to the OU I shall ask three questions.
First, how has the OU engaged with the e-world and what can other universities learn from that? What constitutes quality in e-learning and how do you deliver it?
Second, what impact has the development of for-profit and corporate universities had on the OU? Has it changed the way we fund and manage our activities?
Third, does the OU claim to be, or intend to be, a global university? What does it mean to be global university anyway and are there alternative approaches to becoming international?
As I explore these themes I will try to summarise my conclusions in the form of a series of propositions related to your theme of quality and innovations.
The Open University today
Before examining the OU from these three perspectives it will be useful to give a summary description of the institution. I shall argue later that an important predictor of quality is the mission of an institution. So what was the Open University set up to do and how far has it achieved it? How is its quality viewed? It was hailed as an innovation at its birth. Has it managed to maintain a capacity for innovation?
Mission
The Open University was set up in the 1960s for a number of reasons. Harold Wilson, its political founder, had three aims. He wanted to open up university study to the many adults who had not been able to access the restricted university system in the UK of those days. As an academic himself he also wanted to open up the work of the university to public view. This led him to stress the importance of TV and radio broadcasting as a tool for the new university. Indeed, he first called it the University of the Air, believing that television in particular was far too important a medium to be left to the entertainers.
The OU planning committee that implemented Wilson’s idea changed its name to the Open University to reflect the end rather than the means. It also insisted that, although the institution might work in new ways, its quality would be as good as the best universities in the land.
All these aims were brought together in the speech that the first Chancellor, Lord Crowther, made at the OU’s inauguration in 1969. The first human landing on the moon has occurred the previous week so the climate favoured innovation and daring. By declaring that the Open University would be open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas, Crowther gave the institution a mission statement that inspires it to this day.
Performance
How far has it fulfilled this mission? The scorecard looks good. The fragile and politically controversial project of the early days has become the largest university in the UK with some 180,000 students in award-bearing programmes this year and another 130,000 people studying courses without formal assessment. Moreover, delivery on the mission of openness to people is not just quantitative. The profile of the student body comes closer than the average of the other UK universities to reflecting the profile of the adult population as a whole in terms of age, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic background and disability.
The ambition of being open as to places of study at first meant UK-wide coverage. Very quickly however, the OU found that it had a mobile student body and agreed to try to serve those people who, having first registered in the UK, then found themselves living overseas. I shall come back later, in discussing the concept of the global university, to describe how the OU came to have 30,000 students studying its courses outside the UK this year.
For the OU to reach its distributed student body successfully, being open to methods clearly had to be a requirement, rather than just an intention. It quickly captured the imagination of the public by broadcasting programmes related to its courses on TV and radio. Although these broadcasts were never more than a tiny component of the study regime for the students, the idea that the OU’s teaching system is based on television remains widespread among the general public. I shall describe later how one aspect of the OU’s use of media is that there are now 110,000 degree-credit students online at home.
The goal of being open as to ideas expresses both the OU’s commitment to conduct research in the disciplines that it teaches, as well as the determination to be open to new ways of fulfilling its mission. After a slow start in the 1970s, as the OU focused on developing its teaching programmes, research has grown steadily and the University is now in the top third of UK universities for the extent and quality of its research.
In implementing its mission successfully the OU has had a major impact on the educational profile of the UK. It has over 90% name recognition amongst the population, with one in four adults knowing someone who is or has been an OU student. Since most OU students tell a good story about their experience the University enjoys a good press. Since its creation the OU has awarded over 250,000 degrees and its graduates are now found everywhere.
Perceptions
How is the OU judged by the academic profession and by the guardians of quality in higher education? Surprisingly perhaps, the first group of stakeholders to acknowledge the high quality of the OU’s academic work, right from the start, were academics in other universities. This was because the OU made extensive use of such people as course assessors, external examiners and part-time tutors. The tutors in particular, who number 8,000 today, are a crucial part of the OU learning system. Many of them take the methods and materials that they use in their OU work back into the institutions where they have their full-time appointments.
This enthusiastic acceptance by the wider academic community was particularly helpful during the first twenty years of the OU’s existence because during this time it was kept outside the funding and regulatory framework that governed the other universities. In those two decades the OU was funded directly by the UK’s government’s Department of Education and Science, supposedly to protect this tender new growth from predatory behaviour by the other institutions. However, by the early 1990s this protection had long outlived its usefulness. The OU was by then the UK’s largest university and in 1992 it was integrated into the new funding framework that was set up for all universities.
Moving into the national funding framework was helpful in two ways. First, the OU was able to compete with all other universities for public funds according to clear ground rules. Prior to joining this framework, government ministers had to use their discretion about translating the policies of the bodies that funded the other universities into decisions about the annual grant for the OU. This became progressively more difficult as the OU grew in size.
Quality
The second beneficial impact of joining the national framework was that the OU became subject to the same quality assurance and quality assessment processes as all other UK universities. This is enormously helpful because it allows comparisons to be made. I shall not go into detail about the UK quality assurance processes because many of you will be broadly aware of them. Suffice it to say that UK quality assessment has three components.
The first is quality audit, which as its name implies, is simply an audit of all the processes that have a bearing on the quality of the provision and output of the university. The OU has been through this process three times. Each report was useful in vindicating large areas of our organisational culture and pointing up some issues that needed closer attention. Each successive report did seem less useful than the last, but I suppose it is inevitable that repetition of these audit processes produces diminishing returns since you are working over known territory.
The second quality test is the Research Assessment exercise, the RAE. This divides the universe of knowledge into about 70 areas and sends in a team of peers to judge the quality of a university’s research in those areas where it is active. Scores are given by subject and by institution and public funds for curiosity-oriented research flow as a result.
This process was and is very beneficial for the Open University. Its first vice-chancellor, Walter Perry, had determined at the start that the OU would be a research university. However, the grant from the government did not include a research element and he had to tax other income in order to support research.
The 1992 Research Assessment Exercise allowed the OU to compare itself to other universities in an objective way for the first time. We were enormously encouraged to find ourselves about one third of the way down the table of research quality and quantity and well within the group of universities that had for years been receiving funds explicitly earmarked for research. You could see the OU staff walking taller the day those results were announced. Another RAE was conducted in 1996 when we rose a few places to 28th out of a hundred and we are busy preparing for the 2001 RAE where we hope to do better again.
The third dimension of quality assessment is teaching. If research assessment has been very beneficial to the OU, teaching quality assessment has been very, very beneficial. The process is that the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education picks a number of subjects each year and sends teams in to each university that offers them to assess how well they teach each subject. In the present manifestation of the process the team has to allocate up to four points in each of six areas:
That means you can score up to 24 points in each subject and the UK press, which takes a close interest in all this, has decided that 22/24 or better means that the teaching of that subject is excellent. Here are the results for the Open University. Out of 18 subjects that have been assessed we have been judged excellent in 12 of them. I particularly ask you to note that several of our excellent subjects, like General Engineering, Music and Earth Sciences, are subjects with a strong practical component.
For reasons that I don’t understand, since people allege that the UK taxpayer is spending about $400 million per year to get this data, we are not meant to use these results in a comparative way. However, the press ignores that and who am I to contest the freedom of the press? The Daily Telegraph simply ranks universities according to the proportion of its assessed subjects that have attracted an excellent ranking. Here is that newspaper’s league table for the year 2000. You can see that the OU is in tenth place keeping good company.
My final comment on these results is to observe that you get some interesting results when you combine quality and quantity. Take the results for General Engineering. Eight universities received excellent rankings, with the OU at the top. The seven others together have 4,687 full-time equivalent students enrolled in this subject. The OU has 4,331. So you have the interesting result that 48% of all students studying excellent-rated General Engineering courses in the UK are at the Open University. You get similar results in other disciplines. In Music the OU accounts for 65% of all excellently taught English students, in Geology 62%, in Social Policy 54%, in Chemistry 42% and in Business 32%.
I warned you that I would punctuate this address with a series of propositions on quality and innovation. Here is the first. It is that if you are innovating in higher education it is very important to be able to compare your performance on key academic indicators with other universities.
I draw that conclusion because universities are, rightly, slowly changing institutions with rather stable academic value systems. Any innovation will break away from tradition in various ways – that is the purpose of innovation. However, that is all the more reason to be clear about how well the innovative institution stacks up in comparative quality judgements in research and teaching. It is much to the credit of the UK Quality Assurance Agency that it has created a system that allows such judgements to be made across a wide variety of institutions – even though it would prefer that we keep the results a secret.
That concludes my basic summary of the achievements of the Open University. It is a 20th century innovation that has been extremely successful at fulfilling its mission. It has made massive innovations in the delivery of higher education without any sacrifice of academic quality, as its rankings in the league tables of research excellence and teaching excellence show. But where does it stand in relation to the three trends that I flagged earlier, e-learning, higher education for profit and the global university?
e-University or o-University?
First, where does the OU stand in relation to the e-world? It is important to understand that the OU’s use of learning media has evolved steadily since its early days. For thirty years each new manifestation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has been examined and experimented with to see whether it could be used at scale to add value to the OU’s learning system. Thus some students were using e-mail two decades ago.
An important milestone occurred in 1988 when a new course, DT200 Introduction to Information Technology, used computer mediated conferencing on the CoSy system which some of you may remember. That course enrolled 1,000 students a year for four years and showed that electronic communication was a powerful learning tool. Things grew from there and today there are 110,000 OU students using electronic conferencing in some 180 courses.
There are about 16,000 conferences going at any one time, 2,000 of which are organised by the OU Student Association and moderated by the students themselves. So there are 2,000 student moderators in addition to the e-moderation done on the academic conferences by our associate lecturer staff.
This all amounts to a traffic of about 50,000 connections being made each day involving 7,000 users who send 20,000 messages and read 150,000 messages. By operating at this scale we been able to do pioneering research on computer mediated conferencing as a tool for teaching and learning. Much of this is summarised in a new book by my colleague Dr Gilly Salmon: E-moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online.
The vast majority of the electronic conferencing I have described is done asynchronously using text messages and simple attachments. There are also more than a thousand students using a synchronous conferencing system that we have developed called Lyceum. This enables students to interact over the web in full-duplex audio with a dynamic onscreen whiteboard, concept mapper and image grabber.
An example of its use is the MBA course B823 Managing Knowledge that enrols nearly 1,000 students spread around the world. Students take part in structured activities in groups of three or four and also in tutorials with an e-moderator and up to twelve students. We also use this system in our foreign language courses where students are very enthusiastic about how it helps them to speak the language.
Conferencing is not the OU’s only application of modern interactive media in teaching. Sets of sophisticated CD-ROMs have been produced for a number of high enrolment courses and are very popular with students, who say, in particular, that they learn more efficiently from them. The University has always tried to use media in a balanced way and to start from the needs of the students themselves. The OU assumes that students need active learning that is efficient and enjoyable in a supportive environment.
That means, of course, using the web for student support and administration as well as teaching. There again the figures show that the OU community is an active online community. The OU website receives 300,000 hits per month and, interestingly, the Arts Faculty website was receiving three times as many hits as that of the Science Faculty when I last saw the figures. In two years the OU’s online library has gone from 1,000 to 10,000 active users who are making 30,000 successful requests for online resources every month.
Students particularly like doing administrative transactions online. Each week some 20,000 students check their student record – one, who must want a lot of reassurance, has checked his record 100 times since we introduced the service last year. 6,000 students are reserving courses online every month and the student guidance website, which has an extraordinarily good press from students, gets 70,000 page hits per week.
You will understand from all this that the Open University is well down the road to becoming an e-university in terms of the volume, sophistication and success of its use of online and digital technologies. We have gained academic advantage from the use of these technologies.
So what are the lessons that we have learned so far? Here some more propositions. If you want a fuller account of this I refer you to a speech given recently by my colleague Professor Diana Laurillard, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Learning Technologies and Teaching at the OU and our key strategist and manager in this area.
Proposition two is that students appreciate active e-learning if they are well supported.
Proposition three is that the Open University community has shown itself very responsive to e-services when they are offered.
Proposition three and a half is that, in terms of learning media, elements of the course that are compulsory are much more popular than elements that are left optional. In other words, don’t make the ICT components footnotes in the course. Go the whole way and integrate them into the work that all students have to do.
Proposition four is that developing information and communication technologies is very labour intensive. There is a grave danger of overloading both staff and students when courses are migrated to ICT formats
This means that every effort must be made to control costs, to share knowledge, to use templates and shells, and generally to ensure that each new development builds on what has gone before.
That can be expressed as proposition five: there must be continual process improvement.
Proposition six is that what works best is a learning system that balances ICT-based and non-ICT-based approaches.
This proposition is heresy to those who hold that everything in the students’ learning environment must be delivered electronically. This is why the dot.com universities, some of which, of course, now longer exist, accuse the Open University of sticking to old methods. We see ourselves as pragmatic, rather than dogmatic. We listen carefully to our students and we see no evidence that they place any value on making everything electronic for its own sake.
Another way of expressing this is to say that although the Open University is a leader in the e-world it intends to continue to define itself as an o-university – an Open University – rather than an e-university. This is, interestingly, a repeat of the thinking that led to the OU being called the Open University rather than the University of the Air over thirty years ago.
For-profit and corporate universities
Let me deal more quickly with the second trend I identified, namely the impact of the development of for-profit and corporate universities. What is the effect of this phenomenon?
I observe that the major impact has been to confuse people, especially in the United States. We have seen plenty of new initiatives in higher education over the last few years, although I would add – under my breath because this too is heretical – that they haven’t actually made much difference yet. The problem is that because these initiatives occurred simultaneously, people assumed they had the same root. This is particularly the case with distance learning and for-profit education.
If you read, for example, the attacks on distance learning made by the American Association of University Professors, the AAUP, you will find that they tend to bracket these two phenomena together. Since the AAUP is, to say the least, dubious about for-profit universities, it is also dubious, to say the least, about distance learning.
Now it is true that forty years ago there was a lot of distance learning, then called correspondence education, that was operated for-profit – sometimes using questionable business practices. But a famous article by Jessica Mitford in the Atlantic Monthly blew the lid off that back in 1970. Since then there has been much tighter regulation of the industry and, more importantly, the emergence of public sector, not-for-profit institutions that engage in distance teaching with those values.
Hong Kong is a case in point. What is now the Hong Kong Open University began as a for-profit institution based in Macao. Seeing the value of university-level distance education to the citizens of this region the government of Hong Kong essentially took it over and re-established it as the Hong Kong Open Learning Institute, as a not-for-profit institution in the public sector. I add that the first Vice-Chancellor of the OU, Walter Perry, was motivated by the desire to show that a distance learning university based on values of public service could be as good as any university in the country.
My proposition here – I’m at proposition seven – is simply that there is no logical link between distance learning and for-profit education. It is important to remember that and you may wish to return to the issue of institutional purpose in discussion.
The global university
Finally, let conclude with some comments on the third trend that I identified namely the trend to the global university. Does the OU claim to be, or intend to be, a global university? What does it mean to be global university anyway and are there alternative approaches to becoming international?
It is helpful to start with the facts. The Open University now has a substantial international reach with over 30,000 people now studying its courses outside the UK. However, I freely admit that until very recently its activities outside the UK developed in response to requests from overseas and not from any proactive strategy. We are now engaged in thinking through the philosophy of our world-wide operations and I will come back to that in a moment.
When the OU was founded only UK residents were eligible to apply. It quickly became clear, however, that because most OU students were employed they were also mobile. The University therefore agreed that if students who had first registered with the OU as UK residents moved overseas, then it would do what it could to let them continue their studies. The result of this policy today is that during the main annual exam period OU students now write exams in over one hundred countries, paying an additional fee to cover the special arrangements required for invigilation.
As a result of their employment mobility significant concentrations of OU students began to develop in certain overseas locations. Thus in the mid 1980s OU students in Brussels became sufficiently numerous to justify a request that the OU provide some local tutorial services. Thus began the ‘Brussels scheme’ which soon spread to cover the Benelux region. In 1990, faced with requests to create similar schemes elsewhere in Europe the University simply decided to extend its admission criteria to include all residents of western Europe.
By this move the OU became a European university in the sense that all students in western Europe are treated in the same way as far as the OU learning system is concerned. They study in English, they are administered by one of the OU’s UK regional centres (the OU in the North) and their tutors may be either local or UK-based depending on numbers. These students do, however, pay fees at a different level from UK students, reflecting the changing policies of the UK government to students in other EU countries during the 1990s. The scale is significant. Today there are about 8,000 OU students in the countries of the European Union other than the UK.
Outside western Europe, however, the OU has developed on a very different model. There we work with partners, quite a variety of partners. One type of partner, and the Hong Kong Open University is an example, simply uses our course materials in their own courses. In this case the students receive credit and awards from the HKOU. To work well, however, even this type of partnership requires quite close academic collaboration and joint forward planning.
Another very different example is in Ethiopia. The link there began when the Prime Minister and his cabinet did the complete OU MBA programme. They liked it and now we have a partner in Ethiopia offering OU junior and middle management courses for local credit. You could also say that our recently created sister institution, the United States Open University, operates on the same model, but that deserves a comment of its own in a moment or two.
Another type of partnership allows students in a territory to take courses and programmes for OU credit and awards while benefiting from a local support structure. A prime example is the Open University Degree Programme being offered to 6,000 students in Singapore in partnership with the Singapore Institute of Management. Then there are about 12,000 students taking junior and middle management courses in Russia and some of the countries of central Europe with partners in each country. These students are studying in their national languages: Russian, Slovak, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian and Czech.
Operating through such partnerships has two great advantages. The first is that it makes it possible to operate at scale. It is inconceivable, for example, that the OU could serve 6,000 students in Singapore, or 8,000 students in Russia, without a local presence to organise the tutorial network and generally support the students. Much better, in our view, that this presence should be a local partner rather than a foreign branch of the OU.
That’s because of the second advantage, which is that the partner helps to ensure that the OU offerings are adapted to the local reality. That is very obvious when another language is involved. The OU could not teach in Bulgarian without the partnership with the New Bulgarian University. But even where the language is English, as in Singapore, the local partner helps to ensure we offer appropriate courses and awards and gain the support of the government.
There is clearly a conflict looming, for the OU and many other universities, between working in local partnerships, which I shall call the multinational approach to international activity, and going into other territories directly via the internet, which I call the global approach.
The OU itself already has several examples of the global approach; notably our Masters programme in Open and Distance Education which is offered worldwide on the Internet. Incidentally that programme led to the world’s first virtual degree ceremony, commencement or convocation, when the first cohort of students graduated last year.
The conflicts between these approaches are both practical and principled. One practical issue, which the OU discovered very quickly, is that our local partners are not happy to see us going into their territory directly, even to teach a course that is not being offered through the partnership.
The issues of principle are profound and come down to how we view the educational development of the world in this century. The logic of the global university seems to lead to an educational monoculture. My colleague Robin Mason, in her book Globalising Education, points out that many institutions boast about enrolling students in a range of countries but very few make any attempt to adapt the content or style of their offerings to reflect the cultural or national diversity of their global student body. Mostly these are just courses conceived for the institution’s national student body that are offered more widely.
My own belief is that the multinational approach is superior in both practical terms, because it reaches larger numbers of students, and in principle because it helps to preserve cultural variety and national identity. Both in biology and in social systems variety of forms and approaches is a strength and global approaches to education could undermine this.
It is this sort of thinking that has led to the creation of the United States Open University. This is the OU’s latest partnership. It is a special in that we ourselves have set up this partner. However, we have set it up to be an American university, with an American board of governors and an American staff. It is going through the American regional and national accreditation processes and will award American degrees.
We realise that the USOU will start slowly, until accreditation is achieved. However, those accreditation processes are being enormously helpful in making sure that we are mapped on to the American reality and are adapting our approach of supported open learning to the situation of the American students.
In the longer term, and this is my final point, we hope that this multi-national network of partnerships that we are creating, will be mutually enriching. For example, once the USOU is well established, we hope that some of its courses will be of interest to the OU in the UK and to our other partners, just as OU courses are being used as the basis for some of the USOU curriculum. We already have an example of a course that was developed for Singapore being used in the UK.
Conclusion
Let me conclude. I have given you an update about how the Open University, one of the great educational innovations of the last century, is responding to the e-world, to new types of university and to globalisation. We take an evolutionary view of all this.
We will integrate online technologies into our learning system rather than abandoning all the other media that students like. We believe that for-profit universities have stimulated all universities to be more student-centred but we also believe strongly in the values of public education and those values will continue to be the basis of our activity.
Finally, with over 30,000 people now studying OU courses outside the UK we are thoroughly engaged with the agenda of globalisation. However, in the educational arena we believe that the continuing development of a multi-national network of partnerships is a better approach than trying to serve the whole world from a single point. Diversity reflects the reality of the human family and the aspirations of the human spirit.
References
Laurillard, D. (2000) The e-University: What have we learned? Address to the Open University Council, September 22 http://www2.open.ac.uk/ltto/lttoteam/Diana/Council2000/
Mason, R.D. (1998) Globalising Education: Trends and Applications, Routledge
Mitford, J.L. (1970) Let us now appraise famous authors, Atlantic Monthly, 226 pp. 45-54
Salmon, G.K. (2000) E-moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online, Kogan Page.