We are now at the end of the 20th century -- a time of excitement, apprehension and challenge. I need remind no one here that technology is changing at a break-neck speed; that the key technologies of sand, glass, and air -- silicon, fibre optics and wireless communications -- are changing the world in which we live, do business, communicate, and learn. And information professionals are among those whose working environments and paradigms are most affected and challenged. It is an environment in which knowledge and skills become rapidly obsolete; in which exists a dichotomy of increasing degrees of specialisation and increasing work requirement of multi-skilling. It is an environment in which information professionals have constantly to update and retool their skills and knowledge to remain effective. It is an environment that brings enormous challenges to educational institutions charged with preparing information professionals for the 21st century.

2. CONFLUENCE OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND EDUCATION/TRAINING NEEDS INTERNET AND WEB

Computer and telecommunications networks have been around for many years, however only with the popularisation of the Internet, driven by the development of the World Wide Web in 1989, has the potential of networks been recognised for course delivery. The Web with its ease of use, multimedia capabilities and growing support infrastructure of highspeed fibre optic cabling, is quickly becoming a standard method of communication. This is communication in its broadest definition, interpersonal communication, marketing and public relations and access to large storehouses of data and information. This new technology is at the same time one of the causes of education challenges of the next century, and one of their possible solutions.

Just-in-time education & continuing professional education This paper in no way suggests that, at least in the foreseeable future, information professionals will not continue to receive their formal education at universities. Nor do I suggest the immediate demise of universities as they have been known to European civilisation since the 16th century, a system adopted by the rest of the world, wherein students move to academically accredited institutions, listen to lectures by learned professors, take part in seminars, and participate in formal and informal discussions.

However as each new advance in technology emerges, either in the storage of or access to information, information professionals for a variety of reasons -- social, geographic or economic -- may not have the luxury of full time attendance at a university to update their skills. Rather they are looking for convenient, 'just-in-time' courses and continuing professional education. Nor, with increasing specialisation among the information professions can university schools of information science, which tend to be relatively small, hope to have experts in every specialized field. A further factor to be considered is the geographical dispersal of persons who may be interested in such specialisation; without large numbers, traditionally delivered university courses are not always economically viable. Therefore, universities around the world are looking at a variety of methods for 'flexible delivery' of courses, both for subjects within a formal degree and for continuing professional education.

RICH LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

"If we intend to avoid the production of inert knowledge and to prepare our students to stay current in the fields once they have left the classroom environment, we must engage them in the types of knowledge-construction and problem-solving activities and thinking and learning processes they will be expected to engage in once they are on the job" (Grabinger, et al, 1997).

A great deal of the current pedagogical research shows that rich learning environments and problem-based learning enhance the educational process. The characteristics of rich learning environments include student responsibility, dynamic generative learning, authentic and relevant contexts, collaboration between students and teachers and reflection. In the classroom this is achieved with the provision of realistic problems that help to develop a greater depth of understanding, a variety of resources to provide multiple perspectives, and group projects to develop collaborative skills.

In classes with large student numbers where much of the content is delivered in the form of lectures, a rich learning environment can be achieved by dividing the students into smaller groups for seminars, tutorials, and small group project work. It is within these small groups that students can have a free interchange of ideas with the lecturer and where collaborative work emphasises discussion and the testing of ideas.

3. FULLY-WEBBED COURSES OVERVIEW

A 'fully-webbed' course or 'virtual classroom' is one in which all aspects of the course -- enrolment and course administration, content delivery, supplementary reading materials, interpersonal communication, collaborative projects, tests and other assessment, lecturer-student feedback -- are all delivered via the Web. Currently, there are few examples of 'fully-webbed' courses available. Most courses that use network technology do so for only some elements, for example, course lecture notes, access to Internet resources, or electronic mail between students and lecturers.

ADVANTAGES

The 'fully-webbed' course, if well designed, can provide for its students a rich learning environment that includes resources with multiple perspectives, collaboration, contextualised content, and a forum for the exchange of experiences and ideas. There are enormous advantages in using the Web for courses for continuing professional education or for subjects that are highly specialized. These advantages are:

All educators readily acknowledge that providing rich learning environments is a challenge; this is also true for 'fully-webbed' courses. As well, the Web as a mode of delivery has intrinsic complications, of which the most glaring are:

Many of us have, on occasion, have been less prepared for delivering a lecture than we would wish; we make do with a set of notes from which we speak extemporaneously. Delivering course material on the Web is publishing, and therefore involves careful writing and editing. Creating a complete course is tantamount to publishing a book! Reading material on a screen is not easy so care must be taken with reducing the density of the material by using relatively short sentences, by using good layout and design techniques, and by the addition of appropriate graphics.

Once the course content has been created it needs to be separated into 'chunks' for presentation on a screen, bearing in mind that the optimum number of levels for hypertext navigation is three. Appropriate navigation devices need to be created to allow the student to move through or across the levels and to jump in and out of the course material to external documents on the Internet. The richness of the hypertext environment adds the additional complexity that the design must assume students will not access the material sequentially.

In the traditional classroom there is an overt community of students in which normal human communication takes place; this community is not necessarily overt or obvious on the Web. Certainly, 'virtual communities' are alive and well; one only has to take part in listservs or IRC sessions or to read the research of Sherry Turkle to understand the power of communicating in this environment. In 'fully-webbed' courses the task from the beginning is to create for the students a sense of belonging to a group, with a sense of familiarity and shared interests. Most of the anecdotal evidence from fully-webbed' courses is that it is very difficult to motivate students to take part in the groups discussions. "The real life of the class as an interactive body takes place in threaded discussions. It takes a while for students to realize this, as many seek to engage a discussion with the instructor only, responding to the posted questions or topics, but not joining in a dialogue with each other, reading and commenting on each other's statements" (Reddell, 1997).

4. AUSTRALIAN EXPERIENCE

Australia has a long and rich experience in distance education. There is a widely scattered population on outback cattle stations which since last century has relied distance education, mainly correspondence courses. School of the Air, begun in 1951 is still the major method of delivering primary school education to outback children.

European Australia has always felt a 'tyranny of distance' and it is reasonable to speculate that this explains the extraordinary Australian love affair with new technologies. Whatever the explanation, on a per capita basis, Australia has the third highest usage of the Internet and associated Web technologies. This historical sense of isolation and subsequent uptake of new information technologies, has brought to Australia a first class information infrastructure, including technologically sophisticated libraries, museums and archives. It is therefore reasonable to expect that Australia would be quick to exploit the potential of the Web for the delivery of education, particularly the education of information professionals.

Australia's geographic location within the Southeast Asian/Pacific region has ensured it would have a role in educating, mentoring, and advising on a variety aspects of information services provision. Some examples are: The National Library of Australia's regional cooperation programme for support of libraries in the region.

The Australian National University's funding of the first data telecommunications for Vietnam; and the School of Information, Library and Archive Studies (University of New South Wales) conducting the first Vietnamese Internet workshop.

The BISA (Bibliographic Information Services of Southeast Asia and the Pacific) program at the University of New South Wales, which has provided short courses in library and information management for the past 20 years to information professionals in Asia and the Pacific.

AUDIOVISUAL MANAGEMENT COURSES

Until 1997, there was no course available at tertiary level in Australia or the region in general, to prepare specialist personnel for careers in the management and preservation of audiovisual materials. In fact there is a significant lack of professional courses in this area in the world; currently one university-based program in film archiving (University of East Anglia, U.K.) and a one year, non-university program in film and video preservation (George Eastman House, Rochester New York). In 1996 the School of Information, Library and Archive Studies and the Australian National Film and Sound Archive collaborated to develop a specialist program in audiovisual management which covered the full spectrum of the field. All the criteria for 'fully-webbed' courses were present:

A project team was assembled; this consisted of subject specialists (the National Film and Sound Archives and the School of Information, Library and Archive Studies), instructional design specialists (University of Texas), and information design and web publishing specialists, editorial staff, technical support and a project manager (SILAS). Each course had ten modules, each of which was structured to provide a richness of content and environment; there were well-structured lectures, clickable glossaries, external links to Internet resources, threaded discussion groups, case studies for small group projects, automatically corrected quizzes, email access to tutors, and technical support.

The students were a mixture of postgraduate students enrolled in the Master of Information Management formal program and information professionals working in the field. The information professionals were from Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Papua New Guinea, and Israel. The decision to mix the two groups of students was consciously made in order to provide a variety of backgrounds and work experiences. We found that this worked reasonably well, but could be improved by giving the more experienced students a mentoring role toward the less experienced.

We also found that not all students became involved in the discussion groups, unless there was some sort of assessable task involved; the assessable group projects worked very well with lots of chat going on among the students. The sense of community with one group was strong enough to continue after the course finished. Over all, the feedback from the students was that the course material was very good, the delivery mode was very convenient, built-in links to Internet resources were excellent, and email access to and feedback from the lecturers was very good. It was conceded that more effort was required to motivate the students to actively participate in the discussion groups from the very beginning. It was also felt that there needed to be a facility for informal discussion among the students, which was not monitored by the lecturers =97 the coffee shop equivalent. It was also noted by a number of the students that a course delivered over the Web was in itself an excellent learning experience.

5 CONCLUSION

Our experience has left us in no doubt that the new information technologies hold both challenges and solutions for information professionals and educators. We are convinced that Web-based courses can provide the rich learning environments which are found in the well-designed courses held in traditional classrooms. There is much to be understood about how people learn best in the 'virtual' classroom, but we believe that it is an environment which can develop students' creativity, independence and responsibility. Finally, the new technologies certainly hold some of the solutions to the problems of delivering specialized education to students who, for any reason, are not able to avail themselves of traditional education methods.
 
 

REFERENCES

Grabinger, R. Scott and Dunlop, Joanna C. (1997) "Rich environments for active learning," Association for Learning Technology Journal, 15 (2): 5-17.

Instructional strategies: Interview with Trace Reddell, Instructional Design Program Coordinator for CU Online. (1997, November).

<http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~jdunlap/seminar/ interview1.html>

Newman, D. R., Chris Johnson, Brian Webb, and Clive Cochrane. (1997). "Evaluating the quality of learning in computer supported co-operative learning," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48 (6): 484-495.

Taylor, James. (1994). "Technology, distance education and the tyranny of proximity," Higher Education Management, 6 (2): 179-190.

Turkle, Sherry. (1995). Life on the Screen; Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Wilson, Paul, Paul McNally and Maureen Henninger. (1997). "Audiovisual management education: An Australian initiative," Audiovisual Librarian, 23 (3): 175-181.

Winn, William. (1993). A conceptual basis for educational applications of virtual reality. (accessed Sept. 1997)

<http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/education/winn/winn-paper.html>