Course specification:

LSHTM Infectious Diseases Distance Learning programme

Course specification: 1

LSHTM Infectious Diseases Distance Learning programmeIntroduction. 1

Introduction. 3

3

Criss-crossing learning landscapes. 3

Content and structure. 5

8

Learners’ access and attitudes to media. 8

10

Proposed teaching media. 10

Learning activities for learners (and teachers) 13

Learning materials/resources. 15

16

The role of assessment 16

Conclusion. 18

References. 19

Introduction

On the Masters Distance Learning programme in Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) students are feeling quarantined - isolated, unable to collaborate with others on the course or to introduce their own experiences and contexts in meaningful ways.

This proposal reflects research conducted directly into the ID[1] DL[2] students’ views and experience (Alsford, 2003a).   Survey responses are threaded through this paper; essentially, they reveal good levels of access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and, most importantly, a willingness on the part of learners to adopt and adapt to learning media hitherto untried. 

From the Learner Survey, the required functions of any course development were to:

      (re-)motivate students (or respond better to students’ motivations);

      provide spaces to recall previous learning and share contexts;

      improve the feedback loop between tutors and students;

      offer opportunities to practice skills; and

      enable the production of real deliverables

Interaction media, rather than transmission media, are required.  I have designed an environment that moves a text-based course into an interactive space, and enables learners to produce rich and complex knowledge artifacts which will have lasting reference value.

 While the scalability of the solution was not a major concern, its flexibility was, since any solution must work for very different subject areas.  While interactive environments that present several viewpoints of information are considered particularly suited to complex knowledge domains such as medicine, it is true that much of the literature examines those developed for discursive subjects such as literature, education and the social sciences.  The proposed solution has been designed as a proof of concept, to work equally well for two very different advanced units from the programme.

 

Criss-crossing learning landscapes

I have designed the course elements on a framework of flexible cognition, which is based on constructivism, and considered by its advocates to be particularly suited to complex areas of study such as medicine (TIP website).

Constructivism places the emphasis on learning in real contexts, in order to find appropriate “ways to structure the world” and develop meaningful perspectives on it (Duffy and Jonassen, 1992;p.3).  Learning always involves work, purposeful action – for example as cognitive apprenticeship (Brown et al., 1989). 

Burge provides a useful summarization:

To learn constructively is to actively process new information, use structured experiential activity and analyses of life experiences, solve problems, examine critically one’s existing mental frameworks, accept ambiguities in knowledge, explore belief systems and assess one’s learning.

Burge, 1995;p.155

 

Burge’s recommendation for those teaching constructively (1995;p.156) includes an instruction to “help learners revisit material in greater depth”.  This is also an important idea for cognitive flexibility which I develop here in the design of conference activities.  Burge also acknowledges the difficulties of balancing freedom and structure, which may prove to be an issue for this implementation.

Burge describes fairly well-structured environments.  For Jonassen and Rohrer-Murphy (1999), however, an essential part of the learning process is the tension produced when active work is done, or:

Intentions emerge from contradictions that individuals perceive in their environment, such as differences between what they believe they need to know…and what they do know

They argue that such contradictions can and should be designed into constructivist learning environments (CLEs).  The environment should include all technologies contributing to real world decision-making for the group, providing an ‘ill-defined context’.  The ‘noise’ of peripheral activities should impinge on what they term the ‘problem space’ of a CLE; in other words, the space should include conversational areas, multiple representations of content and related cases.  The idea is that the CLE “replicates the tools, the object, the community, the rules and division of labour” of real life contexts. 

Building on this, Spiro et al develop the idea of cognitive flexibility.  Cognitive flexibility theory is concerned with how learners transfer knowledge and skills beyond their initial learning situation. Teaching underpinned with this theory places emphasis on the presentation of information from multiple perspectives and the use of a multiplicity of case studies that present diverse examples.  Cognitive flexibility theory is especially formulated to support the use of interactive, hypertext technologies.  A typical learning environment presents multiple perspectives, is complex and ill-defined, and emphasizes the construction of knowledge by the learner. 

 

For Jonassen, Ambruso & Olesen (1992), the core principles are that:

      Learning activities provide multiple representations of content;

      Instructional materials avoid oversimplifying the content domain and support context-dependent knowledge;

      Instruction is case-based and emphasizes knowledge construction, not information transmission;

      Knowledge sources are interconnected, not compartmentalized.

 

In designing activities based on the application of learned structures to local work contexts, I hope to provide learners with just such an ill-structured environment, and thus maximize learning transferability.  The metaphor of this learning domain is that of a “criss-crossed landscape”  (Spiro et al, 1991; Spiro and Jehng, 1990). 

 

Content and structure

 

Learner Outcomes

I have specified materials for two advanced Units in the programme (Hilary Alsford, H804 BR 277 03 Group B, April 25 2003).  I have chosen courses from different areas, with different disciplinary ‘cultures’.   One, Parasitology, is more deductive, detailed and scientific; the other, Health Promotion, is more inductive, evaluative and discursive.  It is essential that the environment structure suit each of them and offer multiple pathways between them. 

The learner objectives are as follows (LSHTM, 2002):

Health Systems and Health Promotion (ID402)

By the end of the unit, the student should be able to:

      Appreciate the diversity of the organization of health systems

      Translate health science findings into health service practice

      Use a range of management skills to manage complexity in health care organizations

      Explain approaches to programme planning, finance and policymaking

      Address such ‘infectious disease problems’ as new and resurgent diseases and increasing antibiotic resistance

      Make meaningful decisions based on knowledge from a range of disciplines including sociology, political science, applied research, economics and psychology

      Understand the functioning of health systems and the role of health promotion

      Contrast and compare health care in different countries

      Describe basic functions of health services and how health systems develop

      Present problems encountered in developing and industrialized countries

      Conduct needs assessment

      Explain factors influencing the utilization of health services

      Discuss outcomes management and quality assurance

      Evaluate strengths and weaknesses of different approaches

      Illustrate the different spheres of health promotion - education, clinical and behavioural interventions, public policies and community development

      Apply concepts to own country’s health system or work situation

      Put new ideas into practice.

Parasitology (ID203)

By the end of the unit, the student should be able to:

      Build on previously acquired knowledge of parasites and the diseases they cause

      Describe the prevalent parasitic infections which present serious problems worldwide

      Present the complex life cycles of protozoan and helminth parasites

      Enumerate intermediate hosts

      Differentiate the elaborate morphological changes parasites from other agents of infectious disease

      Analyse the consequent problems for effective control

      Describe the development and transmission of major parasite pathogens

      Explain how complex life cycles cause clinical and pathological conditions that constitute the disease

      Explain the diverse ways in which parasites survive by evading the host response

      Outline attempts to control each infection by drug treatment, vaccination or attacking vector or intermediate hosts

      Discuss the protozoa of medical importance including those responsible for major diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness and amoebiasis.

      Describe the worm (helminth) parasites causing diseases such as schistosomiasis, elephantiasis and river blindness

      Analyse the problems for diagnoses

      Use scenario-based work to develop a portfolio of strategic responses to infection

      Explain why attempts to produce effective vaccines against the parasites have so far been unsuccessful

      Integrate the different types of analyses needed at different stages to develop a strategy for the study of parisitic diseases

      Compare different approaches and develop own views, reflecting own perspectives.

Bringing in own contexts: flexibility of structure

The Learner Survey Report (Alsford, 2003b) reveals a high level of cultural diversity in students’ undergraduate, post-graduate and professional experience.  At present, in their work with relatively univocal, print-based materials, students are not fully utilizing and reflecting on these contexts. 

The current structure of the course could be described as linear.  Students on the ID course have some opportunities to switch perspectives and experiment with different methods and points of view (Jonassen and Rohrer-Murphy,1999), in that units from other disciplines (Health Management and Epidemiology) can be incorporated into the degree.  However each unit moves step-wise through the content rather than offering space for multiple representations and manipulations. 

The guiding principle for a cognitive flexibility structure is that it be non-linear (Spiro and Jehng, 1990).  Each unit can instead be seen as having a matrix structure – for example, Parasitology could be approached by studying parasites individually, or by studying specific aspects of all parasites together.

Fig.1: Providing multiple paths through scientific analysis

A similar structure can be used to bring the required context- and case-specificity to discursive areas such as health promotion in ID402.

Fig.2: Introducing case specificity to discursive subjects

 

In addition, study of infectious disease in the field will need to avoid confusing parasitic with bacterial and viral infections, and these diagnostic difficulties be compounded by cultural and economic issues of disease control – so field work will in practice move through several of these knowledge matrices.  Therefore, a three-dimensional matrix structure is in fact what is required.

I appreciate the irony of using a very structural metaphor to describe an ‘ill-structured’ environment, but activities designed along these principles will offer multiple pathways through the content.

Fig 3: Three dimensional knowledge matrix model

Learners’ access and attitudes to media

Current media are books, case studies and wraparound study guides.  Computer-mediated conferencing (CMC) is being used on another Masters course from LSHTM, Epidemiology.

Published survey findings in the area of learner access to ICTs, and attitudes to mediated learning with them, were contradictory enough to justify the implementation of research directly into the ID DL learners’ views and experience.   In terms of conventional, print-based distance learning materials, students had praise for the “availability of organised study materials” and for the “programmed study guides”.  However, they criticised the “lack of laboratory work” and other aspects. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Such comments justified an attempt to find other ways of presenting – and developing – knowledge through the use of ICTs.  ID DL students were surveyed on their access levels to technologies for study, their preferences for a variety of teaching media and their view of their own skills levels and training needs for learning with ICTs.

From the point of view of course design, key to the findings is the fact that even among those accessing the internet “most days” (82% of those surveyed) the majority have never used on-line conferences or discussion groups (61% of those surveyed).

 

 

Students within this group showed willingness to adopt and adapt to different learning media for the ID DL course.  In practice this means a reduced reliance on books, physical libraries and face-to-face (F2F) teaching and an increased use of CMC, the Web and videos. 

 

Proposed teaching media

This proposal hinges on three key aspects:

      the adoption of CMC to enrich the learning experience and facilitate students’ production of academic deliverables (Virginia Vaughan, H804 br277 03 B2 Act2, April 11 2003);

      the use of the Web to deliver course information and materials to support conferencing;

      the retention of texts as the backbone of the study.

Media selection is based on the functions it needs to serve – to motivate, provide a space to recall previous learning and share contexts, improve the feedback loop, offer opportunities to practice skills, and produce real deliverables – as well as in response to specific issues on the course (Moore and Kearsley, 1996;p.97). 

For cognitive flexibility, learning media should provide a ‘problem space’ where an  issue is be presented, simulated and manipulated “in the context in which it is normally and naturally encountered” (Jonassen and Rohrer-Murphy, 1999).  Computer-mediated conferencing allows learners to bring multiple contexts and real life challenges into their course work.

Based on survey results, a mixed media approach is proposed to accommodate different learning styles, the cultural diversity of the student body and their varied experience.  Increased focus is placed on ICTs in line with preferences of several stakeholders, including learners, tutors and administrators.  Hypertext media are also seen as appropriate in developing ill-structured learning domains (Spiro and Jehng, 1990). 

Why use text-based computer conferencing?  Essentially, because it elevates on-line learning from mere electronic page-turning or the point-and-click of on-line shopping into real activity (Lisa Schoening, H804 BR 277 2003 Act 2, April 11 2003).  There is a long and successful history of knowledge sharing through teleconferencing by health care professionals (see, for example, Jonas et al. 1995).  Computer-mediated conferencing was selected to retain the benefits of this style of co-operative communication, while responding to a need for asynchronous working due to the mostly self-paced nature of the course.  It also avoids the difficulties audio-conferencing presents for non-native speakers.  As for Stokes (2000;p.2),  CMC:

      serves authentic purpose within the programme in terms of preparing required knowledge artifacts (McConnell, 2000;p.151);

      provides a generic tool with applications outside the course;

      builds skills with ‘real world’ relevance;

      is of well-documented usefulness in professional development (Salmon, 2000).

 

Moore and Kearsley (1996;p.93) agree on other benefits, namely that:

      turn-taking is more egalitarian;

      it is ideal when the “emphasis is on the contributions which students can make from their own personal experience”;

      it provides a written record of discussion;

      it gives students access to “electronic lecturers”.

 

Specifically, WebBoard was chosen for LSHTM due to the expertise already in the organization.  It is considered to be ‘future-proofed’ in that it is a standard product with good rates of take-up, and its adoption avoids issues of perceived trespass on the part of technical and other specialist support workers in the organization (Brown, 1999;p.186).

 

 

 

 

Fig. 6  Example of a WebBoard conference

On the other hand, certain ‘media-specific’ weaknesses have been noted in a study of CMC:

Group learning is often trivialised by the threaded-topic discussion format that is typically used in computer conference systems. Teachers can lead a group to raise the intellectual level of group discourse by requiring student groups to produce tangible work products (not just opinion comments) and by creating a logical structure to achieve this end.

Klemm and Snell, 1996

But it is important to bear in mind Burge’s (1995;p.153) cautionary remarks on the lack of “causal relationships between technology and learning” and that successes – and indeed failures - are “more likely contingent upon the informed application of time-tested learning strategies than the technological capabilities of a medium.”

It must be remembered that media exist and function in a complex system of several human and non-human elements.  As such, effective and valuable dialogue within conferences depends upon structured pre-work as well as effective moderating on-line (Madeleine McGrath, H804 BR 277 2003 Act 2, April 8 2003).  Activities, therefore, will be carefully scaffolded, especially in early stages of the course.

 

Learning activities for learners (and teachers)

…Students should DO something; i.e., produce an academic deliverable. Such deliverables can include making (and defending) a decision, creating (and defending) a prioritized list, formulating a question/thesis/problem, answering a question or solving a problem, preparing a report/proposal/plan, designing a prototype, or conducting a project.

Klemm and Snell, 1996

In answer to Rowntree’s question about what learners might be doing with the course content (2002;p.37), the common ground for ID DL learners is that they are preparing deliverable documents – designing a study, proposing a set of laboratory routines, building a model for a health care system, or producing an evaluation of a health care intervention (Hilary Alsford, H804 BR 277 2003 Act 2, April 12 2003).

As we have seen, several writers have commented on the benefits of developing such artifacts of knowledge.  Thus many course activities will centre on the core fieldwork activities of research and response design, and both present and invite multiple representations of content (Jonassen and Rohrer-Murphy, 1999). 

 

At the level of a course Unit (ID203, ID402) there will be:

      One introductory conference for introductions and first presentations of contexts. 

      Around six further conferences per Unit.  Each conference will be open for a period of two to three weeks.  (Any shorter, and students pacing their own study may find it difficult to synchronise; any longer and momentum is lost). 

A conference may be repeated once during the Unit.  Students are not obligated to contribute or observe but will be encouraged to ‘attend’ at least three conferences during the year.  With current student numbers that should give an average of 35 participants at each conference.

Some conferences will be based around a major (un-named) disease and be diagnostic in nature.  Others will be based on an aspect of study (e.g. developing a Disease Control plan).  This offers several pathways across the matrix of knowledge.

      One End conference per Unit, in the form of a longer term WebQuest (see Dodge, 1995, and below), offering opportunities for reflection, revision, and synthesis.  This would be a ‘Plenary’ conference, ideally designed to run across more than one Unit, in order to offer pathways through the three-dimensional knowledge matrix discussed above.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig. 7  Conference plan

 

Researching activities

o      In all Unit conferences, students will be asked to share specific relevant experiences and present their own contexts in loosely structured ways.  This might be through naming relevant success stories or lessons learnt, or outlining local health policy frameworks or major health problems.  This presents opportunities for “learning through verbalizing” or articulating (Madeleine McGrath, H804 BR 277 2003 Act 2, April 8 2003)

 

o      Website Research

The study guide (SG) and certain case studies will be made available on the course website.  A simple search facility will provide practice in accessing on-line resources.

o      World Wide Web Research

Some conference instructions will direct learners to the internet.  Using ‘Think/Pair/Share’ techniques (Nagata and Ronkowski, 1998) will allow students to work collaboratively, and practice evaluation and synthesis skills in a less familiar research environment (Susan Smith, H804 BR 277 2003 Act 2, 18 April, 2003).

o      WebQuests

This is enquiry-oriented research in ‘Learning teams’ where a given deliverable, such as an evaluation of a health care intervention, can be split into several different areas (such as background levels of health, costs, and cultural attitudes to medical treatment).  Each area should be sufficiently complex and engaging for a small group to research and report back.  For example, Lawrence et al. (2002) have designed a WebQuest on infectious diseases set in Argentina; students take on roles within a team of epidemiologists in a real world organisation.  Some conferences will use smaller-scale WebQuests (see, for example, Conover, 2000).  Larger-scale WebQuests require fairly sophisticated internet research skills and the use of report templates.  For this reason the more complex version will form part of the final conference.  All provide opportunities for learning through ‘performance’ – research, presentation, verbalizing – while applying learnt structures to one’s own context(s).

The WebBoard conferences will store work done in a fairly ill-structured way.  Summaries of conferences will be made available to all students via e-mail (Martin Taylor, personal communication, 17 April 2003).  Thus analyses of a given disease/ context becomes steadily richer as subsequent course work adds new facets, branching from a study of the biology of the virus into areas such as health policy and environmental issues.

 

 

 

Learning materials/resources

Generic materials

A central Course Website will be provided, as a gateway to resources, conferences, study plan and support materials.

In any integrated media approach, it easy for learners to get lost in the system.  Therefore, the existing wrap-around study guide (SG) will need to be substantially re-designed.  Increasingly, rather than providing academic content, it will suggest pathways through content, time management help, re-orderings and re-mediations, and present  different philosophies on the subject.  In the future, it will serve to prompt learners into activities, list pre-requisites for conferences, respond to the shift of emphasis in the course environment, and provide a course “map”.  Delivered on paper and on-line for download, it will also provide more learner- content interactivity (Moore and Kearsley, 1996;pp.79;99;128-129). 

Many students responding to the survey are willing to invest time and effort in learning to learn on-line.  An equal number declined because they considered their “internet study skills” already adequate; only 5% said they “did not wish to use the internet for study.”  Given this, “learning to learn on-line” components will be integrated for the most part into the scaffolded activities.  However internet search guidelines, including pointers to specific subject area search engines, will be available for download (Hilary Alsford, H804 BR 277 2003 Act 2, April 22 2003).

 

Unit-specific materials

For conference activities designed around WebQuest pages, learners’ materials will be comprised of:

      case presentation

      role descriptions

      process instruction, with pre-defined links in early conferences

      process guide, where scaffolding required

      worksheets, to structure report back

The role of assessment

The Units I propose here are summatively assessed by a two-hour unseen written paper (LSHTM, 2002), which constitutes 70% of the marks, and an assignment constituting the remainder. 

Many students experience a mismatch between assessment and motivation.  Most (53%) respondents to the learner survey indicated an academic/vocational:intrinsic orientation and motivation (“to improve my skills and knowledge”).  However, 24% expressed vocational:extrinsic motivation (“to improve my job prospects”) and 24% expressed academic:extrinsic motivation (“to gain a recognized qualification”).  For this sizeable minority of extrinsically-motivated students, therefore, greater linkage between course work and assessment, and between tutor-marked assignments (TMAs) and grades, might be established.

Greater transparency of examination grading would be appreciated by the intrinsically motivated too:

Structural change to the assessment process is beyond the scope of this proposal.  However, formative assessment is also a major problem area for students, and one that can be influenced by students’ experiences on-line. 

CMCs will help create stronger and more immediate links between students and tutors.   (Pickett and Dodge,2001)  can and should be developed to assess the deliverables produced in conference activities.  Many of the activities will test key competences such as design, persuasion, collaboration, analysis and organization and rubrics would allow individual and/or group review and feedback.  More, better focused student-student contact will also facilitate informal peer review.

Additionally, Freeman (1997;p.38) notes that learning outcomes are given value not only by being overtly assessed, but also by creating electronic reference materials which all learners can use later on.  Stokes (2000;p.4) mentions the importance of ‘recognition’ as an additional motivating factor in such an environment.  This could take the form of acknowledgements in conferences from tutors of contributions to conference, citations on the course and even in published work from tutors and peers, or the encouragement to prepare a personal ‘portfolio’ from studies produced on the course.  If activities can be successfully built into a knowledge database this will lead to other forms of recognition of achievement. 

 

Course development

In order to achieve a consistent look and feel to the conference presentation, a course team will be formed using an Integrated Systems Design Approach (Moore and Kearsley, 1996).  The development of conference materials will be low on content, since the documents can be  largely based on a templates Toolbox (Oliver et al., 2001;p.104).  Generic materials to support on-line learning as outlined above are readily available and easily adaptable. 

The course team’s challenge will be to invent questions/situations/cases of sufficient complexity and depth to generate productive learning in conferences.  However the real  “product” of this period is a team of proficient e-moderators; tutors will require training and support (Salmon, 2002). The activities development will be managed by on-line conferencing as far as possible to give tutors early experience of the WebBoard environment.  Closed tutor conferences will also be used while Units are running to evaluate the activities and ‘close the loop’ with further development.

Conclusion

The development of a ‘criss-crossed landscape’ of learning, using Web-delivery of course resources reinforced with active conferencing, has clear benefits for the major stake-holders on the LSHTM ID Distance Learning programme. 

It answers concerns of students for increased contact with tutors, provides more opportunities for formative assessment, and enables and accelerates the development of core work-related deliverables.  Opportunities to work across and through discipline areas will increase the transferability of skills acquired.  It enables the course tutors to bring the ID course up to the mark of - and quite possibly leapfrog - other courses in the LSHTM stable, thereby offering the organization a better branded image.  It has limited impact on existing infrastructure and technical support systems.  It is to be expected that tutors will require training in e:moderating rather than systems (Freeman, 1997; Mason, 1998). 

However tutors’ – and students’ – initial responses to the innovations involved are difficult to predict.  This is just as much culture as curriculum change and perceived threats to status or skills gaps can often be the reason why “apparently objective solutions to stated problems are not adopted” or why ‘open access’ technologies are not, in fact, widely accessed (Brown, 1999;p.187). 

Burge and O’Rourke (1998;p.199) reflect that what tutors can expect to have to change in their approach and working practices will depend on their existing styles and strategies:  in other words that there will be a change in “procedure rather than a transformed conceptual approach.”   They conclude that the trick lies in balancing the static and the fluid elements of course development and compromising between growth and production models of learning (p.193).  When learner attitudes to e:learning were surveyed this uncovered strong intrinsic motivations, and a real flexibility of approach.  It is not possible to say with certainty that these attitudes are shared by LSHTM tutors who may be more attuned and used to a ‘transmission’ model of learning (Rowntree, 2002;p.34).    Tutors may also have resistance to formative assessment of conference activity. 

 

If conference activities succeed however, there are great opportunities for the future to build the deliverables produced into a knowledge management database – a library of case studies on multiple facets of disease and health management.  This is an avenue of research and development that could add significant and unique value to the ID course in the eyes of all its stakeholders.

References

Alsford, H. (2003a) Learner Survey

Alsford, H. (2003b) Our learners’ needs: A report on the ID DL student survey, online at http://pageperso.aol.fr/hilaryalsford/LSHTMSurveyReport.html [accessed 26/04/04]

Alsford, Hilary  “Activities and media” April 12 2003, H804 BR 277 2003 Act 2

Alsford, Hilary  “Re:Activities and media” April 22 2003, 7:37, H804 BR 277 2003 Act 2

Alsford, Hilary  “Learner outcomes” April 25 2003, H804 BR 277 03 Group B

Brown, J.S., Collins, S. and Duguid, P. (1989) Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning  Educational Researcher; v18 n1, pp. 32-42, Jan-Feb 1989.

Brown, S. (1999) Case Studies from Industry and Education, London: Kogan Page

Burge, L. (1995) Electronic Highway or Weaving Loom?: Thinking about conferencing technologies for learning in Fred Lockwood (ed.) Open and Distance Learning Today, London: Routledge

Burge, L. and O’Rourke, J. (1998) The Dynamics of Distance Teaching: Voices from the field, in Colin Latchem and Fred Lockwood (eds.) Staff development in Open and Flexible Learning, London, Routledge

Conover, K. (2000)The ABC's of Viral Hepatitis (WebQuest)

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Moore, M.G. and Kearsley, G. (1996) Distance Education: A Systems View, Wadsworth, USA

Nagata, K. and Ronkowski, S. (1998) Co-operative learning strategies for university students

Oliver, R., Towers, S., Skippington, P.,  Brunetto, Y., Farr-Wharton, R. and Gooley, A. (2001) Flexible toolboxes: A solution for developing on-line resources? in Fred Lockwood and Anne Gooley (eds.) Innovation in Open and Distance Learning, London: Kogan Page

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Salmon, G. (2000) E-moderating: The key to teaching and learning on-line, London: Kogan Page

Salmon, G. (2002) Designing & Managing E-Learning Communities: Lessons Learnt, Paper presented to Educa On-line, Berlin, November 2002

Schoening, Lisa, “Re: Virginia’s learning activities”, April 11 2003, 12:49, H804 BR 277 2003 Act 2

Smith, Susan, Re(3): Activities and media, 18 April 2003, 9:34:04, H804 BR 277 2003 Act 2

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Stokes, A. (2000) Introducing text-based computer conferencing within an accredited academic development programme, Interactions, Autumn term 2000 Vol. 4 No.3

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Vaughan, Virginia, April 11 2003, 02:18 pm “Re: Lisa’s learning activities”, H804 br277 03 B2 Act2