Bridging the Gap between Teaching and Learning at a Distance

Abstract

Unlike teachers in traditional universities, Open University teachers are faced with the very difficult task of having to produce course materials for students learning at a distance. Typically, Open University materials include a number of adjunct teaching aids which encourage students to become actively involved in the learning process (eg, aims and objectives, study guides, self-assessment questions, in-text summaries, etc). Unfortunately, few of these teaching aids have been evaluated systematically. Open University teachers simply do not know, for example, whether a list of objectives placed at the beginning of a course unit actually helps students to learn the related material. This paper describes a methodology for helping Open University teachers find out whether the particular teaching practices they adopt are successful. The effectiveness of the methodology is also evaluated. IntroductionOpen University (OU) teachers are faced with the very difficult task of having to communicate with students at a distance. To do so, they aim to produce course materials which encourage students to become actively involved in the learning process. Unlike textbooks which are usually written to convey information about content in a subject area, OU courses try to create materials which are designed to teach.During the past three years, I have been examining the way in which OU course materials are designed and have identified a number of common teaching strategies. These are set out below.