Learning in a Distance Teaching Community:
A Case Study
Jon Dron
Athabasca University
Canada
jond@athabascau.ca
Terry Anderson
Athabasca University
Canada
terrya@athabascau.ca
Abstract: Athabasca University (AU) is an open and distance university. This
distance applies not only to students but to the staff, who are distributed over
thousands of kilometres across Canada and, in some cases, beyond. The
consequences of this distribution mean that, as a learning community, transactional
distance is a problem for teachers as well as for students. In this paper we report on
how this problem evolves and presents itself, and describe progress we have been
making to reduce the distance, notably through Athabasca Landing, a social
construction kit and shared informal and formal learning environment intended to
fill some of the gaps. In the process, we extend and develop the notion of
transactional distance to describe how it applies outside the closed formal groups of
intentional learning into network, set and collective contexts.
Introduction
Athabasca University (AU) is a distance teaching and research institution where
100% of the students learn remotely, but it is also a distance learning institution where
staff, working at a distance, form a distributed learning and research community. Teaching
and learning at AU follows a systemic and distributed approach that militates against use of
the kinds of face-to-face teacher development strategies applied in other institutions, which
is compounded by not just the physical distances between staff members but also, and
crucially, the transactional distance. In this paper, we describe both the problems AU faces
in developing teacher learning, and one of the solutions that we have developed. We frame
this in the context of transactional distance, which lies at the heart of the problem and
informs its solution.
Transactional distance
Transactional distance has arguably evolved as the most important theoretical
construct influencing distance education research and practice. According to Moore,
transactional distance is a ‘psychological and communications space to be crossed’ between
learner and teacher (Moore, 1997). It posits that distance is not determined by physical
proximity but by the relative amounts of structure and dialogue and their interplay with
learner autonomy in a learning transaction. These are linked variables: Saba & Shearer
(1994) have demonstrated experimentally that structure and dialogue are mutually
dependant. The greater the structure, the lesser the dialogue in any learning transaction,
and vice versa. Dron observes that this is due to a dynamic of control (J Dron, 2007).
Dialogue distributes control between learner and teacher, while structure (usually in the
context of prescribed readings, activities etc.) equates to teacher control and thus takes
away control from the learner. However, as Haughey & Muirhead (2005) have shown,
distance learners seldom follow the instruction of the teacher and, perhaps for this reason,
Moore also describes highly structured transactions as demanding more learner autonomy.
Prior to the ubiquitous availability of Internet and teleconferencing technologies,
high structure was ubiquitous in distance education courses because dialogue was difficult
and expensive to sustain, so wholly distance teaching rarely employed social pedagogies.
Even today, it is often necessary to be more explicit and structured about expectations,
processes, intentions and content in an online course. Getting and giving clarification and
feedback is a more strenuous and time-consuming process online than it is in a face-to-face
setting, so more care needs to be given to clear communication in the first place. This turns
out to be of as much consequence to Athabasca University (AU) as a learning institution as it
is to distance learners on its courses. To understand why this is so, it is necessary to provide
some history and background that explains how and why AU operates as it does.
Athabasca University’s course development and delivery process
Athabasca University was founded in 1970 as an open and distance public
university, supported by the government of Alberta, Canada. From the beginning, the
institution operated as a correspondence-based distance education system with no face-toface contact with students. Course production was set up on an industrial model, with a
seven-phase course development cycle geared to high quality print production and postal
delivery. The teaching role was distributed among many specialist roles such as subject
matter experts, instructional designers, editors, graphic designers, media specialists, audio
technicians, librarians, copyright specialists and tutors. The result was high quality course
materials, designed for mass consumption, that could be sent through the post. Typically, it
would take a year or two, or sometimes more for a course to be completed and available to
students and a course would run unchanged for a period of years.
Once a course was in production, the teaching role was further distributed. A
network of mainly part-time tutors, mostly distributed at distance, was employed to
provide assessment, and limited feedback to students, with each group of tutors supervised
by an academic coordinator, typically a member of faculty who may often, but not always,
have been closely involved with the course development. Students could register at any
time and start at any month of the year. They received study packs, including all the books
and materials needed to complete a course, and were assigned a tutor who provided
marking and telephone support, at fixed hours of the week. After that, they were free to
work at their own pace for up to twelve months, submitting assignments as they went and,
typically, taking an invigilated exam at one of many exam centres scattered throughout
Canada and the world.
This model is still being used with only minor modification to this day for almost all
undergraduate courses. Though different paced models have been developed for graduate
students, and though study packs tend to be electronically delivered and there is extensive
use of electronic communication throughout, this ‘industrialized’ model remains the
predominant form of teaching and course production. At AU, undergraduates have no
cohorts, no scheduled classes, no fixed timetables, and little opportunity for rich learning
dialogue. For tutors and coordinators, there are no rhythms caused by terms or semesters:
the process is continuous, with students joining and leaving every month. And it still takes a
year or (sometimes much) more for most courses to reach production status.
Support for faculty teaching development at AU
Given the distributed nature of the teaching role and the fact that much direct
teaching and marking is handled by part-time tutors, AU has very few permanent faculty,
with approximately 150 professors supporting the 40,000 students (most of whom are part
time) or so that pass through AU every year. Because the teaching role has, traditionally,
been embedded more in the course packs than in individual professors or tutors, and
because the process involves experts in learning design and development with whom
professors worked to create courses, it was deemed unnecessary to create a separate
department charged with teaching teachers. There is instead a large, centralized
department, the Centre for Learning Design & Development (CLDD), that works closely with
subject experts and professors to develop courses. In addition to this key role it does,
incidentally, help teachers to understand more about how to teach, but it is not resourced to
spend a great deal of focused time on faculty development. There is also a Centre for
Distance Education (CDE) that plays a prominent role in publishing and disseminating
research into distance teaching and learning, as well as many other faculty working in the
area spread more thinly across the university, and this filters through to teachers through
frequent ad hoc presentations and workshops, usually online, that support learning about
teaching.
Working at a distance
Initially based in the relatively large city of Edmonton, political pressures soon
resulted in AU headquarters being moved to the small town of Athabasca, some two hours
north of Edmonton by car. With icy conditions for over half the year, and winter
temperatures sometimes dropping below -40 degrees Celsius, it is an isolated location.
Faculty were initially expected to work in Athabasca, so many left. Over the ensuing
decades, as communication technologies improved and there was increasing pressure to
recruit faculty who were unwilling to travel to or live in Athabasca, learning centres were
opened in cities around Alberta, notably in Edmonton and Calgary. A handful of faculty lived
in Athabasca, but most stayed in the cities. Athabasca became mainly home to staff involved
in support and administration. Video conferencing links were established between centres
and much use was made of email, and teleconferencing. Slowly, the requirement for
collocation diminished until, by early in the twenty-first century, the majority of faculty and
many other support staff worked from home offices and, though they might occasionally
visit one of the centres for meetings, seldom met their colleagues in person, still less
informally. Staff spread across Alberta, and many moved to other provinces for part or all of
the time.
Today, each learning centre has a number of full-time administrative and support
staff and a handful of faculty offices. For the most part, as well as acting as exam centres for
students, they provide spaces for face-to-face meetings. Almost every meeting has a
teleconference or online webmeeting component because of the large number of staff
located beyond easy reach of the centre. Increasingly, therefore, real-time meetings are held
entirely online, usually through Adobe Connect or teleconference. Apart from these realtime meetings, a large amount of communication at AU occurs through email, augmented
with numerous mailing lists. There is some use of the institutional Moodle learning
management system (LMS) for focused groups, one academic centre uses a Lotus Notes
system, and occasional use is made of other online communication tools, such as Google
Groups or Skype. However, email is by far the most widely used tool for internal dialogue.
Email is, however, a very soft technology that can be flexibly bent to a myriad of purposes –
scheduling, project process support, shared editing, file storage, chat, formal messaging and
so on - but only with significant effort. It is not a shared social space but a flow, captured
and organized by each individual.
Transactional distance at AU
Those who work in a particular location often develop rich informal networks and
some could be characterized as a Community of Practice (Wenger, 1998), although each
physical centre is an island with distinctive and somewhat divergent cultures and practices.
Notably, faculty in Edmonton and Calgary and administrators in Athabasca rarely meet in
person and, when they do, meetings are typically task-driven and focused. The centres are
regular hubs for meetings, but only for some of those who teach and research at AU.
Between tutors (whose only communication is sporadic, typically via email) and faculty
who do not live near one of the centres, a large majority of teaching staff rarely meet with
one another and, when they do communicate, it tends to be in formal ways, typically for
instrumentally focused tasks. There is little exchange of social pleasantries, little knowledge
of what others are doing, little opportunity to ask trivial questions about processes. In a
face-to-face environment, the gears of an organization are oiled by the constant exchange of
small bits of information, and by people knowing who to talk to and even for questions like
‘where should this go?’ or ‘who knows about that?’ that fill in gaps in procedures or
methods so that things can run more or less smoothly. While, in excess, they may lead to
inefficiencies, gossip and lack of focus, such casual exchanges are the neural transmitters of
the organizational mind; the glue that holds communities of practice together (Wenger,
1998); the form that distributed cognition takes within an organization (Caporael, 1997).
This is of particular relevance in a distance community where physical architecture
provides no guidance of where to seek knowledge; where the physical form of the
organization, as perceived by both students and distributed members of staff, is that of
websites and streams of reified conversation in email exchanges.
In the relative absence of dialogue, the theory of transactional distance predicts the
outcome: structure takes hold and indeed is necessary for functionality. Things that do not
need to be made explicit when people are able to talk to others easily and freely are
automated, created as forms, built into rules. At AU, structure is a particularly compelling
route forwards because of the industrial methods and pedagogies on which the institution
was originally based: it is in the genetic makeup of the organization. Habits from one
activity transfer easily to others. This is an example of the adjacent possible (Kauffman,
2000): technologies make possible new technologies both by suggestion (we think of ways
of using tools in new ways) and in the capacity to build on what we already have. And then
path dependencies set in that serve to limit diversity and result in lack of consideration of
alternatives (Page, 2011).
If the structures that were created were sufficiently well constructed and easily
discovered, it is possible that the relative paucity of dialogue would have little ill effect.
However, Athabasca University is an institution that, like many others, is going through a
lengthy process of renewal. A technological and pedagogical revolution has been occurring
at AU for over a decade. More learner-centric and social pedagogies, new and nimbler
electronic tools and processes, and a significant shift in pedagogical thinking in favour of
constructivist and Connectivist pedagogies that is at least partly due to the deliberate
recruitment of a wide range of world-class distance learning researchers over a decade or
more have created a seismic shift in needs for support and infrastructure. Industrial
methods designed for paper production that were used in the past prove to be unwieldy
and inefficient when tools are available that let an individual do in a week what a team used
to do in a year, and are not geared to methods of teaching where dialogue and networking
are central and assumed. Methods, organization structures, processes and tools, that served
the dominant self-paced correspondence model well, have proved a major impediment to
adopting newer, agile and responsive techniques for teaching and learning. Despite and
sometimes because of large investments in major centralized systems – tools for tutor
management, LMSs, e-library tools, registration systems, assessment tools, synchronous
conferencing tools and a host of others – the rate of change in infrastructure has not kept up
with the need for change in methods and pedagogies. Though under attack from all sides,
the seven-phase industrial development model persists, despite its manifest lack of agility
and relevance when the vast majority of course materials and processes are electronic.
Much of the reason for its persistence is the difficulty of handling communication between
the many stakeholders in making changes, leading to a chicken and egg problem: structure
reduces dialogue, but dialogue cannot become sufficiently robust and meaningful until
structure is relieved. This structural interdependence runs deep and broad. For instance,
union pressures ensure that the staff involved in packaging and distributing paper course
packs remain employed in that function, despite many new course packs being a redundant
piece of paper with a URL to where one can find the electronic environments, ebooks and
resources that are needed, thus taking needed resources from other emergent areas of
need. Similarly, technicians are employed to manage expensive video conferencing facilities
despite better and more flexible webmeeting tools being ubiquitously available. Such brittle
structures fail even at small scales. For instance, the first author’s use of zero-weighted
formative assignments make it impossible for the marks-submission system to accept them.
The only reason that they have to be entered at all is that tutors are paid according to
assignment work marked so, if not submitted to the system, tutors would not get paid. The
manual process that was developed to overcome this is costly, inefficient and, for students,
bewildering and sometimes traumatic as automatically prepared transcripts aggregate the
zero-weighted mark with the real grade and insist that they have failed.
Athabasca Landing
Partly in response to the limitations of role-based LMSs to support studentcontrolled beyond-the-course learning, partly to address the multiple holes between hard
and brittle monolithic systems but mainly to provide a learning commons to reduce
transactional distance across the university and to encourage the growth of a richer, more
inclusive learning community where people could be aware of others, exchange ideas, build
knowledge and communicate freely, the authors obtained grant funding to create a social
media site. It was christened Athabasca Landing (the Landing), reflecting both the concept
of a space between others, and the original name of the town of Athabasca – a port of
landing on the Athabasca River
The Landing is conceived as a social construction kit for building a learning
commons – a shared dynamic and safe academic space providing a plenitude of tools such
as blogs, wikis, file sharing, bookmark sharing, microblogs, groups, discussion forums, polls,
calendars, podcasting, news aggregation and many other facilities, all socially enabled:
anything posted to the site automatically gains the means for others to develop
conversations around it. It is based on Elgg, (http://elgg.org) a flexible, open source
framework for building social sites based on a small core and multiple plugins to provide its
functionality. The Landing has around 80-90 of such plugins, many of which were
developed by our team and released to the wider Elgg community.
Beyond its malleability, one of the main reasons for choosing Elgg is that it offers
very fine-grained, user-set access controls. Anything posted on the site can be shared with
as many or as few people as the poster wishes, from totally public (including search
engines) to totally private, as well as one’s social network, subsets of that network (for
instance, users can differentiate friends and teachers or students), groups, or the whole set
of logged-in users. There are, deliberately, no predefined roles in the system apart from a
system administrator, required for maintenance. Students, professors, tutors, learning
designers, office administrators, janitors and even the university president have precisely
the same rights as one another to create, share and communicate with others. To foster
trust, the site is a walled garden with windows, restricted to those with an AU login and a
few invited guests, though posts that are made public are visible to anyone in the world and
(moderated) comments can be added to them by anyone, whether a site member or not.
Membership is mostly voluntary, although some centres have mandated that staff should
join and some students are required to use the site as part of the course process.
The Landing is approaching its third birthday and currently boasts around 4,500
users, from across the university spectrum, from visiting students to long-term staff. Most of
AU’s staff, tutors and faculty have joined the site and, though by no means are all active,
most have posted some content at some point and many read the site. We have tried
diligently to encourage a diverse range of uses. Diversity serves multiple purposes. It gives
multiple reasons to visit the site and hence to increase the chances of social encounters and
serendipitous discovery and, much as Jane Jacobs has noted for thriving city districts,
diversity drives growth and creativity (Jacobs, 1961) as well as fostering robustness (Page,
2011). It also reduces the barriers to exchanging the kinds of information or posing
problems that might not be shared otherwise, because a diverse audience provides greater
likelihood of others finding it interesting, making comments or having solutions. Amongst
the thousands of different ways it has been used are groups for committees, subcommittees
and working groups, research groups (including a Zombie Research Group), social and
humour groups, study groups for students, personal blogs, file sharing repositories, series of
podcasts, course groups, course sub-groups, shared document development, operational
management, computer support and a host of other purposes, projects, groups, networks
and subject interests.
The Landing’s role in social learning
The Landing has been successful in knitting a closer learning community than was
possible before, reducing the sense of isolation felt by staff and students alike. A member
writes:
“I'd say it's a close-knit, supportive place: comfortable, maybe even cozy. It has a thousand
starting points and paths, many tools and endless possibilities;”
For its members, there is a greater awareness of the breadth and spectrum of
activities performed across the university. Some of this is the result of mindful sharing. For
example, an internal monthly journal that reports on activities of people involved with the
university was once was distributed by email to staff and was read by few people but now
current and archived past issues are read by many more, including students and alumni. In
other cases it just happens as a result of engaging in the site. Whenever anyone contributes
anything to the Landing, if they have set sufficient permissions, it is visible to all in an
activity stream. Most users receive notifications via email when posts within specific groups
or by people they are following have been posted. Landing users are thus aware not only of
things that they actively seek but also of many other things going on in the site. Much of the
value is simply the result of seeing what people share. It is also searchable by tag, including
tags on individual profiles. Those who have filled out their profiles can be discovered by
others and shared interests can be found. The first author has frequently discovered
unknown facets and previously hidden talents of colleagues through profile browsing,
opening up channels of dialogue that were unavailable before. Blog posts are particularly
valuable as they often result in conversations related to the topic being written of. This can
be helpful to sustain connections between sporadic face-to-face encounters that occur at
AU.
Posts can also lead to discoveries across disciplinary borders. One member of
faculty, for example, in a different academic discipline than that of either of the authors and
who would otherwise be unknown to us, posts frequently on issues such as open
educational resources and copyright legislation, bringing a very different perspective from
the dialogues that go on within online and distance learning communities, that enriches and
informs with new ways of thinking about the same ideas. Others use the import feature to
embed blog posts, YouTube videos or other content they have created into the Landing,
thereby increasing our capacity to know and benefit from the talents of others in our
broader community
The process of creating the Landing has itself resulted in a rich vein of informal
learning. Rather than a traditional steering committee, the Landing has a steering network,
loosely aggregated as a Landing group known as ‘Friends of the Landing’ that anyone who
uses the site may join and contribute to. The group of nearly 100 volunteer members (and
rising) is perhaps the most diverse social entity on the Landing, with representatives from
across the institution – students, faculty and tutors from every academic discipline, learning
designers, editors, administrators and many more make this more than just a group focused
on improving the Landing but a group focused on improving learning in general. Many
conversations that started with a focus on what the Landing should do and how it should do
it have branched into discussions of the nature of (for instance) privacy, discrimination, the
nature of courses and of learning itself. It is not uncommon for lengthy discussions and
debates to occur and for comments such as these to emerge:
“My views have changed considerably through this discussion”
“by my following this conversation I am richer”
“I, for one, am engaged in some important learning.”
Teaching the teachers
Despite our best efforts to encourage diversity on the Landing, by far the most
dominant interest expressed on the site is in distance and online learning. Partly this is
because of the Matthew Effect (Merton, 1968) by which the rich getting richer while the
poor get poorer. When we created the site we imported all the posts and users from an
earlier prototype site that had predominantly been used by students and teachers of
distance education. This led, especially in its early growth period, to it being preferentially
visited and consequently used by those with an interest in that area. Partly it is a result of
the Landing being valued by the many distance education researchers who work at AU as an
opportunity to share and explore new ideas. Many of them are early adopters and share an
interest in how it is working as a “beyond the LMS” learning environment. Its contributors
include a litany of the gilded and famous in the field of distance and online learning. Many of
this group’s posts are public, taking advantage of the Landing’s access controls, so their
posts are seen by all. The Centre for Learning Design & Development is a particularly active
user of the site both as individuals and in support of process. Beyond that, many staff and
students alike share an interest and sometimes a fascination with the process of distance
learning because it is how they are learning and teaching. We would like to encourage more
diversity but, more by accident than design, the Landing has become an amazingly rich
source of shared knowledge about distance and online learning and a place to share practice
and problems.
Apart from this rich body of blogs, bookmarks, shared videos and other resources
on distance and online learning, The Landing has brought about changes in teaching
practice in three distinct ways. Firstly, for those that have used the site in their own
teaching, it has often proved a liberating experience. Because of the nature of self-paced
delivery, courses delivered via the institutional Moodle site cannot be modified while a
student is taking them, because a student may be at any point in the course at any time over
a 12-month period and he or she cannot have the rug pulled from under his or her feet. A
change to a course thus implies a new revision, and the complexities for tutors and
administrators as well as the others involved in the process make this a far from trivial
exercise: the work needed to track students on multiple versions of courses alone is
substantial. The Landing, however, can soften these hard and brittle technologies, by
allowing the creation of course-related groups containing supplemental activities to be
added, new links to be shared (by staff and students alike), frequently asked questions to be
answered and social engagement to occur through sharing. Secondly, Staff and students (a
significant number of whom are teachers) share ideas and observations on their own
teaching on the site. These can range from extensive reflective blog posts to comments on
posts with suggestions, to discussions on the nature of learning and teaching. The third
effect is subtler but perhaps the most important. While the vast majority of course groups
are closed, so do not accept outsiders as members, work within them can be and is shared
with the wider community. It is thus possible to observe some of the process of learning and
teaching as it occurs and to gain inspiration from practice. The first author was surprised,
for example, to discover through the site’s activity stream that one of his colleagues in his
own school had started to use the Landing to support a course, as he had not known this
through formal channels. On following a student post that had been made public, he
discovered a wealth of reflective practice that helped to inform his own learning designs.
This is perhaps the most powerful function of the site: to bring an awareness of what others
are doing and how it relates to one’s own practice, to form and sustain networks.
Transactional distance on the Landing
The theory of transactional distance was created in a context where most distance
education followed a correspondence model or made use of telephones or two-way radio,
and is based on an assumption that there is a formally recognized teacher and a learner in
any learning transaction, that the learner may be guided by that teacher, and otherwise
must exercise autonomy. Moore himself recognises this limitation and talks of more open
and peer-oriented teleconference scenarios, but the teacher remains a central figure in his
model (Moore, 1997). In the networked community of learners found on the Landing, these
roles are far more diffuse. We learn from and with others, sometimes teaching, sometimes
learning, often both at once, in ways that may be one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many
and many-to-one. On the Landing, regardless of formal roles within AU, learners have many
teachers and play the teaching role to many learners, with little regard to status or academic
position. Moreover, the Landing supports far more diffused social forms. People on the
Landing work together not only in closed and formal groups, but also in multiple
overlapping networks involving stronger and weaker ties (Granovetter, 1973; Rainie &
Wellman, 2012). Further, the Landing allows interaction with an unknown set of people
who are not part of any groups or networks that its users deliberately belong to. In many
cases, the network ties between people on the Landing are so weak as to be non-existent or,
at best, latent. We describe this social form as the ‘set’ – simply a collection of people with
shared attributes such as interest in a topic or shared demographics or geographical
location. On the Landing, there are few visibly shared characteristics beyond membership at
the university itself and many people on the site are, in effect, total strangers to one another,
albeit those that are in principle knowable and that are bound by shared norms of trust, due
to their assured identities as AU members: the Landing is thus a relatively safe place to
engage with strangers, who may both teach and learn from one another.
Beyond these forms, the actions of many people are aggregated and transformed to
provide tag clouds, weighted lists of keywords based on frequency of use that are an
impersonal aggregation of the crowd’s interests, and that implicitly recommend places to
visit, much as a teacher might suggest topics or resources to discover. Similarly we have
built a (yet to be installed) recommender system that matches similar people’s implicit and
explicit preferences to suggest posts they may find interesting. . Finally users can “like”
certain objects or posts thus providing feedback to the creator and there are extensive view
counters showing the number of users who have viewed the contribution. These examples
of collective intelligence (‘collectives’ for short) are the direct result of the actions of a
crowd of human beings, algorithmically combined, and reassembled to play a teacher-like
role of recommendation or evaluation (Jon Dron & Anderson, 2009). However, individuals
that use them are also part of the crowd and their actions play a direct role in influencing
what is recommended, resulting in a kind of dialogue with the crowd, mediated through the
Landing
As well as traditional groups, the combination of networks, sets and collectives on
the Landing means that transactional distance is complex, ever changing and multi-faceted.
In a network, it becomes an aggregate distance, not a distance between two people (learner
and teacher), but between many, where teacher and learner roles constantly intermingle
and adapt. In an anonymous set, the psychological distance between ‘teacher’ and learner
may be vast, but the communication distance may be very small. In collective interactions,
the psychological distance and communication distance are large, and yet there is a strong
sense of the presence of not one but many others and the strange recursion of being part of
the crowd that is one’s own teacher. This combination of multiple levels of transactional
distance, sometimes simultaneously, has some large benefits. Not only does it support
psychological and communication needs through the dialogue that is enabled, but that
reified dialogue, particularly when combined with the collective, provides structure. It thus
empowers users to take as much or as little control of their own learning as they wish,
especially when seen as a gap filler between other systems that afford more or less
structure and dialogue. As one Landing user put it ‘the Landing is a gift’ and, like most gifts,
its members can choose whether or not to take it and later what to do with it.
Conclusions
The Landing is a work in progress and with relatively little funding, progress is
slower than we would like it to be, notwithstanding our mantra of nurturing critical passion,
not critical mass. Though there are many success stories to tell, the site itself is not always a
great pleasure to use, especially for new users. Because it is a social construction kit with no
explicit organizational function to support, no centre, little innate structure, and few rules,
some find it both chaotic to visit and intimidating to learn. The friendliness of the
individuals who use it is counterbalanced by the unfriendliness of the interface and, to an
extent, this is inevitable: the requirement of the site to fill the gaps in the hard systems that
surround it mean that it has to be very flexible, and there is a trade-off to be made between
flexibility and ease of use. One of the benefits as well as the curses of AUs industrial process
and culture is that there is plenty of time to become familiar with systems and they tend to
remain stable for a long time, but the Landing is visibly and continuously changing. Finally,
there are redundancy’s with most of the Landing’s tool. LMS systems also support blogs and
Wikis; LinkedIn, Facebook and Flickr, compete for our networking attentions and none of us
have vast amounts of spare time.
However, our plans include many answers to these problems, such as moving away
from a tools-based to a social-forms-based menu, collecting stories and exemplars, and
creating large templates for particular kinds of commonly associated activities but, once
people have left the site, it is hard to draw them back. There are compelling reasons to do
so, however. A university is a learning community, not just a teaching community. In order
to function, let alone grow, it is essential that such learning is able to occur freely and flow
through the system, for teachers to teach one another. For distance institutions like AU,
much of that learning has, in the past, been formalized and structured, built into processes
and architectures, thus raising transactional distance and requiring more autonomy of its
staff. This has slowed the rate of growth and change, reinforcing its own rigidity, with
communication tending to the instrumental and task-focused rather than the expansive.
The Landing is helping to change that by making learning from others a natural process in
which transactional distance is as high or low as needed at any time.
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