The Next
Generation of E-Learning - Strategies for Media Rich
On-line Teaching and Engaged Learning: Part One
The following article is the first in a series of
three from Nanyang Technological University (NTU),
Singapore. This first one outlines the steps taken
by NTU to introduce e-Learning as an institutional
strategy and, in June, NTU’s developments in
media rich on-line teaching will be explored. Finally,
in August, the results of a university wide survey
will be discussed which provides valuable insight
into the learners’ experience of a full-scale
e-Learning adoption and the pointers this gives for
future development.
Nanyang Technological University (NTU) was established
in 1970. It is one of two publicly funded universities
in Singapore. Courses offered include Engineering,
Biological Sciences, Business, Education, Accountancy
and Communication Studies. In NTU, the service unit
Centre for Educational Development (CED) is responsible
for spearheading and facilitating e-Learning
In a short span of three years, NTU has witnessed
significant growth in the adoption of e-Learning.
With the use of professor-friendly e-Learning applications,
it has been able to achieve critical mass buy-in
by the academic staff when the e-Learning take-up
rate achieved 85% of the existing NTU course curriculum.
NTU is today regarded as an exemplar and recognized
for its leadership in e-Learning in the region.
As NTU moves on to celebrate the third year of e-Learning,
measures were taken with the careful design considerations
that aimed to “humanise” e-Learning,
i.e. make e-Learning interactive and engaging with
active collaborations and student learning involvement.
This includes the proliferation in the use of the
video talking head format synchronized with the
lecture presentation, live audio-video delivery,
text chat and document annotations of a lecture
presentation and delivery. This series of articles
will consider the processes NTU adopted in adding
the human touch to traditional e-Learning projects
and serves as a good case study for other institutions
with a similar aim to achieve interactive and engaged
on-line learning. This first article will outline
the implementation strategy at NTU which centred
round the creation of a central e-Learning support
service for staff and students (edveNTUre).
Implementation Strategy : edveNTURE 
Launched at an estimated cost of S$1.1 million,
edveNTUre enables 23,000 NTU students and 1,300 academic
staff to access online resources through innovative
means of content creation and knowledge discovery.
The e-Learning platform allows dynamic content to
be delivered digitally over the campus wired and
wireless network to any student, anytime, anywhere
and on various devices. edveNTUre complements the
traditional lectures through several e-Learning tools
including discussion forums for collaborative knowledge
sharing, personalised learning, dynamic content delivery,
and other automated e-teaching tools. This on-line
learning environment exposes students to new learning
approaches as they acquire skills for life-long learning,
a critical asset in today's knowledge economy. edveNTUre
has enabled and facilitated new paradigms of teaching
and learning not possible before in traditional classroom
settings.
The innovative brand name edveNTUre was created
for the e-Learning initiative in 2000: "e" represents
everything electronic for the knowledge economy,
and "ed" stands for education - the purpose
of the platform for life-long learning. "Adventure" in
a modified form depicts the concept of learning
as an experience and journey to explore new frontiers
of knowledge, much like a team collaborating synergistically
together in new learning environments to discover
new frontiers.
With the university’s name “NTU” embedded, "edveNTUre" symbolises
the e-Learning initiative and aspiration for the University. Professors and
students feel a sense of identity and affiliation as stakeholders in an environment
where they share experiences, knowledge and experimentations in a new learning
paradigm and environment. The current home page is shown in Figure 1 below.
 Figure 1:edveNTUre home page
EdveNTURE Business and Educational Goals:
(a) to create an eco-system of life-long learning
in our students and graduates towards the pursuit
and establishment of a national digital knowledge
economy;
(b) to facilitate, equip and enable the academic
staff (who represent the beginning of the e-Learning
food chain in this local context) to create and enhance
content, develop competence and capability to deliver
effective learner-centric and pedagogical approaches
and methods for the training and development of our
students and graduates;
(c) to “humanize” e-Learning and develop
quality interactive and engaging content that will
facilitate and enable self-paced learning for students
anywhere, anytime on any device
(d) to enhance face-to-face tutorial sessions and
enable collaborative learning in such environments
through the provision of effective audio-visual tools;
(e) to provide robust and reliable e-Learning services
to a progressive community in content delivery, knowledge
management utilizing synchronous and asynchronous
modes of teaching and
learning. This includes an infra-structure that facilitates
fault tolerance systems, disaster recovery-high availability-business
continuity systems, content creation and editing
tools, online assessment tools, student tracking
and progress tools, etc.
Planning for edveNTUre commenced in November 1999.
The concept of edveNTUre was that it should be a
dynamic e-Learning environment that will evolve and
facilitate change. The initial target was that by
end
2000, there would be 100 courses online. The hardware
system and software were delivered in May 2000. Within
two months in July 2000 when the Academic Year 2000/1
began, two hundred course sites were online, exceeding
the original target by two times. By December 2000,
over 800 courses were online. The number of page
view (more accurate measurement of utilization than
page hits) was 1M/month in January 2001, and 1M/week
in July 2002, and recently 2.1M/week in July 2003
Within three years of its implementation, nearly
90% of courses in the University have an active online
presence (96% adoption rate for under-graduate and
75% for post-graduate courses). The hit rate in the
Academic Year 2003/4 (from July 2003) was over 2.1
million page views per week from a student population
of 23,000 and over 1,300 instructors (professors).
Figure 3 shows a typical usage pattern at the course
level. It indicates the edveNTUre e-Learning service
being used by students throughout the day, with
peaks in the morning and late evening. The lull
period was in the early morning hours between 3am
and 6am.
The general implementation strategy for
e-Learning involved the following processes:
- Careful use and selection of professor-friendly
tools. We operated on the axiom that professors
are the beginning of the e-Learning food chain.
If professors
do not create an online course, e-Learning do
not exist.
- Creation of the edUtorium initiative,
a
staff development program – till date, over
1000 training places have been taken per year since
its launch in April 2001.
- Information sharing sessions
to bring awareness to the academic community – professors
learn more openly and willingly through such
sessions. Champion professors were requested
to conduct and
lead in such sessions.
- Workshop sessions conducted
by fellow professors and other educational
experts to provide training
and enablement
- Demostration show-and-tell sessions
given by schools, Junior Colleges (JCs) and polytechnics
to the university campus community– these sessions
served to provide to the academic community an awareness
of developments of IT in education at the earlier
portion of the education “supply chain” of
students. Professors were impacted by the message
that “if this is the experience of their students
today [in the schools, junior colleges and polytechnic],
these future students would expect more when they
become our students within a few years”.
- Clinical
sessions in which professors can walk-in and
speak to technical staff regarding their
need for assistance and guidance
- Establishment of
School-based e-Learning Support Team to provide
effective first line help.
(Schools refer to the Schools of Electrical & Electronic
Engineering, Civil and Environment
Engineering, Nanyang Business School, etc.)
- Training
sessions were done for students, but they were
found to be unnecessary – edveNTUre
is also student-friendly!
A faculty development initiative – edUtorium – was
established in April 2001 to provide training and
support to the teaching staff as they were inducted
into e-Learning environments. Information sharing
sessions, workshops and one-to-one clinical sessions
on how to use the learning management system, edveNTUre,
were regularly conducted. In addition, a computer-based
teaching system on CD-ROM was developed for professors
to learn anytime the edveNTUre system. A newsletter – aCEDamia – is
also published monthly to share on news, development
and best practices of teaching and e-Learning for
the academic staff.
For students, a manned Help Desk has been made available
to support them. An RFI was called in 2002Q4 for
Help Desk-Call Centre application to give better
support and service to the student-learner community.
Training sessions were initially organised for students,
but such sessions were found to be unnecessary, as
edveNTUre was browser-based. Except suffice for a
short 20-minute talk to freshies - edveNTUre has
been designed to be user-friendly - short reference
guide on edveNTUre is printed and distributed to
all freshie students annually.
At a higher administrative level, the e-Learning
initiative is fully supported and guided by an executive
committee called IT-SEED (Steering Executive on Electronic
Education) which provides directives and vision for
new educational initiatives in NTU. The IT-SEED committee
members comprise senior appointment holders and stake-holders,
and have the capability to expedite influential action
plans efficiently at a campus level. These senior
executives also lead an e-Learning support team at
the departmental or school level. Members of the
departmental/school support team are trained technicians
who provide first-line and proximity assistance to
academic and administrative staff. Problems beyond
their first line supportive role are escalated to
CED. An online line help-desk application from Parature
ensures efficiencies (quick response and resolution)
and
effectiveness (tracking
of help requests and technical assistance, case management
and closure).
Chye Seng LEE, Daniel Tiong Hok TAN, Wee Sen GOH
Centre for Educational Development
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
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