Multiform teaching has a long history in the Open University. E-teaching is the latest method connected to it. Today this kind of teaching mostly takes place on the web. The Open University of Helsinki has a closed learning environment on the web which the students can visit using their personal password. All instructions for the exercises and the examinations, website lectures (sound files), time-schedules with important dead-lines and supporting material such as learning, guidelines for the tutors and register of passed grades, are located in this area.

The Open University is an independent department at the University of Helsinki. It provides university level teaching in 85 different subjects. Subjects cover almost all the faculties of the University of Helsinki. Teaching is organised by the Open University itself and in cooperation with 90 adult education institutes all over Finland. The Open University does not grant degrees but courses may be incorporated into a university degree. In 2006 15,587 students studied through the Open University.

The Open University is open to all, regardless of age and educational background. The students are very heterogeneous in age: from 18 to over 60 years old; 51% of our students are less than 30 years old; 8.6% of them are more than 50 years old. The students are also very heterogeneous in their education and professional experience with 41% of them not having any professional degree but 34% who finished their higher education. 80% of the students are women; in behavioural sciences (general education, special education, psychology) the percentage is even higher.

In general education, 723 students started their studies in 2006. Of those students 193 (27%) took part in this multiform teaching programme. Studying in a multiform programme is much more popular in general education compared to other subjects: only 7% (n=15 589) of all of the students in the Open University took part in the multiform teaching programme in 2006. 59% (n=723) of the students started in the traditional contact teaching programme in 2006 and 14% (n=723) in the website programme.

The 193 students in our multiform teaching programme live in 14 different cities in Finland. There is a two-stage supporting system for the multiform teaching: one is local and the other is distance stage. In the local stage each city has a local tutor whose duty is to support the students’ learning process. Each tutor has a group of 5-25 students. The tutors are either professional teachers or have at least a higher degree in educational sciences. The university teacher is responsible for the overall conduct of the course and operates from the distance stage.

In general education the group sizes in multiform teaching have always (since 1987) been large. In the literature different views of how group size influences learning can be found. According to some researchers the group size has no effect at all on university level teaching (Ellis, 2007). In connection with e-Teaching, Schulmeister (2007) has expressed concern about very large courses – up to 200 people may study on the same course. This kind of development has according to Schulmeister (2007) been seen as contradictory to the development of quality teaching. There is also evidence that the group size is connected to student-teacher interaction. Students in small groups can be more engaged with the instruction, which will be reflected in the satisfaction of students with the teaching (Ellis, 2007).

In multiform teaching, large groups are only an apparent concept. The group as a whole appears only to the teacher, not the student. It is possible that the student does not even know that she is a member of a 200-person group. The reason for this is that each student in multiform teaching is a member of a local class with 5-25 students led by a local tutor. Therefore the students can take advantage of support from both the large and the small group at the same time. Twigg (2003) has commented on this perception; according to her findings, large lecture-based courses in particular are ideal for adaptation to the web. In traditional lecture courses there can be up to 500 students simultaneously (Ellis 2007). In Finland 100-200 person lecture courses are common. Those courses give only a few possibilities for student-teacher interaction (Ellis, 2007). Considering then the limits associated with large face-to-face lectures multiform teaching provides new alternatives for supporting the learning of large numbers of students. For instance the web gives the student the opportunity to make contact with the teacher, allowing more timely and relevant student-teacher interactions. Of course the quality and the frequency of the teacher’s responses to the students are very much connected to the wider context, including the terms and conditions of employment of the university teacher and how the university, as an employer, manages the teacher’s workload. This will be discussed below, with reference to the teacher’s pedagogical approach.

In addition to concerns about group sizes, there has much been discussion regarding the pedagogy of e-Teaching. There seems to be a unanimous opinion that e-Teaching demands a different pedagogical approach than face-to-face teaching (Ellis, 2007; Dalsgaard, 2005). Despite this expectation, most traditional courses seem to be transposed directly on to the web with little if any consideration of the pedagogical implications. According to Twigg (2003, in Schulmeister 2007, p. 19) “the new technology has not yet led to a new approach to learning”. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT, 2003) notes that “today most DE courses are simply online versions of traditional courses” (Schulmeister, 2007, p. 19). This means that the change of technology has not affected the student-teacher interactions.

In the background there seems to be some fear that a wish to profit from online courses, and the need to keep down costs of going online, have contributed to a reluctance to develop new pedagogical approaches. Within this context increased group sizes in multiform programmes may indeed receive less support than if they had chosen to study face-to-face (Bok, 2003). These kinds of concerns are based not only upon pedagogical factors, but also societal and economic factors in a competitive world for tertiary education.

According to Dalsgaard (2005) e-Learning and e-Teaching can offer many advantages to students and teachers. Principally it gives flexibility, which means an opportunity to enrol in courses without connection to a special place or given time. However, further advantages cannot be realised without careful consideration of pedagogical discussion of e-Teaching and e- Learning. The discussion is insufficient because the relevant technology is believed to be pedagogically neutral (Dalsgaard, 2005) – that is, that it is not perceived necessary to ask critical pedagogical questions when you are developing a new online mode of study. According to Dalsgaard (2005) e- Learning programme development must revisit, adapt and generate theories of learning, they cannot simply be based upon existing practice.

Of course, a sense for what is practical is a very important starting point and a precondition in Finnish multiform teaching. The students can be gathered together even many hundreds of kilometres from Helsinki and most of the students work in the day-time. However, the importance of what is practical does not mean that the theoretical approach of learning be forgotten, as without turning to theory, what might be practical in one context may be impractical in another. Within this understanding, the paper now turns to the development and evaluation of one multiform course delivered recently.

A specific description of the multiform teaching model: The “Teaching and Learning” course

The Teaching and Learning course is included in the basic studies of the general and adult education sciences at the Open University. The aim of the course is to help the students become better acquainted with lifelong learning and help them to learn about the demands of teaching. The extent of the course is 4 study points, which means 108 hours work for the student. The course lasts 6-8 weeks, during which time students participate in a guided learning exercise and an exam. The course includes three books: one deals with the questions of development and learning during a human lifespan (from childhood to aging) and two deal with the principles of quality teaching and methods to support learning.

An exercise on the multiform website in 2006-2007

The student task was to “Plan, Implement and Evaluate One Teaching Lesson”. The planning and evaluating of the lesson had to be made individually, by each student, but the teaching took place in groups of 3-6 students. The groups were formed with the support of the tutor. Each student could choose one topic from six given. The only condition was that students in the same group had to take different topics. So, in every group there were 3-6 lessons on different subjects of learning. The given topics included development and learning during the lifespan. In order to plan the lesson, every student had to read and learn the central points of the topic which he/she had chosen based on 3-4 selected articles. Every group could independently decide the time and place to meet and implement the planned lessons. The idea of a collaborative working model arose from the literature on andragogy. The purpose was to give the students a common target: collaboratively preparing for an exam with the very same content included in their course exercise. This strategy reflects Knowles’ (1980) expectation that “the teacher seeks to build relationships of mutual trust and helpfulness among the learners by encouraging cooperative activities and refraining from inducing competitiveness and judgementalness” (p. 57). These cooperative activities occurred in this course as the students were preparing for the exercise by teaching each other.

The lesson had to have two parts: the lecture (15-20 minutes) and the discussion (15-20 minutes). The main idea was that both parts had been planned beforehand; for example the students were told to gather the main content of the lecture by writing a manuscript and preparing the supporting material. For the discussion the students were told to plan the questions beforehand. The students had to share and also distribute this material to the other students in the same group.

The university teacher recommended that the planning of the lesson would start with reading the books, the main contents of which were to give instructions for teaching and supporting the student’s learning process. The general idea was that students would choose the principles of teaching they wanted to concentrate upon in their lesson: it could be for example motivation, orientation, choosing the contents of the lesson or analyzing the meaning of the language or the technical equipment in teaching. By undertaking this exercise the students would know something about learning-teaching processes before they implemented their own lesson.

The theoretical approach of the course

The pedagogical decisions underpinning the development of this course were based on a cognitive-constructivist approach of the learners and on the activity theory of learning. The ontology of cognitive psychology is based on the belief in an objective reality and the mental and intellectual abilities of the individual to perceive this reality (Dalsgaard, 2005). Learning, from this approach, is the building and arranging of cognitive structures. The information processing is possible due to the mental structures of the mind (Gardner, 1985). The learner’s duty in this course was then to build as precise a picture of the given reality as possible. Accordingly students were obliged to use the given material (3-4 articles) in planning the lesson. Every student had to plan his or her own lesson and gather the information from the given articles.

In contrast, the fact that the teacher asked the students to lead the discussions connected to the lecture was born out of a different approach to learning. The teacher believed that the students, due to different life- experience and history, would analyse and understand the world – and in this case the lesson they listened to – differently. The goal of the discussion was that the students would discover that the same lesson could be understood differently. The aim was also to get the students to think about the borders and limits of their knowledge. The relativity of knowledge and possibilities to understand it in many ways – as has been connected in pedagogical discussion to the epistemology of constructivism (Glasersfeld, 2000).

The third principle of the course was related to the activity-theory in which learning is understood to happen in social actions and practical situations (Dalsgaard, 2005). One important principle of education is to create a learning environment as an instrument for the student’s objective-oriented actions (Engeström, 1987). As the name of the course “Teaching and Learning” shows, the central aim was that the students would get knowledge about teaching. The idea was that students learn to teach through the actual experience of teaching. Therefore, the structure of the exercise was formulated in the following way: “Plan, Implement and Evaluate One Teaching Lesson”. To complete this exercise the student had to work individually (gather the content of the lesson, lecture and report on this experience) and coordinate a group (agree the time schedule and place of lessons with other students with the active participation in the lessons of the other students). Teaching through action promotes the student’s deeper understanding of the nature and purpose of teaching (see Gardner, 1999) and facilitates the student’s ability to transfer the learned skills of teaching to other contexts (Soini, 1999).

The planned lessons were delivered to the small peer groups in order to create a less stressful environment, as advocated by Hannahford (see Hannaford, 1997). In addition the tutors did not follow or evaluate the lessons, but were asked to be available for students in case they needed guidance. The tutors’ duties were not to evaluate or control the performance of the students, but only to support and guide. The students had to ask for support if needed. This approach is based on the view that the adult as a learner is active and self-directing and can make different kinds of decisions concerning the learning process (Knowles, 1975; Soini, 1999).

The four levels of course support

A) Support by the university teacher to the students
The university teacher was to be responsible for the course as a whole and give support to the tutors and also directly to the students. The most important support for both students and tutors was to give clear instructions on the website regarding all aspects of the course. The teacher’s support for students consisted of the audio lectures, five website lectures and a discussion forum.

The audio component was conducted on through a negotiated phone call in which 3-6 groups are connected to the same phone at the same time. The teacher and the groups of students with their tutors sit in different cities during this audio interaction. The operator connects all the groups. The teacher is chair and lecturer at the same time. The tutors chair their own groups. So all the participants connected to the audio can discuss, and ask questions. The teacher tries to anticipate problems the students might have although all the material for this audio exchange is given on the website beforehand.

According to Weber-Wulff and Schmiedecke (2007), in e-Learning it is necessary to create opportunities for reciprocal discussion and co-operation in addition to producing PDF material on the web. Bonk and Dennen (2003) have emphasised the meaning of both teacher-student and student-peer interaction in the learning process. The web-based learning environment gives a chance for interaction between the students when they use tools such as e-mail, chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards (Ellis, 2007).

In this course the audio and the website forums were places for interaction between the students, the tutors and the teacher. The websites were available for the tutors four weeks before the students. In order to plan the local course in an effective way the tutors needed appropriate time to become acquainted with the material before the course start date. The audio lectures then took place after the website pages had been opened to the students. The meant that the students had already read the information and the instructions for the course before the audio became available. In the audio in 2006-2007 the exercise (how to plan, implement and report the teaching lesson) and the nature of the report were discussed.

The teacher made five 10-35 minutes website lectures (sound files), each with an accompanying PDF file. The objective of these lectures was to support the students’ planning and implementation of their lessons; so that the students could get ideas from the files about what to teach (the content) and also about how to teach.

The content of the website lectures were as follows:

1. Learning and the life span
2. The psychological obstacles and the preconditions for learning.
3. The cognitional point of view in learning.
4. The brain-research point of view in learning
5. The challenges of teaching

The Forum is the area on the website where everybody can leave questions and start a discussion (literally). The teacher’s duty was to respond as soon as possible to questions and problems. The students asked a wide range of questions, for example:

The students asked questions during the course, but considering the large size of the group, there could have been more questions. The low number of the questions might be a sign that some of the students were too shy to ask, or alternatively it could be a sign of sufficient tutoring (there was no need to ask). One possible obstacle to the interaction could be a reluctance to ask questions publicly. Students might be afraid to ask questions that appear ignorant (Weber-Wulff & Schmiedecke, 2005). The emphasis for the teacher is then to encourage students to adapt to a new learning culture in which participation is valued as constructing new knowledge. There are no so-called ‘stupid’ questions, and different kinds of questions facilitate other students’ learning.

B) The support by the university teacher to the tutors
The most important support to the tutors was well planned material on the website. The website pages opened first to the tutors (four weeks earlier) and then to the students. If the tutors had questions they could send an e- mail to the teacher or call or leave the question in the forum. In addition an instruction guide was given on the website. The guide contained the tutors’ duties during the course, a recommendation for the time-schedule and short descriptions of the contents of website lectures.

Before the websites opened to the tutors the Open University arranged a training day for the tutors, where all the teachers of basic studies presented the coming courses. This was the only meeting where the local tutors and the teachers participated together during the course. The idea was that the local tutors get the information about the course in advance and discuss it. At the same time the teachers could discuss what may be difficult for the tutors as they prepared to give extra help if needed.

The timetable was as follows:

C) The support by the local tutors to the students
The tutors primarily supported students in weekly local meetings. Their most important duty was to support the students during different parts of the process. For example they helped the students to find their group or choose a suitable subject for their lesson. They showed them the appropriate website lectures and were accessible if somebody needed help concerning his/her implementation or reporting of the lessons. The tutor was made available, ready to react and give an answer to questions and problems from the students.

D) IT support to the teachers
The team in the multiform teaching consisted of the teachers, the website editor, the planning staff and the course-secretary. All who were involved had their own duties but the main objective was to help students’ in their learning process. The teacher sent all material to the website editor or to the course planner. The website editor put the material on the web and the course planner read the text in advance. If there was something that could not be understood in the material, or errors, they were corrected before the material was placed on the web.

The course planner was responsible for the complete website: she was a link between each teacher on the multiform team. Her work was very important because she was responsible for all the planning of the six basic studies courses. The planning integrated the teachers’ instructions. Each teacher then concentrated on disseminating the content and the structure of the course. The planner also followed the discussion on the forum and sometimes gave valuable information to the teachers (for example if there was a question on the forum which the planner noticed first; she immediately sent an e-mail to the teacher).

The course secretary mailed the exercises to the students after the evaluation by the teacher. This was very important because of the large number of students and co-operative partners. Unfortunately evaluation through the web was not possible because the web-based learning environment did not have a template that allowed planning and completion of an evaluation form for the students.

The evaluation

The report of the exercise contained three parts. In the first part the students gave a description of the group members, the teaching environment, and the teaching arrangements (for example how many lessons were given in the same evening). The second part of the exercise contained the manuscript of the lecture with attached supporting documents. The third (and most important part from the point view of evaluation) part was the evaluation of the teaching process. The students had to evaluate the teaching process based on the criteria for best practice from the course literature. The student was required to concentrate on 3-4 criteria (for example motivation, language and content of teaching). The students made their report individually and sent it by mail or to the website.

The teacher gave an evaluation and grade for each student and mailed the students’ reports back to them. The teacher evaluated how the students managed to define the theoretical concepts of learning and teaching, how the students managed to evaluate their teaching based on these concepts and how well the students managed to apply the concepts in their lesson. If the exercise was not of an acceptable standard the student had one possibility to complete the exercise according to the teacher’s advice. After this process the teacher placed the grades on the website along with a general evaluation in the forum.

In addition to the exercise the students had to pass a traditional exam of the same subjects which are considered in their group (four subjects). The idea of this was to make sure that the students themselves internalized the content that they had taught to the other students or learned during the other students’ lessons.

Key outcomes

The teacher received 124 reports from the students evaluating their experimental teaching process. Each report was 8 pages; the teacher evaluated about 1000 pages. The evaluation-scale was from 1 to 5. Only 3% of the reports were evaluated to the two lowest categories (1-2 - poor or satisfactory), 28% received a grade of 3 (good) and 21% were evaluated to the two highest categories (grade 4-5). 48% of the reports were not accepted in the first evaluation and students were provided with detailed written support for completion of the report.

In general those who got the lower grades had difficulties choosing the contents of their lesson; they had for example selected contents that were too complicated and hence experienced many kinds of difficulties in writing the report clearly. Many of the students did not plan the discussion of their lesson in advance as asked. This caused a lot of problems in the timing of the lessons delivered by the students; for example in the reports, there was talk about not enough time for discussion or that the discussion deviated from the topics of the lesson. In the good and excellent reports students evaluated the learning of the audience according to the questions, comments and discussion. In the good and excellent reports students could also understand and adapt the theoretical concepts of teaching which they studied from the course texts. For example they engaged with the concept of “motivation”, considering how motivation impacted upon their lesson.

Many students did not understand the meaning of the ‘audience’, the ‘teaching place’ or the ‘teaching situation’. Each is an important factor in planning a lesson. Detailed information concerning, for instance, the age or profession of their audience was given in the report; however it was not regarded as influencing the planning or the implementation of the lesson. The order, number and the place of the lessons were evaluated in many reports. Many groups had decided to have all their four lessons in the same evening. In the reports this was seen as a wrong decision. The students reflected that to teach four lessons in the same evening was too much. This reflection was aimed at a decision made by the group itself. Some of the students also paid attention to the effects, on their teaching, by somebody coming into the class late or interrupting the lesson by leaving before it ended. This is an interesting reflection because in Finland leaving the lesson before the end is quite usual.

Almost half of the students were asked to resubmit their report by the teacher, who gave detailed written support. In the 48 percent of incomplete reports, the predominant problems were unclear definitions of the theoretical concepts of teaching, the quality of the student’s writing, and the student’s citations and referencing. After following the written instructions of the teacher’s evaluation 29% were evaluated as poor or satisfactory, 65% were evaluated as good and the rest as very good or excellent.

Many students reflected that the process was very demanding but at the same time that it provided a good experience of teaching and learning. Many students also said that their appreciation of teaching increased a lot. The number of students who withdrew from their studies was quite high (22%) but not higher than during previous years (it is important to note that in previous years students completed a different and less demanding exercise). These students already interrupted their studies before the course had begun.

Transferability

Effective, reflective and meaningful learning was possible in this course because the course contained diversified methods outlined below. The multiform learning is suitable for adults, who have many kinds of responsibilities and limited possibilities to study during daytime or find it difficult to travel to the city. Two points are important when considering the application of the model described above to alternative programmes:

1. The team work between the teachers, website editors, planning personnel and the course secretary; and
2. The multiple level support to help the students’ learning process (tutors, teachers, planning staff and the course secretary), who provided a quick response to the students’ questions.

The transparent evaluation is a necessary part of the teaching. This means that the teachers’ feedback to the student is very valuable and very important. Grades alone do not give very much information to the student. The student cannot improve their knowledge and their studying skills based only upon the grade. This problem was solved in the Open University by giving immediate and direct written feedback to the students. This written feedback is a practical implementation of Ellis’ idea (2007, p. 7) that the students “need to learn how to assess their own learning”. This is possible if the students get to know how they will be evaluated. Of course the teachers of the Open University are in a very different situation compared to the teachers in the faculty. The teachers of the Open University are not in face- to-face contact with the students. Their contact with the students is based on phone, e-mail, the website forum, the website lectures and feedback from the exercises. The power and the strength of this kind of programme is then in the diversity of the methods and the support system.

A next step

The University of Helsinki has purchased a new modern programme called Connect Pro. The Open University has piloted this programme during 2007- 2008 in a range of courses, including the Teaching and Learning course. The programme gives new possibilities for communication simultaneously by web-camera (video), sound and written text (file-sharing, chat, whiteboard). The new technology gives more possibilities to the teacher-tutor, the teacher-student and the student-student interactions (Hannafin et al, 2003). It will also provide new possibilities to the website lectures through connecting the audio lecture straight to the Power Point slides.

Conclusions

This article described the demands for the lecturer, tutors, support team and students in completing an online course on teaching and learning. The delivery of the course was informed by different approaches to learning. The central issues were engaged with through two concepts: flexibility, and self- direction.

Conceiving of the student as a self-directing adult (see Knowles 1980) encourages the tutors and lecturer to support and facilitate the processes of self-direction. The aim of this course was to guide and support the students to make demanding decisions during the whole learning process: for example help them to evaluate their own teaching based on their learning of theoretical concepts about teaching. Many researchers note that the orientation to self-direction requires that the students and teachers create different roles compared to traditional learning. Pape, Janneck and Klein (2005, p. 2) explain that “teachers give up their traditional mode of conveying knowledge…. Students have to give up their more passive role.” Bonk and Dennen (2003, p. 338) note that “the online instructor must constantly shift between instructor, facilitator and consultant roles”. The facilitating of the learning took place for example by planning a realistic timetable, recommending the order to complete different parts of the exercise, and by giving easy access to the content (website lecturers) and practical support.

Dalsgaard (2005) defines flexibility in two different ways. Both definitions reflect different aspects of learning theory. Where flexibility is defined as independence of time and place (as it is in cognitivist and in radical constructivist theory), it is connected to the individual working orientation, and the collaboration (as required in activity theory) between students is seen as very difficult to combine (Dalsgaard, 2005). In this course flexibility was understood as the independence of time and space in the ‘co-operative- action-orientation’ studying model, which was possible for not only each individual student but also the self-directing student groups. This was the main theoretical and practical principle and the most important decision made in the course.

The course was planned so that, in order to complete their exercise successfully, students were required to participate in collaboration with the other students. The planned lesson had to be implemented in a group, which the students formed themselves – this component reflected the importance and value of activity theory. The implementation of the lesson demanded that the student negotiated with other students, and engaged in the group decisions. The students could choose to ask for help and guidance from the tutor and the teacher. Because student groups were self-directing, it was possible to combine the above learning theories, a combination not, as noted by Dalsgaard (2005) above, very easily achieved.

The opportunities for individual and independent study in each student’s own time and place (for example listening to the website lectures at home, forming questions in the forum and writing the report individually) further reflected cognitivist and radical constructivist theory. However, the students were guided to participate one time per week in a meeting with their tutor, and once during the whole course through the audio lecture, which limited the sense of an individualised independence.

The other way to understand flexibility is in terms of the contents of the courses. The flexibility of the contents means, according to Dalsgaard (2005), that students can choose the contents of the course. This technique reflects the approach of activity theory. The flexibility of contents was applied through the students’ requirement to prioritise and emphasise the content of their lesson. Besides this, students had to exercise personal choice in selecting one topic from the given six.

The main conclusion from the course is that it is possible to implement diversified flexibility in the teaching. The main condition, to implement both sides of flexibility in teaching at the same time, demands a special attitude from the whole support-system, so that both individual students and student groups are seen and treated as self-directing.

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