A successful example

of distance learning opportunity

Jalobeanu Mihai Stanislav Computer Science dept.

“Vasile Goldis” Western University of Arad Romania

jalobeanu@uvvg.ro

Abstract — In 1997 the Romanian Internet Learning Workshop (RILW) project begun as a challenging experiment: to organize in Romania an International workshop devoted to Internet and using Internet tools only. There were five editions, and from the third one they included a summer school. Just after the third edition, it happens that two very ill kids asked us by email, to help them to learn. They discovered on the Internet our involvement in using Internet in education. It was a challenge to organize an Internet-based class and to teach them. With a severe disease, they were unable to go to school, but they have a PC with Internet access. Consequently they became our students for three years, and we called this activity “a virtual class”, even if it was mainly distance asynchronous learning. Now, after twelve years, they are yet alive and very active, graduated successfully in Computer Science, enrolled as master students. The difficulties and the problems of this distance learning case study will be analysed.

Keywords: Virtual class; Internet; disabilities; LMS

I. INTRODUCTION

A. Romanian Internet Learning Workshop In 1997 the Romanian Internet Learning Workshop (RILW)

project begun as a challenging experiment: to organize in Romania an International workshop devoted to Internet and using Internet tools only. This was possible inside the Romanian Academic Internet Networks of that time, extensively using email communications, and the first Web server that was just installed at the Institute for Isotopic and Molecular Technologies.

It was probably the first workshop of this kind, organized solely through the Internet, the Call for Papers being published repeatedly in the ISOC Forum; a workshop having a web-site from the start (http://www.itim-cj.ro/rilw) – mirrored subsequently in many countries, including South Africa. For the first edition we received financial support from the Soros Foundation for an Open Society, an institution which, at that time, was also a big supporter of connecting schools, universities and other organizations to the Internet.

This way, the initial experiment became the first meeting of the annual ones. It was called workshop and not conference, because what we wanted was a real debate, with a limited number of participants and plenty of time for discussions. And it was a good idea: this very format selected a certain kind of participants, with a considerable degree of enthusiasm. As a result, due to the high interest the project continued until 2001. There were five editions, and from the third one onwards the workshop was completed with a summer school, part of an EU Erasmus project. Besides the European countries, there where participants from Argentina, New Zealand, Turkey, USA.

From the second edition onwards RILW had as a subtitle “Internet as a Vehicle for Teaching” (suggested by Steve Wheeler) [1,2,3]. Since 1999, RILW became an International Conference and Summer School on the framework of an EU Erasmus Program. RILW’99 took place in Cluj, August 16-28, with Teacher’s House between conference organizers. RILW 2000 and 2001 took place in a small town called Sumuleu Ciuc (June 26 - July 8, respectively August 11-20). The Erasmus project was coordinated by University of Bucharest, with Universities of Munich, Berlin, Strathclyde, Plymouth, and Malaga as foreign partners.

At each event, around 20 to 30 papers have been selected and presented, and several round panel discussions have been held. One of the successes in organizing RILW was to publish in advance the full papers volume, giving it to participants at the first day of the workshop.

B. The Internet Learning Centre for Teachers Training At the second RILW edition debates about preparing active

teachers for Information Technology resulted in a project to build an Internet Learning Centre for Teachers Training at the Teacher's House of Cluj.

Preparation of Information Technology-proficient educators to meet the needs of Information Society learners has emerged as a critical challenge facing teacher preparation programs across the country.

978-1-4673-2427-4/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE

School boards, school administrators, parents, and students expect all future teachers to be well-prepared, technology-proficient educators. There were well-equipped schools with computers and quite modern communications networks, but there were also very bad equipped schools, without computers and without e-mail access. In Romanian schools, at that time, there was one PC to 175 students. A low rate, indeed, coupled with an extremely low presence of the home computers [9]. But even in the countries where schools appear to be full of computers, the trend in educational technology is focused on training and staff development, on preparing tomorrow’s teachers to use technology [4], [7], [8].

While discussing about the lack of hardware we often forget that the real IT challenges in education involve people, not products. Clearly, to transform the learning environment, to re-educate the current teachers to use ICT and to take full advantage of these powerful new tools, we need a proper infrastructure (a reliable wide area computer network) and an extensive professional development over many years.

The first step in our ILC project was to select a team of trainers and to teach them with courses on specific Internet tools, e-communication, Web page design, and Web educational resources searching. At the same time we started the preparing the Teacher's House computer network which was going to be controlled by a Linux server, including an installation of a Web server. The Web server content, developed at course time, included examples, tutorials, Internet guides (in Romanian), and links to educational resources sites [10].

The second step dealt with special tools for Web-based teaching, i.e. web course's development software, examining the products available at that time (like WebCT, BlackBoard, Eduprise). All of this work was aimed for elaborating models of Web courses for science, mathematics, history.

C. The ILC Intranet The Internet Learning Centre for Teachers Training should

be a proper place where teachers and administrators can learn how to build and how to use their school’s computer network, how to find educational resources [10]. It was developed as a joint project, using the expertise of Faculty of Psychology and Continuous Education (‘Babes-Bolyai’ University), Computers & Communication Lab (National R&D Institute for Isotopic and Molecular Technology), Romanian Ministry of Education (CS Dept., countryside infrastructure), and I*EARN Romania.

The infrastructure of ILC was configured as an educational Intranet with following goals:

• To extend the use of new media for distance education delivery;

• To build a new technological orientation;

• To change the teacher’s role and the quality of student support.

At the beginning, the ILC project included the following six threads:

• The development of the local network with corresponding Internet connection;

• The identification and acquisition of proper educational software;

• The configuration of the Intranet and the corresponding Web site development;

• The formation of an appropriate library with printed and electronic books;

• The formation of the basic trainer team; • The development and publishing of basic interactive

guides and e-courses.

Unfortunately, this ambitious ILC project was interrupted after no more than 2 years due to some organizational changes at Teachers' House and new governmental policy into the ICT use in Romanian educational system.

II. THE VIRTUAL CLASS

A. First steps Just after the RILW 2000 edition, it happens that two very

ill children asked us by email, to help them to learn. They discovered on the Internet our involvement in using Internet in education. It was a challenge to organize for these 13 years old children an Internet-based class and to teach them through email and chat. Mihai and Marius are twins. Due to their severe illness, they were unable to go to school. But they had their own PC and quite good Internet access for that time. They were able to communicate through email or chat, succeeding to graduate the primary school due to a generous teacher who taught them at home.

Consequently they became our students for 3 years, and we called this activity “a virtual class”, even if it was mainly distance asynchronous learning.

In the same year, they already learned (more or less alone) to build Web pages. A young teacher from "Al.Papiu-Ilarian" school of Dej, hardly and successfully taught them mathematics and computer basics, by email and IRC only, in spite of all the difficulties regarding the writing of mathematical formulas and the drawing of geometric shapes.

Other teachers from Cluj, Calarasi, Dej, Eforie and Focşani voluntarily joined the project. They helped us as much as they could in teaching history, grammar, literature, natural sciences, French and English languages. Namely, we tried to cover the 5th grade curricula with at least two volunteer teachers for each field, establishing email distribution lists by fields, and a general discussion list as well [5].

B. Searching and rethinking It was a new challenge to organize for these pupils a

friendly learning environment, a virtual classroom, to find

volunteer teachers able to teach through the network, completely without a face-to-face meeting.

A Web-based teaching environment was unavailable yet in Romania at that time. We already hoped to use one in the following years, based on the experiences at the RILW Summer School.

In such situations the basic instruments for teaching were limited mainly to email messages. First of all it was necessary to teach them carefully the first lessons regarding the role of interactivity and critical thinking in distance education; also about the existing Internet-based educational resources, and the credibility evaluation of the web pages.

It was an exciting experiment, rethinking the material and curricula for the special conditions of the students life. They are not able to browse a textbook, but they can read texts on the screen. They cannot use a pencil, but they are able to write with a the keyboard.

In few months they became really good at Internet surfing, electronic communication and computer drawing. Moreover, six months after the virtual classroom was created, they were able to communicate quite well in English, with their new friends from Japan, United States, and UK, without taking any lessons in English. A result achieved more or less without the teachers participation, mainly through reading Web pages and by having on-line IRC-based conversations.

C. Difficulties The main difficulties of this virtual class project resulted as

teacher' communication difficulties in the network. Together with their difficulties to rethink the curricula and to redesign a lesson for a distance education delivery.

Are the secondary school curricula suitable for such students? How can it be changed? How to organize the teaching and learning process, how to deliver the educational material? And especially, how to prepare the volunteer teachers for this kind of activities?

At that time very few Romanian schools had an Internet connection, email clients and servers had technical difficulties to accept Romanian character sets... They were also missing math specific tools like Geogebra, LaTeX-based editors...

Consequently, due to the general communication difficulties, only four from the initial large group of teachers really contributed to the virtual students education for all the three years. Only four teachers from fifteen succeeded to escape their own difficulties of using computers and network to prepare teaching materials, and to send them through email. At the same time the students already asked for more interactivity, at least to use IRC communication channels, for prompt questions and answers. The email distribution lists already configured for this educational project on the “Teacher' House” server were appreciated too difficult to use (by teachers).

Between all school disciplines, that means that only mathematics and computer basics, history and natural sciences

(biology) were covered. The three active teachers working from the High-schools connected through Soros Educational Network (Dej, Focsani, Cluj).

Since all activities were organized on a volunteer basis it was difficult to respect a proposed schedule, to plan and deliver a lesson in time, or to respect an already planned IRC meeting.

The twin students were successful in learning, being extremely motivated, they passed all the periodic tests, and successfully entered high-school.

III. THE MOTIVATION IN THE FIRST PLACE Their interest was focused mainly on computer science,

they became present on the Web, with their own web site called ROBO design, including the blogs for both, as http://www.robodesign.ro/mihai/blog, and respectively http://www.robodesign.ro/marius/blog.

Since 2005 they already changed their home desktop computers from MS Windows to Linux, learning themselves different programming languages and Web technologies. Since high-school the twins split their domains of activity: Marius likes more to do graphics design, digital art, 3D simulations, graphical web site interfaces and anything related. Mihai likes browsers, web standards, web development.

Their Web presence grows remarkably step by step with their collective account robodesign, designing and building together different successful Websites, book covers, or building a GPL graphic editor (PaintWeb). Marius is especially visible (since 2003) with his Computer Graphics works at deviantART http://robodesign.deviantart.com/, and also as a member of the Computer Graphic Society (with CG-works available at http://robodesign.cgsociety.org/gallery/). Mihai was an active as a contributor to Wikipedia (both in English and Romanian, since 2005), and also as an Opera browser contributor (see for example his articles regarding Canvas [6]). Marius is also visible through a remarkable kind of illustrated poetries (in Romanian), between 2006-2008 – see his e-book at http://www.robodesign.ro/files/marius-misc/zgandurele.pdf .

Finally now, after twelve years, they are yet alive and very active, both enrolled as master students after the extreme successful graduation in Computer Science (with Magna cum Laudae).

Marius is now pursuing a master's degree in Visual Arts at the Western University from Timi�oara, and he is working hard to do all the painting projects with a graphic tablet and software tools.

Mihai is pursuing a master's degree in Computer Science at the “Aurel Vlaicu” University of Arad. Since 2010 he is working also a contributor within the Mozilla Firefox team.

Recently, Mihai succeeded to take part to a meeting of Mozilla contributors in London, a very impressive travel for him, very difficult to imagine few years ago.

Beyond those results they also have other successfully projects, like the one for Moodle, which was accepted as a 2009 Google Summer of Code project (to integrate the PaintWeb project into the Moodle Learning Management System http://code.google.com/p/paintweb ).

IV. CONCLUSIONS In the last twelve years the evolution of the communication

infrastructure and the large development of virtual learning environments, with a diversity of teaching tools changed the way we may learn and teach.

But there are very few visible changes regarding the overall difficulties of preparing teachers to change their old teaching style using information and communication technology, with learning management systems in a blended or flipped learning style, to be able to teach their students at distance.

The author transitioned ten years ago from the pure scientific research activity to the teaching activities in a computer science faculty, delivering different courses, from networking and operating systems, to computer graphics, Web server management and Internet ethics courses. Mainly in a virtual space, using different virtual learning environments, like Google groups, GoogleDocs and Moodle. He also organizes a national workshop “Linux and Virtual Learning Environments” since 2003.

With very few exceptions, it seems that the overall author' results with his CS graduate students are far away when compared to the performance registered by the twins Marius and Mihai. Why? Maybe the motivation, curiosity, their illness? Or maybe the freedom they have in their virtual classroom, without all the restrictions and obligations involved in a typical Romanian school?

REFERENCES [1] Jalobeanu, M. & Nistor, N. (2000). Romanian Internet Learning

Workshop: Building an International Community of Experts on Learning in the Internet. In D. Willis et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2000, Vol.2, pp. 909-913. Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

[2] Nicolae Nistor, Susan English, Steve Wheeler, Mihai Jalobeanu (editors) “Toward the Virtual University – International online perspectives”, A volume in Perspectives in Instructional Technology and Distance Education, Information Age Publishing, Connecticut, 2003

[3] Susan English, Mihai Jalobeanu, Nic Nistor (2003) “E-learning evolution in Romania. The Romanian Internet Learning Workshop Project”, http://www.formare.erickson.it/archivio/febbraio_04/3english.html

[4] [PT3, 2000] Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology, Special session and Keynote panel at SITTE2000 the 11th International Conference, February 8-12, 2000, San Diego, USA

[5] Mihai Jalobeanu “The Virtual Class organization” (in Romanian), http://jalobean.itim-cj.ro/Cl-virt1.html

[6] Mihai Sucan “Creating an HTML 5 canvas painting application”, http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/html5-canvas-painting/

[7] A. Dietze, M. Snoek, D. Wielenga "Exploring the future; The Dutch Experimental Teacher-Training Programe", ATEE Conference in Limerick, 1998 (included also in 'Dutch Courage - Teacher Education in the Netherlands' CD-ROM, distributed at SITTE2000)

[8] Uwe Debacker "School in Hamburg in the Year 2005", in M. Jalobeanu and N. Nistor (Eds.) RILW 1999 ‘Internet as a Vehicle for Teaching’ Proceedings, Teacher’s House Publisher Cluj, 1999, pp.70-73

[9] Mihai Jalobeanu, Cornelia Platon, Constantin Predescu "Internet in Education in Romania: Electronic Distance Education, Web Teaching, and On-line Learning", in M. Jalobeanu and N. Nistor (Eds.) RILW 1999 ‘Internet as a Vehicle for Teaching’ Proceedings, Teacher’s House Publisher Cluj, 1999, pp.40-54

[10] Mihai Jalobeanu, Eugenia Popescu, Constantin Predescu, A. Voicu "Developing an Internet Learning Centre for Continuous Professional Development of Teachers", in M. Jalobeanu and N. Nistor (Eds.) RILW 1999 ‘Internet as a Vehicle for Teaching’ Proceedings, Teacher’s House Publisher Cluj, 1999, pp.82-87