MONITORING A CMC ENVIRONMENT CREATED FOR DISTANCE LEARNING

Projects using Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) are becoming of i nterest to all academic institutions Worldwide. STILE (Students' and T eachers' Integrated Learning Environment) is one such project which in cluded four universities in the United Kingdom. The Open University im plementation of the project was called M205-STILE and it used a CMC en vironment with 110 students and nine tutors nationwide and in Europe. The participants were on-line from February to October 1995 and the pr ovision of these facilities allowed distance learning students to avai l themselves of better communication with both their tutor and with fe llow students. This paper discusses, from both the tutor and student p erspective, how computer science students made use of a CMC environmen t created especially for them. It illustrates that students used the s ystem to learn more about the subject area and about each other, and t o sustain or motivate themselves throughout the learning period.