A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO SUPPORTING DISTANCE LEARNING USING THE INTERNET - TRANSFORMATION, NOT TRANSLATION

This is the first of a series of papers describing how the Open Univer sity, a large distance education institution, has embraced the Interne t as a medium for supporting its students, tutors, academics, and admi nistrators throughout the education process. This paper reports on a h olistic approach to integrating technology into the teaching process w hich addresses how to provide necessary functions in effective forms-s ome traditional, some new It describes the development and structure o f actual systems, which incorporate electronic student registration; e lectronic assignment submission, marking, and recording; electronic tu torials and other interaction; and electronic examinations, It describ es and summarises some of the findings of the evaluation of those syst ems, including student, academic, and administrator feedback. Finally, this paper reflects on the benefits of an integrated holistic approac h in exploiting the Internet's potential to support distance learning on a massive scale, Subsequent papers in this series will address spec ific areas in detail: the student experience, the role of the tutor in an electronic environment, and the institutional perspective.