MONITORING THE ONLINE BEHAVIOR OF DISTANCE LEARNING STUDENTS

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 us ed a CMC environment with one hundred and ten students and nine tutors in the United Kingdom and Europe. The participants were on-line for a period of ten months in 1995. The course selected was Fundamentals of Computing (M205) which catered for both technical and nontechnical st udents. The provision of these facilities enabled distance learning st udents to avail themselves of better communication with their tutor an d fellow students and to download extra electronic course materials. T hey could also send their computer code, created for the course, aroun d electronically. This paper discusses student reactions to the on-lin e collaborative experience and reports on their collaborative behaviou r with respect to the conferencing environment.