New approaches and technologies will combine with traditional practice to create more flexible, student-centred learning, with a more interactive dimension. Monash communications lecturer Leanne White comments.

As Australia edges towards the new millennium, the higher education system is embracing emerging communications technologies that promise a better way of learning.

One future for the university sector is being played out on the Berwick campus of Monash University, about 40 kilometres southeast of Melbourne. From this small campus in the heart of the second fastest growing region in Australia, the students are plugged into a global classroom that stretches across Victoria and, soon, into Southeast Asia.

Flexible delivery, resource-based learning, virtual teaching, mixed mode delivery -- these are the buzz-words of higher education in the late 1990s. The new methods are sometimes touted as the next best thing to face-to-face teaching, but the Berwick example shows us that the new communications technologies can complement rather than replace the more traditional modes of teaching.

Interactive learning

The new flexible approaches and technol-ogies have been developed as a response to the growing awareness that traditional on-campus university teaching does not suit all students. Many want access to a university education less dictated by the constraints of place and time.

More flexible modes of delivery draw on some of the techniques of distance education programs but can add a more interactive dimension to learning. Courses are being offered by a range of modes, including tele-teaching, the Internet, software packages, newsgroups, audio and video, and others. In many cases, face-to-face teaching is still a central component.

One future scenario for teaching and learning at Monash encompasses students on different campuses, students at home on their computers, and students across Australia and throughout Southeast Asia engaging in discussion and debate with their lecturer, accessing library and teaching resources, submitting assignments and enrolling in subjects -- all at a time and place that best suits them.

Virtual university

Students in the Berwick communications course attend lectures in a venue more closely resembling a movie cinema than a classroom. They occasionally converse and discuss topics with a lecturer who may be standing in front of a group of students on another campus.

The Berwick campus has a 240-seat and a 60-seat tele-teaching lecture theatre, a video-conference room, tutorial rooms with networked computer points, video projection and large screens for dynamic display of lecture notes, web pages and other visual aids.

So why all the fuss about the notion of a 'virtual' university? Monash has not adopted this term, but it is committing itself to more flexible, student-centred learning to overcome a common problem -- the difficulty in gathering students at a common teaching venue at a common time.

Courses which would not normally attract viable numbers at one campus have a better chance of survival if flexible teaching modes are used. Tutorial groups potentially become more dynamic with input from students from a range of locations. Students also benefit from gaining experience with emerging communications technologies that could be used in the workforce in future years.

New teaching tools

With the opening of the Monash University Sunway Campus Malaysia and with other significant developments likely to occur within the next year in the Asia-Pacific region, Monash is set to become a truly international university. There will be several campuses and extension centres set up for both the electronic sharing of information as well as more conventional teaching modes.

Flexible learning brings another set of tools into the lecturer's toolbox along with print material, audio material, software and the whiteboard. Just as society has responded to the challenges of each new communications technology -- for example the printing press, telephone, radio and television -- so too are universities responding to the opportunities that new technologies provide for teaching beyond the limitations of the traditional lecture theatre.