The Challenge
OUHK wanted to further its goal of providing students and staff with the best distance education support and needed a reliable e-learning platform to provide it with the programming flexibility and multilingual capabilities.
The Solution
The University chose Lotus Domino to develop a bilingual e-learning system that can provide a communications platform and a fully integrated course management system.
The Benefits
The consolidated system facilitated online discussion between students and tutors in the distance learning environment and retention of comprehensive student records and reduced software licensing costs and system management overhead.
Unlike other tertiary education institutions, distance learning at The Open University of Hong Kong (OUHK) is the focus of continual innovation . To further its goal of providing students and staff with the best distance education support, the University has developed its Online Learning Environment (OLE) using IBM's Lotus Domino, providing it with the programming flexibility and multilingual capabilities it needs to excel.
Since its foundation in 1989, OUHK has been dedicated to providing sub-degree, degree and postgraduate courses leading to awards and qualifications, principally through a system of open access and distance education. This makes higher education available to all those who aspire to it, regardless of previous qualification, gender, or race. The University has more than 20,000 students in Hong Kong and another 3,000 in enrolled in China through partnerships with mainland institutions.
The origins of OUHK's Online Learning Environment date back to 1996 when it started investigating system to support online staff-student interaction and course delivery. E-Learning became the mainstream medium for academic dialogue in 1999, largely taking over from telephone tutoring which had been used extensively during the previous decade.
"One of the problems we faced from the outset was the lack of a suitable multilingual e-learning platform," said Kin-sun Yuen, Head of OUHK's Educational Technology & Publishing Unit. "Rather than wait for the market to provide, which could have delayed the whole initiative, we decided to launch our Online Learning Environment with a commercially available English language e-learning system and to try developing our own Chinese system.
"We looked at Lotus Notes during our evaluations and were impressed with its support for Chinese and other useful features such as replication. When IBM released the Lotus Domino server, which supported interactive web applications and a very flexible application development model, we decided to use it as the base for the Chinese version of our e-learning system."
By October 1999, when OUHK was ready to make e-learning its primary medium of student interaction, the first version of its Chinese system ¡V developed by a pair of dedicated Domino system programmers ¡V was also ready. In the years since then the number of Chinese courses supported on the OUHK's Domino-based e-learning system has expanded to 70 and the system has been refined and enhanced to better support the University's special requirements.
"With the experience gained from running the English language system and the Domino-based Chinese system we can then combine their best features and use them in the development of a bilingual platform that is specific to an institution of distance education."
The Internet is used in a number of different ways to support education activities including research, course content delivery, student collaboration, academic communication and administration. While these are common to all universities, where OUHK differs from more conventional institutions is the degree to which it relies on its e-learning system.
"Our on-line system has to be failsafe. There's no opportunity to make up for things at lecture time so we have to deliver 100 per cent of the payload through distance learning. The online community is a lot more active than would be the case at a normal university because it is the only way the students, who otherwise work in isolation from each other, can interact," said Dr Yuen.
"We've found that online discussion forums are actually more effective than either telephone or face-to-face discussion. The fact that it's asynchronous means students have the time to think and come up with better questions and likewise, our tutors have time to prepare better answers."
For OUHK, the Domino-based e-learning system is not just a communications platform. It is a fully integrated course management system that maintains comprehensive student records and encompasses online processes such as assignment extension request and approval.
"So, if a student asks for a lot of extensions this is reflected in their assignment records. In campus-based universities this stuff is often not systematically recorded. Keeping a record of interaction with students is a powerful functionality that is simply not available in standard e-learning systems ¡V we believe our system is the first of its kind," said Dr Yuen.
Development of the bilingual e-learning system, taking advantage of Domino's Unicode capabilities, took about four months. As well as supporting both Chinese and English the system has been given a "flatter" user interface making it quicker to navigate around.
An initial set of English language courses were migrated on to OUHK's Domino platform in April 2004 with the balance moving over in October. The last courses still hosted on the old system will be completed in March 2005.
The consolidated system will host more than 230 separate courses and support more than 15,000 students off a single Domino server running on a dual-processor Window NT platform. The University also runs a backup server which is also used for development and testing.
"By moving all our courses on to the IBM Domino e-learning system the University is able to eliminate significant licensing costs and to also reduce our system administration overhead," said Dr Yuen
"The biggest benefit, however, is that we are freed from the limitations of the commercial e-learning system. We now have greater flexibility to cater for different needs and develop new innovations in distance education."
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