Alternative approaches to face-to-face teaching: the changing status of options

Abstract

Information Communication Technology (ICT) diffuses to a mixed reception among academics, partly because the scope for pre-adoption experimentation needed for devising new practice is being eroded by the centralized nature of infrastructural controls that accompany initial ICT implementation. Corporate managers now leading Universities are coming to regard ICT as the key to implementing the transition from the modern „mass university to the future virtual university ( see table 3.1 in Delaney 2002). Clearly, face-to-face teaching is soon to be widely regarded as only one of the options in course-unit content delivery, especially if course-unit pre-requisites are to be relaxed in the interests of widening appeal and class sizes without generalizing content so much as to dilute quality, not to mention relevance. It is argued here that, in this context, online delivery should be in hypertext including links to relevant web sites, and that if the university cannot support the necessary net-ware, the hypertext can be distributed on CD with supporting documents, with teacher-student interaction served through a university web site and/or email system.