The Implications of Teaching and Learning on the Internet

INDEX

INTRODUCTION PAGE

MAIN ESSAY

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

STUDENT EXPERIENCE

HEALTH AND SAFETY

INTERESTING LINKS

SOURCES

ESSAY PLAN

Student Experience

An acquaintance of mine is also studying with the Open University, but on a totally different course.  She is currently study a Foundation course in Literature which will lead to an MA in Humanities which is literary based but shared her own experiences with me or using the internet as a teaching resource for her studies.

Originally she had not thought of even using the internet for her study, it was down to a passing comment from a fellow student who mentioned certain on line academic journals which she had used, that she investigated for herself.  She discovered that the internet opened up a vast plethora of on line knowledge.

Her experiences of using the internet to aid with her course from here onwards, were very good, despite the fact that it is a literary course, there were various different methods that helped her to study.

Academic journals were available, (as previously mentioned) in which the content and quality were very good and there were also articles from people mentioned in the course notes and tutorials.  

Two examples of this; 

• When writing an essay on new historicism in late Victorian literature, she not only found several up to date articles on the subject, but also the email address of the leading living exponent of new historicism in the U.S.A.

• She was also able to actually able to hear the speaking voice of Virginia Woolf (who committed suicide in 1941) and having heard that could place her in the context of a lady from an aristocratic background, brought up in the nineteenth century with all that this implies. This helped to understand what the author was writing, and from what perspective.

The internet also houses the most up to date academic research and thought about particular topics and authors. Particularly useful were the 'Literature on line, or LION', 'Studies in Bibliography' and 'Voice of the shuttle' websites.

Searching for information via the internet was a great deal quicker than searching through volumes of books in the library, (taking into account also that OU students often have to pay for rights to access to some libraries) and the searching could be done from the home.  Given the fact that she works full time and studies part time this was a massive bonus.

Although the course notes for the MA in Humanities specifies that  neither internet access or a computer is required, the additional research tools available on the internet have opened up whole new areas of knowledge to incorporate into her essays and allowed her to investigate fully her subject area, which would currently have taken an age to trawl through many many books.