An Interview With Wolfram Laaser

As a practice exercise, I recently planned a simulated training activity for rural teachers in Botswana. I subsequently read Laaser’s article on “Virtual Universities for African and Arab Countries” (eLearning Africa, 2008; Laaser, 2006b) and was pleased to note that many of the difficulties he discussed relating to Africa had been included in the literature review I did for my Botswana training simulation. He discussed in detail the African Virtual University (AVU), and how it had evolved from a system combining e-mail, fax, telephone, and one-way satellite links to its current state of high-speed Internet access, interactive video, and a very large library of instructional materials.

I posed the following question to Laaser: “In the three years since you published this article on virtual universities, have you been surprised by the progress made in the AVU and with the extent of interaction with universities around the world? Do you feel that there is an appropriate level of learning material produced in the participating African universities compared to the course materials produced elsewhere? Are quality controls adequate?”

Laaser’s response: “Thank you for your very well prepared questions. Unfortunately I had no chance to go back to Africa last year. But I gave a short interview in preparation of the eLearning Africa conference. My impression is that the African Virtual University still is far from offering own developed degree programs and that it is still dependent [on] a considerable amount of donor money. Like the commonwealth project a lot of propaganda is made for many years until a minimum output is achieved.”

Many of the training programs Laaser has developed have been produced on CD-ROM or DVD (Laaser, 1998, 2004, 2006a; Laaser & Gerke, 2001). One of the debates in this country is over the extent of control that should be given to students in taking a lesson. On one side of the argument is the feeling that students should progress through the training material in the precise, linear order that the trainer intended. On the other side of the argument is the idea that students should be given free rein over the material and be allowed to access the components in a nonlinear fashion if desired.

I asked Laaser for his position on this matter: “Do you have any strong opinions in the linear vs. non-linear access debate? Do the CD-ROM or DVD training materials you produce limit students to a relatively linear path or do you allow for skipping to various sections/chapters?”

Laaser’s response: “I think that linearity or non-linearity is not the main point. Nevertheless, I always allow for students to select chapters of my production on CD-ROM or DVD. But still the idea is that they should study the whole program. I am still convinced that in distance education you have to produce elaborated teaching material to compensate for the lack of frequent face-to-face sessions. Also I always aimed at contributing other aspects to student learning that they don’t find in the printed course units, practical application of theories, expert interviews, simulation and animations to better understand difficult concepts.”

In his article, “Economics of Distance Education Reconsidered” (Laaser, 2008), Laaser wrote about the failure to meet the high expectations that had been set for the development of huge repositories of customized or reusable learning objects. Even in my field of medical education, I have noted that there is far less sharing of learning objects between universities than one would expect, leading to substantial duplication of effort and cost.

With the economic difficulties facing developing countries trying to establish distance learning, I asked Laaser about his experience with sharing of learning objects: “On the global level, overcoming difficulties in language and cultural markers may drive up costs for localization of learning objects, but what do you feel is the major factor in the delay in developing repositories of reusable learning objects within a given country? Have you encountered cultural differences in the willingness of educators in different parts of the world to share materials they have developed? Are universities able to produce learning materials as cost effectively as private companies?”

Laaser’s response: “I am convinced that good description of learning objects can help to know about other people’s way to teach a certain concept. I do not believe that teaching can exist in just an automatic combination of existing learning objects. One obstacle is that the development environment practically always will diverge from the potential user’s context. Second, the amount to adjust is mostly quite laborious or even impossible. A good teacher is reinventing the content for himself or, in Marx terms, appropriating the knowledge for himself to be able to teach others. The saying that you should not reinvent the same thing is sort of an ideology to market data banks of learning objects. Finally, we know from economics that property rights—or, in our case, copyrights—are the driving forces in a market economy. So there is a systematic resistance to share teach-ware. This will be impossible to be overcome in our contemporary societies.”

There are many challenges in the evaluation of distance education systems and in the evaluation of the learning by distance learning students. There are many different approaches to evaluation, and it seems that some of these may be due to cultural factors. For instance, some cultures welcome review and constructive criticism, and others do not, so I now question whether the evaluation component of instructional design that I’ve learned in this country (United States) is universal.

With this in mind, I asked Laaser about cultural differences in distance learning: “Have you encountered significant cultural, philosophical or attitudinal differences between developers of distance learning materials in Africa and their counterparts in Germany relating to implementation of formative and summative evaluation? Is the evaluation component more accepted in one of these geographic regions? What differences in the approach to the evaluation stage of instructional design have you encountered that could be attributed to culture?”

Laaser’s response: “I think that in authoritarian societies evaluation still is a very difficult issue. There is no tradition in questioning teachers by grading them through their students. Also, in Germany, usage of extensive evaluation still is something that professors are not yet very familiar with. However I think also that the US tradition of evaluating everyone by everyone is exaggerated as well. What does it help a student if he gets from his fellow students 3 instead of 5 stars? Is that really motivating? I think especially in adult education this way of majority voting is inadequate. That doesn’t mean that feedback should be absent, but I think in adult education we can let people classify themselves just by looking at what their costudents are producing.”

Laaser is a fascinating person to read about and to interview. His global experiences certainly added to my perspectives on the international differences in teaching with technology. His comments on training programs in Africa reinforced greatly what I had reviewed in my exercise on developing a distance education program for use in Botswana. He was candid on the limited progress of the African Virtual University project toward meeting expectations. Regarding linear versus nonlinear learning systems, he was less concerned about that issue than he was that the distance learner have complete materials to compensate for the absence of face-to-face learning. Finally, Laaser confirmed my suspicions that evaluation needs to be dealt with differently depending on the cultural context. But most interesting was his negative opinion of quantitative peer evaluations in U.S. education. This gave me food for thought.