Bridging the Gap between Teaching and Learning at a Distance

Unlike teachers in traditional universities, Open University teachers are faced with the very difficult task of having to produce course materials for students learning at a distance. Typically, Open University materials include a number of adjunct teaching aids which encourage students to become actively involved in the learning process (eg, aims and objectives, study guides, self-assessment questions, in-text summaries, etc). Unfortunately, few of these teaching aids have been evaluated systematically. Open University teachers simply do not know, for example, whether a list of objectives placed at the beginning of a course unit actually helps students to learn the related material. This paper describes a methodology for helping Open University teachers find out whether the particular teaching practices they adopt are successful. The effectiveness of the methodology is also evaluated.