Week 7: Distance learning: The LOI (The Netherlands)

The LOI (Leidse Onderwijs Instellingen > Leiden-based Educational Institutions) is a privately owned educational institute providing distant-learning only. I feel it needs pointing out that the city of Leiden is home of the prestigious Univerity of Leiden (www.leiden.edu) and that therefore the name of the city is usually associated with higher education. The LOI always put great emphasis on the fact that they're from Leiden in their promotional campaigns, however, the LOI have nothing to do with the university, which is one of the oldest universities in the country.

The origins of the LOI lie within the city's "Institute of Trade Sciences". In 1923 this institute started doing their first (postal) distance-learning programme: a course in book-keeping. Ove the years the the institute has started running several other courses and in 1941 (So, surprisingly, in war time) the institute teamed up with a number of Leiden-based colleges to run distant-learning courses on their behalf, all under the LOI-banner.

In 1953 the LOI started providing audio-based language courses (on good old fashioned casettes) and in 1988 the LOI started experimenting with something called "digimail", a computer-based form of distance-learning, the technology of which seemed to be quite similar to what we would later become familiar with under the name E-mail. In 1996 the LOI introduced what they called the "LOI campus", an online, web-based learning environment. Originally the campus provided only written lectures, later video-lectures (some also streamed live) and downloadable audio-lectures became available. Since 2001 most of the courses are almost completely web-based with lectures ebing given through audio, video and text, seminars taking place in forums and online audio/video conferences and most assessments being submitted online. The LOI provides students with their own personal tutor (or I-coahc, as they like to call them) with whom they keep in contact through both email as well as instant messenging.


In 2002 the LOI started doing a small number of full university degrees, completely through distance learning, which up until then these were only provided by the Open Universiteit (Obviously the Dutch equivalent of the Open Univerity). The two however are not really in competition though, as these two distant-learning giants provide different degree courses. The reason for this is probably because the LOI would find it hard to compete with the lower tuition fees of the government funded Open Universiteit. Nonetheless, the LOI-brand has pretty much become synonym with distance-learning in the Netherlands and some of the open university's online services are clearly inspired by the LOI's online campus.

Week 2: Topic 2 | Blogs

NAVIGATION | Navigation around the blogs is quite easy, especially since I already had experience with Blogger in particular. It easy to keep track of new posts on blogs of your peers, making it easy to respond to each other's posts. Also, the actual posting-part of the website works very intuitive and is easy to use.

EXPRESSION | Well, originally the essence of blogging is publishing your thoughts and musings to the world, and it is noticeable how blogger is clearly designed to make it as easy as possible but at the same time enables more advanced functions like HTML-support and custom layouts for those "in the know".
In this case it works very well as it enables us to put our different findings in different posts and make it easy for people to find similar posts by using tags.

INTERACTION | It's nice to have an on-the-spot comment-option here on blogger enabling people to comment immediately after reading the post without having to go elsewhere. Hopefully over the next few weeks the blogs will become a places of in-depth discussion and fiery debates! It's a nice thing to be able to read back what people are on about, something you can't do in a real-life discussion without having to ask and halting the process of the conversation when doing so.

TIME | The same goes here as what I said about this this specifgic topic about the forums, really. It is nice to do the work at a time when you are at your best, whether it's at 10 AM or 10 PM, the site works the same and people can respond to your posts anytime after you've posted them!

AUTHORITY AND IDENTITY | THe person who's blog it is is sort-of in charge I think. But more like a discussion leader, if anything. He/She brings up the points of discussion and the conversations go from there. For the rest of it I think the same sense of equality is on the blogs as there is on the forums.

SPEECH & WRITING | The same applies as to the blogs, I feel. The mode of address is quite informal as there is no requirement to use formal "essay style" writing. It is merely a platform to raise topics and share your findings with others. It is even possible to just say that you really don't get or really don;t agree with something that's written or taught on the course.

Week 2: Topic 2 | Forums

NAVIGATION | The navigation around these specific forums is rather basic, but in this instance that's fine as they have a very specific and sober purpose. Some other web forums have more advanced navigation options but these often also feature posts containing images and other types of multi media. But the basic navigation and the sober appearance of the forum fits the to-the-point purpose of the forum and doesn't allow people to be distracted by things that simply do not matter.

EXPRESSION | Of course posting on a forum is different from just saying things in a group meeting or actual seminar. For one thing user's would've thought more about HOW they are going to make their point before they start typing away. I don't think the views expressed themselves are very different though. Also it allows people to have a good hard think about what is being said and come back later to respond. Something you can't to in real-life as, well, you would've left by then.

INTERACTION | It is sometimes hard to get how people MEAN what they say. Are they being sarcastic or do they ACTUALLY agree? On many online communication platforms they have emoticons (smileys) to help get your point across, but out forum doesn't. This doesn't always make it easy to understand how to interpret what is being said sometimes.

TIME | One of the great advantages of using a forum ios that they are available all the time, you can whack a question onthere as soon as it arrises and you can respond to it whenever you've thought of an answer. It's also handy as some people are morning people while other, like myself, are definitely NOT and function better at night.

AUTHORITY AND IDENTITY | Every one is equal on the forums, there is no way somebody can shout over you as all opinions get the same space and the same amount of attention. Talkative people and those who are less confident to speak in "public" are both able to express their opinions like equals.

SPEECH & WRITING | The tone of the forum is quite informal, so the way we all interact onthere is not too different from how we address each other on a day to day basis.

Task for week 1: Chatrooms, (instant) messenger services and IRLs (characteristics and use)

Good example of messengers are MSN Messenger, well, everyone still calls it MSN Messenger, but officially Microsoft deemed it a good idea to ditch one of the internet's best-known brands in favour for Windows Live Messenger, for text-messenging and Skype for video-calls. MSN actually can do video-calls just aswel as Skype can, however, Skype has become the norm, probably due to it's ability to actually audio-call traditional phones aswel.

The basic concept of instant messenging is quite simple. A (fairly small) piece of software tells you which of the people you have added to the application's "friend-list" are online and whent heya re you can open a chat-window in which you can instantly send eachother and an unlimited amount of short terxt messages thus enabling an actual conversation, be it in text-form. Users can also send each other files and pictures. Users who have a webcam and/or microphone installed on their computer can use these to have actual audio and/or video conversations with each other.

Chatrooms are similar in the sense that messages are sent instantly, however they are mostly divided by region or a specific interest or subject and a meeting place to talk to a larger group of people you may not even know.

IRL's are basically a different term for web-forums, where subjects can be discussed in a post-after-post manner rather than in real-time.

I personally mostly use MSN Messenger as it has more or less become the standard form of instant messenging. It's a good way to keep up with other people's going on's or simply to pass the time. However, occasionally it's a good way to communicate actual constructive information when doing university group work and an actual physical meeting isn't possible for whatever reason.

So, here is where the whole thing starts...

Right... it's still early here at the first ever digital-thingy tutorial, so far we've...

• Been introduced to the forums
• Set up our blogs (As you probably would've guessed)
• Made our groups

My group consists of my good self, Jason New (for as long as he's here, anyway), Sam Jarvis and Pete Byrne. And one of today's skyvers will probably be added to our group next week.

Oh, would you look at that? It's an actual, factual picture!!