Case Study 5: Automotive Engineering

Two versions of this case study are available to download in pdf format (the Adobe Acrobat Reader to allow viewing of pdf files is available for download here). The first version is the basic case study as presented on this page, the second version includes all the 'voices of experience' - comments taken from learners and teachers to build up the case study - that are accessible from each section below, interwoven into the case study as a whole.

>> Case Study: CMC Use in Automotive Engineering - summary version

>> Case Study: CMC Use in Automotive Engineering - including interwoven 'Voices of Experience'

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Introduction

Students participate in the Masters course in Automotive Engineering on a part-time basis over three years. They visit the University campus approximately every 10 weeks, for periods of intensive study and direct contact with lecturers and peers. Each of the four campus visits in the year falls part way through a module element of the course. There are four modules in the year, each worth 10 credits towards the final award.

Students on the course all come from jobs in the automotive industry, working in plants across Europe. Most of the students are employees of one large multinational car manufacturing company, with a few coming from other automotive engineering concerns. The original course was established as a partnership between this large manufacturer and the University, although it has been opened to other participants in recent years.

Characteristics of the Communication Technology

Networked communication was used to augment the course through the provision of computer-mediated communication (CMC), and by the delivery of course documents through the World-Wide Web. The vehicle for provision of the CMC was Lotus Notes, accessed through the Domino Web server. This provided a 'threaded' asynchronous text conferencing system.

Teaching staff thought and talked about this facility as a distributed "database" (reflecting the underlying architecture of the system), while students saw a sequence of linked Web pages accessed through a course home page "menu". Students tended to talk about the communication facility in interview as "the Web page" or "the Web pages", reflecting the external manifestation of the system, and their route to access it. The database contained a mixture of "broadcast" information, and opportunities for communication and questioning.

Broadly, the database was used to disseminate organisational information about the course ("Module Information"), to make available learning resource materials which students could download at their place of work ("Study Support Materials"), and to afford opportunity for students and staff to participate in discussion and questioning about the work of the course ("Discussion Forums"). Illustrated here is the home page and point of access to the database.

An additional discussion forum was established as an area for social "chat" among the students.

The study support materials accessible via the Web for downloading were held as pdf (portable document format) files readable using Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Stated Purpose of the Conferencing

When the course was first offered, the blocks of face-to-face campus participation were of two weeks duration. It became increasingly difficult however for employers to allow their engineering staff to be away from the factory floor for such extended periods of time, and a major reorganisation of the provision of the course was carried out in 1997. The desire was thus to provide students with an experience of equivalent academic value and merit while reducing the time during which students were asked to participate on campus. Part of the response to this imperative was through the introduction of the CMC. Residence on campus was reduced, at that point, to four periods of one week each. It was hoped that the availability of CMC would enable communications to take place between staff and students, and between students and their peers, in an ongoing way while students were distributed across Europe at their normal site of work.

Stated Principles of Use

Each year cohort of students has an area of the database 'fenced off' for group use, with participant identification and password protection. This situation determines a number of characteristics of the communication, which may or may not be advantageous depending on one's perspective. Participants are able to know the individuals in the group with whom they are communicating, and the participants in the discussion are themselves identified because of the need to log-in. While it appeared to be possible to deposit messages without signing them in any way the expectation was, and the convention had developed, that contributions would be identified. Where messages were posted anonymously this was either as a result of an oversight, or as part of some humorous aside.

Participants therefore have the security of knowing who is reading their messages, but also that they are revealing themselves very directly to a small group of their immediate peers, who may judge or criticise. For some, this is a major inhibiting factor in determining the extent to which, and the purpose for which, they would post messages to the discussion forum. Some students declared that they would not choose to use the discussion forum to explore problems which they were having with the course because they would, by so doing, be exposing their lack of understanding to the other members of the course group.

The CMC facility was offered to the group to facilitate their general communication, rather than to support any particular task or activity.

Character of the Communication

Each year cohort on the MSc course comprised about 20 to 30 students (22 and 28 students in the two groups which we considered). Participants come from plants across Europe (including Belgium, France, Germany and the UK) and included native speakers of a range of European languages. The students are predominantly male, with only one or two women in each cohort. As a consequence of their area of work and concern they are technically sophisticated and have no anxieties about the use of computers or electronic communication. Indeed, because they all come with established experience of a corporate culture they all have access to electronic mail, and are all regular and frequent users of this medium for professional and social purposes. They did not have to be introduced to the phenomenon of electronic communication per se, or convinced of its potential value in support of group work. They did however have an immediate point of comparison against which to judge the technical and communicative potential of the CMC system offered by the course, and some were "set in their ways" as regards their personal practice in the use of CMC. Further, the course could derive no benefit of motivation from the novelty of the technology, as the students were totally familiar with its potential.

The range of nationalities and native languages represented on the course could present a problem for communication, although most students believed that it did not. The medium of the course was English. All the students were fluent in English, and regarded this as being simply part of international corporate existence. Most denied that any barriers to communication existed on the course due to language, or that students might choose to communicate more with colleagues who shared their native language. Some isolated examples of failed comprehension through the CMC database were offered however, which were believed to be attributable to language difficulties.

The students appeared to value the existence of the CMC system, but to use it primarily as a source of information published by the University and the Course Team rather than as a means of interpersonal communication. Most did not covet further collaborative opportunity on the course, seeing their learning and progress as being essentially a personal thing. This was starkly revealed in the context of discussions of assessment. If the degree was awarded to an individual on the basis of assessed work, then collaborative activity towards that assessed work was seen as a paradox. While the students joked about there being little communication among members of the group, it did seem to be the case that they did not see their work as being dependent on opportunities for collaboration.

A further inhibition to the use of the discussion forum within the course was the established culture of electronic mail (email) use among all of the students. All of the students were familiar with the use of email in their normal daily experience, and were thus in a position to judge the technical resources offered to them on the course with those which they enjoyed through their employers' provisions. Further, the working practice of most students was such that their personal email was far more salient for them than was the course Web page. Communication by email was an important part of their working lives, and their personal mailbox would be checked at routine times across the day, every hour or half-hour. The course Web materials did not have such centrality and urgency as would compel their attention with anything like that frequency.

The lack of integration between the email package that students used routinely and the Web-based resources of the course meant that the Web-resources would not be used or consulted routinely. This, coupled with the fact that the personal email seemed to afford all the opportunities which the Web forum offered served to de-emphasise the forum as a medium of interpersonal communication. Indeed one student participating in a focus group discussion took the position that any feature or function which the Web forum appeared to offer could be duplicated or enhanced through the use of the personal email system with which he, and most of his student colleagues, were already familiar.

The fact that most of the students worked with the same employer may have also served to emphasise the potential of email as a logical alternative to the discussion forum for their purposes. All were familiar with the same email system, and presumably had access to a company-wide directory which would allow them to obtain one another's email addresses. In part counter to this, another student observed that the presence of a University-provided course communication facility might be important in a situation in which the students came from widely distributed employment backgrounds.

The email advocate responded however that everyone on such a course would have access to their own corporate email system, and the interactions within the course group could be managed by the use of distribution lists. It was as if this particular student could see answers to any questions or problems within his own immediate experience, and thus his own internal email system has always been able to be used or configured to meet his needs, and he does not concede that any additional system put in place to augment communication would actually be necessary. It seems likely that many of his colleagues tacitly shared this view, preferring the routine and familiar (that over which they felt control) to any system put in place to serve the needs of the course.

Self-Perceptions

There was a certain feeling that the discussion forum was an "exposed" environment in which it was not particularly easy for students to express problems which they were having with the course. "Problems" were perceived to be bad, indicating one's weakness, and the extent to which one was not coping with the work of the course. Some students feared that exposing one's difficulties in the hope that another will be able to help may constitute taking the lower ground, and be seen and criticised as such by one's peers. This was not the view of all of the students however. Some were able to perceive and appreciate the potential value of academic collaboration. Some could see some middle ground between undue collaboration and academic isolation, believing that it would be possible and valuable to help one another out, without simply giving away solutions.

Getting Things Done

Two of the general discussion forums were followed in some detail. These ran between the end of March 1998 and the beginning of June that year, and following directly one through June and until the beginning of September. Over these two three month blocks the general discussion forum contained around 120 messages from both staff and students. Of the approximately 80 of these messages which could be identified as having come from named and identified students in the course group, 75% came from 5 students who were the prominent contributors. Of the 28 students in total, 13 members of the group were not identified as having posted any messages. The remaining group were noted to have posted only once or twice. There thus seemed to be a sharp discontinuity between those who were prominent on the forum discussion and the rest of the group, rather than there being a smooth distribution of frequency of posting.

The available record did not allow any analysis of the frequency of reading of the messages. No comment could therefore be made about the possibility that those who appeared to be engaging in little or no participation in the forum might be reading regularly without posting.

In some cases, messages were "signed" by more than one of the students so, for some of the course members, participation may have been by proxy. Thus the overall participation rate, in the sense of the overall number of students believing and feeling themselves to have been involved in the discussion, may have been somewhat higher than estimated by the crude message count. While the students were off campus, some of them worked at the same plants and were therefore able to confer and collaborate, and this was the probable source of these joint postings.

The number of messages posted over the 6 month period would suggest an average frequency of less than one message per day. Such a frequency of use might be thought to be less than would be needed to sustain a "momentum" in a discussion. Like the distribution of participation across the class, however, the timing of arrival of messages was highly "clumped". Rather than there being a message arriving regularly every other day, there would be "flurries" of posting activity (around some course exercise, for example) followed by periods of inactivity. Thus a participant going to the Web pages looking for changes in the discussion forum material might find that nothing was happening for days on end.

Few of the postings constituted part of an ongoing "conversation" among the participants, but were rather "question and answer" pairs. By far the most frequent poster was one member of the teaching staff who was responsible for twice as many of the postings as the next most frequent contributor. Some of these postings were announcements on behalf of the course as a whole, or members of the teaching, administrative or technical staff. Some were direct replies to questions, or requests for information, sent by students. The most common pattern of communication seen in the forum therefore were question and answer exchanges between a student and a (usually that one) member of staff. In some cases it would be made explicit that the teacher was replying via the discussion forum to a request which he had received as a personal email message. In other instances, because the initial question was nowhere to be found in the discussion forum, one could infer that the exchange had been participated by a direct email approach. In some cases, one message to the forum from a member of staff would include comment on, or responses to, issues raised by a number of student approaches.

Comments made at interview with the students strongly suggested their preference for person-to-person email as a means of communication rather than the use of the Web discussion forum, and two general classes of reason were mentioned for this preference. One was that email was already part of the students' daily work routine, and was therefore the prior and preferred communication technology for reasons of convenience.

The second issue related to privacy. Students at interview made mention of their reluctance to post questions to the open forum on some occasions, as these questions risked manifesting their problems or misunderstandings to their peers. If this anxiety was acute (either for a particular student, or in the context of a particular problem domain) the student might prefer to address the question directly to the lecturer using email.

From the perspective of the lecturer, however, there would be advantages in the students using the discussion forum to air difficulties. Lecturers could answer a question once for the whole group to see, rather than having to answer the same question many times over to individuals. Even those who do not voice a particular question may be experiencing difficulties which the lecturer's response to another student might help to address. For this reason the lecturers sometimes posted a student's email request for help, along with their response, to the public discussion forum. There is, of course, the danger here that the students, as discussed above, felt exposed when their misunderstandings were openly manifest on the public discussion forum, and thus chose to contact the lecturers directly by private email. The lecturers had clearly tried to establish a pattern that questions would be posted to the public forum, so that their answers and commentaries would be available as a resource for the others. It is not clear however that students would always feel relaxed about this pattern.

Quite a number of messages served to "second" a request or comment offered by another student. Beyond the adding of voices to a question or issue raised by another, there were few instances of sequences of postings which constituted conversations among students.

Where a student did offer advice in response to a request from another student, this appeared to be behaviour in need of some explanation. An offer of information would sometimes be followed by some taunt, or self-deprecating remark from the sender. It seemed as if such behaviour might be interpreted as being overly 'keen', and that light had to be made of it.

Most two way exchanges were between students and staff. Most communications of this sort focused either on the general organisational arrangements of the course, or on the set problem exercises. Often questions seemed to come from students who considered themselves to be in a position of significant strength, rather than being manifestations of failure to comprehend. For example, students would ask questions about the correctness of problem solutions in situations where they were fairly clear that they knew that they were on solid ground.

Overall then, the students seemed to appreciate the potential for electronic communication as a means of disseminating information to the course members, but appeared to be less convinced by the vision of the course team for the potential of collaborative discussion, and vicarious learning through participation in collaborative discussion. Given this perspective, they saw little need to participate in use of the Web discussion forum.

Continuity with Curricula

As perceived from the students' point of view, the system offered a point of access to administrative information and study resources which, in their distance mode of learning could not easily have been distributed without it. The website gave them the opportunity to extract information from the University in a form, and at a time, convenient to them. In this regard the system was enthusiastically appreciated. One student had experienced the education system in Australia and had made use of distance education approaches in the past. She believed that she could readily see the power and value which the website offered.

The difficulty in contacting lecturers during the brief periods when students were on campus, or by telephone between the study visits, was noted as an important reason for wanting to use electronic means of communication. Messages could be left for the lecturers, either by electronic mail or on the Web forum, to which they could respond when they were available.

The interpersonal discussion potential of the CMC system on the other hand seemed to have been less valued by the students, and generally less widely and frequently used. In considering the reasons why this should be the accounts of the students will be presented and discussed below. It is inherently difficult to determine however, which are "reasons" and which "excuses". That is, some of the accounts offered by the students as to why more use was not made of the discussion forum may be post hoc rationalisations rather than direct causative influences.

In general, the students did not seem to see the CMC discussion forum as meeting an otherwise unfulfilled need. When asked directly what would have increased their use of the system, many of those interviewed responded that there was no need for them to use it. In part these were references to the absence of any course-related imperative which made completion of some task contingent on use of the forum. More frequently however the students' perceptions were simply that there was little directly relevant to their own learning which could be achieved by posting to, or consulting, the forum. They saw no poverty of communicative opportunity on the course which the forum could serve to offset.

Evaluation

Students appeared to value the communicative potential of the conference, though more for dissemination of general information than for the interpersonal communication, although it was acknowledged as being a useful route to contacting staff members. In general, the medium had come to be seen by some as a central part of the course, and to be easy to learn about and use. There was reservation about the extent to which the medium might distance people from one another, although it would constitute less of a problem when the users were known to one another.

The student group appeared to see varying levels of involvement with the system by members of the group. Some were believed to be more frequent posters than were others, although this was held to be down to the students themselves, rather than being seen as a result of the quality of the system.

It was always possible to detect technical shortcomings with the system, and in particular with response time, and the screen resolution for reading text. The lack of integration between the web-based communication tool offered by the course and the electronic mail system with which the students were familiar was held to be fundamental inhibition to its wider use.

Text of this section by Hamish Macleod, editor Erica McAteer

Computer-Mediated Conferencing: Grounded Guidelines