The Unisa Graduate School of Business Leadership (SBL) has taken education into the 21st century and expects to meet the demands of the market place by implementing a Lotus Notes-powered distributed learning environment. Professor Willem Hugo, director and executive officer of the SBL, says traditional methods of teaching are fast making way for a new order represented by multimedia. "LearningSpace is suited to these changes because it offers all the tools required to create content using animation, video, music or graphics." Hugo says they first started using Lotus Notes two years ago after employing a Canadian consultant on electronic delivery systems. During 1997 the SBL commissioned Lotus business partner, Africa Growth Network (AGN), to create a system which could build on the initial experience and which would enable the SBL to expand into a multimedia platform for distance education. However, Lotus` announcement last year of its Notes application, LearningSpace, changed the original development plans drastically. "Continuing the project in its initial guise would have wasted resources. Since there was no reason to reinvent the wheel, we embraced the new product and concentrated on creating content," says Hugo. SBL technology director, Bart Smit, sees that early phase as an important step in getting to grips with the complexities of messaging and electronic collaboration. "Technology first revolutionised education with the advent of computer-based training in the early eighties when students could proceed at their own pace," he says. "LearningSpace represents the metamorphosis into a location-independent environment within which real learning can take place by virtue of store-and-forward collaboration among students and with instructors." In addition to the aesthetic enhancement of course materials, the technology has also allowed SBL to broaden its horizons when seeking qualified instructors and courseware. "Being able to `borrow` expertise from leading business schools all over the world has added value to the level of service we can offer without incurring the travel or shipping costs normally associated with education across national boundaries," says Hugo. Another key advantage of electronically driven education is the improvements in communication it enables. "All assignments submitted on EDS can be marked almost immediately and the results can therefore be made available faster," says Smit. Relating this back to didactic principles, Hugo says shrinking the time between submission and the receipt of results adds value to the education process. "The Didactic Quotient is the time between completing an assignment test and a student receiving his/her formative evaluation comments or results. The shorter this time, the more valuable the learning experience." As a result of the collaborative functionality built into Lotus Notes - study group membership need no longer be restricted by geographical boundaries. "We can now group similarly paced students together, regardless of which city or country they live in," says Smit. While this technology enhances SBL`s ability to serve foreign-based students, Hugo does not anticipate wholesale migration of the organisation`s courses onto the electronic platform. "Certainly lower level training could become completely electronic, but at senior management levels, interaction and direct contact with other participants is a vital element in the education process," he explains. In terms of delivery, instead of registering and receiving reams of paper-based information as was the case in the past, students now receive a CD-ROM disc. "This contains all prescribed material required for any course and can be updated during the year," says Smit. Apart from the obvious savings resulting from the virtual elimination of paper-based documentation, the SBL has also saved significantly in postage and courier costs while providing a more reliable service to participants. Hugo says the EDS system has created the opportunity for the SBL to add value to the whole tuition package. "It enables us to offer a far larger range of inputs and viewpoints on a wide variety of subjects," he says. Lotus Development SA`s, Cindy Richards, agrees. "The deployment of Lotus` LearningSpace technology has earned Unisa fame as one of the leading universities worldwide and has positioned the local institution to meet many of the educational challenges facing South Africa and the world." Hugo has the last word. "Leadership in practice - the slogan of the SBL - now also implies leadership in technology-based business education."
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