And within a couple of days of posting this, LibreOffice has released a version that seems to do much of what I want! http://www.libreoffice.org

Maybe not perfect but, at first glance, it seems to be much more usable than the older versions. I will report back on it once I've played with it for a while.

Jon, I like the distinction between amount of interaction and the perception of transactional distance, but I think taking that abit further, the ideas of "gudied transactional conversation" is not creepy at all, but engagement of interaction with content. Certainly watching video, reading a great book or being engaged in a game ( Csikszentmihalyi's flow) are ways of descreasing transacational distance. Moore (writing when he did in the late 1980's) I don't think experienced the type of engagement that media rich content interaction can produce, and thus suggested that only "dialogue" was the recipe for reducing transactional distance. 

Interesting - I'm not sure that it is entirely correct to equate interaction with dialogue, though I quite like it as a metaphor. Indeed, I often describe the process of building technologies as a kind of conversation with the tools and materials, which are typically mediating artefacts between us and one or (usually far) more others, so it would be inconsistent of me to suggest otherwise. When using a doorknob, for example, we are seldom aware of being in a dialogue with its designer and maker, though it can be useful to think of it that way, despite there being no direct interaction that the creators would even be aware of. But it is much more a 'dialogue' with the doorknob itself.

On reflection, I think I agree with you re flow and engagement, at least up to a point: if transactional distance is a psychological and communications gulf as Moore suggests, then I can see how the psychological gulf might be reduced in even basic textbooks that are engaging and that give a sense of the person behind them - in such circumstances we might begin to get inside the head of another, to think a little like they do or, rather, to model their ways of thinking - that's often the value of being taught as opposed to self-guiding our own learning. But the communications gulf would still seem to be a yawning chasm, at least when compared with a situation where the author can talk back. It would be instructive to think of this in a rich game context, where interactions with the AI (the ghost of the designer, perhaps, reified interaction as well as content) are, subjectively, qualitatively different from those with other human players. In our book we cited a couple of bits of very clear evidence of this, including evidence drawn from brain scans of people who believed they were playing against a computer compared with those who thought they were interacting with a machine. As the example showed, we can be fooled, sometimes, but there is something much more meaningful and very different involved when we know (or believe) that we are playing with real people. And I think that meaningfulness is what comes from, and at least partially defines, lower transactional distance. And that's also why it might be a bit creepy if we felt that meaningful attachment without an actual person being on the other side.

I just hope wheoevr writes these keeps writing more!
- Vlora

It's a very typical story, thanks Caroline! I'd be interested in others people have to share. I have caught a few this way in the past and there's a great team in the UK who actively seek such things and pass them around, including to us. I have a friend there who actually got research funding to enlist a 'student' to take a couple of courses at a face to face institution, which included invigilated exams, and who passed them for, as I recall, around $60 per assignment and a little more for the exam, though that was as few years ago and prices seem to be dropping.  It's most depressing when it occurs on paced courses, when you think you're getting to know someone who is not who they claim to be.

Of course, it's not new: there have always been students willing to write assignments and exams for other students since at least a century before the Internet and, in the past, they were rarely caught. I think what's new is that it has become a lucrative and large-scale international business.

>>I think what's new is that it has become a lucrative and large-scale international business.

I believe for the most part it is due to the WWW. It's so much easier to access the assignments from other parts of the country or even other countries if one has means to translate.

Unfortunately things like that have been happening when I was a student, and that was about 20-25 years ago.

Thanks for that Helen - indeed, it certainly happened when I was first a student, which was long before the WWW.

I think it is misleading to say that it is due to the WWW though. The WWW facilitates it and exposes weaknesses that have always been present in the system, but I think the root cause (in the case of contract and other forms of cheating in courses - journal cheating is related, but the cure might be a little different) is our flawed educational system, which insists on aligning learning and certification for no better reason than historical happenstance and perceived efficiencies that might have made sense a hundred years ago but that do not now. If we got rid of that pernicious link, we could improve learning beyond measure and truly transform the educational system. At the same time, assuming we put sufficient energy and ingenuity into managing the assessment process as a result, we could greatly reduce the potential for cheats to prosper though, when accreditation has such high value, it is unlikely we would ever cure it entirely.

Agreed, there's a lot of things going on in the accreditation process, and not all of it relates to optimizing learning opportunities. 

We're breaking free of some the disciplinary constraints these days, which were more concerned about policing entry into the various academic "guilds" or disciplines than learning. There are, of course, good reasons for disciplinary standards, but sometimes it's more about restricting membership rather than expanding.

This is why I think it's essential for AU to undertake a self-assessment to identify what it is we are committed to and how best we can accomplish it. Currently, we're trying to do a lot of very different things for a lot of very different people. 

I don't believe we should try to be all things for all learners (the comprehensive research university (CRU) model). I know many of my colleagues don't agree, and see AU's "promotion" into the CRU pool as a good thing. But I don't think we'll ever be able to compete with UofA and UofC, or even UofL, for that matter, because we just don't have the numbers or resources. Moreover, I think AU can make a very important contribution in areas the CRUs don't. As faculty, we don't have to abandon research, but we can turn away from competing for research funding in time-consuming, mega competitions wherein others determine what is of importance for us to research--SSHRCC & NSERC, for example, toward research that is more pedagogically focused and meaningful for the mission we choose, and/or our discipline/field/profession. 

There's nothing wrong with accreditation in principle: in fact, it can be a mighty good idea. It should just be dissociated entirely from learning and teaching. Learning for grades is about as useful as standing over someone with a big stick and forcing them to eat your choice of candy, with equally predictable results.  

A self-assessment is a mighty good idea! I agree that we are spreading ourselves thin in research. With about 180 full-time faculty (compared with, say, the UofA, who have about 1700) combined with a very limited number of doctoral programs (a major problem we have to solve) we simply don't have the personnel. Thanks to our tutor model and paucity of doctoral programs, we are largely a de facto teaching university no matter how amazing our faculty might be: it's simple arithmetic. However, there is one crucial area where we excel mightily: we have by far the highest concentration of top quality thought-leading distance and online education researchers in the world, bar none. Our non-faculty distance/edtech researchers alone leave the UofA standing, and our faculty are positively stellar. That's precisely why I came. While we have some great pockets of research in other fields and I think we should nurture and cherish them, if for no other reasons than that passion for a subject feeds back into teaching and diversity is crucial to sustain creativity, we just don't have critical mass in any other area than online learning to sustain big projects or to claim eminence. Partnerships are not a bad idea though.

I'm all in favour of research on a shoestring and alternative sources of funding. SSHRC or NSERC are not the only fruit, and efforts to meet their demands take way too much time away from productive research.

Right now, FHSS is at ground zero, IT wise; other faculties would have to give up what they currently have to start something anew.

I've suggested to Cindy Ives in the past that FHSS is the place to start developing and refining a first class online learning environment, but we need some bodies and support.

FHSS is the perfect location to launch a new online learning environment from, and to establish an innovation unit.

We'd have to do some serious convincing, because it will require resources, but I think this is the ideal starting point to launch a serious effort to bring AU up-to-speed in terms of online provision and pedagogy.

First thing is to get FHSS innovating with existing systems, Moodle in particular. In the meantime, an innovation unit could be exploring how to improve/expand the existing system.

I'm just not sure we can create the will to make this happen.

I wonder if this negative result from comparing one's performance to others (as indicated from analytics) is culturally dependent. When I did a study with a Japanese Colleague with Japanese students we foudn that motivation to blog (in English) imporved when the students were able to see their performace as compared to the class norms. see 

Miyazoe, T., Anderson, T., & Sato, S. (2013). An Exploratory Study on Blog Visualization and Learners' Reactions in an Online Learning Community (in Japanese). Journal of Educational Media Research, 19(1), 35-46.  

Certainly, here in China, students seem very motivated to please teachers (external yes) but very powerful.

Terry

Very interesting, as usual. And in Ottawa...