American by birth, Canadian by citizenship but Swedish by origin, professor Betty Collis, who received her doctorate from the University of Victoria, Canada, began introducing aspects that have led to the TeleTOP educational philosophy as far back as 1979. Flexibility and reusability in learning are the salient features of the TeleTOP tool that caters toward the enrichment of teachers and students alike.
The flexibility in TeleTOP-supported education can be demonstrated by the fact that the participants in the same course can be both students on campus as well as working students who are less frequently or not at all on campus.
TeleTOP-supported learning can help students surmount psychological barriers which for some of them can exist in a regular classroom setting. "Students who never talked much before in the classroom can be more interactive in these kinds of TeleTOP-supported exercises. The response from students is often intense. This coupled with the high standard of their work proves to be a tremendous boost to the use of an e-strategy in education."
Since the products made by the students are stored in the database and can be passed on to students in subsequent cycles of the course, the results of the process of learning become reusable. And, "since the work of each student can be compared with that of the others with an aim to share experiences, students do their work to a higher standard than used to be the case when an assignment was something only read by the instructor."
Her appointment as the Shell Professor of Networked Learning (2001-2006) was another feather in Betty Collis' cap. Via the Shell Open University (based at the Learning Centre in Noordwijkerhout), employees take courses to enhance their competencies and use the same TeleTOP technology as at the University of Twente. "People with generically similar problems can have a common platform to discuss problems. For instance, aspects of developing new oil-well technologies involve real workplace problems that could be addressed by sharing experiences as part of assignments in courses supported by TeleTOP."
Citing the problems that any multinational company has to build on the experiences of persons within different parts of the company, she reasons, "the lessons that are learnt by an individual do not percolate enough throughout the company. The likelihood of sharing each other's experiences is not as high as it could be and often occurs through personal contacts which are not captured for reuse by others. This capture of potentially reusable knowledge is the underlying purpose of the use of TeleTOP to support learning at the Learning Centre." She emphasises this problem-oriented approach for learning in a corporate environment, "it is difficult for companies to employ software houses to develop computer-based learning materials when the tasks in which the learner is involved are innovative and not routine. In these cases the learning material cannot be too much pre-determined. The approach we use with TeleTOP allows the focus to be on support of learning activities in the workplace, not on the supply of pre-determined content."
Comparing the academic and her newly-adopted corporate settings, professor Collis asserts, "in many cases, the problems discussed at the university remain at the conceptual level while those in the industry are real. Whatever is studied in the corporate learning setting can be applied directly and the consequences can be perceived." When asked about possible constraints to research in the corporate culture, she comments, "in applied educational science there are always constraints on research, as one needs a real learning setting for the research to occur."
One of the advantages of doing this kind of research in a corporate setting is that there are "many people whose experiences can be a good source for a database of reusable learning objects. The use of TeleTOP can help you test your ideas by letting you know what other people do with them."
Decades ago, Betty Collis began using technology as an aid to simplify the process of teaching mathematics; from this she has made technology-supported learning the focus of her work. Truly, a teacher who has revolutionised the concept of teaching.
