"To study social forms, it is certainly necessary but hardly sufficient to be able to describe them. To give an explanation of social forms, it is sufficient to describe the processes that generate the form." (Barth, 1969.)
INTRODUCTION
When Murdoch was established as Western Australia's second university in the early 1970s it was inevitable, if perhaps regrettable, that it should be located within the Perth-Fremantle conurbation. Regrettable because this conurbation lies in the southwest corner of the state's huge land mass and Murdoch's mandate included an objective, "to open opportunities to benefit from a university experience for those who are disadvantaged by an inability to participate in a regular programme of university studies". Inevitable because Murdoch was founded as a dual mode institution to which younger students would come predominantly from metropolitan schools. They, their parents and, importantly, their school teachers would expect campus based education to be readily accessible and would select a preferred tertiary institution accordingly. So, although the new university was offered sites in at least two country towns, its planners declined the invitation to decentralize and Murdoch consequently took a very differ
ent path to that followed earlier by the pioneer of Australian dual mode university education, the University of New England (UNE), when it located at Armidale in rural New South Wales. It was a path which ensured that off-campus, or, as we prefer it, "external", study would never be the dominant learning mode at Murdoch. However it also ensured that guided independent study would be an alternative available to all students who preferred it, either on a regular or an occasional basis, rather than providing only for a specific off -campus group. In 1990 over 60% of Murdoch graduands had academic profiles which included some mixture of "internal" (on-campus) and "external" (off-campus) study. Murdoch is therefore essentially a mixed mode university in which the mixture is an aggregate of student choices, exercised within a set of academic and organizational constraints.
PLANNING
Planning for Murdoch University's establishment began in 1970 and its first students were admitted in 1975. Early in the process it became clear that distance education would feature strongly in the academic plan. While the University of Western Australia (UWA) had long carried a nominal responsibility for university external studies it had been less than enthusiastic, confining its off-campus credit courses largely to those specifically required by in-service teachers who were posted to bush schools before completing their studies. Both universities saw their interests served by a transfer of responsibilities. Murdoch's view of the potential offered by distance teaching and learning was much more ambitious, forming as it did an integral part of a founding ethos which fostered innovation and flexibility in teaching alongside a strong academic research base (Bolton, 1985). UWA was freed to focus on campus based teaching for full-time students and part-time evening students. In addition, UWA had at its
campus a strong and well regarded program of non credit extramural education with which Murdoch was happy not to compete in the early years.
In seeking to establish its credentials, any new university will wish to distance itself from what it perceives as traditionalism in others. To some extent this is merely a way of creating a viable market niche. But it is more than that. Beloff (1968) argues that a major attraction for foundation academic staff in the British post-Robbins new universities of the 1960s was the opportunity they were offered for major syllabus reform on a scale which academic politics would render impossible in established institutions. While this observation may appear self-evident it carries some important implications for the introduction of dual mode education. The easier option for established universities may well be to plan a structure in which the internal and external modes run in parallel, but with separate academic staff teaching separate courses to separate categories of students. There are several successful precedents for that approach. But with such parallel structures there is always a risk that the ext
ernal stream may become regarded as a "substitute for the real thing" rather than as a viable study mode in its own right. By contrast, the integrated dual mode structure avoids such segregation by ensuring that courses are planned, developed and taught by the same academic staff to students enrolled for the same awards whether they are located on- or off-campus (Smith, 1979). In this way, the perceived quality of courses delivered by non-traditional methods is protected, and students are enabled to move between the study modes as and when their personal circumstances demand. As with most innovation, however, the introduction of such integrated structures may be more easily effected in the planning of new institutions than added to those with well established traditions and practices.
THE ACADEMIC STRUCTURE OF MURDOCH UNIVERSITY
Murdoch University was established with six schools; each containing, for academic, administrative and resource purposes, a number of programs of study1. The major purpose of this type of organization was to foster cross-disciplinary interaction and to avoid the rigidities which can arise from a more traditional academic discipline or departmental structure. There are two science based schools, one relating to Environmental and Life Sciences and the other to Mathematical and Physical Science. Among their programs are the familiar range of disciplines (from biology through maths to physics) and some directly cross-disciplinary ones including Population Resources and Technology, and Information Systems. The School of Humanities covers literature and communications, but also has a strong commitment to Asian Studies which involves it in a range of inter-school links with Economics, Commerce and Law and with the Social Sciences. Mainstream Social Science programs include Psychology, Sociology, Politics and
Philosophy, but this school also places a strong emphasis on inter-disciplinary linkages which provide programs covering Australian Studies, Public Policy and Women's Studies. The Women's Studies development is of particular interest in the current context. During the early 1980s, academics in three Australian universities (Queensland, Deakin, and Murdoch) were anxious to develop undergraduate programs in Women's Studies. None of these groups alone had the strength to marshall the resources required. However, by networking they were able to establish a structure which served both their individual and collective interests. Each of the three participant universities designed a number of separate but compatible course units. These were then pooled and each partner was able to establish its own Women's Studies degree major in which students are required to take some of their courses from the other universities, by cross-enrolment. Since the three participant universities are situated in different states o
f Australia, distance education was a fundamental and indispensable feature of the Women's Studies model and that in itself provided a novel prototype for inter-institutional collaboration in Australia. However the fact that each of the participants was a dual mode university enabled them to go further by offering the degree not only to externally enrolled, but also to campus based students. "Home" course units could be taken by standard class attendance while those of the other two universities were accessible through distance education. Women's Studies students are thus operating within a dual mode structure by exercising choices for "mixed mode" enrolment (Thornton, 1986).
Finally, Murdoch has two professional schools, Education and Veterinary Studies. In-service teacher education, more particularly for the Bachelor of Education, has long been the bread and butter of many Australian external studies programs and Murdoch has serviced that demand. However the School of Education also made a bold decision at an early stage to offer courses designed for the initial training of new teachers by distance education. With the use of on-campus attendance requirements to cover supervised classroom practice the programs at both primary and secondary level have been of particular value for women seeking re-entry to the work-force from locations throughout Western Australia. While the initial training of veterinarians at a distance has not been attempted, this professional school has been very conscious of its responsibilities to the continuing education of its graduates and other practising vets. This has resulted in an innovative masters degree available only by external study, and
built around clinical projects which are conducted in the student's own professional practice.
By 1990 all six schools of study were actively involved in the provision of dual mode education. More than 70% of the University's undergraduate and postgraduate awards were fully available for study and graduation entirely in the external mode or, should the student prefer, by a mixture of campus and off-campus study. The proportion of external mode to total course enrolments averaged around 20% overall in terms of full-time student equivalents (EFTSU) although at any one time well over one third of Murdoch's student body would be taking at least one course unit in the external mode.
Undergraduates are, in general, admitted to the university rather than to a specific school although the necessity for tight quotas in some popular programs has modified this broad principle. The purpose behind this policy is to underpin a degree structure which requires a more or less broadly based first year, including a foundation course, before students concentrate on the program specialization of their choice. General admission to the university, rather than to a particular department, also means open access to either study mode. Because Murdoch has always had a relatively high proportion of mature undergraduates, and because many of these live and work in Perth, this particular flexibility has always been popular. A civil servant in the city may, for example, be entitled to one afternoon's study release each week, but may also wish to proceed towards graduation at a faster pace than this minimal attendance permits. A rural teacher may have accumulated sufficient leave entitlement to permit a ful
l-time semester of on-campus study. In both cases provision for mixed mode enrolment, whether concurrent, (the civil servant), or consecutive, (the teacher), provides a flexibility which students in single mode institutions cannot readily attain. By providing learners with increased control over the pace and style of their study patterns, dual mode institutions which encourage mode mixing are therefore actively fostering greater openness in learning.
THE STRUCTURE OF EXTERNAL STUDIES
At Murdoch the operational planning of distance education was directed by three guiding principles adopted in 1974. First, "external" would describe a study mode rather than a category of student. This established flexibility as a basis for planning access to independent study, and ensured that students would be able to move between campus based and home based study as their circumstances required. Second, it was decided that programs, or award courses, would be offered right through from first year to graduation or not at all; there would be no part awards in which off-campus students could only proceed so far before coming into residence for completion. A corollary of this was that component course units of an award would be developed sequentially so that a student using only the external mode could graduate in six years from commencing enrolment; half the pace of a full-time student. Third, and following directly from the second principle, all academic staff would be required to teach in both the c
ampus and the external modes as and when the course units for which they were directly responsible came forward in the academic planning schedule.
These requirements ensured that academic planning processes had always to treat the external mode as an integral component, and not as an optional extra. This of course has been a major bonus for those whose task it is to provide viable study programs for distance learners. Less attractive were the workload implications which would flow inevitably, and quite unavoidably, from the preparation of independent study materials according to such a lockstep growth model. Nevertheless the alternatives looked worse. An external mode program in which course offerings were random, and awards incomplete, would be frustrating enough for students living relatively close at hand who might have some scope for campus attendance. For students scattered widely over the outback of Western Australia and beyond, such fragmentary provision was likely to be intolerable. It would also have run counter to the new university's claim "to provide a liberal and relevant education for a varied range of students, some of whom will
be External, drawn from a wide range of age groups and from many walks of life" (M.U. Triennial submission to the Australian Universities Commission for 1976-78).
The decision to develop and offer a wide range of complete degree programs, each comprising as many as 24 course units, was just as bold and just as ingenuous, as the rest of Murdoch's founding ethos. There would be some compromises, but never abandonment of a core belief that distance students deserved the same quality, and as far as possible, the same range of study opportunities, as their on-campus counterparts.
In order to coordinate and foster this complex development, Murdoch established a specialist External Studies Unit (ESU) with a joint administrative and academic mandate. This contrasted with strategies adopted in other Australian dual mode universities. At Deakin, in Victoria, the organization of off-campus education was "mainstreamed" throughout and no specialist department of external studies was necessary. At Murdoch, while the distance mode itself was a mainstream activity, the university's metropolitan city context meant that the proportion of students involved solely in off-campus study would always be significantly lower than at Deakin, and a similar structure would have seriously disadvantaged those who were out of sight. The University of New England's Department of External Studies maintained for many years that its role was appropriately confined to administrative and student counselling duties and, until quite recently, it eschewed any participation in course design. However UNE had been
central in establishing that most fundamental principle of dual mode education, namely that curriculum and assessment methods must be identical between the modes if comparability of standards is to be assured (Smith, 1979). The natural corollary to this is, of course, that delivery methods must be different, and Murdoch's ESU has always had a specific responsibility for guiding that perspective among faculty for whom it was generally unfamiliar. The strategy adopted was to employ, in the ESU, academic staff with skills and experience in distance education, but whose credentials were also strong enough to ensure their active participation in a school's course planning and teaching in both modes. In this way, academic faculty, who are often jealous of their autonomy in teaching strategies, receive guidance from academic peers.
IMPLEMENTING THE EXTERNAL STUDY MODE
In mid 1974, the University Academic Council adopted a recommendation that teaching should commence simultaneously in both study modes from 1975. Earlier there had been a tacit assumption that distance education would be phased in commencing a year later than the campus based program, but some urgency in arranging the transfer of responsibility for University of Western Australia external students influenced a change of strategy. While this required a frantic work schedule on the part of those responsible for initial course development and production, the decision to introduce dual mode course delivery and external enrolment at the outset proved quite correct. It established a firm base upon which it was possible to introduce an unfamiliar mode of teaching, and of workload scheduling, as a natural part of the foundation structure rather than as a subsequent "graft" onto established practice.
So important was this factor that it is all too easy to overlook some basic difficulties which arose out of it. The conventional method for calculating academic faculty workloads assumed that a working week contained three major components, teaching, preparation and research, with administration intruding more or less equally into each. Now deans were faced with a situation in which some academics would be preparing their courses for classroom delivery only, while others had to undertake double preparation of content for delivery by different methods to off-campus and resident students. The deans' initial and, in several cases, sustained reaction was to argue that the conventional contact/non contact hour formula was inviolable. To introduce workload allowances for preparation of a second delivery mode would open the floodgates to other special pleading and result in an erosion of the staff:student formula on which schools' academic staff numbers were based. Over time this position was modified to the
point where modest course preparation allowances were adopted by Academic Council as non mandatory yardsticks for deans to use in the allocation of teaching loads. However, with the decline in overall resource levels and the consequent steady worsening of staff:student ratios during the 1980s, allocation of adequate preparation time for academic course coordinators has remained a problem in several schools.
Despite these heavy pressures on staff the lockstep development of programs in both modes survived and provided for a very rapid expansion rate. In 1975 when teaching commenced, six one-semester courses were offered to about 150 students but, by 1980, 94 courses had been developed for external enrolment . As new programs were introduced the growth rate continued so that, in 1990, Murdoch students could access more than 200 course units in 30 full awards at undergraduate, graduate diploma and Masters level.
Clearly such an expansion could not have taken place had the university adopted the pattern of multi-member course teams favoured in open universities. The advantages and the disadvantages of course team processes have been extensively addressed (Mason and Goodenough, 1981), but for Murdoch, the scale of operations and the comparatively short lead times available simply make multi-member course teams inappropriate. The pattern adopted has rather been one in which a course coordinator from a school works directly with a specialist ESU academic on initial course development. He or she is then expected to undertake the distance tutoring of several of the initial students in order to experience directly the implementation of the course and, as a consequence, to be in a good position to evaluate and revise it, again in collaboration with ESU academic staff. In order to maximize this opportunity for course revision to reflect teaching experience, and to ensure the continuing close identity of curriculum cont
ent between the two modes, courses have always been reprinted each year rather than being produced in bulk for warehouse storage. For a number of years this became a very severe burden on course production staff handling master copy of standard print materials, but recent advances in electronic and desk-top publishing have effectively begun to turn a liability into a specific advantage. Small institutions operating across a broad academic profile for relatively small student populations have been able to gain some benefit from "economies of scope" rather than "economies of scale" (Campion, 1989). A more pervasive and continuing constraint has been the limitation placed on media selection for course delivery by having scarce resources and enrolments scattered both geographically and across a wide range of courses. The use of broadcast media at Murdoch has therefore been limited to some experimental use of public time on a TV network serving rural regions of Western Australia, while work using narrow cast F
M radio for interactive tuition won a national award before the demise of a joint universities radio station removed the carrier. The university introduced external mode science teaching from the outset and has used home experiment kits where possible to reduce the need for extensive and expensive on-campus laboratory attendance. For the most part, however, it has been print with associated audio tape and occasional video which has dominated course delivery.
A broad range of course offerings is generally appreciated by students but it is not without its disadvantages. Because 70% of the state's population lives in the Perth-Fremantle conurbation and no other town has more than 25,000 people, most Murdoch rural students are dependent on direct radial links to and from the campus, rather than a local peer network for tuition and support. In this situation the telephone has assumed tremendous importance. both as a direct one-to-one link, and in the conference mode. Increasingly important too is the rapidly growing use of the telephone as a conduit for electronic mail and bulletin board communications which are now often available to Murdoch's distance students at their work-place or at home (Guiton and Atkinson, 1991).
Because of the thin scatter of people in rural Western Australia, Murdoch has never placed any great emphasis on the development of study centres, preferring to maintain student support resources in a more flexible form to serve individual students. In recent years, however, the establishment and growth of a number of regional post-secondary colleges in rural areas has provided the opportunity for introduction of a specialized form of mixed mode study. The colleges are anxious to expand a tertiary education profile but lack the academic staff resources to do so over more than a very limited range. The university is anxious to provide rural students, and more particularly starting students, with the most supportive learning context possible. An effective link between these two aims is provided by using the course materials developed at Murdoch for external study. Groups of first year students, enrolled for a range of Murdoch credit courses are guided systematically through these external mode courses b
y local college academic staff accredited by the university. A variation on this theme was also provided by contractual arrangements between Murdoch and Disted College in Penang, Malaysia, for several years.
COSTS
Much has been written about comparative costs in single mode institutions which are devoted exclusively to campus and to distance teaching respectively, (Snowden and Daniel, 1980), but until recently there had been little analysis of the fixed costs of course development and maintenance in dual mode universities. The drive towards "rationalization" of Australian distance education in the mid 1980s had the useful effect of focusing greater attention on costs, particularly as these relate to interdependence of the study modes. Rumble (1986) distinguishes between the economists' top down approach to institutional cost allocation by spreadsheet analysis and an accountant's empirical approach based on costing the specific activities involved, arguing that the latter is necessary if we are understand the largely hidden costs of course development in the dual mode system. Activity costing is, however, time consuming and the necessary data collection relies heavily on the systematic accuracy of those who record
their time inputs, often while working under pressure.
Costings undertaken at Murdoch have drawn on both approaches. A 1988 study undertaken as part of the university's successful bid to host a Western Australia Distance Education Consortium suggested that the fixed costs of course design and development accounted for approximately 25% of per capita (EFTSU) funding, with a further 9% going to meet the variable costs of production and dispatch, the provision of counselling and other support services from the External Studies Unit. Course materials, however carefully designed, can provide only the starting point for a guided independent study system and implementation of the courses at Murdoch demands intensive one-to-one distance tutoring by correspondence, telephonic and electronic communications. The 1988 survey showed that such tutoring absorbed a major proportion (43%), of EFTSU cost with the balance accounted for by a share of central institutional costs and overheads.
Australian higher education policy has so far precluded universities from charging local students directly for tuition . Historically it has also provided parity funding for EFTSU regardless of study mode. Parity funding has been questioned on the grounds that open universities regularly claim comparative cost effectiveness as a major advantage for distance education. But, as Rumble (1992) has observed, the price which distance teaching universities have characteristically paid for their comparative cost advantage over campus based teaching is to limit both the range of subjects taught and their level of student support services. The costing study conducted at Murdoch in 1988 had indeed indicated that obtaining such comparative economies between the study modes would require students to be confined to a very narrow academic profile of external mode course offerings, and would also demand severe curtailment of teaching/learning interaction. Recent introduction of relative funding models for differentia
l funding by academic discipline has reactivated the debate both in Australia and New Zealand, with some arguing that all off-campus enrolments should be funded at the lowest level regardless of subject matter. For present purposes it is sufficient to note that differential funding by study mode, as opposed to discipline, would effectively undermine the principle of parity between the modes, and do much to destroy the motivation for schools of study to participate. Parity of funding may therefore be a critical precondition for an effective dual mode university structure.
DISCUSSION
It has always been clear that commitment to developing a wide range of fully comprehensive programs in Australian dual mode institutions would prevent attainment of those economies of scale which have been of importance in the establishment of single mode open universities. Practitioners have been criticized accordingly (Johnson, 1983; Campion and Guiton, 1991). Efforts have also been made to encourage institutions to abandon the development of their own external mode courses in favour of adopting those produced elsewhere. The thrust of such advocacy has been to emphasize that there is much duplication of effort in course development, and an assumption that this must inevitably result in reduced quality learning. In those contexts where the terms "Internal" (campus based), and "external" (off-campus) describe segregated categories of students enrolled at a common institution but studying different curricula taught by separate staff, the arguments for centralizing course development and sharing the prod
ucts between institutions clearly have substance and must be addressed accordingly. However at Murdoch, as at an increasing number of dual mode universities, the interlock of the modes, and more particularly of students' enrolment patterns, provides for a much more complex picture.
A major aim of those responsible for course development in distance education is to find ways in which the front end fixed costs can be spread as widely as possible. One strategy has been to develop courses for an extended life and to amortize development costs over several years of warehouse stock. Another is to pass on some of the costs by sales to other teaching institutions. This strategy, as has been observed above, runs into some serious difficulties when the receiving institution operates close integration between the on-campus and off-campus study modes. While it may well be tempted to save its own development costs for distance education by purchase from elsewhere, it is most unlikely to require its academic faculty to use that imported curriculum for classroom teaching. If it is adopted only for the external mode, a rift between the curriculum for external and internal students therefore becomes inevitable, and the flexibility offered by open access to either mode is compromised. The prefer
red strategy at Murdoch has been neither of these. Rather than exporting or importing curricula, course planning usually starts with the assumption that course materials may be used to guide and support learning both on- and off-campus, and that significant economies may therefore be obtained by producing for both modes concurrently. Until quite recently this strategy was difficult to sustain in the face of critics from both sides. Traditional classroom teaching has long favoured didactic and often spontaneous, oral instruction rather than guided independent study. Established practice in distance education has been to assume that the needs of distance learners are so unique as to demand learning materials exclusive to them.
Recent developments in flexi-mode and other patterns of open learning provision appear to have modified such conventional thinking quite significantly but it would be easy to be complacent about such trends, at least as far as they affect practice in a small university. It is true that in almost all dual mode courses delivered at Murdoch, students in both study modes now receive common print resource materials. However it must be noted that in the majority of cases these materials remain ancillary to full classroom teaching for on-campus students. Informal reports from one or two other Australian tertiary institutions have suggested more substantial progress in securing classroom contact hour reductions in exchange for guided independent study patterns but details of the motivating factors, or directives involved, are not yet readily available. Clearly assurances are required that adoption of more open classroom teaching practices will be regarded positively by the employing institution and will not be
countered by workload substitution or other personal disadvantage. But steady deterioration in staff:student ratios and in access to research time suggest that incentives do exist and the potential for distance education to influence, and perhaps to transform, traditional classroom teaching practices is readily apparent. Dual mode institutions, and more particularly those with well established mixed mode policies and practices, will be well placed to respond.
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