Internet Learning Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 81

Internet Learning Journal – Volume 4, Issue 1 – Spring 2015
students, it should not be assumed that similarly sized universities work in similar manners.
For example, the medium-sized Dutch Open Universiteit works in a very different manner
from the two mentioned medium-sized universities (e.g. adopting different pedagogical
approaches, and using different online interaction strategies).
Long-range online universities are typically marked by the existence of a much
smaller number of teachers per student than face-to-face universities. This difference is
based on the used teaching methodologies, basically that in online teaching students are
expected to be a lot more autonomous than in face-to-face universities and that they can
attend the lectures at any time by just downloading the materials (in general, multi-media
materials which allow for multiple forms of interaction). Both the greater student autonomy
and the thoroughness of the support materials greatly reduce the number of required teachers
without reducing the quality of what is being taught. We will even argue in this work that
what is taught at online universities can potentially be considerably better than what is
taught at face-to-face universities. An obvious advantage in the reduction of teachers is that
universities can potentially become cheaper, while actually increasing the quality of the
education.
The face-to-face universities are certainly aware of the potential of online teaching,
but the teaching load of online teaching is considerably higher than that of face-to-face
teaching; and so teachers in face-to-face universities are often reasonably weary of
committing themselves to online teaching. The inexistence of a differentiation between faceto-face
and online teaching is often negative career-wise to those professors that focus on
online teaching, therefore appropriate legislation needs to be enacted. A policy recently
adopted by the Aberta University that is likely to be positive for other fully-dedicated online
universities, is to have their teachers linked to face-to-face research institutions, thereby
increasing their scholarly productivity.
For different reasons, both Germany and Brazil are keenly aware of the importance of
online learning; Brazil because of its size, and Germany because of its ever increasing
economical interaction with both China and Russia. It is actually the success of its
interaction with the two large-size countries that is behind the more recent, and very strong,
economical success of Germany. When one thinks about countrywide high quality education
in linguistically mostly homogenous countries such as Brazil, Russia, or China, then online
learning should be strongly considered. For online learning to be successful in the EU, it
must be done by strongly multilingual professors, as the courses will need to be
multilingual.
In face-to-face universities there are teachers and tutors, but, in online universities,
besides those two, the web designers also play a very important role. The teaching
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