Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1995

enthusiasm, to catch every ray of light with which he is able to illuminate the subject. It is easier said than done! So if tutorials work better, why do we not do most of our teaching in small tutorial groups? The reason is of course economic. It is amode of teaching which a few universities could afford when higher education was aprivilege confined to anarrow elite. We now live in societies where we strive for the ideal that everyone who is capable of benefitting therefrom should receive some form of higher education. It is an ideal which is within sight of achievement in Hong Kong, as it is in the UK. The same applies to Europe including Eastern Europe, Russia and some of the other republics of what was the Soviet Union. The reason for this fervour for mass higher education stems from the recognition that in the present world, for any country, and particularly for those like Hong Kong and the UK who are not rich in natural resources, wealth creation is primarily dependent on the skills, knowledge and creativity of the population. It is therefore natural to see whether, and to what extent, technology could provide a solution to the basic problem. There is, of course, already a good deal of technology in the infrastructure of a modern university — including sophisticated library and data base resources. But the narrower issue I want to touch upon is that of computer aided l e a r n i n g . It is a subject which has been much discussed, though in most universities as yet little implemented. There are exceptions in specific subjects and in a few universities — but so far the impact has not been decisive. Why is this so? Let us imagine a course of study, be it in the arts, the humanities, in science or engineering. Let us imagine that one of the leading performers in the chosen subject has constructed a multi-media package, which includes elements of lectures on video, dynamic illustrative material, passages to read, pointers to further reading. In the case of the sciences or mathematics, it includes problems with at least a measure of response to the student's answers, with guidance in the case of incorrect reply. It could be one of the most inspiring of lecturers who would be featured on such a system. It is one which could be used for any number of students. It could often be transferable from one university to another. At first sight it is a prospect which is hard to fault; it is hard to see how conventional lecturing could compete! Yet there are difficulties: The most apparent is that producing asystem like this is avery expensive project. It has been estimated that it would take a lecturer 10 to 20 times as long to produce such a learning aid, as to write a textbook covering the same material. Now time is money 一 but perhaps even more importantly, time is time! Outstanding teachers tend to be doubly gifted in teaching and in research. Such a vast expenditure of time on the teaching function is bound to detract from the opportunity to undertake research. Most of us who work in a university want to succeed in both teaching and research. This is the reason why computer aided learning systems are unlikely to spring up spontaneously, as a by-product of the normal teaching function, as has been normal for the writing of textbooks. Universities and funding councils will have to develop wider collaborations and new funding mechanisms in order to bring about the advance in computer aided learning that we would like to explore. There is however, another reason why computer aided learning has not advanced as rapidly as many anticipated. It has been found, where it has been seriously tried — and this is usually at lower levels of education — that it has not proved to be as successful or as popular with the students as one would have hoped. I suspect that there is something fundamental about this lack of total success. The total dependence of the newborn and thereafter, for many years, is a distinctive attribute of the human species. The ability, in this dependent phase, to learn from parents is essential to survival. It is a fundamental aspect of our nature that people learn from people —that this is in some manner writ in the DNA. This does not make other learning modalities ineffective. I am however suggesting that the total replacement of a live encounter with a teacher may be difficult just because this is not the way we are designed to learn most readily. There is here perhaps an analogy with the development of the cinema, and later television. It was widely predicted in the 1930s that the cinema would obliterate the theatre. The marvellous technology which can at one instant provide panoramic views of scenes of natural beauty and at the next the intimacy of the 48th Congregation 11