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<Paper uid="W99-0808">
  <Title>An Open Distance Learning Web-Course for NLP in IR</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> There are two traditional distinctions in higher education that are currently on a period of big debate. The first one concerns industrial training vs higher education objectives, the second one is related to the role of emerging technologies for distance learning, potentially blurring the until now clear separation between conventional universities and distance learning Institutions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Changes in both Education and Training contexts are moving closer their previously separate objectives. On one hand, there is much concern about bringing educational curricula more in line with vocational needs. In a variety of disciplines, higher education courses are becoming oriented to professionally recognized qualifications, adopting approaches to integrate practice in context. On the other hand, industrial organizations are looking for a more versatile way of building personal profiles to adapt individuals to the changing needs of their organizations. Thus, acquiring more general skill is been increasingly addressed for advanced training purposes.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Distance learning Universities are operating since the seventies. Most of them were based on the industrial model characterized by the production of highly effective learning materials for independent study and the use of &amp;quot;one-way&amp;quot; media, such as print, video, radio or TV broadcasting. While in traditional education the cost of education depends on the number of students involved, this is not the case with the industrial distance education model. The cost depends on a fixed part for the preparation of materials with less investment in academic staff for tutoring tasks. A clear improvement of using new technology for this model has been the delivery of course materials through CD-ROM, and later on through the Internet. Computer-based materials can integrate presentations with simulations, problem solving tools, virtual laboratories and the like, to engage students in a process of active learning. More controversial is the embedding of human-human interactive technologies. It is an open challenge to find new ways of satisfying increasing interaction between students and tutors when staff resources remain scarce. Peer collaboration is an idea to explore, but as it is the case in many industrial organizations collaborative behavior does not happen spontaneously just because the technology is available, but rather is a shift of culture to be established.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The virtual campus \[1\] is a metaphor currently deserving a lot of attention. It is sometimes presented as a bridge for conventional universities tO extend their scope to reach distance learners, sometimes as an opportunity for distance learning institutions to provide an environment combining the strength of systematic teaching with elaborated materials to support more!efficiently distance study. But metaphors should be carefully contrasted with the demand side perspective to foresee whether technology-baged distance teaching can succeed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> For example, 'there is, despite the quite short history of desl~top computer conferencing, some failed pilot experiences in real-time multipoint teleteaching. The cost of equipment was a well-known factor,, but another very practical issue was often neglected: real distance students are in fact fully reluctant to participate regularly in synchronous events, with a fixed schedule. The existing technology has demonstrated to be powerful. Payilng due regard to usability issues in order to realize its potential for learning purposes remains an open question.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Over the last decade the European Commission has launched a variety of programs to encourage international partnership and cooperation in the field of education and training. Some of the programs aimed at analyzing the current situation to recommend future action. Others were projects strongly technology oriented to develop platforms and environments specially focused on distance and flexible learning. In addition, a Set of pilot experiences and applications were also implemented.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Within the :SOCRATES framework \[2\], ACO*HUM \[3\] is a thematic network including a working group on Computational linguistics and language engineering. A plan for developing open distance learning pilot courses was proposed in cooperation with ELSNET \[4\], and finally a proposal including six pilots was launched in February 98. We have developed one of them, on the topic of Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) \[5\].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> This topic is! especially well suited for a learning-by-doing web course. The Internet itself is the biggest IR testbed, and the web search engines are the most powerful applications of IR techniques. The students can be guided through on-line NLP software to manipulate, expand, translate queries, etc., and get first hand impressions on the utility of such processes.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Next section discusses our approach while a detailed presentation is given in section three.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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