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An interview with Mike Ahern, Director of Information Studies, UCLan

Kim Thomas

As a former polytechnic, the University of Central Lancashire, based in Preston, doesn't have the glamorous reputation of some of the older universities, but it may be one of the most innovative in its use of learning technology. UCLan's approach to e-learning has been to invest in ICT centrally - rather than at departmental or faculty level - and to create a digital environment that brings cutting-edge technology to all its students.

No-one can accuse UCLan of lacking ambition. In 2004, it partnered with the city council to create a series of wireless hotspots in Preston city centre - the first city in the UK to see such a deployment. It means that anyone with a laptop, including students and residents, can, for an annual subscription fee of £60, connect wirelessly to the internet provided they are near a hotspot.

The UCLan campus itself has 1,000 high-specification workstations that students can use to gain access to more than 350 applications. The idea, says Mike Ahern, Director of Information Studies at UCLan, is that students can work wherever they want: a design student wanting to use computer-aided design (CAD) software doesn't have to find a free workstation in the design department - they can access it from anywhere on campus.

This is not about investing in technology for technology's sake, says Ahern: it's about creating a "blended learning environment" where students have a choice of approaches: "What we're saying to students is 'We want you to learn in a way that best suits your learning needs'. And for some students that's face-to-face, for some students that's online, and for many students it's a mix of both."

UCLan has a high proportion of overseas students, including many in China. To support both their overseas students and their residential students, the university has adopted the WebCT virtual learning environment (VLE), which enables students to communicate with each other online. Sitting alongside WebCT is the Adobe Breeze video-conferencing software, which means that students can not only talk to but see each other. "You can quite easily have a classroom on screen, and the students interact with each other and put together little workgroups where they work together using Breeze," says Ahern. All the student needs is a webcam and a broadband connection, which means that students from all over the world can collaborate: "Recently we had an international conference where the lecturer was doing his conference from Preston, and we put it out over our Breeze infrastructure, which meant that people all over the world could watch it at the same time. There was, for example, a classroom in the US with 250 students watching it, so we can hit many thousands of people at once." Students are able to use the technology, too, to ask each other questions while the lecture is taking place.

This kind of technology, Ahern argues, offers particular educational benefits. A VLE, for example, makes it easier for shy students to voice their opinions and ask questions than a face-to-face environment - but surveys show that it's popular with other students too: "Students would be unhappy if they couldn't have access to their tutors, but they really enjoy having things online as well, because if they come out of a lecture and they're not sure about something, they don't want to have to find a lecturer to talk to them about it." The VLE has also proved a boon to disabled students - one of the things the university provides through Breeze is a signing facility, where one person can sign to students in many different locations. UCLan has a history of catering for disabled students, says Ahern, and so taking their needs into account was important when the e-learning environment was developed.

The innovation Ahern is most excited about is the new 450-seat digital theatre currently being built at the university. This theatre will use purpose-built presentation equipment and will offer the ability to experience a particular environment in three dimensions: "Students will be able to sit inside a human brain and watch how it functions, or follow a piece of dust through a vacuum cleaner and see how it works, or sit inside a car engine, or look at works of art as if they were in the room."

The university is also considering purchasing a special camera for the theatre that provides a 360º view of the world, says Ahern: "If we can site that sort of camera inside a fire created specifically for the purpose, and the camera's protected, our fire engineering students can watch fires develop in a more interesting way. What we're trying to do is create learning experiences that students can't otherwise get. You can't stand someone in the middle of a fire or put them through a Hoover."

These days, almost all students own mobile phones or PDAs. Whether this creates a technology headache or an educational opportunity depends on your point of view, says Ahern: "If you talk to most universities, they are trying to find ways of protecting students from using their network with a range of devices that are causing problems. We're trying to make it so that students can connect to our network with many devices." In one example, the university gave a group of fashion students PDAs (HP iPaqs) and created a virtual base room: "As the students went around the city and saw fashion ideas they would photograph them, record them, put them on the PDA, share them with other students through the virtual wireless base room and create a whole digital asset to the course."

Such mobile devices can also be used for podcasts or videocasts, says Ahern. The university is planning to issue instructions on how to use the library in digital audio format that students can listen to on their MP3 players. It's also looking at creating instructional videos that can be turned into different kinds of client content that students can listen to on different devices: "We don't create a video for podcasting and then a video for distribution on the web, and then a video for distribution to mobile phones: we'll try and create a video that will be usable on different devices and then turn it into content that those devices can use."

Ahern is keen to stress that the university's approach is not about investing in technology for technology's sake, but about providing a way of learning that is flexible enough to meet the needs of all students: "We don't want our digital environment and our learning environment to be separate. We're trying to make sure learning takes hold of all the digital opportunities that are available, and making sure that it supports the pedagogy rather than the other way around."