From an historical perspective, individualized study courses have their roots in correspondence education or home study. Such courses easily conjure up images of lonely, rural-based students crouched over textbooks and notebooks in their bedrooms, who, when they are not reading, writing, or working on the farm, pay frequent visits to their local post office, mailing off their homework assignments to some uncaring bureaucrat.

At AU, that’s not the case today. AU’s individualized study courses are created by teams that consist of a course professor, who is called the course coordinator (and who may or may not have the assistance of a subject-matter expert), highly skilled editors and graphic designers, and digital media technologists.

Today, these courses almost always have a Web site that lists basic information, such as a course syllabus and contact information. "An individualized study course can range all the way from having everything online and everything in between," says Dietmar Kennepohl, AU’s associate vice president, academic. "These courses are changing quite a bit as we are realizing that more students are living online. In the last two years, our primary way of delivering course material has switched to online, with print materials now secondary."

Nonetheless, textbooks are still the center of the universe in an individualized study course. "In most cases, our mode is a wrap-around model, especially for our junior courses, where we will base our course materials around a textbook," says Kennepohl. "We wrap around a textbook and write out a study guide and our own online materials."

The first stage of an individualized study course development process starts with the course coordinator choosing the appropriate textbook(s) and how he or she wants to structure the course, which is usually based on a 3-credit, 13-week lecture model course, with weekly assignments, plus a mid-term and final exam.

AU has a little more than 100 full-time course coordinators, the vast majority of whom are PH.Ds. To get the beginning phase of individualized course development off the ground, course coordinators write a course outline and one sample chapter that gets circulated to all the colleges within the university (called centers) for feedback and checking. The outline and sample chapter are also routed to the library staff, who more than likely will be required to add external resource materials to the course, such as journal articles. Once this process has been approved, the course coordinator dives into developing the content for the entire course.

Course coordinators are typically either creating a new AU course or actively revising an old course at the rate of one to two courses each year. They are also responsible for the ongoing development of five to six courses.

In addition to course development duties, course coordinators supervise the course tutors, who are very much like online professors in that they are responsible for helping individualized students move smoothly along the pathway of their course(s), providing detailed and effective feedback when needed. AU tutors are part-time academics who hold full-time positions at other higher education institutions, mostly located in Alberta. In 2003, AU employed 249 tutors, up from 226 in 2001. Tutors are responsible for blocks of 32 students and are allowed to take on no more than three blocks. Many course coordinators also take on the duties of a tutor for one block of 32 students.

Getting back to the course development process, once course coordinators get the go-ahead to fully develop their course, professional editors come in to assist with the content development and basic structure of the course. "We have found that it is better to have early intervention and have the editor come in at this time and get involved with working with the course coordinator to discuss how to proceed and avoid problems early on," says Kennepohl. "It makes for less work further down the line. The editors are very good. They are not just doing copy editing. They are also editing for content, for consistency, for gender neutrality, all sorts of things."

Editors are required to pass an internal exam, that is "fairly rigorous," before being hired. "They do go through the material in quite a bit of detail," says Kennepohl. "In some instances, the editor will do some instructional design because they have seem so many courses that work well."

Once the course content is complete it goes to the graphic designer, who is responsible for designing course materials and illustrations. Then digital media technologists, who are similar to typesetters, work with editors to input everything into files and ensure that all graphics are properly inserted.

The entire process is ultimately approved by the vice president of academics office at the recommendation of the academic centers.

Kennephol says that, overall, individualized study courses are quite varied at AU. "If you were taking a course in nursing, you would be in a WebCT environment and everything would be completely online. If you were taking a biology course, you would have a textbook, but you would also have an associated Web site with interactive materials, plus you might have to do a face-to-face lab. In many English courses, they are still sending out books instead of electronically. In the computing sciences, all courses are online."

Basically the order of the day for individualized study courses is to provide time convenience and flexibility to students who don’t particularly want to be in any kind of group study environment.

For instance, AU Professor and Associate Vice President of Research Rory McCreal notes that the opposite of individualized study - collaborative learning - is overrated. "I think we need to do more research on individualized study," he says. "I am talking with one of our research assistants about what real support there is for collaborative learning as far as achievement levels of students are concerned. And the deeper you look into it, you realize that the emperor has no clothes. In collaborative learning, you can’t take any measure to show that it really does help.

"In all the measures, they say ‘well it is good that people learn to collaborate any way,’ which is a good point, but as far as the achievement levels for learning are concerned, Tom Russell put out his idea quite a few years ago - there is no significant difference. So why bring in? One of the main costs is this collaboration, and the other argument I would give you is if collaboration is so great, then why don’t they do that on campus?"

So, at the end of the day, as Kennepohl suggests, "the driving force is about accessibility and flexibility. From an individual’s point of view - ‘I can’t wait until the Fall; I need something now that fits in with my schedule; I need something where I can work as fast or as slow as I want; I decide when assignments go in; I decide when to take my final exam’ - that is the lure of individualized study."