Version: Friday 17th of August, 4PM

"Working in the New Economy"- 6^th International ITF Workshop

AN "INTER-REGIONAL" PROJECT BETWEEN NORWAY AND SWEDEN

• MEDIA CHOICE AND MANAGEMENT
•  

Svein Bergum, Eastern Norway Research Institute/Lillehammer College, Norway *)

Rolf Laggar, Karlstad University/Laggar Consulting, Sweden

Willy Bakkeli, Center for telework, Ringsaker, Norway

ABSTRACT

As part of a developing project on ICT and regional development between the eastern parts of Norway and the western parts of Sweden, twelve courses on various academic topics have been developed. This paper will deal with some experiences, especially those concerned with communication media and management, on one of the courses, called "telework and flexible work methods".

16 students from both countries participated in this course, that lasted from November 2000 to March 2001. Most of the teaching took place on the Internet, but there was a two-day face to face meeting in the middle of the course, where students from both nations participated. During the course, there were eight group-discussions on various topics, from definitions of telework, to managerial- and technical aspects. Besides this medium, e-mail, information/messaging services, telephone, video-triggers, videoconferencing and chatting (for the whole group and for sub-groups) were utilized.

The course was quite a considerable success, with active group discussion on the net and interesting projects from the students, especially on: virtual teams and the management of telework. Students had interesting comments on the bias of telework research towards studies of home work, and they indicated a preference for more research on other distance-dimensions and other forms of telework like mobile work and virtual organisations. Media choice is shown to be important in the management of the course and in communication with and between students. Several of the findings from research on telemanagement could also be applied in the management of remote students. We need to know more about the complementary use of media over time, alternative roles of teachers in flexible learning, and the need for telework knowledge.

*) Main author, for correspondence: Svein.Bergum@ostforsk.no

The interest for flexible work arrangements is increasing, and also the the need for knowledge about it. Therefore this topic was among the ones given priority when twelve courses were developed for knowledge development in small and medium sized companies located along the border of Norway and Sweden. The colleges in Lillehammer and Rena were Norwegian partners, while the University in Karlstad had the corresponding Swedish role.

This pilot course started in November 2000 and was finished in March 2001, with nine Norwegian - and seven Swedish participants. Most of these came from smaller places in the two countries. Some of the students worked as self-employed teleworkers, some wanted to start up as teleworkers, some had experiences in flexible learning, while others were general business consultants for small and medium sized companies. Generally, the students were well educated, had ICT-knowledge above average level, and most of them were between 35 and 50 years old. Five of the participants were women.

As we saw, a variety of professions parfticipated on the course, often with different motivations. Some wanted to start up as teleworkers, some wanted to know about this new way of working and informing/supporting others as consultants or as managers.

This matches the broad target groups for this course:

• managers who have subordinates at other geographical places, like branch offices, sales people
• people/organisations in inter-organisational networks
• managers/members in geographically distributed groups
• persons responsible for telework-project
• independent/self-employed teleworkers, either considering to start up as teleworkers, or experienced teleworkers who want to make their telework more effective

This course should also have relevance for managers and Human Resource Personell more generally. People from labour unions and people working with regional development should also benefit from insights into new flexible methods of work.

The goals of the cours and benefits for participating students were the following:

• access to methods, experiences and theories on how companies can apply flexible work, independent of suppliers
• exchange of experiences with other participants
• establishment of personal networks, both nationally and internationally
• possibility of gaining formal qualification at College/University level

With such a heterogenity in the target groups of this course, it is impossible that everyone will share the same interests. Among our students some were interested in technology, others where interested in managerial aspects, some in independent teleworkers, and some in small companies. Upon this basis, we then chose to have three general modules and one module where the students wrote a paper about their particular line of interest.

This course consisted of the following four modules:

- Why flexible work and how to introduce it

- Technical, legal and administrative aspects

- Management, organisation and evaluation of flexible work

- Project work, where students wrote a paper, around 12-15 pages in length

This is rather "traditional", and these modules can be found in most other educations on telework/flexible work. But, we think that our course is somewhat different to most of the shorter seminars often offered by consultants and others:

The most innovative aspects are probably our emphasis on writing a project report, and on the variety of resourses available for the students. These resources will be described in the next sub-chapter.

Other main charcteristics of our course seem to be:

• Theory-based: this is an academic course, which focuses more on analysis and reflection more than "how to" solutions.

• Flexible/net-based education: the course lasted for four months and was mainly Internet-based, i.e flexible education. Other courses are more like 1-3 days seminars with face-to-face communication

• A focus on management and organisation, not technology: Some telework courses, e.g in Ireland and Sweden, are more focused on how to use the technology to become a teleworker. This was not the case on our course. We devoted some time to technology in one of the modules, but this refered to: technology cheque lists, data security issues, economic considerations/who should buy the equipment, and evaluations on the choise of technology i.e media choice, and applications for example of teleconferencing.

We could also add that it was special that the course was international, involving students from two countries. This introduced some challenges with respect to language, even if Sweden and Norway share quite similar languages.

The following resources were at the disposal of the student: two text books (400 pages in total), general information (study-guide) and telework-specific information on the Internet-based system, five video-triggers on CD, discussion groups, chatting, tutoring (on group-discussions, chats and especially the project work). Besides this: videoconferencing was used on a couple of occassions, together with a couple of face to face meetings. Telephone and e-mail were used during individual tutoring on project work (this was not mandatory, and 7 out of 16 students wrote a project report). Students were given the possibility of select their own topic, either theoretically, or based on own plans or experiences. Examples of such project-titles were: virtual teams for small- and medium sized companies (SMB), managers as teleworkers, how to be an independent teleworker, flexibility and power.

Even if telework is a rather narrow topic, we are unable to report on all aspects of this course. We wish to concentrate on the following themes:

• media choice in communication between teacher/tutor and students, and between students, with a focus on the need for face-to-face communication and the role of "chatting"

• management and tutoring of students over geographical distance through electronic networks

These are the two main research questions, but we will also include a lesser analysis of the components of, and need for telework education.

It should be noted that this project primarily had the objective of developing and testing a course in a more practical manner, where scientific publication was of secondary importance. This paper does not therefore follow the conventional research design regarding for example data-collection and analysis. And experiences and results are presented together with the analysis, not separately as in most research reports. This paper is written by the people responsible for the course, which might represent a challenge to the objectivity of the analysis.

But, we had at least these relatively unstructured feedback-mechanisms from students:

• open evaluation, after the face to face meeting (9 participants)
• written evaluation of the Internet based education system Q-learn, as part of their project work (7 comments)
• a net-based questionnaire asking for strength and weaknesses of the course, suggestions for change and improvements (12 questionnaires)
• there were also possibilities to gather statistics on the participants use of the Q-learn system

Based on the focus of the paper, previous studies on the following themes are relevant:

There is a lot of research on telework, documented both in printed-books and on the Internet (for example www.gilgordon.com). Several of the topics adressed in this literature are relevant: definitions, introduction of telework, and potential jobs and - persons etc. But, of special interest is the research on managerial aspects of telework: how to manage teleworkers.

Bergum (2000) is a useful reference here. This writer’s Thesis also includes references to a lot of other relevant studies. In one of the authors (Bergum, 2000) recent research on management of teleworkers, the main conclusions are; "Telemanagement is different than and somewhat more difficult than traditional management. Most of the respondents told how their main communication challenges in managing teleworkers involved maintaining frequent communication and the handling of the difficulties of non-work related communication over distance.

These findings indicate that telemanagers must be more goal-oriented than before, and good communication skills are essential. These findings are supported e.g in Nilles, 1998, work entitled: Managing Telework. Another book with the same title,written by Daniels, Lamond and Standen in 2000, also sees the necessity of goal-orientation, but it is claimed that management of all work-processes should not be ignored. This does not mean that the manager should control in a continuous fashion, but rather communicate regularly to motivate and maintain interaction with the remote worker. And this is also in accordance with Bergums findings presented above. So managing teleworkers seems to be a balance between managing output and processes, choosing between different media, and also choosing between different locations.

In the discussion of managers as teleworkers later in this paper, we also will include some of the theories on managerial work, especially from Mintzberg, 1972. But we will as indicated, present the theory there together with the discussion.

Another topic which is less documented in the literature refers to "telework training and education". Here our source of information is mainly courses & seminars shown on the Internet, as well as some handbooks. We have also collected a couple of comprehensive manuals/handbooks from providers of telework courses in US and Ireland. But most of these courses are rather practical or technical. Some of the courses concentrate on how to handle ICT-equipment, to be able to work as a teleworker. But as said before, our course is more theoretical, with a focus on management and organisational aspects of flexible working.

Concerning academic courses, we know that Margaret Klayton has a course on management of remote work in the US. The topic of flexible working is also included, even in Norway and Scandinavia), in courses on information systems or organization theory/new organizational forms. But then, they often have different titles: virtual-, network, e, distributed or flexible organisations. And it is also a question where to set the limit between telework and other research fields: One example is "Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), where we have found relevant courses and research. But there seems to be a rather weak link between these two research areas. We have chosen therefore not to include this aspect in our paper.

To find out about the selection of communication media between teacher and students and between students, media choice theory can be usefully consideres, e.g. Daft & Lengel, 1986. This theory states that the hierarchy of communication media aries according to the richness of the media, where face-to-face media is the richest and simple message like data printout is the opposite. The key point is to find a match between the message and the medium, where the most complex message requires the richest medium. The basic theory of Daft & Lengel has been modified several times and criteria other than the characteristics of the message have been added, like social influence, time, distance, and the relationship between sender and receiver (Webster and Trevino, 1995). This last criteria has only been mentioned in recent years, and indicates that richness in the relation between sender and receiver, is not only influenced by the medium, but also by the actors.

Andresen, 1999 in his book "Flexible learning for adults, from remote education to net-based team-learing" (translated from the original Danish title) discusses the role of the teacher i dialogue-oriented flexible learning. He says that the role of this teacher is mainly to give inspiration, set the frames and be a process-consultant. Compared to traditional education and previous distance education through letters/mail, the teacher now has a reduced role of communicating information/knowledge in a one-way direction, through e.g lectures. But, the teacher in flexible learning has to be active in keeping up interaction, both towards groups and individual students. This is different from earlier traditional tutoring, when students were to be the active and had the responsibility of initiating the necessary communication. This aspect has also been discussed in the literature on telemanagement, and some authors, like Hall, 1997, argue that it is the telemanager’s responsibility to initiate communication, if there is minimal interaction. But here we should bear in mind the differences between a manager and a teacher, e.g the difference in "span of control".

Another example of research on this topic is Korsgaard Sorensen’s Ph.D Thesis in 1997 titled: "Learning in a virtual context". She focuses on several aspects on this topic; what I can mention of particular relevance is the problem of interactions (no interaction, no communicative committment; a new form of interaction – between speech and writing. She also discusses the competence teachers required in virtual education: Some of the competences needed are: planning ability, communicative competence in: writing, ability to give positive feedback, correct misunderstandings over a less rich communication medium, motivate for participation and conduct meta-communication about the interaction (corrections, status, summing up arguments, closing). Korsgaard Sorensen mostly focuses mostly upon electronic/virtual communication. But, she also argues for the importance of combining electronic communication and face-to-face communication, without however specifying the exact role of face-to-face communication. This is however adressed in her other reports on flexible learning, mostly arguing for the importance of face-to-face meetings in the beginning of the learning-process, to facilitate communcation and to build up trust.

It should be mentioned that all the earlier references on management of telework also adress the question of the need for face to face meetings. Another reference adressing the need for face to face communication for distance managers is Fisher & Fisher, 2001. They see the need for face to face communication especially in the beginning of projects (goals, role clarification and socialization), and for complicated tasks (strategic questions, conflicts) during the process.

In this paper, no attempt is made to discuss synchronous versus asynchronous communication. Later we will focus on two synchronous media: face to face communication and electronic chatting.

The main headings from research on management of telework and the competencies of teachers are:

• it is more complicated than face-to-face management/teaching
• requires more planning
• requires more use of ICT and careful selection of the optimal mix of communication media
• motivation and feedback to stimulate communication and interaction over the network, are needed as competencies and tasks among virtual managers/teachers
• more attention when sending and receiving messages
• increased amount of travel

Most of these earlier findings are relevant, both to managers and teachers, apart from the last point, where it is not usually the case that teachers travel to the students.

There are of course differences between employees and students, which influences the role of the teacher. The two most important are:

1. a student does not receive a salary from the teacher and possibly needs to be more independent
2. as a remote student you have normally never worked at the same place as your teacher/advisor, while teleworkers often relocate themselves away from offices together with their boss and initiate distance-relationships
3. a teacher normally has a greater number of students, and a greater number to tutor than the number of subordinates under a manager
4. the relationship between a student and a teacher is for some of the reasons above more professional, because of limited time for social communication. A manager must to a larger extent combine task oriented and social communication. This is of course, also due to the fact the the relationships in working life are normally longer than in student life

Telemanagement literature recommends that the manager should contact the teleworker if there is no communication, while in flexible education the responsibility for initiating contact is normally assigned to the student. But, according to our experience, several of the conclusions above should have relevance to management of students on distance.

As said before, in this paper we will focus on only a few of the many aspects related to the course. Of the topics that are interesting but beyond the limits of this paper are: the quality of the learning process/learning methods, and the design and specific experiences of the Internet based learning system (Q-learn). As said before, what we will focus on are:

• media choice, especially the role of face to face communication and chatting
• managerial issues, that means also that we will look at the needed competencies of the teachers

Media choice and management are the two focal points in this combined presentation and analysis. But we will also at the end of this chapter address a couple of other questions (from the group discussion), that both we and the students found interesting. And, there will also be a short discussion on the contents of such a course.

And as said before, methodologically we will combine the presentation of results and analysis in this chapter.

This course was part time, and the students took it alongside full time work. They also were located at 16 different locations in Norway and Sweden. For these reasons most of the education took place on the Internet, through a newly developed Internet –based system called Q-learn (Quality learning). This was the main communication media between students and between the teachers/advisors and students during the course. A lot of information about telework was distributed through this system. During the course there were eight group-discussions on the topics. On several of these discussions we had around 25 messages, of rather high quality. Besides this medium, we used: e-mail, information/messaging services, telephone, videoconferencing and chatting (for the whole group and for sub-groups).

Regarding media-choice, we will concentrate our discussion on two aspects:

• the role of face-to-face communication (including video-communication)
• the role of chatting

Even if this was mainly Internet-based education, we know from previous research on flexible education and flexible work, that rich communication through face-to-face meetings would improve the quality of the course. Two of our main questions were then to decide when to use this rich medium and for what topics. One limitation, because of time and money, was that there could be only one face-to-face meeting for the whole group. The most obvious solution seemed to have this at the beginning of the course. In this way, we could build personal relations and trust, which could be beneficial for communication over the network afterwards. In the first phase of planning, we therefore had a face-to-face meeting as the start of the course. Later in the planning stage, we however discovered that some of the first topics of the course were rather easy to understand, structured and well explained in the text-books. These topics concerned: definitions of telework, various alternatives for telework, how to plan and introduce telework, and technical issues. The most complicated topics and the topics with limited literature, were connected with economic considerations and evaluations, managerial aspects, and how telework has an impact on private life.

There seemed to be a trade-off between time and the complexity of the message. Media choice theory was useful to apply, e.g Daft & Lengel, 1986. As said before, this theory basically proposes that the hierarchy of communication media varies according to the richness of the media, where face-to-face media is the richest and simple messages, like data printouts, is the opposite. The key point is to find a match between the message and the medium, where the most complex message requires the richest medium.

This fact influenced our plan to have face-to-face meetings at the beginning of the course.

Because the most complex topics were in the last part of the curriculum, we decided to postpone the face-to-face meeting, and rather arrange this at the middle of the course. Then the agenda could be occupied with the most complicated topics and the participants also had some experiences from the course which could be discussed. Experiences from the course showed that this was a good decision.

We however made another change from our initial plans, and also offered some sort of rich communication in the beginning. A two hour meeting in Lillehammer/Norway and Falun/Sweden was arranged in parallel: with the same program, at the same time, at both locations. But, at the end of these two local meetings, we linked up the two places via videoconferencing and made presentations over the video-connection. This appeared useful for subsequent activities on the Internet-based system.

This illustrates the importance of selecting the right communication media in geographically distributed activities.

Of synchronous communication media we have already described face to face meetings and video-conferencing. Audio-conferencing was not used. Instead, we turned to a medium that had hardly been tried by any of the participants before: electronic chatting. Electronic chat allows "participants" in the chat to have typed conversations with other team member, synchronously. The questions, responses, and comments of all participants were visible in a "chat window" on the Q-learn system and could be viewed on the PC by every participating student. This medium was introduced at the end of the course, after the face- to- face meeting. Two chats took place; Thirteen of the students took part in the first chat, and eight in the second. The two chats lasted each for one and a half hours. We had a pre-selected topic on both occasions, but the topic was narrowed for the second chat. The topic for the first chat was on telework and regional development, besides discussing the applicability of chatting in general. The second chat was about how to plan for a more practical course in telework, targeted for Labour Market Administrations and the unemployed.

Everybody agreed that chatting was an interesting medium, and they were impressed by the fact that over ten different places all over Scandinavia took part in the same conference. They were impressed by the features: arguments were written down, arguments were well stated, everybody had the opportunity of "talking", and there were some examples of ideas generated on the basis of previous comments. On the other hand, there were a couple of minor misunderstandings because of the language. Another problem, because we had too broad a topic in the first chat, was that you were preparing for a comment based on a previous comment. While you were preparing a response, another person was sending a comment on a different subject, or sending the same argument as you. How do you then change your comment? Another draw-back mentioned in the literature (e.g Duarte & Snyder, 1999, and Sorensen, 1997) is the need for good typing skills. This was not a problem in this course, because everybody had good typing skills. As said before, our participants had general – and ICT knowledge above average, and this probably limits the external validity of our results.

It seemed that chatting required a structured moderator and a rather specific topic. On the other hand, some of the discussants also argued that chatting could have a potential for more more unstructured and creative discussions. According to Duarte & Snyde, 1999, they found that electronic chat is good for brainstorming and the generation of ideas, and collecting data and discussing trends. Our rather modest experiences seem to support their advice. But we also think that chat holds a potential for application aimed at other purposes, given certain conditions, like determine in advance, the structured leadership of the chat, the characteristics of the participants etc (knowledge level, how much they know about each other). So, there is probably need for more research on the use of electronic chat.

.

Other synchronous media: a brief comment about videoconferencing

As mentioned before, we used video-conferencing a couple of times in this project; Generally videoconferencing is ideal for tasks that require a high level of information richness and social precence (Duarte & Snyder, 1999). And in Daft & Lengel’s media richness hierarchy this medium is next to the top of the hierarchy, below face-to-face meeting. Without a detailed analysis of videoconferencing, our conclusion is that participants were very surprised and happy with this medium. It was used at the beginning of the course, as well as a planning tool for the one-year administration of the project. The use of videoconferencing was one of the key factors in reducing the barrier of distance among the project-administrators and the students. The system was simple to use and worked most of the time. An interesting comment was made by the Swedish project-leader during a video-meeting at the end of the project: "Can you see how much more relaxed we are now than at the beginning." On the other hand, we must also admit that the agenda and planning was more formalized in the beginning, because we had more "respect" for each other.

During the first period of the course we had five asynchronous group discussions on the Internet: These covered topics like:

• a. What is your definition of telework, what is the potential of telework for you, and what type of telework is of most relevance for you
• b. What job-tasks are most suitable for telework, and what is personally required to become a teleworker
• c. How to plan for introduction of telework: either in an organisation, or as a self-employed teleworker
• d. What technical and administrative aspects should be considered when introducing telework (including economic issues like taxation, insurance etc)

During the face-to-face meeting, we had group and plenary discussions on these two topics:

• how to manage teleworkers
• how to balance work and leisure

Several of the debates on the Internet involved most of the students/participants, especially at the beginning of the course. When focusing on such general questions of telework, there were rather low expectations of innovative arguments from the teachers. And of course, most of the arguments are not that original, but here we want to address two topics as part of the group discussions, which have not received much attention.

Several of our students commented rather early that the literature applied in the course had too much of a focus on the distance between office and home, that means telework from home. These students referred to other distance-dimensions that were more frequent and more problematic to handle from their perspective, like: distance to colleagues at other locations, distance to suppliers and customers, distance to travelling managers and - colleagues.

Two key words of main interest for the students are therefore a) mobile type of telework and b) virtual teams/virtual organisations. According to some recent studies of the diffusion of telework/E-work, like the Emergence-study (ref www.emergence.nu), this is not surprising because such types of virtual work are the most rapidly growing.

During the discussion on the Internet about which job-tasks have potential for telework, one of the students asked whether managers could be teleworkers? This student was himself a manager of a virtual company located at four places in Norway and with several linkages to business-partners and customers at other places, both nationally and internationally. More than half of his working time was spent travelling and at other locations than his main office. The first question is of course whether he is a teleworker, but we will not discuss this here. The second aspect is that there are several dimensions of distance he has to handle, as adressed in the question above. The third question is whether managers could be teleworkers. The most referred criteria for telework tasks are that they should be independent or easy to measure. Most participants in the discussion on the net in this course argued that managers could be teleworkers. Many managers travel a lot, and could be regarded as teleworkers already. A lot of the communication and coordination takes place through electronic communication media like the telephone or e-mail, even if the intensive travel is due to the need for rich face-to-face meetings.

As project leaders for this course we were more pessimistic about the potential of managers as teleworkers. We know from previous research (e.g Mintzberg, 1973, Lindstrøm, 1996, Bergum, 2000) that manager’s jobs are characterized by brevity, fragmentation, reactivity, and face-to-face communication with a lot of people. Managers therefore generally have a huge need for rich communication of a face-to-face character. As shown by Lindstrøm, 1996 there is also a symbolic value in the presence of especially top-managers, and this limits the amount of electronic communication.

In the previous research, on managerial communication by one of the project leaders (Bergum, 2000), it was illustrated that managers rarely (on average: once a month) were teleworkers at a home office. And then the purpose was rather to isolate themselves in order to prepare meetings and write reports. Otherwise, home-work only took place as a supplementary activity during evenings and weekends. On the other hand, the 13 managers interviewed by Bergum often travelled more than half of their working time (100-180 days a year) and could be regarded as mobile teleworkers. But, the main purpose of their travelling was to conduct face to face meetings with different types of business partners, inside and outside the company. This type is therefore ironically more "close work" rather than telework. It must however be added that during travel the managers have communication through electronic media. Both Bergum’s study and other recent studies, for example Tegnblad, 2000, show that managers are using more electronic communication media than before, and are expanding their geographical space. But, the extent to which this kind of work can be called telework remains a matter of definition.

We have earlier presented some research findings on managing and teaching remote employees and students. Even if there are some significant differences between these two dyads, most of the challenges and solutions are similar. We therefore based our managerial and tutor activities in this course on these research findings. We therefore experienced that virtual management and teaching/tutoring is more complicated than doing it as a face-to-face manner, and it requires more planning, more use of ICT and careful selection of the optimal mix of communication media. Regular communication has received attention in telemanagement literature. But it was not that important in flexible education, apart from the project period, where you as an advisor on some occasions had to take the initiative to find out the status and do some motivating work.

Regarding face to face activities, theory has claimed the importance of such a medium at the beginning of the process. We chose to arrange face to face meeting later on, to balance complexity of task with medium. This was successfull. We must however add, that we alternatively used videoconferencing at the beginning, and this probably explains why we had such high interaction during group discussions for example. Other variables also explain this, for example the characteristics of the students: well educated, high ICT-skill and motivated to be part of a pilot course.

We experienced the necessity of good communication skills, for example how important it was to be careful and specific, both on the telephone and also when sending and receiving messages by e-mail, and during group discussions. It is a possibility that things can be misinterpretated over weaker electronic networks. Other communication competences we experienced, were the ones mentioned by Sorensen; to initiate interaction and to conduct meta-communication about the interaction (corrections, status, summing up). This was especially true during the group discussions on the net.

Positive and negative feedback:

Korsgaard Sorensen (1997) noted that it is important for virtual teachers to give positive feedback. We agree on this motivating function. But, a more difficult task is how to give negative feedback over electronic network. Research on telemanagement shows that as a manager you wait until you meet face to face. But, in virtual environments, as in this course, you cannot wait because you will not meet the student. Our experiences are that you must apply the general rules of giving negative feedback, that you not only give negative feedback, but start with positive aspects. And the criticism must be constructive and not personal. But, this is easier to write than to practice.

Teacher as reactive or proactive:

From telemanagement literature it is recommended that the manager should contact the teleworker if there is no communication, while in flexible education often the responsibility for initiating contact comes from the student. According to our experience, several of the conclusions above should have relevance to the management of students on distance. Challenges and solutions are here related to communication and media choice, where the teacher must find an optimal mix of communication media.

The general comment from the students was that they were satisfied with the contents of the course, and also with other aspects of the course. A problematic question refers to how much students should know about legal, technical and economic issues. Some students said it was too much, some said it was too little. Our goal on these topics was to give an overview and provide references too relevant literature. And students had the opportunity to write their project-report about such topics, if they wanted. As said before, it is difficult to satisfy everybody: As an example: one of the students wrote about the management of teleworkers, but would have liked to have learned more about management in general. Another would have liked to learn more about economic issues like insurance. We anticipated this problem; Our answer is that the three first modules were general. Thereafter students with a special intgerest could choose their speciality as the topic for their project work. Alternatively, they could read about it on their own, through literature references, and links on the Internet, presented by the Q-learn system.

The major comments regarding contents are: They wanted books less oriented towards home work and less telework from the employee’s perspective. They rather want to learn more about mobile telework, virtual organisations and – teams, i.e working over distances more generally, and see how telework could be applied by companies to increase their competitiveness. A couple of the students also thought that one of the text-books was too normative and simple, and wanted instead a more reflective book. They thought that some of the text-books suggested "only one possible solution". One example was the discussion of the introduction of telework, which some participants thought was too focused on large companies. Their question was then: how can smaller companies adopt this introduction plan, and do we always need a pilot and a formal plan? The answer to this is probably that text-books must be general, and the reader must adapt the text to his specific situation. On the other hand, this probably also indicates that telework literature has a bias towards large companies and home-work type of telework.

Another minor comment was that they wanted to know about how companies and persons have benefited from telework after the pilot-period and to see more long-run benefits. The literature focused on pilots and introduction of telework.

The conclusion is probably that for the next course we will devote more time to virtual organisations and teams, and more academic reading material. And the title of the course will probably be more like: "E-work: net-based work methods"

And lastly we can mention that most of the complaints were related to the internet-based education system, regarding: services, user-friendliness, and how to learn about it. This is interesting, but beyond the scope of this paper.

In spite of the obvious limitations of this pilot-project, in terms of what concerns the number of students and the formal design of the research e.g data-analysis, some lessons could be learned for education, practice and research. We will look at some strengths and weaknesses of this course, the market for such courses, look at the external validity of this course, and indicate some future research topics.

As said before, the general view of both students, teachers and other interested parties was that this course was successful. Some of the positive aspects are described in this paper, and the critical success-factors are probably due to: professional planning and execution of the course and that teachers had skills both in the professional topic (telework), and on different types of media and ICT. We also had pretty good feedback on the video-triggers, where also professional producers were involved. The aspects of the course that needs to be improved are related to aspects we have not touched on so much in this paper: We need to improve the Internet based learning system, and we need to be more professional in learning methods over the net, that means in terms of educational methods for flexible learning.

It should also be mentioned that a possible weakness (but also a strength) is that the same people took responsibility for the whole process of planning, running and evaluating this course. This continuity has an advantage, but it could also mean that weaknesses are ignored.

This pilot started in November and during the Christmas period, we had almost a month’s break. The total length of the course for students writing their project-report was more than four months. This was too long. In the future, the time period will be between two and three months, given the same extent of material required.

We have already said that there will be more of a focus on other telework options than homework and more of a focus on business motivations, rather than the individual employee, more on experiences rather than planning, and more academic literature. The project work will be maintained, perhaps given a more dominant position, because in this way the students can individualize and read/write about specific topics according to their own interests. In the next course, student- projects will probably start earlier.

Much is written about this in this paper, and this is relevant. We had several options for communication available and it was crucial to find the optimal selection of media. Much contained in the theories on media choice was shown to be relevant, but is also the case that some of it was of limited value. There is for example a need for more research on the dynamics of media choice, that means: media choice over time. And as said before, more research on for example electronic chatting is needed.

A lot of the findings in telemanagement research, on management of flexible learning were confirmed, and will not be repeated here. The aspects of special interest for future studies are:

Telemanagement focuses on goal-orientation in stead of process-orientation. But it seems that both telemanagers in working and "virtual teachers" must include process-elements and find a balance between product/goal and process-activities. This is also related to the question of the level of initiatives teachers should take in the virtual communication. Telemanagers should always have the responsibility to ensure interaction. But teachers, with a much larger number of students, cannot have the same responsibility for making initiatives and maintaining high communication frequencies. But teaching/tutoring at a distance means more initiatives from the teacher, both bring about interactions in group-discussion, and to conduct meta-communication for corrections, framing and conclusions. Probably, responsibility has to be formulated in a contract before the course, but it is difficult for example to forecast the level of activity in discussions. So there must be some flexibility, even if virtual communication generally requires more planning and formalization.

The last aspect is also related to communication, and refers to the challenge of giving feedback over electronic networks: Both earlier reasearch and our experiences show the importance of the manager and teacher giving positive feedback. But how do teachers in virtual learning give negative feedback. This is a problem in telework, where leader and subordinate know each other, but how do you give negative feedback when you not have seen each other. Alternatively it might be easier when you don’t know each other so well and have less of a personal relationship. This is a question for further research.

We called this course "telework and flexible work methods". The term flexible was mis-interpretated and some students thought we should include topics like part-time part, shift-work etc. This was not our intention. The term telework in Norway has become more associated with home work. Because of this misunderstanding we probably will change the title of the course to something like: telework and net-based work, eventually supplemented by E-work.

We have also been discussing whether this course should be part of other courses, or extended to other general topics in e.g management, organizational development, or team building. In parallel, at Lillehammer College parts of this course it have been incorporated into more general courses like Human Resource Management (HRM) and Organizational Change. The two scenarios are therefore either a separate course like our pilot, or an integrated approach where separate parts of this course are integrated into more general topics, like: information systems, laws, HRM, organization theory, and more specific courses in e.g project organisation. This might be the most likely scenario in small markets like Norway. In larger countries like UK and US there might be more of a market for separate courses on telework, even limited to specific managerial issues for example.

As said before, we still want to maintaint the academic, reflective approach of this course, and probably even strenthen it. On the other hand, we see that there might be a larger market for more practical courses, but that demand will not be met by our course. But, some of the students in this course are planning to develop a practical course including more ICT-work, especially designed for persons who are unemployed and want to start working as teleworkers..

We marketed this course at a rather broad target group. This gave us challenges regarding some inequalities in basic knowledge, but also about different motivations for the study. Besides focusing on different aspects of the topics, there were also rather huge variations in how much time participants devoted to the course. But, this will always happen in part-time courses. 13 out of 16 students came from the target regions for this regional development course. Three persons found out about this course on the Internet. It should also be mentioned that one of the students was recruited at the previous telework conference in Stockholm last year.

As a conclusion, we will prefer such a broad target group for the next course, but market the course towards other geographical regions. As far as we can see there is not that huge a market to justify specializing in only one or two market segments. Because of the modest change in contents, we will perhaps direct our marketing more towards leaders of geographically distributed teams.

We have earlier described the students as motivated, well educated and with good ICT-skills. Therefore they are probably not representative for the average potential student. Their ICT-skills were a particular advantage when we had problems with the Q-learn system. For future courses we need a more user-friendly and stable system, well documented with information and some user-support. And probably, the students will need some time to become familiar with the system, before the course starts up.

On the other hand, not all aspects of the participants were positive: They were busy people and some of them had limited time to devote to this course. But this was a minor problem, because their contributions to the course were positive when they participated. And, it should also be mentioned as negative that several of the participants had never tried telework.

Lastly: the students paid only a symbolic price for this course, because it was a pilot. Therefore, the general positive comments about the course, could be due to this fact. But because it was a pilot, there was money available for development, so that the leaders of the course had relatively speaking much more time to support the students.

As a conclusion, we can say that we will not generalize our results to a huge population. But, a course in telework is a "nische product" and potential students will probably have some of the same characteristics as our pilot students. At least, some of our experiences should be relevant in other courses.

Some indications of future lines of research can already be found in the text: On such an un-explored field as this there are several possibilities for future studies on the aspects focused in this paper: media choice and management (e.g the role of the teacher). A couple of the specific studies proposed are related to: dynamic media choice over time, more analysis of the use of e.g. electronic chatting, and rather than decide between different media you should look at the complementary use of media. There are also unexplored communication questions referring to feedback and interactivity. Next time we aim to gather data more systematically during the whole course. One area to explore involves finding out more about the real need for knowledge about telework and flexible work-methods, in order to improve the structure of the course. This could for example consider the need for knowledge in small businesses.

And lastly there are several questions to be raised on the areas not discussed greatly in this paper: Internet-based learning-systems and learning- methods over the net.

We have presented the pilot of an academic course in telework, with a focus on communication and management. Careful selection of communication media is important in the management of net-based telework courses, and we found it useful to have the face-to-face meeting in the middle of the course, because of the complexity of topics at this time. Many of the recommendations from telemanagement theory were found to be relevant, also for teachers/tutors in flexible learning, but communication is not so frequent and you cannot travel like traditional managers.

We think that the need for knowledge of various forms of working over geographically distances will increase in the future, but we are not sure whether this will be on independent courses like this, or integrated together with generell topics in e.g IS, HRM or organisation science. Students appreciated an academic course, but thought that "traditional telework literature" was too practical, normative and too focused on individual employees, home work, planning issues, and large companies with formal strategies.

Andresen, B.B. (1999): Fleksibel læring for voksne-fra fjernundervisning til netbasert teamlæring, Systime, Århus (Flexible learning for adults – from distance learning to net-based team-learning) In Danish

Bergum, S. (2000): Managerial communication in telework, Thesis No 807, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University,

Daft, R.L. and Lengel, R.H. (1986): Organizational information requirements, media richness and structural diesign, Management Science, Vol 32, No 5, May 1986

Daniels, K., Lamond, D.A., Standen, P. (2000): Managing Telework, perspectives from Human Resource Management and Work Psychology, Business Press, Thomson Learning

Duarte, D.L. & Snyder, N.T. (1999): Mastering Virtual Teams, Jossey-Bass Publishers

Fisher, K. and Fisher M. D. (2001): The distance manager, McGraw-Hill, 2001

Hall, T. (1997): Fremtidens arbeidsplass krever en annerledes lederrolle, foredrag på konferanse om fleksible arbeidsplasser, (The future working-place demands a different leader role, lecture at the conference for flexible work-places), Oslo 4^th July 1997, arranged by the Institute for International Research (in Swedish)

Lindstrøm, J. (1996): Chefers användning av kommunikationsteknik (Managerial use of communication technology), Thesis No. 587, Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University (in Swedish)

Mintzberg, H. (1973): The Nature of Managerial Work, Harper & Row Publishers

Nilles, J. (1998): Managing telework, John Wiley & Sons Inc

Sorensen, E.K (1997): Learning in a Virtual Context, Volume 1, Ph.D Thesis, Aalborg University, Dept. of Communication

Tegnblad, S. (2000): Continuity and change in managerial work, Gothenburg Research Institute: report 2000:3, Göteborg University

Webster, J. And Trevino, L.K (1995): "Rational and social theories as complementary explanations of communication media choices: two policy capturing studies", Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 38, No. 6, pp 1544-1572