In the past decade or so there has emerged a new line of therapeutic practice, that, following on from psychoanalysis and cognitive behaviourism, has been called 'the third wave' in psychotherapy (e.g., O'Hanlon, 1994). One component of this wave has come to be known as 'Narrative Therapy'

Most of these contemporary therapies find themselves drawing their theoretical inspiration from a number of different sources that are often seen as central to postmodernism. They include in their approaches such notions as language being a practice that constructs many of the 'objects' that we talk about, rather than a set of symbols that refer to an independently given reality; that language is not a neutral tool of rationality, but a subtle and powerful political positioner of our selves in relation to each other; that truth, reality, sanity and madness are not absolute categories, but relative to the local conditions of enactment; and so on.

At the same time as these therapies have been emerging, postmodern concerns have leaked into the social sciences, through feminist thought, the empirical study of discourse processes, concerns to elucidate the legacies of post-colonial rule, and so on.

In both the cases of practice and theory, the available resources are widely dispersed. The Web is a medium that has the potential to connect up geographically isolated resources and the capacity to make such resources more widely available and accessible. This site is an attempt to realise that potential.

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At the outset, this is a joint project involving the School of Psychology at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, the Virtual Faculty project that has been developing via the Web for the past 4 years, and the Family Center in Lower Hutt, New Zealand.

• Our intention is to develop a set of resources that will together make up a course on Contemporary Therapeutic Practices within the constraints of the newly revised regulations of the Postgraduate Diploma in Psychology at Massey University.
• We intend to include contributions from a wider array of teachers, researchers and practitioners than could be accomplished if we relied on traditional educational media.
• We do not intend to provide practical training and supervision in this package, although the regulations for the Postgraduate Diploma do enable such practical training to be included.
• We intend to make these materials available via the Web, but to locate them in the first instance within a framework of short, intensive, face-to-face courses, conferences and workshops.
• Later, we would hope that other institutions and groups will be joining us, and thus extend the range of locations through which these resources can be used so as to gain an accredited qualification.

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The structure of what we will be offering fits within a New Zealand qualification. The Postgraduate Diploma in Psychology at Massey is traditionally a one-year course of full time study. Students who take this course will already have completed their first, or Bachelors', degree. In this first graduate year, both Diploma and Masters' students pursue a number of taught courses. Students who continue to complete their Masters' degree undertake a further year of study in which they carry out research which they write up as a thesis.

In New Zealand, a full-time year of study is defined as 'taking academic courses to a total of 100 points'. How this might be translated into the academic system in another country is unclear, but suppose you were taking a 25 point paper here. You could expect to spend x hours a week in classes (both lectures and seminars) over two semesters; to write x papers that count towards your final mark, and to sit an examination at the end of the course that is externally moderated. The expectation is that you would need to spend around 12 hours a week working on your studies for this paper over the two semesters, inclusive of the time you spent in class. Thus, the expectation is that you would be spending about 48 hours a week at your studies if you were to complete your course of 100 points during the two-semester year.

Two recent developments in the School of Psychology here need to be added to this picture. , the increasing diversity and number of topics that go to make up the discipline of Psychology is not necessarily best served by a framework of only 4 specialized papers. Consequently, we are beginning to move to offering 12.5 point papers in our graduate programmes. Thus an approved course of study could be comprised of up to 8 separate papers. Second, traditional modes of graduate study - weekly lectures and seminars spread across an entire semester, for example - are not necessarily the most 'user-friendly' format for students, many of whom are simultaneously in full-time employment. Consequently, an increasing number of our graduate courses are being offered in what is termed a 'block mode' format: students study course materials independently, and attend campus for one or two concentrated weekly periods of lectures and seminars.

It is these differing elements that contribute to the structuring of the course of study being developed here.

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We are proposing a programme of study that will meet the requirements for the award of a Postgraduate Diploma in Psychology at Massey University: that is, an academic programme in which the various components total 100 points of assessed study. The course may be taken as a full-time commitment on the students part, but we anticipate that most students will build up their points for the qualification on a longer term basis than this.

Half of the course will be made up of 2 papers:

1. Contemporary theoretical perspectives
2. Contemporary therapeutic perspectives

The remaining half of the course will be made up from a range of 4 papers, some of which are being specifically developed for this programme. These include:

1. Issues of culture and gender in psychological practice
2. The narrative perspective
3. Organizational structures for multicultural work
4. On-line seminar in contemporary professional development

Course materials will be available on the Web using the WebCT package that you are currently 'inside' now in order to be reading this list. Our reasons for choosing this package are that it provides a common format across materials; it is supported at Massey as a medium for extramural study; it provides for structured discussion lists of class material; and it enables course materials to be assembled from distributed sources.

We do not see this medium as a replacement for traditional modes of teaching and learning, and as such we are including a face-to-face block course component in many of our courses. Initially, this will restrict enrolment to students who are able to attend such courses. But we are seeking to bring additional sites and personnel into this programme so that it can be more easily undertaken at diverse locations.

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We aim to have materials in place by the beginning of the 2000 academic year in New Zealand. Effectively, then, material will be here in its final form at the end of December 1999.

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We have established a steering committee and a forum for course development. We are using the forum, which runs under the WebCT package, to develop our syllabus at this point in time. We anticipate discussions continuing until March 1999, at which point we will shift to (the frantic) preparation of course content under the headings and responsibilities that have been agreed.

We will be following a constructivist philosophy in our approach to learning.

We will be drawing on related web resources for our materials, as well as more traditional ones such as journal papers and texts.

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