No. 6 aha moment: the convergence of online learning (from the periphery to the core)

Joseph Kim's blended learning class at McMaster University

This is the seventh in a series of posts about the most seminal ‘discoveries’ in my researching and working in educational technology, where I discuss why I believe these ‘discoveries’ to be important, and their implications specifically for online learning. The others to date are:

My seven ‘a-ha’ moments in the history of educational technology (overview)

1.  Media are different.

2. God helps those who help themselves (about educational technology in developing countries).

3. Asynchronous is (generally) better than synchronous teaching

4. Computers for communication, not as teaching machines

5. The web as a universal standard

What was the discovery? (1995)

Not so much a discovery as a realization. This was the year I moved to a campus-based university, the University of British Columbia (UBC), after 25 years working solely in dedicated, open distance education institutions (the UK Open University and Open Learning Agency in British Columbia). The move was partly driven by a growing realization that the technologies being introduced into distance education, and especially online learning, would eventually transform campus-based teaching as well. This is just beginning to be fully realised 18 years later, through developments such as hybrid learning. However, the realization in 1995 was also accompanied by a unique opportunity to work in a major research university (some might call the realization cognitive dissonance). How did this come about?

In 1994, the government of British Columbia decided to hold back 2% of all post-secondary institutions’ operating budgets, and 1% the following year, to be placed in a fund to stimulate innovation in teaching in BC’s universities and colleges. This amounted to several million dollars in the case of UBC, so they decided to develop a comprehensive plan for teaching innovation, based mainly on the use of technology. Faculty and departments were asked to put forward specific proposals which went into the proposal to the government, and UBC received back all its ‘lost’ funding. This lead to the creation of a Centre for Educational Technology, which was set up originally to co-ordinate and support the innovation and research activities. One of the projects partially funded through this initiative was the development of WebCT, which was later bought out by Blackboard. I was hired (separately) as Director of Distance Education and Technology, but with an ‘unwritten’ mandate also to help with the development and application of learning technologies on campus.

Why is ‘convergence’ significant?

We are now at the point where in almost all subjects, students need to develop skills of knowledge management, the ability to find, evaluate, analyze, and apply information. They need to become adept at using the Internet for doing this. Furthermore these are not generic skills, but are deeply embedded within a particular subject domain. Thus such skills need to be integrated within the teaching of nearly all subjects.

In addition, there are now particular digital technologies that are essential within professional areas such as business, health, engineering, and education. Students (and faculty) need to be aware of the use, value and limitations of such technologies, which means embedding them within the teaching and learning. This applies whether the courses are offered on campus or at a distance.

The need to integrate digital technologies into nearly all courses, and the resulting convergence between online and campus activities, have significance for campus-based institutions, fully online institutions, and particularly for Continuing Education and Extension departments/divisions.

Significance for campus-based institutions

In a stretch of six months, I will have been invited to 13 universities across Canada to advise them on their use of learning technologies and strategies for online and especially blended or hybrid learning. We are now seeing a major transformation of teaching where online learning in particular is moving from the periphery to the centre, particularly in the form of hybrid learning (as I predicted in my Outlook for online learning for 2013).

This is forcing a major re-thinking of the standard, lecture-based teaching model. Since students can now access the lectures at home through lecture-capture and online video distribution, many interesting questions are being asked, to which we still  do not always have good answers:

What can the university or college offer that will make the morning commute for students worthwhile (not to mention faculty)?How can institutions leverage more fully the benefits of the campus when students can do much of their learning more conveniently, and often more effectively, online?For which students is fully online more appropriate than blended or hybrid learning?What factors should drive the move to hybrid or fully online learning? Where do MOOCs fit within an institution’s strategy, if at all?How do you decide what is best done online, and what face-to-face?Is lecture capture the best way to use the online time?What are the quality standards for hybrid learning?Could the campus as a whole be made a more creative and student-centered space for learning?What are the implications for the use of space, and in particular for future classroom requirements, of an increased move to hybrid or fully online learning?What are the implications for faculty development and training?What are the resource and governance implications of such a change?Do we still need campus-based institutions? If so, what are the clear benefits over any time, anywhere learning? Is it worth the extra cost?

Thus the convergence of online and face-to-face teaching is immensely significant for campus-based universities and colleges.

Significance for distance education institutions

As brand name campus-based institutions move to wholly integrate online learning, where does this leave the dedicated distance and open universities such as the UK Open University? In fact, the DE universities in general have been very slow to adopt online learning for a variety of reasons, including concerns about access, especially in open universities, heavy investment in print and print inventories, and general inertia and bureaucracy associated with institutions built around mass production models.

Even more of a threat though to open and distance universities is the eroding of their market as campus-based institutions become more flexible through the use of hybrid and online learning.

Another threat comes from a related but different direction, and that is the increasing use of open educational resources and MOOCs from brand name campus universities.

We have recently seen at Athabasca University how these factors are starting to play out.

Ironically, I suspect that it will be much harder for these large, bureaucratic institutions to change quickly than many campus-based universities (as sclerotic as they are). Open and distance education universities will need urgently to find new teaching paradigms, new business models, and new markets if they are to survive, which some are doing, such as the UK Open University and the Open University of Catalonia.

Significance for Continuing Education and Extension departments

Distance education and more recently online learning have often been located in Continuing Education departments, even when the programs have been for credit as well as for non-credit.

However, as on-campus Faculties and Schools start to increasingly develop hybrid learning, the division between hybrid and fully online learning will start to break down. Once a Faculty or School has put more than half of its curriculum online, it is not a major step to offer the course or  program fully online as well, thus increasing the potential market. It does not make sense in such circumstances to have a separate division managing the online component. Indeed, it was such thinking that eventually led to me having to leave the University of British Columbia in 2003, because the university, quite rightly, wanted to integrate distance learning within its mainstream activities.

For many Continuing Education departments, the loss of credit-based online programming, and in particular the challenge of MOOCs (why pay for a non-credit online course when you can get one for free from Harvard?), will require a major rethinking of Continuing Studies’ budgets and above all their purpose. (Would it be too much to hope that they could return to being a free, open public service subsidized by the rest of the university, instead of the other way round?)

Conclusion

There’s a lot of talk about MOOCs transforming higher education. However, the real transformation is not coming from MOOCs (although they are helping) but from more traditional forms of credit-based online learning penetrating the heart of the enterprise. This is forcing faculty and institutions to re-think their whole approach to teaching.

Initially, much of it will be a straight transfer of lectures to online delivery, but over time, faculty will find new ways to re-design their teaching to integrate better online and face-to-face teaching, thus increasing effectiveness and leading to better and different learning outcomes. Significant indeed.

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No. 7 aha moment: strategy matters in online learning

© Bates and Sangra, 2011

This is the eighth in a series of posts about the most seminal ‘discoveries’ in my researching and working in educational technology, where I discuss why I believe these ‘discoveries’ to be important, and their implications specifically for online learning. The others to date are:

My seven ‘a-ha’ moments in the history of educational technology (overview)

1.  Media are different.

2. God helps those who help themselves (about educational technology in developing countries).

3. Asynchronous is (generally) better than synchronous teaching

4. Computers for communication, not as teaching machines

5. The web as a universal standard

6. The convergence of online learning (from the periphery to the core) 

What was the discovery? (1997)

Having worked as a manager by this time for 7 years, I was beginning to understand the bigger picture regarding the planning and management of learning technologies, and it wasn’t pretty. For educational technology to be used effectively, it has to be planned and managed well, and there were almost no specific guidelines at the time. Almost everything was left to the IT people. This had to change. Academics had to get involved as well.

How did this come about?

Part of my responsibility when I was at the Open Learning Agency between 1990-1995 was strategic planning. In fact I was sent on a very useful three day course on strategic planning offered by the American Management Association, but in reality at OLA my main responsibility was not so much to set strategy but to implement what the executive decided (and to be fair, I was part of the executive). This involved lots of Excel spreadsheets with deliverables and dates, but the strategies changed so often it started to become a meaningless exercise – the approach was far too much like the central planning of the Soviet Union, where plans were made but they failed to match reality. What OLA really did was driven mainly by external events, and how staff at the director level responded to them.

When I went to UBC, the approach to planning was very different, because of the culture of a university. In 2000, the then VP Academic, Dr. Barry McBride, sent out a note to all faculty which among other things stated:

We need to pay increased attention to IT and learning.  While I am convinced that IT will have a significant effect on teaching and learning, I am not convinced that we fully appreciate the opportunities and pitfalls…….In response to the IT challenge, we need to do several things but chief among them are the following: first, encourage a wide discussion about the possible role IT will play in learning at UBC and second, implement an appropriate process to support the vision that emerges from that discussion.  We must ensure that the process is responsive to the views expressed by colleagues.

He then created a committee (with the interesting name of ACCULT – Academic Committee for the Creative Use of Learning Technologies) with experts in using technology from various areas (the CIO, the Director of Distance Education, two or three faculty with experience of using LTs – including Murray Goldberg, who had developed WebCT, and representatives from the Library, student services, and a student representative.) The committee was chaired by Neil Guppy, the AVP Academic Planning, a position that had been created earlier with specific responsibility for learning technologies. among other things.

Thus it can be seen that at UBC:

leadership identified the issue, a senior administrator was appointed with a specific mandate to manage issues around learning technologies, a committee of experts/interested people was established to develop vision and strategy, a process to involve faculty across the university in setting a vision, or, as resulted, a set of visions, for the use of learning technologies was establisheda committee developed a range of strategies and actions that would facilitate the implementation of these visions, and this was subsequently approved by Senate and the Board of Governors. 

This is a good example of what I mean when I talk about the governance of learning technology or online learning.

The approach was also very different from that at OLA, with UBC focusing particularly on faculty developing vision and goals for learning technologies, rather than the administration setting goals and the ‘workers’ trying to find ways to implement what in fact were are a continually changing set of goals and strategies (and a continually changing external environment that the administration was continually responding to.)

Why is this significant?

The default model in many institutions had previously been to leave individual faculty to decide how to use learning technologies, and for the IT department to respond as best they could to these demands. In best case scenarios this would lead to the CIO developing an IT strategy that covered both administrative and academic needs, but was almost always underfunded and priorities could not be set (except by the CIO). There was no pressure or encouragement for faculty to use learning technologies, and no attempt to use best practices or identify success or failure in individual faculty initiatives.

In fact, we have seen online learning in particular now starting to converge with campus-based activities, so it has become increasingly important for institutions to develop plans and strategies for online learning and learning technologies. Experience and research now suggest what this process should look like. Here are the lessons I’ve learned about this (this is a summary of the main points from Managing Technology in Higher Education: Strategies for Transforming Teaching and Learning).

leadership is essential. The Board and the institutional executive team need to support a move to greater use of online learning, and they all need to be on the same page about this. However, the main role of leadership is to provide overall direction and broad goals for online learning (e.g., to enable more flexible access to programs) and especially to focus on the governance structure and governance processes for learning technologies, but allow the decisions on the right mix of delivery and learning technologies to be made by faculty (preferably at the program level).vision and strategic thinking about online learning is more important than detailed plans or targets. In other words avoid setting a goal of 100 fully online courses by 2014, but think strategically about where and for whom online learning will provide the most benefits.faculty need to be engaged primarily in developing a vision for teaching and learning with technology, and for implementing that vision, again preferably as a team at the program level.decisions about delivery models should take place through the same process as deciding about content (i.e. at the program level)the role and design of online learning will vary according to the needs of the students targeted and the requirements of the subject area, which is why the delivery model and the choice of specific technologies must be driven by faculty, supported by professionals such as instructional designers.a high level committee with representatives from all areas affected by the use of learning technologies needs to be established todeal with priority-setting for resources to support the use of learning technologies,set policies or strategies for learning technologies, such as for intellectual property, protecting student privacy, or for open educational resources,ensure that the necessary support for faculty and students is in placeto ensure that data and evidence is collected about successful and unsuccessful strategies, actions and innovations.this committee needs to be ongoing, as learning technologies will continue to develop, and the external world will continue to change, requiring strategic responses from the institution as a whole.faculty training and professional development is essential and also needs to be systematic and mandatory for online teachingrewards need to be put in place for innovative teaching, and a strategy needs to be developed to ensure that successful innovations are spread across the institution where they are appropriate.

It can be seen that decision-making about learning technologies will take place at all levels in the institution. Good governance will ensure that the right kind of decisions are taken at the right level by the most appropriate people.

Conclusion

The planning and management of learning technologies are essential, but they can be done well or they can be done badly. In knowledge-based organizations such as universities and colleges, the full engagement of ‘front-line workers’ such as faculty and students in decision-making and especially setting a vision for teaching and learning, is paramount, but faculty and students need to be supported, so strategy, decision-making, priority-setting and training and development needs to be ongoing and continuous if learning technologies and online learning are to be used effectively.

Next

A bonus! The ninth (and last) post in this series will be on the importance of web 2.0 technologies for online learning. Coming next week at all theatres.

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