From the article:

What do you do when 500 applicants are competing for 60 seats in your two-year nursing program? That’s just what happened at Southern California’s Riverside Community College. Administrators there didn’t just want to turn those students [...]]]> Harrison, D. (2010) Lecture capture helps Riverside meet nursing demand Campus Technology, March 10

From the article:

What do you do when 500 applicants are competing for 60 seats in your two-year nursing program? That’s just what happened at Southern California’s Riverside Community College. Administrators there didn’t just want to turn those students away. Instead, they scrambled their technology leaders and launched a distance learning program–one that’s built around lecture capture–to meet the demand.

When I read this article and what they are doing, I shuddered. I come from a background where distance education courses are specifically re-designed for distance learners. In particular, they are designed to allow students to interact with instructor and other students any time and anywhere. They are designed to ensure that distance learners have adequate support and help from their instructors. This takes longer and means thinking differently about how the course is designed and delivered – not taking the standard classroom model and multiplying it to extra students.

Now I’m not against introducing new methods of design to accommodate or exploit new technology, but it must meet certain criteria. Does it at least maintain and if possible increase the interaction between student and instructor and between students? Do all students have equal access to service within the course? Does it provide the flexibility and access that distance learners require? Do students learn better?

I would suggest that the strategy proposed by Riverside fails on all these counts. In fact if you read the article carefully, it doesn’t accommodate 500 students by any means – it adds a relatively few students to the existing face-to-face class.

The issue for me is that we have over 50 years experience of what works and what doesn’t work in distance education, hundreds of books and thousands of research articles about effective practice in distance education, standards for best practice and quality assurance standards, yet all this continues to be ignored by many colleges and universities in the United States. Everything has to be invented from scratch as if nobody had ever done anything similar before, just because the technology is new – yet it is not really invention; it’s just the tired old classroom model with technology added.

Is it any wonder that their education system is in crisis?

An article about student clubs for distance learners at Penn State’s World Campus and the University of Maryland’s University College.

This will come as no surprise to open universities: the UK Open University has had a student association since its inception in 1971, and the Open [...]]]> Kolowich, S. (2010) Student clubs, virtually Inside Higher Education, March 10

An article about student clubs for distance learners at Penn State’s World Campus and the University of Maryland’s University College.

This will come as no surprise to open universities: the UK Open University has had a student association since its inception in 1971, and the Open University of Catalonia has also many extra-curricular activities for its students.

The University of Illinois is facing a major budget shortfall, and the IT department is looking for cuts of 10 per cent in its budget which will amount to about $10-$20 million in savings. This article describes how it is going about solving the [...]]]> McCrea, B. (2010) Campus IT under the knife Campus Technology March 4

The University of Illinois is facing a major budget shortfall, and the IT department is looking for cuts of 10 per cent in its budget which will amount to about $10-$20 million in savings. This article describes how it is going about solving the problem and provides some interesting data on the costs of IT on a large state campus system in the USA.

This is a report of a ‘minimal technology’ approach to using games in the teaching of Latin by Roger Travis, associate professor of classics and director of the video games and human values initiative at the University of Connecticut. The article contains [...]]]> Fusch, D. (2010) An innovation in learning games Academic Impressions March 11

This is a report of a ‘minimal technology’ approach to using games in the teaching of Latin by Roger Travis, associate professor of classics and director of the video games and human values initiative at the University of Connecticut. The article contains a number of useful further links.

COL President Sir John Daniel’s new book advocates new approaches for providing access to secondary education for today’s rapidly growing population of children and young adults.

Sir John describes the  contents of his book in a three-minute video.

In this opinion piece, Bob Moon, of the UK Open University, comments:

‘In country after country, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, the vast majority of resources are going to campus, residential training programmes extending for up to three or four [...]]]> Moon, B. (2010) Time for radical change in teacher education Connections February, Vol. 15, No. 1

In this opinion piece, Bob Moon, of the UK Open University, comments:

‘In country after country, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, the vast majority of resources are going to campus, residential training programmes extending for up to three or four years, whilst unqualified teachers flood into the classrooms and existing teachers have little or no opportunities for professional development…..

The logic of this situation points to the systematic development of school-based programmes using a variety of open and distance teaching and learning methodologies.’

Professor Moon then offers six strategies to support distance education approaches to teacher training in developing countries.

This particular edition of Connections is full of interesting accounts of open and distance learning and technology projects in Commonwealth countries, only a few of which I have selected. For the full edition, go to: http://www.col.org/news/connections/2010feb

In a blog posting in December (2009), I wrote that a priority for e-learning for 2010 was the development of educational applications for mobile learning, particularly for developing countries. Well, the Commonwealth of Learning and the University of British Columbia were [...]]]> Commonwealth of Learning (2010) LIVES: Mobile phones for learning Connections February, Vol. 15, No. 1

In a blog posting in December (2009), I wrote that a priority for e-learning for 2010 was the development of educational applications for mobile learning, particularly for developing countries. Well, the Commonwealth of Learning and the University of British Columbia were ahead of me.

This article describes a partnership between CoL and UBC’s Network and Internet Computing Lab to develop a system that delivers learning via mobile phones. Learning Through Interactive Voice Educational Systems (LIVES) is an educational software system that offers audio lessons to multiple users over mobile telephone networks. The system is designed so that there is no cost to the end user, if they already have a mobile phone.

Filed testing will be done with CoL’s Lifelong Learning for Farmers‘ project in India.

The Commonwealth of Learning has expanded its lifelong learning for farmers program into Sri Lanka, to support mushroom farming.

Computer facilities are being provided by the University of Ruhuna and the Vidatha Centre. Future plans include expanding marketing efforts beyond the [...]]]> Commonwealth of Learning (2010) Lifelong learning for farmers: Sri Lanka Connections, February, Vol. 15, No. 1

The Commonwealth of Learning has expanded its lifelong learning for farmers program into Sri Lanka, to support mushroom farming.

Computer facilities are being provided by the University of Ruhuna and the Vidatha Centre. Future plans include expanding marketing efforts beyond the local community, providing lessons to mushroom farmers by mobile phones and developing value-added mushroom products.

Launched in the Tamil Nadu region of India in 2004, L3 Farmers is being adapted for use in Jamaica, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka and Uganda.

The Virtual University of the Small States of the Commonwealth is one of the more interesting international distance education consortia, and seems to be gaining some traction.

Twenty-five educators from 13 countries took part in VUSSC’s seventh International Training and [...]]]> Commonwealth of Learning (2010) Samoa workshop develops VUSSC maritime training materials Connections, February Vol. 15, No. 1

The Virtual University of the Small States of the Commonwealth is one of the more interesting international distance education consortia, and seems to be gaining some traction.

Twenty-five educators from 13 countries took part in VUSSC’s seventh International Training and Materials Development Workshop, hosted by the National University of  Samoa. The participants, representing maritime regulatory and training bodies in small states in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the South Pacific, were immersed in hands-on training in information and communication technology (ICT) skills, particularly those related to course materials development. Course development is now continuing online.

Maritime training, particularly transport and logistics, is the newest area of course development for VUSSC. Courses are already available in the areas of tourism, life skills, professional development for education, disaster management, fisheries and construction.

The Commonwealth of Learning provides resources and support for VUSSC.

In fact, public two year colleges in North America have realised [...]]]> I have argued frequently that universities had yet to grasp how online lifelong learning could be a new line in business and potentially an unfettered source of new revenue – where learners (and their employers) would be prepared to pay the full cost of tuition.

In fact, public two year colleges in North America have realised this – there has been a 10-15% per annum increase in online enrolments compared with 2% for the whole system fairly consistently over the last seven years (without in most cases increasing fees, because they are reaping economies of scale). For-profit online universities in the USA have been expanding by 30-40% per annum. (However, quality of online courses  in the public two year colleges has been problematic, due to poor course design and faculty training). The main research universities though have been much slower in moving into this market, around 5% increase per annum, and growth has been particularly slow at the professional masters level, mainly because they do not have an appropriate business model for this market or because they are not really interested in expanding into this area.

In Canada, different provinces have different policies towards tuition fees paid by students. Most provincial governments though strictly control undergraduate tuition fees by setting a limit that universities can charge. In British Columbia, though, universities can charge full cost tuition fees for NEW post-graduate programs but increases to existing programs are limited to the rate of inflation (2%). Thus it is easier to set up a completely new program that did not exist before (subject to approval by the Ministry’s Degree Quality Assurance Board) than to take an existing on-campus M.Sc for example then offer it as an online program at a higher tuition fee.

However, in reality, since the online courses would need to be re-designed and probably even the content changed to meet market requirements, it would not be difficult to give such a program a slightly different name for it to be considered a ‘new’ program. For instance UBC was able to charge full tuition fees for its Masters in Educational Technology (a new program) while its longstanding M.Ed on-campus program has much lower fees. (This can cause some internal problems when students want to include online courses within their campus degrees because there may be differences in tuition fees). One major innovation with the MET was a tuition fee per course rather than per annum, which gave working students much more flexibility (they could take five years to graduate)

So it all hinges on whether a redesigned online program is considered ‘new’, even if it covers the same ground as a campus-based institution.

In a sense there are two issues here. Should new courses aimed at a professional rather than an academic market have a higher level of tuition fee, irrespective of their means of delivery? Or should online or ‘hybrid’ courses be charged differently from on-campus courses? My view is that the former makes more sense than the latter, since tuition fee policy is more clearly ‘market’ focused in the former case. With the growth of hybrid programs, it will in any case be more difficult to differentiate on the basis of the delivery mode.

So what we have at least in BC is an extension of existing policies to ‘new’ courses aimed at a professional market with a good degree of freedom for universities to charge market rate for professional programs (so long as they are ‘new’).

There is however another way of looking at the issue, which is more controversial. Instead of determining fees by the program, you could determine fees by the history of the student. For instance, all students may be ’subsidized’ for a maximum of seven or eight years of post-secondary education. After that, they pay full fee (irrespective of the program). This would have the advantage of getting students to complete more quickly (a growing problem in North America, where the average time to degree completion for a four year undergraduate program is between six and seven years), and it would be more equitable. It then allows for unlimited expansion of cost-recovery lifelong learning programs, provided the mature students or employers can afford the cost. With quicker completion, it may even bring down the cost of tuition fees for undergraduate students, resulting in students working less to pay their way through university. However, I don’t know of any jurisdiction that has tried this.

Underlying all this is public policy about who should get subsidies for higher education. I can see the equity argument for everyone having the opportunity of some form of higher education, but once they have been subsidized for a first degree (and possibly even for one year post-graduate study) and as a result have a more opportunity for a well paying job, should they continue to be subsidized for ever? Or is lifelong learning now such a great public good in terms of economic return that it should continue to be subsidized – and can the state afford this? A good question for economists!

In the meantime, the only barrier I can see to universities rapidly expanding into the professional masters market for lifelong learners is the lack of an appropriate business model and imagination. However, UBC’s Masters in Educational Technology shows that costs, including recruiting new tenured research faculty to teach the program, can be fully recovered through tuition fees. So if the opportunity is there why are so few institutions or departments seizing it?

What’s your view on this?