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Africa is the world’s fastest developing e-learning market

January 29, 2013 By 3 Comments
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Computers for student use at Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa

Adkins, S. (2013) The Africa Market for Self-paced eLearning Products and Services: 2011-2016 Forecast and Analysis Monroe WA: Ambient Insight

This is one of the most interesting reports I have come across in a long time. Even the abstract is packed with information and data. I have pulled out here just a small selection of particular interest to online learning in higher education.

According to this report, e-learning is forecast to grow in Africa as a whole at a rate of 15% per annum over the next four years, with growth rates in individual countries at the following:

  • Senegal: 30%
  • Zambia: 28%
  • Zimbabwe: 25%
  • Kenya: 25%

In terms of volume of revenues from e-learning, South Africa is the dominant country but will be overtaken by Nigeria by 2016.

There are several drivers of this development in Africa:

  • the recent arrival of fiber optic connectivity. Prior to this, satellite access was the primary connectivity medium, which is very expensive. This was inhibiting the uptake of Internet connectivity
  • a price war with telecoms and ISPs dropping prices to attract customers. This has also created a boom in the adoption of Internet and mobile technologies
  • Internet penetration in Kenya essentially doubled from 2010 to 2011, growing from 28% to 52% in just one year. Internet penetration more than tripled in Rwanda between 2011 and 2012, growing from 8% to 26% in one year.
  • The wide scale digitization of academic content in every country analyzed in this report
  • The explosion of online enrollments in higher education institutions
  • the sharp spike in the adoption of eLearning in the corporate segments in the booming economies.

According to the report:

The boom in online higher education enrollments in Africa is nothing short of astonishing. Many countries are adopting eLearning as a way to meet the strong demand for higher education – a demand they simply cannot meet with traditional campuses and programs:

  • The University of South Africa (UNISA) UNISA is a pan-regional virtual university with over 310,000 students (3,500 come from outside Africa.) Over half of all UNISA students take at least one online course a year. New virtual universities are springing up everywhere in Africa.
  • In May 2011, the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) announced the launch of a pan-African virtual university branch of IGNOU with headquarters in Ethiopia. IGNOU has partnerships with institutions in 20 African countries.
  • Innorero University, a private institution in Kenya, launched their Virtual Campus in January 2012.
  • The Virtual University of Uganda (VUU) claims to be the first online university in East Africa and started taking students in January 2012.
  • In June 2012, the Kenyan government funded the development of a new online education institution called the Open University of Kenya in an effort to meet the strong demand for higher education in the country.
  • The African University College of Communications (AUCC) and the India-based AVAGMAH Online School of Bharathidasan University announced in October 2012 that they would launch a virtual university in Ghana in January 2013 
  • in January 2012, the African Development Bank approved a US$15.6 million grant to help strengthen the capacity of the African Virtual University (AVU). As of 2012, the AVU had 31 active higher education partners across Africa, which it helps in building e-learning centres and training content developers. The new funding will be used to build 12 new e-learning centres.

With very few exceptions, most of the countries in the region now have official government policies on the use of technology in education. There are now dozens of new national digitization projects funded directly by the central governments with and without the aid of external donors.


Filed Under: access, Africa, Bibliography, current state of the art, national, regional and international strategies, planning, policies and management - institutional, Strategies, planning and management, Technology Tagged With: , , , , ,

Measuring the growth of online learning: the Babson College 2012 survey

January 13, 2013 By 1 Comment
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©2013 by Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group, LLC

Allen, I.E. and Seaman, J. (2013) Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States  Wellesley MA: Babson College/Quahog Research Group

Based on responses from more than 2,800 colleges and universities, this year’s study, like those for the previous nine years, tracks the opinions of chief academic officers. The figures refer to fully online courses, i.e. courses where over 80% of the content is delivered online. Most of you will have seen at least the headlines about this report, but it is so significant that I am providing a detailed analysis.

Main findings:

Online course enrollments

  • The number of students taking at least one online course increased by over 570,000 to a new total of 6.7 million.
  • The online enrollment growth rate of 9.3 percent is the lowest recorded in this report series (but higher than enrollment growth overall, which dropped to below zero in 2011-2012.)
  • The proportion of all students taking at least one online course is at an all time high of 32.0 percent
  • The continued growth in online enrollments has come from the transition of institutions with only a few online courses moving to offer fully online programs, and from institutions with online programs expanding their offerings and building their enrollments.

©2013 by Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group, LLC

Learning outcomes

  • In the first report of this series in 2003, 57 percent of academic leaders rated the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face.  That number is now 77 percent.
  • A minority (23%) of academic leaders continue to believe the learning outcomes for online education are inferior to those of face-to-face instruction.
  • Academic leaders at institutions with online offerings have a much more favorable opinion of the relative learning outcomes for online courses than do those at institutions with no online offerings.

Faculty acceptance 

  • Only 30 percent of chief academic officers believe their faculty accept the value and legitimacy of online education.  This rate is lower than the rate recorded in 2004.
  • Chief academic officers at institutions with fully online programs have the most positive view of their faculty acceptance, but even for them the proportion agreeing is less than a majority (38 percent).

Time to teach online

  • The percent of academic leaders that believe it takes more faculty time and effort to teach online has increased from 41 percent in 2006 to 45 percent this year.
  • Private for-profit institutions are the lone group whose level of agreement has dropped (from 32 percent in 2006 to 24 percent in 2012).

Who offers online programs?

  • Virtually all publicly funded institutions (90%+) had online courses even in 2002.  One big change for these schools is the big gain in the proportion whose online offerings now include complete online programs (49% in 2002 and 71% in 2012).
  • The number of private nonprofit institutions with online offerings increased from 22% in 2002 to 48% in 2012.

MOOCs

  • Only 2.6 percent of higher education institutions currently have a MOOC, another 9.4 percent report MOOCs are in the planning stages.
  • The majority of institutions (55%) report they are still undecided about MOOCs, while one-third (33%) say they have no plans for a MOOC.
  • Academic leaders remain unconvinced that MOOCs represent a sustainable method for offering online courses, but do believe they provide an important means for institutions to learn about online pedagogy.
  • Academic leaders are not concerned about MOOC instruction being accepted in the workplace, but do have concerns that credentials for MOOC completion will cause confusion about higher education degrees.
Online learning as strategic to institution’s plans
  • The proportion of chief academic leaders that say online learning is critical to their long-term strategy is now at 69 percent – the highest it has been for this ten-year period.
  • Likewise, the proportion of institutions reporting online education is not critical to their long-term strategy has dropped to a new low of 11 percent.
Methodology
  • A total of 2,820 responses were included in the analysis, representing 62 percent of the sample universe (all active degree-granting institutions in the USA).  Because non-responding institutions are predominately those with the smallest enrollments, the institutions included in the analysis represents 83 percent of  higher education enrollments.
Comments

1. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman have provided a unique and invaluable service for the last ten years. Initially supported by the Sloan-C foundation for the first nine years and now supported by Pearson, this survey has provided the only comprehensive analysis of the growth of online learning in the USA. Its particular value is the consistency of methodology which allows for valid comparisons from year to year.

2. The results themselves this year are somewhat surprising. Almost one third of students in the USA are now taking at least one online course. Although growth is slowing somewhat, online enrollments are still outpacing the overall college enrollments in the USA. Nearly 70% of chief academic officers see online learning as strategic to their future plans.

3. I was surprised to note that even as early as 2002, over 90% of state-funded universities claimed to have at least some online courses. The private nonprofit (i.e. most of the elite universities) have been much slower moving in this direction with still less than half offering for credit programs.

4. The data clearly shows the over-reporting in the main media of MOOCs. Only 12% of institutions are offering or considering to offer MOOCs and as we have seen elsewhere, these are mainly the elite institutions who to date have been slow to recognize or accept the value of for-credit online programming. It is a pity less media attention has been focused on the 6.7 million online enrollments that have built slowly but steadily over the last 10 years. But then these weren’t at  Stanford, MIT or Harvard.

5. The report has some interesting observations on the time factor in teaching online. The report states:

Before the advent of MOOCs, the prototypical online course in U.S.higher education over the past decade has not been structured to provide large increases in efficiency.  Most online courses are very similar in design to existing face-to-face courses.  These courses typically run on the same semester schedule, cover the same corpus of material, represent the same number of credit hours, and are led by a single faculty member who is directly interacting with his or her students…..One result of building online courses that mirror the existing face-to-face framework has been they place additional demands on the faculty that teach them….. The most recent results show 44.6 percent of chief academic officers now report this to be the case, with only 9.7 percent disagreeing. However, the percent of academic leaders at for-profit institutions agreeing it takes more time and effort to teach online courses had dropped from 31.6 percent in 2006 to only 24.2 percent for 2012.

This suggests that the for-profits such as Phoenix and Kaplan have been more successful in scaling up online programs. There are several ways online learning could be done more cost-effectively in public institutions, from greater use of open educational resources, especially open textbooks, flexible instructional design, more planning, teamwork and design at a programming rather than a course level, greater sharing of materials and more inter-institutional collaboration and partnerships, especially for core undergraduate programs and specialized masters programs. Now that institutions are seeing online learning as of strategic importance, I hope we will see more concerted efforts at improving the cost-effectiveness of online learning.

6. I have just one caveat with all the surveys in this series. I have a concern that they may be unintentionally over-indicating the volume of online learning. Just two straws in the wind: in 2010, the government of Ontario in Canada did a comprehensive census (i.e. all institutions) and found that 13% of all course enrollments were in online courses, which is less than half the Babson figure. At the time, I thought this might be an indication that Canada was slower than the US in developing online learning. However, earlier this week, Dr. Andreea Serban, interim vice chancellor of education services at Coast Community College District, reported that in the California community college network, the number of online enrollments equalled 11% of full time equivalents – FTEs (identical to the figure for the Ontario two-year college system). One reason for the differences may be due to the way data are reported. The Babson survey reports on the number of students taking at least one online course (32% of all students). The Ontario survey required institutions to provide a detailed breakdown of their course enrollments from their registration data, and calculated this as a proportion of FTE enrollments, and I’m guessing that is how the California figures were also arrived at. The reason for the discrepancy is that students are probably taking fewer online than face-to-face courses, thus the FTE proportion is lower. However, I would argue that the proportion of students taking online courses in terms of FTEs  is the better ‘true’ measurement of the impact of online learning.

Despite the caveat, what is more important than the actual numbers is the trend, and on this the Babson survey is extremely consistent. We are seeing some indication that the rate of growth of for-credit online learning is beginning to slow (at one time there were annual increases of over 20%), and I suspect that the move to hybrid learning is likely to slow down further the growth of enrollments in fully online courses (although increasing the total number of students studying at least partly online). Allen and Seaman in fact also collected data on blended/hybrid learning in this year’s survey and I hope they will publish this data as well.

Lastly, despite (or perhaps because of) this detailed analysis of the results, I strongly recommend you go to the original report, which contains a great deal more than I’ve reported here, is clearly written and is well worth reading in full.

Filed Under: Bibliography, current state of the art, Events, learners, measuring institutional performance, MOOCs, research, Strategies, planning and management, students, surveys, Teaching and learning Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Massive growth of online learning in Asia

November 18, 2012 By 1 Comment
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Aakash 2: already 3.5 million ordered

Adkins, S. S. (2012) The Asia Market for Self-paced eLearning Products and Services: 2011-2016 Forecast and Analysis Ambient Insight, October

In all the hoopla about MOOCs, it is worth noting that in Asia, credit-based online learning is already reaching many millions of learners. This report from Ambient Insight, targeted mainly at the corporate e-learning market, provides a host of fascinating statistics about the Asian market for online learning.

Several countries for instance are putting their entire k-12 curriculum online. China’s goal is to have their entire K-12 population of over 200 million students online by 2020. In South Korea all primary and secondary schools must be entirely digital by 2015, and every child with have a personal learning device. In India, the Aakash 2 tablet, which launched this month, already has 3.5 million orders.

The report also highlights ‘explosive growth of online higher education enrollments‘ in Asia. One institution alone in China, ChinaEdu, has nearly 200,000 students taking degree programs wholly online, and over 100,000 South Koreans are enrolled in cyber universities.

Perhaps most interesting of all though is the author’s comment on how the digitization is occurring:

The content digitization tends to start with converting print-based textbooks to eTextbooks. Yet, once the infrastructure and learning technology is in place, the buyers are increasingly opting for interactive, self-paced multimedia content. Several of the newer initiatives are leapfrogging eTextbooks altogether and building out interactive media as a core component.

If you want to pay for a full copy of the report, contact: info@ambientinsight.com



 		

		
Filed Under: Asia, Bibliography, China, current state of the art, national, regional and international strategies, South Korea, Strategies, planning and management  Tagged With: , , , , , ,  

	

	


				
Survey of the digital lives of professors

		
		
August 24, 2012  By  Leave a Comment 
		

			
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Allen, I.E. and Seaman, J. (2012) Digital Faculty: Professors, Teaching and Technology 2012  Inside Higher Ed, Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group, LLC.


Kolowich, S. (2012) Digital Faculty: Professors and Technology 2012, Inside Higher Education, August 24


This is a report of a survey of 4,564 faculty members, composing a nationally representative sample spanning various types of institutions; and 591 administrators who are responsible for academic technology at their institutions. An earlier report focused on faculty views of online education. This survey focuses on how digital technology is affecting the lives of faculty in more general terms. The Kolowich article is a fairly extensive summary of the report.


The report suggests that in general, faculty are fairly positive towards many of the digital developments in academia, such as ‘flipped’ classrooms which allow for more in-class discussion, and the growth of learning analytics (although not described as such in this report). There was also general support for the move towards e-publishing and e-textbooks.


One finding that struck me is that administrators consistently over-estimate faculty engagement with digital technologies such as an LMS.


Another finding that struck me is how relatively few e-mails faculty received from students, even when teaching online courses – rarely more than 25 a day.


There’s a lot of data in the original report and it is worth reading in full.


 		

		
Filed Under: Bibliography, e-books, e-mail, Events, learning management systems, social software, Strategies, planning and management, surveys, Technology  Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,  

	

	


				
The impact of online learning on the future of higher education: a response to the study from the PewResearchCentre

		
		
July 28, 2012  By  6 Comments 
		

			
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Armageddon for the US public university? Art: © Jonsibal.com, 2012


Anderson, J., Boyles, J., and Rainie, L. (2012) The Future Impact of the Internet on Higher Education Washington DC: The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project


The study


This is a Delphi-style study where over 1,000 ‘experts’ in the USA were asked to choose one of two possible scenarios that describe the likely impact of the Internet on the higher education system, and then provide comments or a rationale for their choice (see the full report for more details on the methodology).


The results


39% agreed with a scenario that articulated modest change by the end of the decade: 


In 2020, higher education will not be much different from the way it is today. While people will be accessing more resources in classrooms through the use of large screens, teleconferencing, and personal wireless smart devices, most universities will mostly require in-person, on-campus attendance of students most of the time at courses featuring a lot of traditional lectures. Most universities’ assessment of learning and their requirements for graduation will be about the same as they are now.


60% agreed with a scenario outlining more change:


By 2020, higher education will be quite different from the way it is today. There will be mass adoption of teleconferencing and distance learning to leverage expert resources. Significant numbers of learning activities will move to individualized, just-in-time learning approaches. There will be a transition to “hybrid” classes that combine online learning components with less-frequent on-campus, in-person class meetings. Most universities’ assessment of learning will take into account more individually-oriented outcomes and capacities that are relevant to subject mastery. Requirements for graduation will be significantly shifted to customized outcomes.


The Pew researchers grouped the arguments that participants used to justify their choice under the following themes:


    

  1. Higher education will vigorously adopt new teaching approaches, propelled by opportunity and efficiency as well as student and parent demands.
    2. 

  2. Economic realities will drive technological innovation forward by 2020, creating less uniformity in higher education.
    3. 

  3. “Distance learning” is a divisive issue. It is viewed with disdain by many who don’t see it as effective; others anticipate great advances in knowledge-sharing tools by 2020.
    4. 

  4. ‘Bricks’ replaced by ‘clicks’? Some say universities’ influence could be altered as new technology options emerge; others say ‘locatedness’ is still vital for an optimal outcome.
    5. 

  5. Frustration and doubt mark the prospect of change within the academy. Change is happening incrementally, but these adjustments will not be universal in most institutions by 2020.
    6. 

  6. Universities will adopt new pedagogical approaches while retaining the core of traditional methods.
    7. 

  7. Collaborative education with peer-to-peer learning will become a bigger reality and will challenge the lecture format and focus on “learning how to learn.”
    8. 

  8. Competency credentialing and certification are likely……yet institutional barriers may prevent widespread degree customization.
    9. 



Comment


This provides an excellent overview of the current thinking about the future of higher education in North America, at least.


I did not participate in the study but I would have been in the 60% who would have voted for the second scenario, but with one caveat: 2020 is too soon, mainly because of theme (5) above. However, I do believe that this is the direction public higher education will go, indeed will have to go.


There was a third scenario that was not discussed in the study, and I believe should have been:


The publicly funded higher education system as we know it will no longer exist in the USA. Elite universities funded mainly through endowments, corporate donations, and very high tuition fees will provide a campus-based education for the very rich and powerful. The majority of government funded research will be allocated to these elite institutions, which will also provide non-credit online free education for the masses. Three or four large for-profit institutions will provide low-cost, tuition-funded medium quality degrees and vocational diplomas using a combination of class-based and online learning, frequently enabling students to transfer in credit from their non-credit certificates from the elite institutions. These for-profit institutions will provide the vast majority of post-secondary education in the USA, helped by Federal and state student grants that require rigorous quality standards from qualifying for-profits. Many states will have either no or at most one of two large, publicly funded research universities. Meanwhile, the USA continues with an accelerated economic and social decline.


Although this last scenario is in my view less likely than the second, I believe that it has a similar if not greater probability than the first scenario, and needs to be treated as a serious threat to the USA’s public post-secondary education system. If my third scenario prevails, it will be because of theme (5) above. Faculty will have only themselves (and the Tea Party) to blame.


Meanwhile, thanks to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project for a very interesting and thought-provoking study.


Your comments, please


How do these scenarios match your view of the future of higher education? Is there one you like but would amend?


Do you have a fourth scenario?


Will it be different in Canada or other countries? Or is the USA unique?


Is this kind of study useful? Or does it just further add to the hype and hysteria around online learning?


 		

		
Filed Under: Bibliography, change management, design of virtual learning organizations, futures, national, regional and international strategies, quality and quality assurance, Strategies, planning and management, United States of America, USA  Tagged With: , , , ,  

	


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