What I did

This year I worked in Alberta, Cuba, Mexico, Germany, and Saudi Arabia, [...]]]> It’s that time of year again. Here’s a personal look back at e-learning in 2009 (I will do another blog on priorities for Canadian e-learning in 2010, and a third blog on international trends to watch in 2010).

What I did

This year I worked in Alberta, Cuba, Mexico, Germany, and Saudi Arabia, and taught online briefly (but twice) for the University of Maryland/Oldenburg University’s joint Masters in Distance Education. I also visited UBC several times to see what they were doing, which included attending the excellent Canadian e-learning conference in June.

Meeting with the Distance Education people, University of Havana

My major work was for the Government of Alberta, helping them develop strategic directions for the use of information and communications technologies for the whole post-secondary system. This will eventually see the light of day next year.

I’m currently writing a book (with Albert Sangra) on the governance and management of information and communications technologies in post-secondary educational institutions, to be published at the end of 2010 by Jossey-Bass/John Wiley. I also have another book in the pipeline, a (third) complete re-write of Technology, e-Learning and Distance Education, due in 2011.

2008

In my blog, the State of e-Learning, 2008, I argued that although e-learning continues to grow and expand, there was a lack of innovation and change, with efforts concentrated on using technology to re-inforce the classroom teaching model, while I on the other hand believe that e-learning should be used to re-design teaching and learning for the digital age.

I have very mixed feelings about e-learning in 2009.

Good developments in 2009

The technology gets better

First, the developments in technology are very exciting. In particular, the developments in mobile technology are moving forward in ways that are really valuable for education: greater bandwidth, greater functionality, improved user interfaces, many more apps, greater access, lower costs (especially for Canada in 2010). Social media such as Twitter and Facebook are beginning to penetrate even formal education, if only in limited ways. The uptake of e-portfolios is increasing. The first steps in open source administrative systems, with the launch of the Kuali Project, offers potentially huge savings for universities and colleges. Cloud computing also offers potentially large savings and greater flexibility for educational applications. Technology continues its rapid development, ever more interesting and exciting, with huge potential for education.

E-learning outside ‘the system’

Outside of the formal education system, great things are happening in e-learning. Communities of practice, sharing of experiences, and self-learning are growing rapidly. For instance, Supercool School, which uses Facebook to link those who want to learn with those who want to teach, is taking off in a big way, with contracts with some of the larger IT corporations, such as Google, for in-house training. Open publishing now enables many people who want to share ideas in a limited market that traditional publishers wouldn’t touch can now get their ideas out. More importantly for the formal educational system, open publishing is dramatically cutting the costs of textbooks for students. For the general public, and especially for small Internet-based companies, ranging from advice on beauty spas to advising parents on how deal with their children’s difficulties at school to independent advice on banking services, e-learning is taking off around the world.

Disappointments in 2009

Then we look at the public sector, and in particular the big research universities, and what do we see? Clickers, lecture capture, multiple screens in the classroom, learning management systems with Powerpoint slides and pdf files loaded, and a total lack of recognition that the current formal higher education system is failing, and a total lack of vision of what is needed for the future, and the role that information and communications technologies can play in formal learning.

As always, I will bracket my comments by noting that many individual lecturers and instructors are doing great work, being innovative and doing great things. Also, there are a lot of colleges and universities with excellent support units and staff, who are doing great work in helping instructors and faculty do the best they can with new technologies. Fully online learning, i.e. online distance learning, continues to grow at a rapid pace – but not as fast as market demand, and often institutions or instructors moving into fully online courses are often not applying best practices so the quality is not always as high as it should be.

Open educational resources

First, some specifics. My biggest disappointment this year (apart from the disastrous Canadian Council of Learning report on e-learning, which in any case is an irrelevance) has been with open educational resources. Yes, we have seen more initiatives, not just in North America but also in Europe and Africa. But what are we getting? Digitally recorded 50 minute classroom lectures and digital textbooks. What we are not getting are materials designed from scratch for multiple use, with learning objectives, contextual materials (such as links to other open source materials and possible assessment questions), student activities, and guides for instructors. There is one exception to this statement and that is Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, which I welcome, but which I fear is too much in the other direction of whole packaged courses.

And there is still so little of it. What I would like to see are many thousands of short modules with contextual materials that allow instructors to mix and mash – yes, remashing for education. So when a new course is being planned, thought needs to be given at the design stage not only to the ‘in-course’ design of materials for students enrolled in the course, but to how the materials could best be used as open source materials. We also need some educational design models for using open source materials that would help both in their development and their application.

Mobile learning

Now mobile learning. Although the technology is rapidly developing, and some of the existing apps could be (and are being) adapted for educational purposes (such as RSS feeds), we need specifically educational apps for mobile learning that make it easy to organise and create learning materials, and integrate them with materials located elsewhere, without having to come out of the mobile environment. However, this is just a matter of time. What we then will need will be again appropriate design models for mobile learning that make full use of mobility, audio-visual collection and analysis of data, and geo-spatial location.

Virtual worlds

Educational applications of virtual worlds also seem to have been on hold this year. The reality is that creating educational virtual worlds is expensive. Again, it is also necessary to develop appropriate design models as well as creating the virtual environment, so that the skills and competencies afforded by virtual worlds are achieved. I wouldn’t write them off, but I had hoped for more developments in 2009.

Institutional vision and the management of e-learning

This is the area of greatest disappointment for me in 2009. Where are the exciting new developments in hybrid learning in universities? What institutions are making the break with traditional classroom and laboratory-based teaching and looking to develop a digital learning environment where face-to-face teaching has a specific but limited role? How are institutions responding to the fact that they have more students now who are over 24, in reality working at least part-time, with families, and many returning for a second or third degree, than they have young, full-time students? I look at UBC’s latest strategic plan (Place and Promise) and there is nothing in it that refers to the the needs of learners in a post-industrial society, the changing profiles of our students, or the role of technology (even though UBC has probably more innovative e-learning projects than most institutions in North America).

The problem is that there cannot be real change in our post-secondary institutions without strong leadership and vision, but it seems that for the leadership of most North American post-secondary education systems, technology is so 1990s – been there, done that. The funding crisis doesn’t help, at least in the short term (more on that in my future trends blog).

However, our public post-secondary institutions are far too complacent about the current classroom-based teaching model, which is not serving our students well, in terms of giving them personal interaction with highly qualified and expert teachers and developing the skills and competencies needed in the 21st century. Too many institutions pay lip service to the use of technology for teaching, (‘a cutting edge university in the use of technology for teaching’ referring to the introduction of clickers, for instance), seeing it as a marketing tool or a way of winning government funding, rather than addressing the needs of learners in fundamentally different ways. There are no real incentives for change, especially with respect to the essential need for instructors to be properly trained to teach, which would include pedagogy as well as training in the use of technologies.

Conclusions

So in summary, the technology continues to develop and improve, e-learning is developing incredibly well outside the public system, there are many individuals and units working very hard within formal education to make e-learning succeed, but there are still deep systemic issues in the public post-secondary system that are severely limiting the application and usefulness of e-learning.

Your comments

However, I am now on the outside of the system looking in, which of course is both a strength and a weakness. What is the reaction of those of you inside the system to my review of 2009? What excited or disappointed you? Have you got examples that contradict my very subjective conclusions?

The University of British Columbia recently completed a trial of a new satellite polling system by i>clicker, which sells student-response systems. The new system allowed students on three campuses, all part of the university’s Distributed Undergraduate Medical Program, [...]]]> Terris, B. (2009) University Uses ‘Clickers’ to Quiz Students in Multiple Location Chronicle of Higher Education, September 14

The University of British Columbia recently completed a trial of a new satellite polling system by i>clicker, which sells student-response systems. The new system allowed students on three campuses, all part of the university’s Distributed Undergraduate Medical Program, to respond to questions in a simulcast lecture . I>clicker hopes to make the product widely available by January 2010.

The university’s Distributed Undergraduate Medical Program enrols students from across the province. Students can study at UBC’s main campus in Vancouver, or in partnership with the Universities of Victoria and Northern British Columbia, on the universities’ campuses at Victoria and Prince George. Programs are delivered in more than 80 communities in BC, and include nine clinical academic campuses and 13 affiliated regional centres located in hospitals across the province. The problem-based program is delivered through a mix of local small-group face-to-face sessions, video-conferenced lectures, an extensive set of web-based resources, and local clinical laboratory work. For more on this very successful program (resulting in more GPs working outside the main urban area of Vancouver) see:

Snadden, D. and Bates, J. (2005) Expanding undergraduate medical education in British Columbia: a distributed campus model CMAJ, Vol. 173, No. 6

Publishers blurb: ‘This book is filled with illustrative examples of questions and teaching activities that use classroom response systems from a variety of disciplines (with a discipline index). The book also incorporates results from research on the effectiveness of the technology [...]]]> Bruff, D. (2009) Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Publishers blurb: ‘This book is filled with illustrative examples of questions and teaching activities that use classroom response systems from a variety of disciplines (with a discipline index). The book also incorporates results from research on the effectiveness of the technology for teaching. Written for instructional designers and re-designers as well as faculty across disciplines.’

For an interview with the author, and some interesting discussion of the value of clickers, see Jaschik, S. (2009) Writing the Book on Clickers, Inside Higher Education, Feb 24

An interview of the author of Bruff, D. (2009) Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, with some interesting comments and discussion about the value of clickers

Hannon, C. (2008) Paper-based Computing EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Vol. 31. No. 4

This article looks at some of the issues arising from electronic note-taking, prompted by the development of the Livescribe Pulse smart pen. This technology is aimed directly at the college student market. The pen points a tiny camera at specially marked [...]]]> (This replaces an earlier post)

Hannon, C. (2008) Paper-based Computing EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Vol. 31. No. 4

This article looks at some of the issues arising from electronic note-taking, prompted by the development of the Livescribe Pulse smart pen. This technology is aimed directly at the college student market. The pen points a tiny camera at specially marked paper, captures what is written, and converts the writing to PDF files and plain text in what is being called paper-based computing. The pen comes with microphones that capture audio and software that synchronizes it with the written notes. A student can replay an entire lecture at a later time, either by interacting with the written notes or through a computer. The pen’s software also makes it easy to share recorded class sessions with other students at the Livescribe website or through Facebook.

I have included this reference because is is a classic example of how technology should NOT be used in teaching (incidentally, I have the same view about clickers). This is the equivalent of putting a steam engine in front of a stagecoach, with two men in front holding flags so it won’t go faster than 5 mph. Technology can allow students access to the same information in different ways. Why do they have to be in the lecture theatre in the first place? Why are they passively taking notes instead of actively seeking and analysing knowledge for themselves? This technology may be useful for teaching office secretaries or court reporters how to take notes in shorthand – but these job functions don’t exist anymore.  The whole premise of using technology to repeat an activity that is inefficient in the first place shows how little we understand technology in education (or to be fair, how little the inventor understands education).

Now of course a case can be made for face-to-face lectures and for note-taking, but only within a design that considers the many ways in which technology can be used and the many kinds of learners that have to be reached, and then selecting the lecture or note-taking because they are uniquely suited to the task in hand – and I’ll bet the smart pen wouldn’t be needed at all in that context.

Its more recent work includes:

Flashlight Online 2.0, a survey tool for [...]]]> Two of the USA’s leading authorities on e-learning, Steve Ehrmann and Steve Gilbert, are behind the TLT Group, a non-profit organization that specializes in the planning and evaluation of e-learning. It has over 100 institutional subscribers, including some of the leading universities in the USA.

Its more recent work includes:

Flashlight Online 2.0, a survey tool for evaluating or conducting research on online courses

An article on ‘Strategies for Responding to Differences Among Learners: Technology as Lever’ This article places the use of clickers in a wider context.

Formative evaluation and planning of e-portfolios.

The Flashlight Cost Analysis Handbook. Its goal: to help reduce stress on people and budgets by studying how programs use time, money, and other resources.

This is only a small sample of the group’s work. For more information, go to: http://www.tltgroup.org/about.htm

At a session on the use of clickers at the EDUCAUSE 2008 conference, officials of three large universities reported on the use of clickers in their universities. By far, the top reason cited by faculty members using clickers was to see instantly whether students were understanding [...]]]> Jaschik, S. (2008) Clicker U? Inside Higher Education, Nov 3.

At a session on the use of clickers at the EDUCAUSE 2008 conference, officials of three large universities reported on the use of clickers in their universities. By far, the top reason cited by faculty members using clickers was to see instantly whether students were understanding a concept.

Andy Guess reports on a presentation about the Campus Computing Project 2008 survey at the Educause 2008 conference. Highlights from Andy Guest’s report:

‘This year’s survey, culled from 531 respondents over the Web from September to October of this year, covers the spectrum [...]]]> Guess, A. (2008) Outsourcing, Open Source and Budget Cuts Inside Higher Education, Oct 29.

Andy Guess reports on a presentation about the Campus Computing Project 2008 survey at the Educause 2008 conference. Highlights from Andy Guest’s report:

‘This year’s survey, culled from 531 respondents over the Web from September to October of this year, covers the spectrum of institutions from two-year public colleges to doctoral research universities in the USA.

Although enterprise, license-based learning management platforms continue to dominate the higher education landscape (56.8 percent use Blackboard, down from 66.3 percent last year), the potential for increasing open source adoption remains. For the first time, the survey asked respondents about their likelihood to adopt open-source solutions such as Moodle or Sakai. Almost a quarter, 24.4 percent, reported a high likelihood that their institutions would migrate within five years, by 2013. The numbers were significantly lower for other open-source applications, such as content management systems and human resource management software.

As it stands, Moodle is used at more than twice the number of colleges than Sakai, with 10 percent adopting the former institution-wide compared with under 4 percent for the latter. The discrepancy owes mainly to private four-year colleges, which overwhelmingly choose Moodle, while public universities favor Sakai in almost a reverse pattern. The two solutions are divided about equally in other sectors.

The use of clickers is rising, although they continue to be relatively rare classroom tools. At community colleges, especially, their use doubled over the past year — to just over 4 percent.’

The report also covers issues such as IT security, IT budget trends, outsourcing of e-mail.