A personal history: 30. A (history) lesson on e-learning research from the Open University of Catalonia

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I am writing an autobiography, mainly for my family, but it does cover some key moments in the development of open and online learning. I thought I would share these as there seems to be a growing interest in the history of educational technology.

Note that these posts are NOT meant to be deeply researched historical accounts, but how I saw and encountered developments in my personal life. If you were around at the time of these developments and would like to offer comments or a different view, please use the comment box at the end of each post. (There is already a conversation track on my LinkedIn site). 

There’s been a big gap in this series, due to my reviews of Contact North’s AI tools. In this post, I want to look at my attempt, 20 years ago, to develop a strategy for e-learning research at the Open University of Catalonia. There are lessons from this that still apply today.

The Open University of Catalonia

In 1998, Murray Goldberg was visiting the Universidad de las Palmas in the Canarie Islands as part of his marketing WebCT, and emailed me that the Universidad de las Palmas was interested in a possible joint effort with UBC for the Canadian/European Community Program for Cooperation in Higher Education and Training. As a result, the next year I received a visit to UBC from one of the Universidad de las Palmas’s professors, Enrique (Paco) Rubio. This was the start of what was to become a close friendship and the opening of a huge opportunity for me.

In 2001, Paco was in the process of moving from the Universidad de Las Palmas to becoming Vice-Rector of International Relations at the Open University of Catalonia (Universidad Oberta de Catalonia – UOC) in Barcelona in Spain. As a result, he invited me to spend a six weeks’ sabbatical at UOC, to advise him and UOC on scaling up their programs internationally and to advise on a strategy for research in e-learning. This was followed by two more six-week sabbaticals in 2002 and 2003.

The Open University of Catalonia (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya – UOC) was the first fully online university, established in 1994 by the regional government of Catalonia. It offered a full range of undergraduate and masters degrees, as well as a Ph.D. program, in both the Spanish and Catalan languages, with a focus on ‘the information society’. In 2002 it had 25,000 students, including many in Latin America. (By 2025 it had over 40,000 students). It had developed its own integrated teaching and administrative software platform, called the Virtual Campus. It used a conventional distance education course development process, with instructional designers and technical specialists working with academics to develop and deliver courses. It had a unique governance structure, with commercial arms such as its publishing house, Eduoc, that supplemented its main financing from the Catalan government.

At the beginning, UOC was headquartered on the Avenida de Tibidabo, in the north of Barcelona. I stayed at the Hotel Bertran, close to the Tibidado metro station from where I could walk up the hill to UOC. Barcelona is a magnificent city with specific neighbourhoods, each with its own community, local restaurants, and cultural centres. The Hotel Bertran was in the St. Gervasi district, a semi-commercial, working to middle class area, with several decent restaurants within walking distance.

E-learning research at UOC, 2001-2006

Having negotiated my departure from UBC in 2003, in 2004 UOC offered me a part-time chair in e-learning research. The contract enabled me to spend six months a year in Barcelona.

UOC had established a research institute, IN3, which was to focus on three areas of research at OUC:

• e-business
• e-society
• e-learning.

However, in 2002, there were no institutional policies governing research at UOC, although UOC’s research office, IN3, was struggling to put together an overall research strategy for UOC, focused on the information society. Hence there was a lack of quality control for most of the existing e-learning research. Most of the academics were young, engaged full-time in teaching and had no time allocated for research. Few had a Ph.D., although many were studying for one from other universities. Often those UOC academics doing e-learning research were junior partners in larger European projects. As a result, the e-learning research was a mile wide and an inch deep, lacked quality and impact, and consequently led to few publications by UOC academics in the relevant journals.

One of my first tasks was to identify everyone at UOC who was doing e-learning research. Altogether I found 13 UOC staff conducting some form of of research in e-learning in 2002. Although UOC had a large international Ph.D. program with over 200 doctoral students studying remotely all over the world, but largely in Latin America, most of the supervision of these students was being done by young academics who themselves did not have a Ph.D.

The impact of physical distance

When I returned in 2004 to take up my new position, I found that UOC had expanded to a new, modern building in the Mediterranean Technology Park at Castelldefels, a town about 20 kilometres south-west of Barcelona, where it moved all its full-time research and support staff. This meant an awkward ninety minute journey that sometimes took up to two hours in each direction from my hotel in Tibidabo. I had to get a subway from Tibidabo to Sants railway station, in the west of Barcelona, then catch a train to Castelldefels, then a relatively short walk from the station to the new building.

However, only a minority of the academic staff moved to Castelldelfels. The senior administration remained at Tibidabo, and in 2004 many of the course developers and most of the academics went to work at a new campus in Poblenou, in Barcelona’s tech district.

I did not like the move to Castelldelfels. Quite apart from the austere, modern building isolated in a tech park, and the ninety-minute commute, the move physically separated research on e-learning from online teaching. Although I was based in Castelldefels, the majority of researchers were also academics based in Poblenou, and a great deal of my time was spent moving between the three campuses. I was not surprised to learn then that years later in 2020, UOC had moved all its academic, research and support staff to an enlarged campus at Poblenou and closed the Castelldelfels campus.

Integrating research and innovation

One major problem at the time was the rigidity of the course production process at UOC. UOC used its own on-house software, the Virtual Campus, to manage courses, which at the time was not web-based and strictly controlled by the IT department. The software reflected a particularly behaviourist approach to teaching. The rigid technological delivery system made it difficult for academics to experiment with new ways of teaching online, so there was no link between innovation and research in teaching.

Who remembers learning objects?

The only area of promise at the time was research on learning objects. A learning object is a collection of content items, practice items, and assessment items that are combined based on a single learning objective. Learning objects were supposed to be discoverable, re-usable and inter-operable. To enable this, each learning object was given a unique set of computer-based meta-data. However, learning objects were rendered obsolete fairly quickly by open educational resources, which were identified by an open copyright licence allowing for re-use and easily found through web-based searches such as Google.

Towards a strategy for e-learning research

By July, 2004, working with the Vice-Rector, Research, Sisco Vallverdu, and Tony Badia, and based on the current interests of those already doing research, I recommended an e-learning research strategy focused on three areas:

• policies, planning and management of e-learning
• teaching and learning in virtual environments
• web services and content management for e-learning.

The aim was to make these research programs relevant to the operation and policies of UOC and to generate proposals that would attract funding within these areas, rather than be driven by the agenda of external funding organizations.

Part of the strategy was that research proposals should go through an approval process to ensure quality and relevance. I pressed the senior administration to negotiate with the Catalan government to fund UOC so that there was time for academics to spend up to 50% of their time on research, as in other Spanish universities.

I also helped with the establishment of UOC’s Master in e-Learning, managed mainly by Albert Sangra and Lourdes Guardia, but drawing on other UOC academics. I was the chair of UOC’s Master in e-Learning international advisory committee from 2004 to 2006. This was a very successful program, in 2004 attracting 800 course enrolments paying full fees, with a 70 per cent completion rate. However, it ran independently of the Ph.D. program at the time. Albert, Lourdes and I tried hard to make the Master’s a requirement for students taking the e-learning strand of the Ph.D. program, without success, and despite the income it generated, the Masters program was was grossly under-resourced. However, despite all its earlier difficulties, the Master in e-Learning is still running very successfully today. 

A failed strategy

By 2006 it was clear that my attempt to develop an institutional e-learning strategy was not working. Apart from a small group called EDU-Lab, which included Albert Sangrà, Lourdes Guardia, Carles Sigales, and Josep Duart, there were no UOC-led e-learning research programs. No extra funding had been made available to enable faculty to have time to do research. The separation between Casteldefells and the other campuses did not help. In particular the rigidity of the Virtual Campus made experimentation with different approaches to e-learning extremely difficult. There was no connection between the Ph.D. program and e-learning research. There was resistance from mainline academics to being grouped within an institution-wide research program, even in a university specialising in e-learning. Thus e-learning research remained the work of a few dedicated visionaries, at least while I was there.

E-learning research at UOC today

UOC, thanks mainly to the efforts of its own staff, eventually overcame these challenges. Twenty years later, it has a thriving eLearning Innovation Centre, with a staff of 25 researchers and specialists in eLearning research, in the following areas:

• analysis of teaching and learning
• creation and promotion of teaching and innovation
• support and transfer of knowledge.

The centre conducts research on e-learning, uses this knowledge as a basis for advising UOC course teams and course designers, and uses learning analytics to support UOC instructors and provide indicators to the university’s governing bodies and committees. It is now one of the leading centres world-wide in e-learning research.

Lessons from history

• e-learning research is a serious area of academic enquiry, requiring dedicated, well-qualified experts with time to do the research
• for any institution seriously engaged in online or blended learning, a dedicated research team tracking and evaluating existing practice, promoting innovation in the design and delivery of e-learning, and advising on institutional strategies for e-learning, is essential
• e-learning research, innovation and teaching are all different sides of the same coin. The research needs to be embedded in the design and delivery of courses, so that lessons learned from research can be used to improve teaching and learning – and current teaching and learning practices can indicate the areas where research is most needed
• the need for research in e-learning is if anything greater today than 20 years ago; technology continues to evolve; in particular, the move to blended/hybrid learning and the application of AI for teaching, learning and management requires tracking and evaluation
• e-learning research needs the support of senior administration, especially in supporting the mandate to do research and providing the resources to enable it to happen.

Up next

More on my time at UOC, in particular the impact of changing the senior administration

Over to you

What is your experience of trying to do research on e-learning? What strategies work – and what don’t? Please use the comment box at the end of this post