Sir Ron Cooke has been asked to provide the Government with advice and recommendations on how the country can be one of the leading – if not the leading – centres of online higher education learning in the world.
This request was based on the growing understanding that in fifteen years time the global market for higher education will have expanded. And that a significant proportion of this expansion will be down to students who do not want to carry out their studies entirely on site, at university campuses, but by distance, online and by using the opportunities that the rapid development of technology gives us.
Sir Ron has now delivered his report: On-line Innovation in Higher Education [PDF 307kb] which is publicly available for you to comment on. (An executive summary [PDF 30kb] of this report is also available.)
You can join the continuing discussion on the issues and recommendations by posting your views on any aspect of Sir Ron’s report on this blog.
Comments made on this page will be brought to the attention of the respective policy handlers for this issue on a weekly basis.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Comment posted at:
http://dmupathfinder.blogspot.com/2008/11/dius-reports-on-line-innovation-in.html
Stephen Downes based in New Brunswick wrote a very relevant post on his website to the topic of e-learning in higher education. His posting is an updating and review of a paper he wrote ten years ago called “The Future of Online Learning”.
His essay ranges from basic technology issues necessary to facilitate online learning such as bandwidth, processing, storage and software to learning communities, accreditation, copyright, ownership and the economics of online learning.
Stephan’s conclusion’s on online learning are clear:
“As I stated ten years ago, and as we see today, even though savings will not be as great as anticipated, it will be necessary for institutions to offer their courses online - and sooner, rather than later - because the costs of not doing so are too great.
Distance learning institutions, such as Athabasca University and the University of Phoenix, are beginning to cut into traditional student bodies. It is becoming necessary for traditional institutions to accommodate more students with existing resources, which means that the pressures to take advantage of the potential savings offered by technology, which were not so great before, are now mounting.
Even more to the point, all educational institutions are facing their greatest competition from their students themselves. This is especially the case in nations where college and university degrees can be obtained only by a moneyed elite. A determined population of ambitious, talented and self-sufficient students can educate themselves, creating their own community, their own professions, their own future. We are seeing this unfold before our eyes, if we would only look.
The Future
Today, and for the last century, education has been practiced in segregated buildings by carefully regimented and standardized classes of students led and instructed by teachers working essentially alone.
Over the last ten years, this model has been seen in many quarters to be obsolete. We have seen the emergence of a new model, where education is practiced in the community as a whole, by individuals studying personal curricula at their own pace, guided and assisted by community facilitators, online instructors and experts around the world.
Though today we stand at the cusp of this new vision, the future will see institutions and traditional forms of education receding gradually, reluctantly, to a tide of self-directing and self-motivated learners. This will be the last generation in which education is the practice of authority, and the first where it becomes, at has always been intended by educators, an act of liberty.”
Stephen’s blog posting can be checked out here: http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2008/11/future-of-online-learning-ten-years-on_16.html
Talis Project xiphos comments posted at:
http://blogs.talis.com/xiphos/2008/11/18/dius-review-of-he-online-innovation-in-higher-education/
Comment posted at http://blogs.talis.com/xiphos/2008/11/18/dius-review-of-he-online-innovation-in-higher-education/
My principal argument is that the report is correct to identify the need for “visionary thrust” but I disagree that the way forward is via new structures (i.e. Centres of Expertise). Instead we should be funding an facilitating intiatives at ground level. This would be a more sustainable approach.
First the confession. I am Director of OpenLearn at The Open University and want to gratefully acknowledge the many mentions of us in the submission. We may be an acknowledged world leader in the use of on-line technologies due to our long history of adapting new technologies, particularly digital technologies, to serving open and distance learning and open but we also recognise that we have barely begun to figure out how we can adapt the rapidly changing set of digital technologies now emerging, and that will continue to emerge, to serve those same purposes. This success so far is largely due to committed leadership within the institution that sets clear strategic priorities and provides sustained investment in the innovation, experimentation, research, evaluation and mainstreaming of ICT infrastructure, digital technologies and e-learning practices with input and feedback from both primary and secondary users of those services. Some of that work involves major partnerships with other organisations and not just other HEIs.
I therefore welcome the three main recommendations as they reflect on a National scale what we are doing at an institutional scale, although I also feel that some greater clarity is needed within and between them.
First, institutions need strategies that address all aspects of ICT use (for teaching, learning scholarship, research, enterprise, community engagement, etc) and not just those for management and administration, which is the impression given by the way the three recommendations are written. Even if that impression is wrong, this is the most critical recommendation as it the only way that the others can be at all effective. A revitalised e-infrastructure is essential but unless institutional strategies are aligned with its capabilities it will not be sufficient to gain and retain world leading status.
Second, a corpus of open learning content is likely to end up as a less than useful vanity publishing exercise unless there is clear understanding and expectation of who might use it, when they might use it, how they use it and what digital technologies (institutionally based or otherwise) are involved. It is worth restating that the official UNESCO definition of open educational resources encompasses tools, technologies and licences as well as content. Similarly, openness has many dimensions, not just those defined in licences, and evidence suggests that the greater the openness the greater the levels of use, tempered by incipient incompatibilities, and that often open content can be intimately bound up with open source software e.g. Wikipedia and/or with open formats. The report is unfortunately silent on the place of OSS in on-line innovation.
Third, I believe it is mistaken to argue for a core of open resources organised in a coherent way. The word ‘core’ implies an agreed ‘common curriculum’ of some sort with all the complications that will follow in agreeing what this might be. I much prefer the term corpus used in the headline recommendation as this can develop more organically to reflect subject and institutional interests and needs. Similarly I do not agree with any more organising than is needed through the deployment of new technologies that make it easier for potential users to be able to discover and utilise the resources in a variety of settings and contexts, especially when that content is as mobile, or more mobile, than the users themselves. Fundamentally, open resources are about sharing within a new gift economy or social market place. In such situations there are different balances between pre-publication quality assurance for one purpose, post-publication review for another purpose and user satisfaction reviews for yet another purpose.
Fourth, in the light of these comments I raise the question of what represents world class or world leading in terms of open learning content. Is it the best examples of e-learning (however defined) even if these are only a small part of most students learning experiences? Is it content that fully represents the likely student experience for UK and non UK students? Is it the amount of UK originated content that is used by people in other countries? Is it having the first fully operational gift economy in open e-learning resources or the reduction in the unit cost of course development across the sector? I expect all of these and others to play a part with different audiences around the world and feel that the comments of Drummond Bone’s submission on internationalisation need to joined up with the aspirations in this submission.
In my view, leadership in open learning resources throughout UKHE can only be achieved by a sustained funding programme over several years where institutions are able to develop their own strategies and for cooperation and collaboration to emerge from these strategies rather than be preordained by the necessity of joint bidding (and with as many of those collaborations being with non-UK institutions as wil UK ones). This will take time (5-10 years) and a substantive funding programme (at least £20 million pa). This I know from any number of OER initiatives around the world, not just the OU, and in may capacity as a Board member of the Open CourseWare Consortium.
Building an effective and competitive on-line learning capacity at both undergraduate and postgraduate level will help meet the changing needs ofstudents and stimulate growth in both higher education and the skills sector.