THE IMPACT OF I.C.T ON TERTIARY
EDUCATION:
ADVANCES AND PROMISES
Kurt Larsen and Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD)
Directorate for Education / Centre for
Educational Research and Innovation*
DRAFT
OECD/NSF/U. Michigan Conference
“Advancing Knowledge and the Knowledge Economy”
Washington DC
ABSTRACT
The promises of
e-learning for transforming tertiary education and thereby advancing the
knowledge economy have rested on three arguments: E-learning could expand and
widen access to tertiary education and training; improve the quality of
education; and reduce its cost. The
paper evaluates these three promises with the sparse existing data and evidence
and concludes that the reality has not been up to the promises so far in terms
of pedagogic innovation, while it has already probably significantly improved
the overall learning (and teaching) experience. Reflecting on the ways that
would help develop e-learning further, it then identifies a few challenges and
highlights open educational resource initiatives as an example of way forward. The first
section of the paper recalls some of the promises of e-learning; the second
compares these promises and the real achievements to date and suggests that
e-learning could be at an early stage of its innovation cycle; the third
section highlights the challenges for a further and more radically innovative
development of e-learning
Knowledge,
innovation and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have had
strong repercussions on many economic sectors, e.g. the informatics and
communication, finance, and transportation sectors (Foray, 2004; Boyer, 2002).
What about education? The knowledge-based economy sets a new scene for education
and new challenges and promises for the education sector. Firstly, education is
a prerequisite of the knowledge-based economy: the production and use of new
knowledge both require a more (lifelong) educated population and workforce.
Secondly, ICTs are a very powerful tool for diffusing knowledge and
information, a fundamental aspect of the education process: in that sense, they
can play a pedagogic role that could in principle complement (or even compete
with) the traditional practices of the education sector. These are the two
challenges for the education sector: continue to expand with the help (or under
the pressure) of new forms of learning. Thirdly, ICTs sometimes induce
innovations in the ways of doing things: for example, navigation does not
involve the same cognitive processes since the Global Positioning System (GPS)
was invented (e.g. Hutchins, 1995); scientific research in many fields has also
been revolutionised by the new possibilities offered by ICTs, from digitisation
of information to new recording, simulation and data processing possibilities
(Atkins and al., 2003). Could ICTs similarly revolutionise education,
especially as education deals directly with the codification and transmission
of knowledge and information – two activities which power has been decupled by
the ICT revolution?
The education sector has so far been
characterised by rather slow progress in terms of innovation development which
impact on teaching activities. Educational research and development does not
play a strong role as a factor of enabling the direct production of systematic
knowledge which translates into “programmes that works” in the classroom or
lecture hall (OECD, 2003). As a matter of fact, education is not a field that
lends itself easily to experimentation, partly because experimental approaches
in education are often impossible to describe in precisely enough to be sure
that they are really being replicated (Nelson, 2000). There is little codified
knowledge in the realm of education and only weak developed mechanisms whereby
communities of faculty collectively can capture and benefit from the
discoveries made by their colleagues. Moreover, learning typically depends on
other learning inputs than those received in the class or formal education
process: the success of learning depends on many social and family aspects that
are actually beyond the control of educators.
Information and communication technologies
potentially offer increased possibilities for codification of knowledge about
teaching and for innovation in teaching activities through being able to
deliver learning and cognitive activities anywhere at any time. Learning at a
distance can furthermore be more learner-centred, self-paced, and problem
solving-based than face-to-face teaching. It is also true, however, that many
learning activities cannot be coordinated by virtual means only. The emulation
and spontaneity generated by physical presence and social groupings often
remain crucial. Likewise, face-to-face exchanges are important when they enable
other forms of sensory perception to be stimulated apart from these used within
the framework of electronic interaction. However, the influence of distance and
time is waning now that the technological capacity is available for
knowledge-sharing, remote access and teamwork, and organising and coordinating
tasks over wide areas (OECD, 2004a).
Focusing
on tertiary education, this paper examines the promises of ICTs in the
education sector, first as a way to better participate in the advancement of the
knowledge economy, second as a way to introduce innovations. Leaving aside the
impact of ICTs on the research or e-science performed by tertiary education
institutions (see Atkins and al., 2003; David,
2004), we concentrate on e-learning, broadly understood as the use of ICTs to
enhance or support learning and teaching in (tertiary) education. E-learning is
thus a generic term referring to different uses and intensities of uses of
ICTs, from wholly online education to campus-based education through other
forms of distance education supplemented with ICTs in some way. The supplementary model would encompass
activities ranging from the most basic use of ICTs (e.g. use of PCs for word
processing of assignments) through to more advanced adoption (e.g. specialist
disciplinary software, handheld devices, learning management systems etc.).
However, we keep a presiding interest in more advanced applications including
some use of online facilities.
Drawing
on the scarce existing evidence, including a recent survey on e-learning in
post-secondary institutions carried out by the OECD Centre for Educational
Research and Innovation (CERI), it shows that e-learning has not yet lived up
to its promises, which were overstated in the hype of the new economy. ICT have
nonetheless had a real impact on the education sector, inducing a quiet rather
than radical revolution. Finally, it shows some possible directions to further
stimulate its development. The
remainder of the paper is organized as follows: the first section recalls some
of the promises of e-learning; the second compares these promises and the real
achievements to date and suggests that e-learning could be at an early stage of
its adoption cycle; the third section highlights the challenges for a further
development of e-learning and shows what directions might be the most promising
for its further development.
I. Advancing knowledge and the (knowledge) economy: the promises of e-learning
The emergence of ICTs represents high promises
for the tertiary education sector (and, more broadly, the post-secondary
education sector if one takes into account their impact on non-formal
education). ICTs could indeed play a role on three fundamental aspects of
education policy: access, quality and cost. ICTs could possibly advance
knowledge by expanding and widening access to education, by improving the
quality of education and reducing its cost. All this would build more capacity
for the advancement of knowledge economies. This section summarises the main
arguments backing the promises.
E-learning is a promising tool for expanding and widening access to
tertiary education. Because they relax space and time constraints, ICTs can
allow new people to participate in tertiary education by increasing the
flexibility of participation compared to the traditional face-to-face model:
working students and adults, people living in remote areas (e.g. rural),
non-mobile students and even foreign students could now more easily participate
in education. Thanks to ICT, learners can indeed study where and/or when they
have time to do so–rather than where and/or when classes are planned. While
traditional correspondence-based distance learning has long played this role,
ICT have enhanced traditional distance education enabled the rise of a continuum
of practices between fully campus-based education and fully distance education.
More specifically, fully online learning can
allow large numbers of students to access education. The constraints of the
face-to-face learning experience, that is, the size of the rooms and buildings
and the students/teacher ratio, represents another form of relaxation of space
constraints. ICTs indeed allow a very cheap cost of reproduction and
communication of a lesson, via different means like the digital recording and its
(ulterior or simultaneous) diffusion on TV, radio or the Internet. The learning
process or content can also be codified, and at least some parts be
standardised in learning objects, for example a multimedia software, that can
in principle be used by millions of learners, either in a synchronous or
asynchronous way. Although both forms might induce some loss in terms of
teachers-learners interactivity compared to face to face teaching, they can
reach a scale of participation that would be unfeasible via face-to-face
learning.
When the needs are huge, fully online learning
can be crucial and possibly the only realistic means to increase and widen
rapidly access to tertiary education. Some developing countries have huge
cohorts of young people and too small an academic workforce to meet their large
unmet demand: given training new teachers would take too much time,
notwithstanding resources, e-learning might represent for many potential
students and learners the only chance to study (rather than an alternative to
full face-to-face learning) (World
Bank, 2003).
E-learning can also be seen as a promising way
for improving the quality of tertiary
education and the effectiveness of learning. These promises can be
derived from different characteristics of ICTs: the increased flexibility of
the learning experience it can give to students; the enhanced access to
information resources for more students; the potential to drive innovative and
effective ways of learning and/or teaching, including learning tools, easier use
of multimedia or simulation tools; finally, the possibility to diffuse these
innovations at very low marginal cost among the teachers and learners.
Distance
E-learning has not only the virtue to be inclusive for students that cannot
participate in tertiary education because of time, space or capacity
constraints, as it was shown above. It can also in principle offer to students
more personalised ways of learning than collective face-to-face learning, even
in small groups. Although learning is often personalised to some extent in
higher education through the modularity of paths, ICTs allow institutions to
give students to choose a wider variety of learning paths than in non-ICT
supplemented institutions – not the least because of the administrative burden this
would represent in large institutions. This means that students can experiment
learning paths that best suit them. Moreover, e-learning can potentially allow
students to take courses from several institutions, e.g. some campus-based and
others fully online. This possible flexibility of individual curricula can be
seen as an improvement of the overall student experience, regardless of
pedagogical changes. In one word, e-learning could render education more
learner-centred compared to the traditional model.
A prestigious university generally has a
sizeable library gathering tons of codified information and knowledge. One of
the most visible impact of ICTs is to give easier and almost instant access to
data and information in a digital form that allows manipulations that are
sometimes not otherwise possible. The digitisation of information, from
academic journals through to books and class notes, can change (and has
changed) the life of students by giving them easy access to educational
resources, information and knowledge, as well as new data processing
possibilities.
But e-learning could also lead to the
enhancement of quality in tertiary education by leading to innovative pedagogic
methods, new ways of learning and interacting, by the easy sharing of these new
practices among learners and teachers communities, as well as by more
transparency and easier comparisons and cross-fertilisation of teaching
materials and methods.
Finally,
e-learning can be seen as a promising way to reduce the cost of tertiary education,
which is critical for expanding and widening its access worldwide. It might
thus represent new opportunities for students having difficulties with this
traditional format. Although ICT investments are expensive, they can then
generally be used at near-zero marginal cost. Where would this cost-efficiency
come from: the replacement of expensive brick and mortar campuses by virtual
campuses; the digitisation of library materials that would save the cost of
keeping huge paper collections; the improvement of efficiency of institutional
management; the automation of some of the traditional on-campus activities,
including some teaching.
II. Living up to the promises: a quiet rather than radical revolution
Has e-learning (and especially online learning)
lived up to the promises outlined in the previous section? It has to some
extent. The reality of e-learning has never matched its most radical promises (Zemsky and Massy, 2004): while
experiments are still underway, the initial stage of over-enthusiasm has ended
when new economy bubble burst about 2002. In this respect, e-learning has
followed the ups and down of the new economy and given rise to the same caveats
as in other sectors: irrational beliefs about its market value,
over-investment, over-capacity, and more announces than services really
launched (Boyer, 2002). Like
other activities, e-learning has not proven yet its ability to generate high
profits or to replace the old economy of learning. However, interpreting this
as a failure of e-learning would however over-simplify the reality and could be
seen as “throwing the baby with the bath water”. While, perhaps unsurprisingly,
e-learning has not led to the radical revolution in tertiary education that was
sometimes prophesised, some of its forms are already pervasive in tertiary
education and have already led to a quiet revolution. Its modesty should not
lead to overlook it. This section gives a overiew of the limited evidence we
have about the adoption of e-learning in tertiary education.
E-learning adoption
The
radical innovation view was that fully online learning would progressively
supersede traditional face-to-face learning and represent a competitive threat
for traditional tertiary educational institutions. To some extent, this belief
has been a reason for the creation of new ventures and for established
institutions to enter this new market: early adopters could indeed possibly
gain a brand name and a serious competitive advantage in the new market. The
reality is that, while sometimes successfully experimented, fully online
learning has remained a marginal form of e-learning and often not even the
ultimate goal or rationale for e-learning adoption. However, this does not mean
that e-learning in other forms has not gained significant ground over the past
decade in tertiary education: there is indeed some evidence of a noticeable
growth of e-learning adoption both on demand and supply sides.
One must
bear in mind that e-learning encompasses a wide range of activities. Following
the terminology used in the CERI survey (OECD, 2005), we distinguish between
different levels of online learning adoption as follows, from the less to the
most intensive form of e-learning:
- None or trivial
online presence;
- Web supplemented: the Web is used
but not for key “active” elements of the programme (e.g. course outline and
lecture notes online, use of email, links to external online resources) without
any reduction in classroom time;
- Web dependent: Students are
required to use the Internet for key “active” elements of the programme—e.g.
online discussions, assessment, online project/ collaborative work—but without
significant reduction in classroom time.
- Mixed mode: Students are
required to participate in online activities, e.g. online discussions,
assessment, online project/collaborative work, as part of course work, which replace part of face-to-face
teaching/learning. Significant campus attendance remains.
- Fully online: the vast bulk
of the programme is delivered online with typically no (or not significant)
campus attendance or through “learning objects”.
What do we
know about the major trends in the adoption of e-learning by institutions and
students?
First,
e-learning has grown steadily in the last decade, at a relatively rapid pace,
but from a very low starting point—and for some activities: from scratch. The
lack of comprehensive data renders these trends difficult to document, but
existing surveys all point to the same direction of an increasing
activity/supply. A significant share of tertiary education institutions have
developed some e-learning activities and strategies and believe in the critical
importance of e-learning for their long term strategy. The 2003 Sloan Survey of
Online Learning based on a sample of 1 000 US institutions shows that only
19% of US institutions have no advanced e-learning activities – that is web
dependent, mixed mode or fully online courses (Allen and Seman, 2003). The remainding 81% offer at least one
course based on those advanced e-learning activities.
Second,
this growth of e-learning under all its forms should continue in the near
future. There is indeed a converging evidence that tertiary education
institutions consider as part of their future development strategy. In the
Sloan survey, less than 20% of the US tertiary education institutions
considered online education as not critical to their long term strategy.
Similarly, data from the first international survey by the Observatory on
Borderless Higher Education (OBHE) revealed that of the 42 UK institutions that
responded (out of a total population of ca.106), 62% had developed or were
developing an online learning strategy and most had done so since 2000 (OBHE,
2002). The second survey undertaken in 2004, 79% of the 122 universities from
the Commonwealth countries responding to the survey had an institution-wide
“online learning” strategy as such or integrated into other strategies (46%) or
under development (33%). Only 9% of these institutions had no e-learning
strategy in place or under development in 2004[1]. While these figures may reflect
some self-selection in the respondents, they unambiguously show a significant
adoption or willingness to adopt some form of e-learning in the coming future.
Although reflecting different levels of adoption of e-learning, all
post-secondary institutions participating in the CERI survey on e-learning
point to the same direction and report plans to increase their level of online
delivery or to maintain their already high levels (OECD, 2005).
Third, virtual universities are not likely to
become the paradigm of tertiary education institutions. While it will most
likely continue to grow, especially in distance institutions (see below), no
evidence point towards a predominance of this form of e-learning in the near
future in tertiary education. While the mixed mode of learning blending online
and on-campus courses now clearly appears as a better candidate, institutions
head towards the simultaneous offer of a variety of learning models. For
understandable reasons, only few campus-based institutions (that is the bulk of
post-secondary institutions) seem to aim at delivering a large share of their
courses fully online or at becoming virtual. While some institutions
participating in the CERI survey are at the avant-garde of e-learning, no
campus-based institution predicted to deliver more than 10% of its total
programmes fully online within three years (OECD, 2005). In the US, rather than
offering only fully online courses (16%) or only mixed mode courses (10%), most
institutions offer both fully online and blended courses; moreover, the
majority (67%) of academic leaders believe that mixed mode and web dependent
courses hold more promise than fully online, against only 14% having the
opposite view (Allen and Seaman, 2003). This clearly reflects what we know
about the main rationales for undertaking e-learning. The OBHE surveys show
that on-campus enhancement of teaching and learning (1st) and
improved flexibility of delivery for on-campus students (2nd) are
the two key rationales in institutional strategies of e-learning. Only 10% of
the institutions considered the enhancement of distance learning as more
important than on-campus enhancement. Interestingly, the level of importance
granted to distance or fully online learning decreased between 2002 and 2004
among returning respondents. Distance or fully online learning remains the
fifth most important rationale though (OBHE, 2002, p. 4).
Finally, while a generalisation of the fully
online model is not probable for tertiary education overall, at least in the
medium run, this does not mean that fully online activities are not growing
rapidly nor that the fully online learning model gains ground at distance
education institutions (Bates, 1995). To our knowledge, no data on fully online
enrolments are available for other countries than the United States. According
to the 2003 Sloan survey, more than 1.6 million students (i.e. 11% of all US
tertiary-level students) took at least one fully online course during the Fall
2002 and about one third of them, that is 578 000 students, took all their
courses online. For example, the University of Phoenix, the largest university
in the United States in terms of enrolments, has for example 60 000 of its
140 000 students online. The enrolments of fully online students in the United
States were forecasted to increase by about 20% between 2002 and 2003, to 1.9
million students—a projection that proved to be accurate according to the 2004
Sloan survey (Allen and Seaman, 2003, 2004). This growth rate, which is
projected estimated at 25% for 2005 is much higher than the growth rate of
total tertiary enrolments in the United States. From a low starting point,
fully online learning is growing at a rapid pace, even if it is merely as a
complement to face-to-face or mixed mode learning. Moreover, fully online
learning is clearly very important for distance institutions. In the CERI
survey, the institutions willing to embrace fully online learning to the
greatest extent were all virtual/distance learning only institutions (or
branches) (OECD, 2005).
In
conclusion, e-learning seems to live up to its promises in terms of flexibility
and possibly access. It is a growing activity that has for example
significantly widened the participation in tertiary education of foreign
students (OECD, 2004).
Does e-learning improve the quality of tertiary education?
The real impact of e-learning on the quality of
education is difficult to measure. E-learning largely embodies two promises:
improving education thanks to improved learning and teaching facilities;
inventing and sharing new ways of learning thanks to ICTs, that is a new
specific pedagogic techniques. While the first promise is by and large becoming
a reality, at least in OECD countries, the second appears further from reach.
Viewed mainly as an enhancement of on-campus
education, and thus matching the reality depicted in the previous section,
there is some evidence that e-learning has improved the quality of the
educational experience on both faculty and students sides (not to mention
enhancement of administrative management). All institutions participating in
the CERI survey reported a “positive impact” of greater use of e-learning in
all its forms on teaching and learning. The quality of education (with or
without e-learning) is very difficult to measure, not the least because
learning depends on students’ motivation, abilities and other conditions (e.g.
family, social, economic, health backgrounds) as much as on the quality of
teaching. However, the reasons explaining this positive impact on quality
largely lives up to the promises of e-learning to offer more flexibility of
access to learners, better facilities and resources to study, and new
opportunities thanks to the relaxation of space and time constraints.
Basically, they do not correspond to a significant change in class pedagogy,
but to a change in the overall learning experience. According to the
institutions, the main drivers or components of this positive impact come from:
·
facilitated access to international
faculty/peers, e.g.
with the possibility of online lectures or joint classes with remote students;
·
flexible access to materials and
other resources,
allowing students to revise a particular aspect of a class, giving more access
flexibility to part-time students, or giving remote and easy access to the
library materials;
·
enhancement of face-to-face sessions, as the availability of archived lectures online frees up faculty time to
focus on difficult points and application and because the introduction of
e-learning has sometimes led to a debate on pedagogy;
·
improved communication between faculty and students and
increase of peer learning;
This “positive impact” on the overall learning
experience is, alone, a significant achievement of e-learning, even though it
has not radically transformed the learning and teaching processes.
The quality of fully online learning is a more
controversial question, possibly because online learning was once viewed as
possibly become of higher quality than on-campus education (possibly including
e-learning as already mentioned). Comparing the quality (or the beliefs about
the quality) of fully online learning against traditional distance learning,
traditional face-to-face learning or other mixed modes of e-learning might not
yield the same results: fully online learning is indeed more readily comparable
to distance learning than to on-campus education. While institutions having
adopted e-learning have generally a positive view of its possible impact on
quality, there is little convincing evidence about the superior or inferior
quality of fully online learning compared to other modes of tertiary education.
Another question is whether fully online
learning has entailed innovation in pedagogy or just replicated with other
means the face-to-face experience. As noted above, ICTs could indeed entail
pedagogic innovations and help create a community of knowledge among faculty,
students and learning object developers that would codify and capitalise over
successful innovation in pedagogy. At this stage, there is no evidence that
e-learning has yielded any radical pedagogic innovation. The most successful
fully online courses generally replicate virtually the classroom experience via
a mix of synchronous classes and asynchronous exchanges. Arguably, they have
not represented a dramatic pedagogical change. We will see below that in spite
of worthwhile experiments, learning objects and open educational resources are
still in their infancy. They hold promises for educational innovation though.
The cost of e-learning
Has e-learning lived up its promises in terms
of cost-efficiency? Here again, not if one looks at the most radical promises:
as noted above, virtual universities have not replaced brick and mortars and
saved the cost of expensive building investments and maintenance; digital
libraries have supplemented rather than replaced physical ones; the
codification and standardisation of teaching in a way that would allow less
faculty or less qualified academics has not become the norm, nor have new
online learning objects been invented to replace faculty altogether; finally,
it has become clear that there was no once-for-all ICT investments and that the
maintenance and upgrading costs of ICT facilities were actually important,
contrary to the marginal cost of then replicating and diffusing information.
Moreover, cost-efficiency has for many
universities been a secondary goal compared to the challenge of developing
innovative and high quality e-learning courses at many tertiary education
institutions. Although the ranking of cost-efficiency has increased between
2002 and 2004 by 16%, 37% of respondents considered “cutting teaching costs
long-term” as a key rationale in the OBHE survey (OBHE, 2004)—a small
percentage compared to the two key rationales (over 90% of responses). Again,
most universities consider e-learning materials and courses as a supplement to
traditional class-room or lecture activities rather than a substitute.
The predominance of web dependent and mixed
modes of e-learning makes the assessment of the costs and benefits of
e-learning investments more difficult to evaluate as they become part of the
on-campus experience. It is striking that the institutions participating in the
CERI survey on e-learning had no systematic data on their e-learning costs (OECD,
2005). In this context, and after the burst of the dot.com economy bubble that
put out of business many e-learning operations (many never really started their
operations though), identifying sustainable cost-efficient models for
e-learning investments in tertiary education has become critical.
There are examples of cost-efficient models
“outside” the traditional colleges and universities though. Virtual tertiary
education institutions as e.g. the Catalonia Virtual University have a cost
advantage as they are developing e-learning material from scratch and not
“building onto” a physical camp. The Open University in the UK which is
gradually moving from a traditional distance learning courses using books,
video cassettes, and CD-ROMs to online courses has reported that their costs
per student are one third of the average cost for similar on-campus programmes
in the UK. Fixed capital costs are lower and it is easier to align staffing
structures to e-learning processes than at “traditional” universities. The
e-learning activities of Phoenix University, which is a private for-profit
university mainly for adult students, is also seen as cost-effective. Its
business model is based on “standardised teaching”, relatively small on-line
class size, and use of proven low-tech e-learning technologies (inducing lower
costs than more sophisticated technologies). Much of the faculty staff at
Phoenix University is often hired part time and having jobs at other tertiary
education institutions, which often implies that staff development costs are
lower at Phoenix University than other tertiary education institutions.
E-learning investments in tertiary education
can be cost-effective, but it depends on the business model, the profile and
number of students and topics (cost-effectiveness has been demonstrated in some
cases in large undergraduate science classes (Harley, 2003), and initial
development costs. The calculations also depend on whether student opportunity
costs are taken into account. The initial costs for e-learning development are
often high (e.g. infrastructure, creating course material from scratch,
experimentation, new kind of staff/units, immature technologies, etc.). In
order to ensure that e-learning investments are cost efficient, e-learning
activities may need to substitute parts of the on-campus teaching activities
(rather than duplication). Educational innovations, like learning objects,
could for example allow supporting the re-use and sharing of e-learning
materials.
Although data is lacking on cost-efficiency, at
this stage there is little evidence that e-learning has led to more cost
efficiency in tertiary education. Failures have been more numerous than success
stories, although the latter document the possible sustainability of
e-learning. The adoption of ICTs for administrating tertiary education
institutions has probably been the main source of cost efficiency in the
tertiary sector, like in other economic sectors.
Conclusion: the
e-learning adoption cycles
So, has e-learning lived up to its promises?
This is probably true as far as it holds promises for incremental improvement,
including an increased access and quality of the learning experience—a kind of
change whose importance should not be underestimated. As for radical
innovation, the answer is rather: not yet. So far, e-learning has induced a
quiet rather than a radical revolution of tertiary education.
Perhaps e-learning will follow the same
development path in tertiary education as other innovations that first begin
with experiments, then expand to a group
of early adopters before becoming commonplace. Zemsky and Massy (2004) have
proposed a possible “e-learning innovation’s S-curve” divided into four
distinctive but often overlapping adoption cycles that help understand the
current development of e-learning, and, possibly, its future challenges. The
cycles include:
1) Enhancements to traditional
course/program configurations, which inject new materials into teaching and learning processes
without changing the basic mode of instruction. Examples include e-mail,
student access to information on the Internet, and the use of multimedia (e.g.
PowerPoint) and simple simulations;
2) Use of course management systems, which enable faculty and students
to interact more efficiently (e.g. Blackboard or WebCT). They provide better
communication with and among students, quick access to course materials, and
support for administrating and grading examinations;
3) Imported course objects, which enable the faculty to embed
a richer variety of materials into their courses than is possible with
traditional “do it yourself” learning devices. Examples range from compressed
video presentations to complex interactive simulations including the increased
use of “learning objects”[2];
4) New course/program configurations, which result when faculty and
their institutions reengineer teaching and learning activities to take full
advantage of new ICTs. The new configurations focus on active learning and
combine face-to-face, virtual, synchronous, and asynchronous interaction and
learning in novel ways. They also require faculty and students to adopt new
roles – with each other and with the technology and support staff.
The overview of current e-learning adoption
shows that most tertiary education institutions in OECD countries can largely
be located in cycles one and/or two. These first two cycles have largely built
upon and reinforced one another. However, they have not fundamentally changed
the way teaching and learning is pursued at the large majority of institutions.
Their momentum has not automatically transferred to either increasing use and
dissemination of learning objects or to the use of new course/program
configurations (e-learning cycles three and four).
Cycles 3 and 4 correspond to changes
remodelling more radically teaching and learning. While some experimentations
underway give us some idea of where they could head, they are still in their
infancy.
The third cycle corresponds to the creation of
“learning objects” that can potentially offer an efficient approach to the development
of e-learning materials (i.e. reduced faculty time, lower cost, higher quality
materials), although many issues remain (e.g. copyright, lack of incentives for
faculty to create, the range of actors in and ‘location’ of the creative
process, lack of standardisation and interoperability of e-learning software).
The learning objects model implies material/course development that departs
from the “craft-model” where the individual professor is responsible for the
majority of work. Instead it is a model where the course is assembled largely
by or from third-party material.
Besides the technical and organisational
challenges of developing learning objects, there are also considerable
pedagogical challenges using them. Some argue that learning is so contextually
based that the breaking up of the learning experience into defined objects is
destructive for the learning process. Evidence from the Open Learning
Initiative at the Carnegie Mellon University suggests that effective e-learning
courses are often facilitated by having a ‘theme’ that runs throughout the
course, which might be difficult to obtain with the notion of decontextualised
learning objects (Smith and Thille, 2004). Therefore, much more research and
development is needed to ensure pedagogical effectiveness of the learning
objects model. For faculty members to rely on others for their material will
also need a cultural change as it would probably often be considered today as
demonstrating “inferiority”. Wide use of learning objects in tertiary education
will therefore only occur if major changes in working habits and attitudes of
faculty are possible.
The development of learning objects is very
much in its initial phase. This is illustrated by the use of the public
available learning objects repositories as e.g. MERLOT (Multimedia Educational
Resource for Learning and Online Teaching). The basic idea behind the MERLOT
repository was to create a readily available, low-cost, web-based service to
which experimenters could post their learning objects and from which interested
practitioners could rate and download objects for use in their courses. While
there has been a tremendous growth in the number of learning objects made
available by MERLOT, there has been very little interest to use what other colleagues
had made available and consequently little effort in terms of rating others’
learning objects. This can however be seen as the first steps towards the
construction of knowledge communities in education.
Despite the premature stage of learning objects
and the large number of obstacles to overcome, some standard form of learning
objects will probably emerge and gain importance in the development of
e-learning in tertiary education as well as in other education sectors.
Very few institutions have reached the fourth
e-learning adoption cycle at an institution wide scale. There are however
institutions which are clearly experimenting with new ways of using ICTs that
change the traditional organisation and pedagogy of tertiary education. One
such example is the previously mentioned Open Learning Initiative at the
Carnegie Mellon University. The use of cognitive and learning sciences to
produce high quality e-learning courses into online learning practices is at
the core of this initiative (Smith and Thille, 2004). As there is no generic
e-learning pedagogy, the aim is to design as “cognitive informed” e-learning
courses as possible. The establishment and implementation procedures for
routine evaluation of the courses and the use of formative assessment for
corrections and iterative improvements are part of the e-learning course
development. The development of the e-learning courses often rely on teamwork
including faculty from multiple disciplines, web designers, cognitive
scientists, project managers, learning designers, and evaluators.
The key question for any project like the Open
Learning Initiative attempting a combination of open access to free content,
and a fee-for-service model for students using the courses in a degree granting
setting is its sustainability. This initiative could not have been realised
without significant voluntary contributions from private foundations and a
major research grant from the National Science Foundation to start the
Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center.
The next
section will address the challenges for the adoption of these third and fourth
adoption cycles.
III. Challenges for the further development of e-learning in tertiary education: what sustainable innovation model?
The aim of this final section is to identify and
reflect on some of the key issues that would need to be considered in a
systematic way for e-learning to develop further and become a deeper driver of
innovation in tertiary education. If the vast majority of colleges and
universities are to embrace the third and fourth e-learning adoption cycles, a
sustainable innovation and investment model will have to be developed. A first
challenge lies indeed in the development of sustainable e-learning innovation
models which go beyond using e-learning as an add-on to traditional forms of
teaching and learning in tertiary education but rather invent new, useful and
better pedagogic innovations partly substituting traditional face-to-face
teaching. This will require a broad willingness of these institutions to search
for new combinations of input of faculty, facilities and technology and new
ways of organising their teaching activities. A second challenge lies in the
development of a realistic model for investment in e-learning that would
stimulate the participation of faculty and other stakeholders and be
financially sustainable, which is not straightforward given that there is
little systematic knowledge on the real costs and benefits of e-learning
investments in tertiary education. However, like for ICT investments in other
sectors, the cost-effectiveness of e-learning investments will depend on
whether new organisational and knowledge management practices are adopted. It
might indeed be more difficult to provide the “softer” social, organisational
and legal changes in tertiary education than the technological infrastructures
necessary to fully embrace the advantages of e-learning.
This section emphasises partnerships and
networks as a possible way forward for further investment, product development
and innovation diffusion in e-learning. There are many examples where tertiary
education institutions seek to share the costs of e-learning development
through partnerships and networking. Partnership and network building are also
useful for having access to new knowledge, to learn from others experience and
exchange information about the latest developments in e-learning and they can
involve many different organisations as e.g. traditional colleges and
universities, virtual universities, libraries, for-profit ICT and training
companies from different sectors etc. These activities can range from sharing
material, joint technology and software development, joint research and
development, joint marketing, joint training, connectivity, etc. and can be
sub-national, national and international (OECD, 2004b; Cunningham and al.,
2000). After showing the importance (and challenges) for universities to
engaging their faculty in e-learning, we will turn to an innovative practice
exemplifying the potential power of partnerships and networks: Open Educational
Resources (OER). They will indeed most likely have significant implications for
the way e-learning activities will develop over the coming years in tertiary
education.
Engaging universities
and faculty in e-learning
In most OECD countries the question is no
longer whether or not tertiary education institutions should invest in
e-learning. Because of the competition between institutions and student demand
for easy access to courseware material and flexible learning environments, most
tertiary education institutions willing to deliver quality teaching are bound
to invest in e-learning. As we have seen, the large majority of institutions
are now embracing e-learning adoption cycles one and two, which are basically
about providing the students with better access to learning and course material
and facilitating the electronic communication between students and teachers.
Again, only very few institutions and faculty are however systematically
exploring and producing re-usable learning material and objects (third cycle)
or have taken full advantage of new ICTs with focus on active learning that
combines face-to-face, virtual, synchronous, and asynchronous interaction and
learning in novel ways (fourth cycle). The latter approach would require
faculty and students to adopt new roles – with each other and with the
technology and support staff.
While ICTs offer powerful new instruments for
innovation, tertiary education institutions are generally decentralised
institutions where individual faculty often has the sole responsibility for
teaching courses and delivering course material. Adoption of the third and
especially the fourth e-learning cycle would imply changing to more
collaborative ways of organising and producing teaching material. Faculty
members would in many cases have to collaborate with a whole range of new staff
as e.g. course managers, web designers, instructional/pedagogical designers,
cognitive scientist etc. to produce course material. This could lead to
resistance from “traditional” faculty arguing that current teaching practices
have proved its value for centuries and there is no need to change them to new
pedagogical and teaching methods, which have hardly proven their efficiency
yet. Moreover, promotion of faculty and funding allocations in universities are
often linked to research activities rather than teaching activities, often seen
as less prestigious. Faculty members have therefore often relatively few
incentives to invest their time in e-learning activities.
The adoption of new ways of teaching and
learning at tertiary education institutions through ICTs can therefore create
organisational conflicts and tensions. New organisational innovations, new
knowledge management practices, and more team working are therefore necessary
conditions for tertiary education institutions to be able to move to e-learning
adoption cycles three and four. The CERI study on e-learning case studies in
post-secondary education has identified a number of lessons learnt by
institutions that are in the forefront of e-learning development (OECD, 2005):
·
More
strategic e-learning planning at the institutional or faculty level and to tie
this to the overall goals of the institution is needed;
·
A
paradigm shift in the way academics think of university teaching would be
necessary, e.g. a shift away from ‘scepticism about the use of technologies in
education’ and ‘teacher-centred culture’ towards ‘a role as a facilitator of
learning processes’, ‘team worker’, and ‘learner-centred culture’;
·
Targeted
e-learning training relevant for the faculty’s teaching programme as well as
ownership of the development process of new e-learning material by academics is
also necessary.
There is no one-best-way or trajectory for
e-learning development at tertiary education institutions. But it might prove
more difficult to provide the “softer” social, organisational and legal changes
in tertiary education than provide the technological infrastructures necessary
to fully embrace the advantages of e-learning (David, 2004). It will depend on
a whole range of factors not necessarily related to the development of
e-learning including:
- Changes in the funding of tertiary education and in particular e-learning funding;
- Student demography;
- Regulatory and legal frameworks;
- Competition between traditional tertiary education institution themselves and with new private providers;
- Internationalisation including the possibility of servicing foreign students living abroad; and not the least to the extent to which students will want to use the new opportunities for new and flexible ways of learning.
Many tertiary education students would possibly
prefer to have some kind of “mixed model” learning choice involving a whole
range of different learning opportunities and forms combining face-to-face,
virtual, synchronous, and asynchronous interaction and learning.
A possible way
forward: Open Educational Resources
Open Educational Resources appear as a
potentially innovative practice that gives a good example of the current
opportunities and challenges offered by ICTs in order to trigger radical
pedagogic innovations. Digitalisation and the potential for instant, low-cost
global communication have opened tremendous new opportunities for the
dissemination and use of learning material. This has spurred an increased
number of freely accessible OER initiatives on the Internet including 1) open
courseware[3]; 2) open software tools[4] (e.g. learning management systems);
3) open material for capacity building of faculty staff[5]; 4) repositories of learning
objects[6]; 5) and free educational e-learning
courses. At the same time, there are now more realistic expectations of the
commercial e-learning opportunities in tertiary education.
The OER initiatives are a relatively new
phenomenon in tertiary education largely made possible by the use of ICTs. The
open sharing of one’s educational resources implies that knowledge is made
freely available on non-commercial terms sometimes in the framework of users
and doers communities. In such communities the innovation impact is greater
when it is shared: the users are freely revealing their knowledge and, thus
work cooperatively.
These communities are often not able to extract
economic revenues directly from the knowledge and information goods they are
producing and the “sharing” of these good are not steered by market mechanisms.
Instead they have specific reward systems often designed to give some kind of
credit to inventors without exclusivity rights. In the case of open science,
the reward system is collegial reputation, where there is a need to be
identified and recognised as “the one who discovered” which gives incentives
for the faculty to publish new knowledge quickly and completely (Dasgupta and
David, 1994). The main motivation or incentive for people to make OER material
available freely is that the material might be adopted by others and maybe even
is modified and improved. Reputation is therefore also a key motivation factor
in “OER communities”. Being part of such a user community gives access to knowledge
and information from others but it also implies that one has a “moral”
obligation to share one’s own information.
Inventors of OER can benefit from increased
“free distribution” or from distribution at very low marginal costs. A direct
result of free revealing is to increase the diffusion of that innovation
relative to conditions in which it is licensed or kept secret. If an innovation
is widely used it would initiate and develop standards which could be
advantageously used even by rivals. The Sakai project has, for example, an
interest in making their open software tools available for many colleges and
universities and have therefore set a relatively low entry amount for
additional colleges and universities wishing to have access to the software
tools that they are developing.
The financial sustainability of OER initiatives
is a key issue. Many initiatives are sponsored by private foundations, public
funding or paid by the institutions themselves. In general, the social value of
knowledge and information tools increases to the degree that they can be shared
with and used by others. The individual faculty member or institution providing
social value might not be able to sustain the costs of providing OER material
freely on the Internet in the long term. It is therefore important to find
revenues to sustain these activities. It might e.g. be possible to charge and
to take copyrights on part of the knowledge and information activities
springing out of the OER initiatives.
Finding better ways of sharing and re-using e-learning material (see the
previous mentioned discussion on learning objects) might also trigger off
revenues.
It is also important to find new ways for the
users of OER to be “advised” of the quality of the learning material stored in
open repositories. The wealth of learning material is enormous on the Internet
and if there is little or no guidance of the quality of the learning material,
users will be tempted to look for existing brands and known quality.
There is no golden standard or method of
identifying quality of learning material in tertiary education on the Internet
as is the case with quality identification within tertiary education as a
whole. The intentions behind the MERLOT learning object repository was to have
the user community rating the quality and usability of the learning objects
made freely available. In reality very few users have taken the time and effort
to evaluate other learning objects.
There is little doubt that the generic lack of
a review process or quality assessment system is a serious issue and is
hindering increased uptake and usage of OER. User commentary, branding, peer
reviews or user communities evaluating the quality and usefulness of the OER
might be possible ways forward.
Another important challenge is to adapt “global
OER initiatives” to local needs and to provide a dialogue between the doers and
users of the OER. Lack of cultural and language sensitivities might be an
important barrier to the receptiveness of the users. Training initiatives for users
to be able to apply course material and/or software might be a way to reach
potential users. Also important will be the choice (using widely agreed
standards), maintenance, and user access to the technologies chosen for the
OER. There is a huge task in better understanding the users of OER. Only very
few and hardly conclusive surveys on the users of OER are available[7]. There is a high need to better
understand the demand and the users of OER.
A key issue is who owns the e-learning material
developed by faculty. Is it the faculty or the institution? In many countries
including the United States, the longstanding practice in tertiary education
has been to allow the faculty the ownership of their lecture notes and
classroom presentations. This practice has not always automatically been
applied to e-learning course material. Some universities have adopted policies
that share revenues from e-learning material produced by faculty. Other
universities have adopted policies that apply institutional ownership only when
the use of university resources is substantial (American Council of Education
and EDUCAUSE, 2003). In any case, institutions and faculty groups must strive
to maintain a policy that provides for the university’s use of materials and
simultaneously fosters and supports faculty innovation.
It will be interesting to analyse how
proprietary versus open e-learning initiatives will develop over the coming
years in tertiary education. Their respective development will depend upon:
- How the copyright practices and rules for e-learning material will develop at tertiary education institutions;
- The extent to which innovative user communities will be built around OER initiatives;
- The extent to which learning objects models will prove to be successful;
- The extent to which new organisational forms in teaching and learning at tertiary education institutions will crystallise;
- The demand for free versus “fee-paid” e-learning material;
- The role of private companies in promoting e-learning investments etc.
It is
however likely that proprietary e-learning initiatives will not dominate or
take over open e-learning initiatives or vice versa. The two approaches will
more likely develop side by side sometimes in competition but also being able
to mutually reinforce each other through new innovations and market
opportunities.
Conclusion
There are many critical issues surrounding
e-learning in tertiary education that need to be addressed in order to fulfil
objectives such as widening access to educational opportunities; enhancing the
quality of learning; and reducing the cost of tertiary education. E-learning
is, in all its forms, a relatively recent phenomenon in tertiary education that
has largely not radically transformed teaching and learning practices nor
significantly changed the access, costs, and quality of tertiary education. As
we have shown, e-learning has grown at a rapid pace and has enhanced the
overall learning and teaching experience. While it has not lived up to its most
ambitious promises to stem radical innovations in the pedagogic and
organisational models of the tertiary education, it has quietly enhanced and
improved the traditional learning processes. Most institutions are thus
currently in the early phase of e-learning adoption, characterised by important
enhancements of the learning process but no radical change in learning and
teaching.
Like other innovations, they might however live
up to their more radical promises in the future and really lead to the
inventions of new ways of teaching, learning and interacting within a knowledge
community constituted of learners and teachers. In order to head towards these
advances innovation cycles, a sustainable innovation and investment model will
have to be developed. While a first challenge will be technical, this will also
require a broad willingness of tertiary education institutions to search for
new combinations of input of faculty, facilities and technology and new ways of
organising their teaching activities. Like for ICT investments in other
sectors, the cost-effectiveness of e-learning investments will depend on
whether new organisational and knowledge management practices are adopted.
Experiments are already underway that make us aware of these challenges, but
also of the opportunities and lasting promises of e-learning in tertiary
education.
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[1] Some institutions had indeed
reported no institution-wide strategy but some strategies developed by
departments or faculties, or other strategies related to e-learning.
[2] « Learning objects » has
become a widely used term to describe a model of materials development that
manipulates and combines/re-combines discrete ‘chunks’ of material designed to
be re-used and re-purposed for different needs. There is however not a fixed
definition of what a learning object is, and an object may range from a single
chart to an entire course.
[3] A well-known example is the MIT
Open Courseware project which is making the course material taught at MIT
freely available on the Internet.
[4] An example is the so-called Sakai
project in United States where the University of Michigan, Indiana University,
MIT, Stanford University and the UPortal Consortium are joining forces to
integrate and synchronise their educational software into a pre-integrated
collection of open software tools.
[5] The Bertelsmann and the Heinz
Nixdorf foundations have sponsored the e@teaching initiative aiming at advising
faculty in Germany in the use of open e-learning material.
[6] E.g. the MERLOT learning objects
repository.
[7] One exception is the user survey of
MIT’s Open Courseware.