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Potential implications of the online learning innovation fund
by
Paul Bacsich
The Online Learning Innovation Fund (OLIF) was
announced in June 2009 by the recently-constructed Department of Business,
Innovation and Skills (BIS 2009), formed from the merger of the Department for
Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) and Department for Business, Enterprise and
Regulatory Reform (BERR) in the UK
government. Its aim is to "facilitate UK
universities to deliver online distance learning to the furthest corners of the
world".
This article considers a number of issues relevant
to the ALT membership raised by the proposal and suggests some ways forward. It
is very much tentative as it is expected that in the next few months progress
will be rapid (but not necessarily in the direction the ALT community wishes)
unless people get to grips with the concept and its implications.
At a strategic level - e.g. from an EU or
UNESCO perspective - one can see the initiative as being the latest in a series
of initiatives in the e-learning area from the UK national agencies active in
this space, namely JISC and the Higher Education Academy. Earlier examples from
the Academy were the Benchmarking Exercise and the Pathfinder Programme; from
JISC the Curriculum Design and Delivery pair of programmes and most recently
the ongoing jointly-run Open Educational Resources (OER) Programme with its
various strands. It should not be forgotten that there are also initiatives in Scotland
(Transformation Programme) and Wales
(Gwella). Given the economic climate, some feel that OLIF could be the last
such large-scale initiative for a good few years.
The genesis of this particular programme
seems clearly to have been the position paper to DIUS written by Sir Ron Cooke,
Chair (at the time) of JISC, entitled Online
Innovation in Higher Education (Cooke 2008). There was some involvement
from the sector in the drafting process but it was very much a vision led by an
individual - as seems to be the brief given to these individuals by DIUS. In
particular paragraph 1.4 said the new initiative should be:
"[A] new
approach to virtual education based on a corpus of open learning content: the UK must
have a core of open access learning resources organised in a coherent way to
support on-line and blended learning by all higher education institutions and
to make it more widely available in non-HE environments. This needs to be
supported by national centres of excellence to provide quality control, essential
updating, skills training, and research and development in educational
technology, e-pedagogy and educational psychology. All HEIs should be
encouraged and helped to exploit virtual education technologies as appropriate
to their student's requirements and their strategies".
Those of a historical turn of mind pointed
out that there were some aspects of this that were reminiscent of the ill-fated
UK e-University, although there was no agreement as to what these aspects were,
even among those who had worked in it.. One issue was that what the UK
e-University became (either shrunk to
or never grown away from) was very far from (or far short of) what was planned (in a comprehensive series of
reports).
However, one thing was clearly similar. At
the time of the creation of the UK
e-University there was much debate inside and outside the Higher Education
Funding Council for England (HEFCE) as to what the "true role" of the Open
University(OU) should be in this new enterprise. Little trace of this debate is
visible now, but the gist was (a) whether the OU was modern enough to cope with being a key part of an e-University, but
(b) on the other hand, whether the OU would dominate
the provision. In the end, the role of the OU was probably rather less than
even the earlier minimal views - one course offering in a specialised area and
little involvement with the development of the learning environment except at
the early specification stage. History does not record any such view but many informally
assumed that the OU was rather relieved at having so little exposure to the
eventual debacle.
Whatever the past, over the last few years
the OU with support from HEFCE (or vice versa?) has been increasing its
"National Role" (OU 2009a) to a point where it is playing a significant
coordinating role in a number of key initiatives. However, the tension remains,
since just ahead of ALT-C 2009 and the keynote speech by Martin Bean the OU
VC-designate, the OU (2009b) announced its own revised strategy in a statement
discreetly slipped out but of course picked up by the edubloggers including
ALT's own Seb Schmoller (2009). This seems to some to not look as participatory
and collaborative as earlier National Role rhetoric might have suggested. Clow
(2009) has an excellent summary of Martin Bean's Elluminate presentation.
Yet unlike in the earlier UK
e-University initiative, the OU seems to be promised a key role in the OLIF: in
fact the incoming Vice-Chancellor will sit on the Planning Committee. But many
would argue that the OU no longer has a monopoly of wisdom on distance learning
methodology, especially at postgraduate level where the more marketable courses
are likely to be found. Although the OU has "exported" many e-learning experts
to other UK institutions and projects, there are also several UK
distance learning experts who have never
worked at the OU. Can we learn lessons from other initiatives as to how to
blend OU experience with that of others? Some earlier OU collaborations were
not so successful but recent JISC projects indicate that a more collaborative
approach is possible between the OU and "traditional" institutions.
So there are clearly some aspects of the OLIF
which suggest that "we have been there before". But there is more - and in the
rest of the article I raise five issues, briefly.
1. The funding for OLIF comes from HEFCE
only. So what of the other home nations? How can "brand UK" work
with three countries missing? Is there some way of ensuring that the other home
nations can join in? Is anyone trying to achieve this by knocking heads
together in funding councils? Could the private sector help to glue the home
nations together? What lessons on "spill-over" can we learn from the JISC and Academy
programmes, which routinely have to deal with home nation issues and funding
differences? If we cannot achieve coherence there is not just a danger to
"brand UK" but a bigger danger that a home nation might decide to "go it
alone" - and faster - as Scotland
did earlier with Scottish Knowledge and the Interactive University. If
Ireland can mount significant distance learning initiatives such as from
Hibernia College, so could Scotland with a competence spread widely across the
institutions (Heriot Watt, Edinburgh, West of Scotland, Robert Gordons) - not
to mention the competence in Wales with Glamorgan University and in Northern
Ireland with Ulster University, to name but two. (Apologies to any missed out -
including the ten or so key players in England.)
2. In a bizarre coincidence, the OLIF announcement
came on the very day of the funeral of Professor Robin Mason, where many
eminent e-learning professors came to pay their respects. Robin (from Institute
of Educational Technology (IET) in the OU, and recently Chair of the ALT
Research Committee) was one of the key experts behind the UK
e-University, but like a number of the other experts involved, her advice was rarely
followed. Will this new initiative suffer a similar fate? How can the ALT
community best guard against this and ensure that researcher and practitioner
views are heard at the highest levels?
3. For some years in Further Education (FE),
and more recently in Higher Education (HE), we have begun to realise that
leadership skills in e-learning are key to success. It is a while since the
merry quip "selling e-learning is just like selling chocolates" was heard in a
board room - that time it ended in tears. But what exactly do leaders need to know and to do? The Leadership Foundation and the Change Academy may
need to reconfigure their programmes to deal more with major step-change and
less with incremental change. How can the relatively few experts in step-change
in this field be brought into play in a coherent fashion?
4. There is evidence - and not only from
the US - that success in e-learning comes from a judicious mix of FE and
HE-level offerings. Arguably, the non-English home nations have made more
progress in integration of these levels even if much is still to be done. There
are interesting providers of FE distance learning as well as HE distance
learning. What lessons can be drawn from these? Why are recent initiatives,
including the OER initiatives, not applying to colleges, as they are soon to do in the US?
(Re.ViCa 2009b) An opportunity was missed the first time round to ensure that
insights and systems from University for Industry (Ufi) LearnDirect were
brought to bear. Given the modern nature of the Ufi's e-learning systems, it
would be even less sensible to miss the opportunity this time.
5. The UK e-University was much criticised
up to and including government circles for not having done enough market
research - although my more refined view (Bacsich 2005) would be: not enough at
the right time, not detailed enough especially in respect of competitors, and
certainly not acted on soon enough. Yet there seems very little evidence of any
market research in the last few years that has informed the current exercise -
if there is, it must be secret. There is not even any very good information on
how much distance learning the UK offers at present, so we have very
little idea of capacity on the supply side - only rather minimal desk research
such as the report at Re.ViCa (2009) which lists 61 HEIs and a surprising
number (36) of colleges offering distance learning. Fortunately the gap is recently
to some extent being plugged, though still at a general level. JISC (2009) has
produced a good overview of the situation for e-learning and e-infrastructure
in nine countries and the UK,
though focussed on the viewpoint of the agencies rather than analysing the
institutions, and not necessarily covering the most obvious country prospects
for "UK plc". The Re.ViCa project (revica.europace.org),
in which I am heavily involved, has produced a massive list of substantial
e-learning providers together with over 100 country reports of which 30 are
aimed to be reasonably comprehensive, but since it is an EU-funded project it
was not designed a priori as a market
research document for UK plc - though good use can be made of it. There are a
number of papers distilling this material (see in particular Bacsich et al
2009) but the headline conclusions are that there is far far more local
competition to distance learning from the UK than there was when the UK
e-University was set up and that some countries like the US are very far ahead (in
deployment terms) of anyone else (Mayadas et al 2009) at both HEI and college
level. Very recent evidence is that the competitor situation is worse than we
thought, in that as we begin to peer through the language barrier (e.g. Spanish
in Latin America - but it is likely to be true of Arabic - and is known to be
true in China) a whole new tranche of providers is revealed who had not
previously done the "Anglo" world the courtesy of announcing their presence via
ALT-C and similar conferences, or by journal papers in English, or in reports
from international agencies. But what is not evident is the kind of detailed
market research report that the UK
e-University commissioned (even if not acted upon) - as will be clearer when
the next tranche of UK e-University reports are released later this year by the Higher Education Academy.
It is a matter for another paper as to
whether the "import" and "colonialist" business models implicit in some of the
planning need to be updated for the web 2.0 age. Not for the first time, views
of practitioners are crucial, especially those with experience overseas.
Paul
Bacsich
Matic Media Ltd and Sero Consulting Ltd
pbacsich@runbox.com
References
and further reading
Bacsich, P. (2005), "Lessons to be
learned from the failure of the UK
e-University", Proceedings of ODLAA 2005,
Australia, www.odlaa.org/events/2005conf/ref/ODLAA2005bacsich.pdf
Bacsich, P. et al (2009), "The Re.ViCa
project: a review of virtual campuses", in: Collected
papers of the Cambridge International Conference
on Open and Distance Learning 2009: Supporting learning in the digital age:
rethinking inclusion, pedagogy and quality,
September 2009 (pp 60-66), www2.open.ac.uk/r06/documents/CambridgeConferenceMainPaper2009.pdf
BIS (2009), Universities set to go online for millions, press release of 23 June 2009, nds.coi.gov.uk/clientmicrosite/Content/Detail.aspx?ClientId=431&NewsAreaId=2&ReleaseID=403851&SubjectId=36
Clow, Doug (2009), Martin Bean: A Journey In Innovation, Liveblog notes from watching
(the Elluminate-mediated broadcast of) Martin Bean (OU VC Designate) keynote
address at ALT-C 2009, dougclow.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/martin-bean-a-journey-in-innovation/
Cooke (2008), Online Innovation in Higher Education, www.dius.gov.uk/higher_education/shape_and_structure/he_debate/~/media/publications/O/online_innovation_in_he_131008
JISC (2009), A national approach to technology in education shows benefits, www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/09/internationalstudy.aspx
Mayadas, Frank et al, "Online Education
Today", in:Science, 2 January 2009: Vol. 323. no.
5910, pp. 85 - 89, www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/323/5910/85
OU (2009a), £7.8 million grant for shared solutions to common problems in the
higher education sector, www3.open.ac.uk/events/2/2009625_31502_o1.doc
OU (2009b), The Open University's Strategic Priorities 2009/10, www.open.ac.uk/ou-futures/direction.shtm
Re.ViCa (2009a), (Post-secondary) distance learning in the UK, www.virtualcampuses.eu/index.php/United_Kingdom_-_distance_learning
Re.ViCa (2009b), US Community Colleges Online, www.virtualcampuses.eu/index.php/Community_Colleges_Online
Schmoller, S (2009), A new strategic direction for the OU - OUeU?, fm.schmoller.net/2009/08/a-new-strategic-direction-for-the-ou.html
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