My career in media-based education began well before the
arrival of online learning on the scene in the mid-1990s. When I started in this field in the
late 1960s, the media of choice were print and video. Correspondence study had long been established as a way to
deliver credit and noncredit courses. Public broadcasting was the new kid on the block in
terms of distance education, but both media promoted collaboration and sharing
in ways that might be instructive as online learning moves into the mainstream.
Correspondence study shared some of the qualities of online
learning. Like online learning, it
eliminated geography as a factor in the relationship between the student and
instructor. As a result, one might
have thought that institutions offering “independent study by correspondence”
would shy away from collaboration.
Quite the opposite happened.
It was not unusual for institutions to license a correspondence course
package from another institution and teach it with local faculty. Most of the correspondence providers
were land grant universities. They
formed a community through what is now the University Professional and
Continuing Education Association and together contracted with a commercial
publisher to create an integrated national catalog of correspondence courses.
Sharing was even more evident in video courses. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s,
video-based distance education was nominated by “telecourses.” A typical telecourse might include 30
half-hour television programs, usually lectures, accompanied by a printed study
guide and a commercial textbook. The
delivery system was the institution’s local public television station and,
increasingly in the 1980s, an educational channel on the local cable television
system. At best, institutions
could deliver on a statewide public TV network. In this environment, sharing course packages was a distinct
financial advantage to the producing institution, since delivery was
geographically limited. Several
community colleges formed the Telecourse People to cooperatively market their
course material to other institutions.
Other, similar collaborations followed. As a result, many institutions
were able to offer a regular schedule of telecourses without the need to
produce their own video locally for every course. The decision to adopt a telecourse was similar to the
decision to adopt a textbook for a course.
Early in the satellite era, the University of Kentucky, with
funding from the Appalachian Regional Commission, created the Appalachian Educational
Satellite Program. AESP used an
experimental satellite to deliver teacher education, nursing education, and
other professional programs throughout the Appalachian region, working through
universities in the region and regional K-12 educational support offices to
coordinate with local schools and hospitals. AEASP demonstrated the power of satellite—and, later, cable
television—to reach and serve professionals in rural communities.
In 1978, the Public Broadcasting System shifted its national
program service—which delivered programs to local stations for broadcast—from
land lines to satellite. The
result was not only a new way to deliver programming to local stations, but a
new national public satellite network that could be used for other, related
services. The impact on course
sharing was significant:
·
PBS created the PBS Adult Learning Service as a
centralized national distribution center for telecourses produced by local PBS
stations and higher education institutions around the country. A collection of courses was fed by
satellite to local stations every semester. Local stations worked with the colleges and universities in
their viewing area and broadcast those courses that the local institutions
licensed. PBS collected a fee
(typically a standard $300 per course, plus $15 per enrollment) which it shared
with the telecourse producer.
·
The Annenberg Foundation gave the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting (a federal corporation that distributed federal funding
for public media) $150 Million to support the development of new telecourses
for national delivery. The result
was a collection of telecourses built around major public television documentary
series.
·
The University of Maryland University College
established the National (later International) University Consortium, which
worked with the Open University of the United Kingdom to adapt their materials
to the North American curriculum.
The resulting course packages were licensed to institutions throughout
North America, as well as Australia Asia, and Latin America. IUC also produced new courses, working
with its member institutions and the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting.
·
The PBS satellite system also opened the door to
other, nonbroadcast innovations.
One was the National University Teleconference Network (now the National
University Telecommunications Network), a network of colleges and universities
that used the PBS satellite uplink and downlink network to deliver live teleconferences
nationally. An institution that
wished to originate a teleconference would schedule the event with NUTN, which
would announce it to its members.
Members that licensed an event would arrange for a downlink and schedule
a live viewing in the local community.
·
AG*SAT used the satellite system to create a
network of Agriculture schools at land grant universities, historically black
land grants, and Hispanic serving institutions, with the goal of sharing local
expertise nationally. AG*SAT later
became ADEC—the American Distance Education Consortium.
Collaboration in the Digital Learning Era
Thus far, resource-sharing and
collaboration have taken a somewhat different path in the online era.
Some new models for sharing have
emerged that focus on sharing students and faculty rather than materials.
One example is the
Great Plains Inter-Institutional Distance Education Alliance (IDEA),
in which participating state
universities work together to offer
graduate degrees that include online courses from multiple participating
institutions.
This kind of collaboration
ensures that students have access to the best content in a specialized
discipline, while opening new doors to collaboration among faculty.
Another example is the
CIC CourseShareinitiative in which participating institutions aggregate students in highly
specialized courses to ensure a financially viable course offering that serves
small groups of students at multiple campuses.
Both of these initiatives allow partner institutions to give
their students better access to courses that might not otherwise be taught
locally on a reasonable schedule.
Other partnerships have focused on
sharing online content.
The
Open Educational Resources movement is a longstanding international commitment
by institutions in developed countries to make their online content available
to colleges and universities in developing nations.
OER Commons
is one example of the
Creative Commons, an effort to allow institutions to make online content more widely available
for noncommercial use while maintaining copyright control.
These are important initiatives
that set the stage for future partnering initiatives as online learning moves
into the mainstream.
Still, given
that more institutions today are involved in online learning than were ever
involved in video-based distance education, it seems reasonable to ask:
Should we not begin to share organized
curriculum packages more widely, reducing the cost of course development at
each institution?
Especially
as institutions adopt the “flipped classroom” philosophy—in which content resides
on the web and class meetings (physical or virtual) are focused on
interpretation of content rather than simply transfer of content—it seems
reasonable that idea of licensing content at the course level might be a good
thing.
Just recently, Tidewater
Community College in Virginia demonstrated the potential for this kind of
sharing.
It developed a complete
associate degree in business administration using OERs.
As Creative Commons
reports:
Tidewater
identified 21 courses and signed up faculty members to design the
curriculum. They started with the desired outcomes for each of the
courses, and then built the curriculum with OER materials that would meet those
outcomes. Developing the curriculum took about 12 months. One year into the
program, the early results are highly positive.
The OER degree
program had two goals – to eliminate cost as a barrier, and to improve teaching
impacts. The textbooks for an associate’s degree in business administration
normally cost $3679, which is about a third of the cost of the degree from
Tidewater. Adoption of OER reduces these costs to zero. Students and
instructors alike are happy with the quality of the OER materials used in the
classes. 96% of the students enrolled in the courses have rated the quality of
the OER content as equal to or better in quality to the textbooks used in other
classes.
This may signal a new level of
institutional commitment to the OER concept that will reduce the cost of course
development for individual institutions and greatly increase faculty access to
content in order to serve students.
Sharing at this level might best
be done within families of institutions—community colleges, private liberal
arts colleges, etc.—or within academic discipline communities. ADEC has demonstrated the power of
sharing content within agriculture disciplines, for instance.
Ultimately, I can see at least three benefits to sharing at this level:
(1) to ensure that high-quality content is widely used, especially in
specialized areas, (2) to reduce
the cost of new course development, thus increasing the number of institutions
that adopt online learning for their students, and (3) to increase access to
higher education.
I would be interested in knowing
about other examples of sharing at the course level.
