On April 1, 2022, I was delighted to take part in a webinar celebrating the research and other contributions made to eLearning by the late Dr. Karen Swan, who died in September 2021. The webinar was organized by Dr. Raymond Schroeder and his colleagues at the University of Illinois-Springfield and made available nationally by the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (for details see: https://www.uis.edu/colrs/research/swan/). Below is the presentation that I gave as part of the event. It was an honor to be able to recognize Karen’s contributions to our field in this way.
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I am very happy to join colleagues from across the U.S. and Canada today to help celebrate the work and the legacy of our late friend and colleague Dr. Karen Swan. Karen and I were at different institutions throughout our careers, but we got to know each other primarily through the Online Learning Consortium. OLC was created by the Sloan Foundation. It brought together a new community of academics, instructional designers, media professionals, and educational outreach professionals to explore and advance online learning in diverse institutions nationally. It was where many of us practitioners first met Karen.
In 2020, I co-edited the second edition of Leading the eLearning Transformation of Higher Education. Karen had written a chapter on learning effectiveness for the first edition of the book. For the second edition, she and Peter Shea co-authored two chapters that focused specifically on what leaders of elearning programs should know about teaching online and learning effectiveness. This recognized a reality in our field: many of the individuals who lead e-learning units are not themselves teachers. I count myself among that group. In the first edition, Karen had written that eLearning represented a paradigm change. “Leaders,” she wrote, “must be able to represent these issues to the institution at large, especially when reporting to academic governance groups” (p. 81). In the second edition, Karen and Peter explained that it is difficult to lead in this ever-changing—ever-new, in a way—environment without understanding both the opportunities and the challenges that the technology presents for curriculum development and instructional design and delivery. And they recognized that eLearning leaders often become institutional change agents whose job is to help the institution adapt to a new teaching environment in a society engulfed by social and technological change.
Karen and Peter looked at ways to evaluate learning effectiveness in eLearning courses. “The foundational learning effectiveness task for an eLearning leader” they wrote, “ . . . often involves justifying the efficacy of learning online.” (p 76) “It is therefore imperative,” they added, “that online learning leaders engage in efforts to understand promising, research-based practices and the outcomes of efforts to improve online education in their own contexts” (p. 77). A key to that goal is the Community of Inquiry framework, in which learning happens at the intersection of three elements that must be present in a course: Social Presence, Teaching Presence, and Cognitive Presence.
They also noted that eLearning leaders need to “take charge of the kinds of outcomes data that their institutions collect,” as this will guide future innovation. They mention six particular outcome measures that leaders need to communicate within their institutions:
Satisfaction
Retention
Course grades—or success
Achievement—or “enduring understandings”
Proficiencies—or knowledge, skills, and attitudes essential for the profession being studied
Performance, which Karen and Peter call “the gold standard” of learning outcomes.
In the second chapter, Karen and Peter focused on four pedagogical approaches that can be used in an eLearning environment.
The first is Constructivism, an approach based on the idea that meaning is something that we impose on the world around us. We construct meaning in our minds as we interact with the physical environment, the social environment, and our inner mental environment. In this view, effective learning is active, unique to the individual, and tied closely to our experiences.
The second approach is Connectivist Pedagogy-- an idea closely tied to the technological revolution. It maintains that learning involves creating and using networks that connect information to meaning. This pedagogy, they say, is most evident in connectivist massive open online courses (cMOOCs) -- guided networks of users who find and share content with each other.
Their third model, Androgogy, dates back to 1980, when Malcolm Knowles differentiated between teaching and learning methods used in adult education with those used to educate children. Knowles argued that, because adults are often driven more by internal needs than external requirements--courses should be organized around problems to be solved and relevant to adult experience and their lives.
Finally, they describe Heutagogy, a term developed when eLearning was first blossoming. In this model learners themselves decide on the questions that they want to explore, with the faculty member serving as an “expert guide.” It is, Karen and Peter noted, a model that may be especially well suited to the eLearning learning environment.
These different approaches to the teaching and learning environment are marked by different senses—different understandings—of how people learn, what they learn, and how teachers can guide that learning process. The challenge for the eLearning leader is to find a match among these different approaches with the institution’s mission, culture, and strategic goals—and then to communicate with academic units and bring the diverse academic and administrative communities together to move ahead.
This is—at least for this generation of leaders—a continuing process. In his book, Thank You For Being Late, Thomas Friedman makes the point that we are in an “age of acceleration” caused by rapid change in technology. But he also writes that social change happens at a much slower pace than technological change. This is a critical concern for the field—how to be sure we evolve our institutional models to make the most of new technological and social realities that are sure to emerge.
eLearning has developed over the past couple of decades into a powerful learning environment that can help learners be more effective in a new environment that affects all aspects of our lives. But it continues to develop, mature, and innovate. Many institutions are just now coming to terms with earlier innovations—things like Open Educational Resources, MOOCs, and degree programs that share online students with other institutions. More recent innovations—condensed micro-credentials, for instance, or the move to make community college (or the first two years of the baccalaureate degree) free to students—could signal broader changes that could make eLearning even more strategically important to many institutions.
Beyond that, we’ve seen many institutions embrace eLearning for the first time during the Pandemic. It was an emergency innovation, and many K-12 and higher education institutions were forced to innovate without a great deal of planning time. The pandemic helped to move eLearning into the mainstream in a new way and to strengthen the need to understand the learning environments in which it is most effective.
Clearly, in this environment of rapid adoption of technology and great social change, our leaders must be able to communicate to their institutions the best thinking about eLearning effectiveness and how to effectively integrate it into our institutional culture. In the process, leaders must also become scholars their fields-- who help the university know what is happening around the world with eLearning-- the person who can tell academic and administrative leaders what their colleagues at other institutions are doing and what is happening in the professions where our graduates work.
The work that Karen and Peter described in Leading the eLearning Transformation of Higher Education has provided a roadmap for these changes. Throughout her career as a writer and teacher, Karen made a huge contribution to the future of higher education in this new environment. That work will continue to benefit our field for many years to come. Thank you.
Works Cited
Miller, G., Benke, M., Chaloux, B., Ragan, L., Schroeder, R., Smutz, W., Swan, K. (2014). Leading the e-Learning Transformation of Higher Education: Meeting the Challenges of Technology and Distance Education. Sterling, VA: Stylus Press.
Miller, G., Ives, K., eds. (2020). Leading the eLearning Transformation of Higher Education: Leadership Strategies for the Next Generation. Sterling, VA: Stylus Press.
