Thomas Friedman has written that, while technological change can happen quickly, the social change brought about by technological innovation often takes much longer to be realized. Today, I’d like to talk about that idea as it relates to online or eLearning in higher education. With that in mind, let me start with a bit of history.
· America Online premiered in 1991—32 years ago.
· The first web browser was launched in 1993—three decades ago.
· Facebook was launched in 2004—nineteen years ago.
· YouTube started streaming video in 2005—18 years ago.
· The first international agreement for Open Educational Resources—the Capetown agreement--was in 2007.
What all that tells us is that today’s traditional-aged college students and many young professionals were born in the full flowering of the Information Age. They have never known a time when there was no worldwide web, when there was no email, or social media. Most have only vague memories of a time before the iPhone—it hit the market in 2007.
So, here we are, a generation into the eLearning movement. And the question we need to ask ourselves is this: How might eLearning help shape the long-term higher education environment in light of the maturing of the Information Age?
That is an essential question for you as leaders in today’s—and tomorrow’s—eLearning environment.
Let’s take a quick look at several elements that are part of today’s eLearning environment AND what they might mean as eLearning enters the mainstream. This involves a bit of speculation, but I hope it also sparks some good discussion at the end.
Micro-Credentials
Micro-credentials have long been a way that colleges and universities have packaged continuing professional education for adult learners. Often, they consist of a collection of three or four credit courses that help young professionals keep up with their field or develop new knowledge and skills they need for professional growth. The results are undergraduate and post-baccalaureate certificates rather than degree programs.
Writing in Evollution (August 31, 2022), Vickie Cook listed alternative credentials as one of five significant trends that institutions will need to address in the coming years. “Continuing Education and alternative credentials,” she wrote, “will ensure students understand that their degree has high value. Using Continuing Education to build employability skills, whether for a new job or a new position within a current company, will help students reach their goals and expand their learning opportunities.”
From an institutional perspective, micro-credentials offer an opportunity to maintain a connection with students as they pursue their careers after graduation. The question is: how do we use micro-credentials to institutionalize an ongoing relationship with former students? One thought: Academic departments could organize alumni as communities and assign faculty mentors to help identify and respond to needs in the community as they evolve. This will also allow faculty –and their institutions—to learn about emerging issues and opportunities in organizations where their students work, leading to new research opportunities and new content for both traditional and micro-credentials.
Multi-Institutional Degrees
When eLearning began in the 1990s, some institutions saw its lack of geographic boundaries as a threat. At earlier points in the Information Revolution, competition was not so much a factor. Institutions worked within the range of their broadcast signal or cable channel. Satellite allowed institutions to connect with each other, but did not necessarily create competition. The Web and streaming media, though, have effectively eliminated geography as a limitation on engaging with students. With no geographic boundaries to delivery, some universities looked around at first and saw every other institution as potential competitor. Others saw it as an opportunity to collaborate in order to better serve learners in their core service areas.
An example of the latter is the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance—the Great Plains IDEA. It was founded in 2001 by public universities in the Midwest on the assumption that it was no longer enough for public universities to offer the best they had locally. Instead, they needed to offer the best content available nationally—and beyond. The goal was to combine faculty resources across institutions to ensure that universities could offer local students the best possible graduate and undergraduate program options in high demand professional fields.
Today, GP IDEA includes 19 public universities from Washington State to North Carolina, with institutions collaborating to offer 18 undergraduate and graduate degrees in Human Sciences and Agriculture through Great Plains IDEA. Examples include master’s degrees in a variety of Agricultural specializations—animal science, agriculture law, grassland management, and horticulture, as well as graduate programs in Dietetics, Gerontology, Education, and other disciplines.
Here is how it works:
*Member institutions chose to participate in programs that fit their interests and expertise.
*Students identify a "home" institution, where they apply for admission, enroll in courses, pay tuition, and graduate.
*Curricula are developed by inter-institutional faculty teams, with individual courses offered by different institutions based on their local expertise.
*The student’s home institution offers the same core curriculum, using that institution’s course title and number.
*The student’s home institution awards the academic credit and degrees for the programs in which they participate, regardless of which institution offers instruction for a course.
*All courses and curricula receive a full institutional review and meet the academic standards of the participating institutions.
*Courses are taught by faculty from each of the partner institutions on a schedule determined by the faculty
*Students pay a common tuition fee per credit hour regardless of which IDEA institution originates the course.
*The student’s home institution maintains the student's transcript and awards the degree to its students; there is no credit transfer between institutions.
*Revenue is distributed among the home institution, teaching institution, and the central alliance management to ensure sustainable programs and a sustainable alliance.\
It is a model that can be applied to many disciplines as the need and/or opportunity arises. It illustrates how innovation at this level requires us to consider anew factors that go beyond the technology and beyond a particular discipline. That, in turn, broadens the challenge for eLearning leadership.
Other institutions are also building new partnerships to deliver specialized graduate programs. This includes international collaborations that grow out of relationships between faculty and academic units at different institutions. Some might be fully online degrees; others allow institutions to add specialized online courses to what is otherwise a residential degree program. This approach allows academic departments to offer their students academic specialties taught by colleagues around the world.
This kind of collaboration can stimulate new relationships between participating academic units—and their faculty-- and the companies in which their students work. This, in turn, opens new opportunities for research and outreach by faculty at the participating institutions.
This kind of collaboration is not new. Back in the 1970s, a project called AGSAT, headquartered at the University of Nebraska, used satellite technology so that Colleges of Agriculture could share content around different regional specializations, for instance. Similarly, the Appalachian Educational Satellite Program, allowed institutions to share access to teacher and health care education to remote communities in the Appalachian range.
However, eLearning takes collaboration to a much higher level. This new environment requires that both faculty and administrators at participating universities take a fresh look at their responsibility to give their students the best possible preparation for the world in which they are going to live and work.
It is something that I can see expanding as the need for collaboration increases and as institutions become more comfortable with the administrative issues. We know how to deliver instruction. The challenge is how to create administrative systems to encourage and to sustain that service.
Open Educational Resources
Another factor that will help to facilitate curriculum innovation and control cost is the growth in Open Educational Resources, or OERs. UNESCO defines OERs as “learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purposing, adaptation and redistribution by others.” (https://www.unesco.org/en/open-educational-resources) OERs were originally conceived as e-books--written lessons or commentaries—that replace traditional texts, which lowers student costs. Increasingly, they can also use streaming media to share video lectures, examples of scientific principles or natural events, solutions to complex math problems, interviews with visiting scholars or celebrities, etc. There are many ways that OERs can be integrated into the teaching/learning environment.
The OER movement grew out of a September 2007 meeting in Capetown, South Africa, when an international group of institutions prepared a declaration that stated “We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.”
In the U.S., that same year, the Community College Consortium for OER was created. Today, it has 110-member colleges in 37 states. Its mission is “to promote the adoption of open education to enhance teaching and learning at community and technical colleges” by providing “resources, support, and opportunities for collaboration for learning, planning, and implementing successful open educational programs at community and technical colleges” (https://www.cccoer.org/about/about-cccoer ).
At the four-year level, Pressbooks was established to help educators and institutions “working across Canada, the U.S., and beyond” (https://pressbooks.com/about/) to develop and share OERs in order to “get accessible educational content into the hands of students.” Currently it lists more than 5,000 open books.
OERs can greatly reduce the cost of materials for students, while giving students increased access to a wide range of content. Instructors can also create OERs to help them update information to a topic discussed in a course, add audio or video interviews with colleagues, or provide hints on difficult problems or detailed solutions. OERs are becoming a natural way to expand faculty-student interaction as well as providing content from other sources. As the Community College Consortium and Press Books suggest, they are also sharable, so that faculty teaching similar courses at different institutions can help each other build a deeper collection of resources for their classes.
It is easy to see that OERs are migrating into the mainstream to serve students in on-campus and off. It is also easy to project that OERs may become a way for academic units to engage employers to support training in the private sector. And, finally, some higher education OERs have potential use in the K-12 arena.
The combination of OERs and the streaming environment creates a powerful new delivery environment that gives both faculty and students greater access to content.
Undergraduate Education: The K-14 Movement
One sign that change is underway is the so-called “K-14” Movement. It is good to remember that, early in the Industrial Age, most students did not go to high school. Free education ended with the ninth grade. By the 1920s—decades into the Industrial Age--a full K-12 experience emerged as the standard. The K-14 idea assumes that all students should have free access to 14 years of schooling in order to prepare for work in today’s society.
Two states—New York and California—have begun to move from a K-12 standard to a K-14 expectation. In New York, the “Excelsior Scholarship” provides tuition-free education at New York State owned public universities for families making up to $125,000 per year (https://www.suny.edu/suny-news/press-releases/04-2017/4-8-17-excelsior/ ). California, as reported in Forbes Magazine in 20019, “will now provide free tuition for the first two years of community college for first-time students who attend full-time.”
There is pretty clear evidence that, while eLearning will continue to serve adult students, the percentage of eLearning students who are recent high school graduates will continue to grow, especially now that the COVID pandemic has given many institutions—both K-12 and higher education—experience with serving students online at a distance from the classroom. The emergency adoption of eLearning did not always start well, but institutions quickly learned do use the environment more effectively—partly because the students were increasingly comfortable online. This is very likely to be a factor in a move toward a K-14 system.
There are other factors to consider, though, when we look at K-14.
One is that eLearning college courses can also present a new opportunity for high school students to take “dual enrollment” courses—courses that give them both high school credit and college credit—online not just from local colleges, but from any institution that offers a desirable course.
Think about the long-term impact: It is not hard to imagine that students might complete their senior year of high school with nine or more college credits already on their record.
It has also been reported that increasing numbers of high school seniors are resisting the idea of immediately moving from high school into higher education. This suggests the need to provide an option for students who aren’t ready to move full-time into college but don’t want to fall too far behind. eLearning fills that need, too.
A K-14 environment, especially one that supports online dual-enrollment courses, might also prompt planners to take a fresh look at both the high school curriculum and the undergraduate general education curriculum. The goal would be to eliminate duplication and to ensure that the K-14 curriculum prepares students both as citizens and professionals in a changing social and work environment.
In a K-14 environment, what should be the flow between high school and undergraduate courses in the general education curriculum? What associate degree majors are most adaptive to this environment? Where is the community need greatest? These are the kinds of questions that go beyond the technology and strike at the long-term strategic planning process for institutions. It is time to start asking them.
Artificial Intelligence
Recently, the eLearning news has been dominated by a new development that could have additional—even more dramatic—impact on teaching and learning at all levels. It is called ChatGPT -- an artificial intelligence software package that allows individuals to ask questions and get detailed answers.
Wikipedia describes ChatGPT as follows:
Although the core function of a chatbot is to mimic a human conversationalist, ChatGPT is versatile. For example, it can write and debug computer programs,[13] compose music, teleplays, fairy tales, and student essays; answer test questions (sometimes, depending on the test, at a level above the average human test-taker);[14] write poetry and song lyrics;[15] emulate a Linux system; simulate an entire chat room; play games like tic-tac-toe; and simulate an ATM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT
Writing in the February 23 issue of Forbes“, Alex Zhavoronkov, noted, “We are witnessing the next major technology transformation since the advent of the Internet. . . . But this time, it is not yet clear who the winners and losers are.”
What happens to the learning process when a creative part of the learning process—or at least one part of that process--getting answers to complex questions—is done through artificial intelligence? How will the instructor know that the student has created the information? That is a question instructors worry they will need to answer in the near future.
On the other hand, the New York Times recently featured a high school teacher who used the app to “quickly write adapted lesson plans for each of his students.” So it seems to have multiple advantages for both faculty and students.
Artificial Intelligence has been very much in the news these past weeks. I can’t see it disappearing from the educational process, but there is much to learn about it. We need to find a safe space for AI innovation in the curriculum and in our expectations of student use of the technology.
How Do We Get There?
One thing I learned over the years is that there is no single academic culture in a big university. Each college has its own history, its own sense of its role in the larger society, and its own way of relating to alumni and the organizations that hire its alumni, its own history with foundations and other funding organizations, and so forth. They also have their own sense of competition with other institutions, and their own sense of what the future may hold for their students. It is one reason why they tend to want to keep local control over the educational process.
It very important, then, that eLearning leaders be able to say to faculty at their institution what is happening in similar academic institutions elsewhere and what how employers in their disciplines are responding to rapid change.
To make this all work at the institutional level, it will be important for faculty members to have access to IT and Instructional Design support. Ideally, these specialists would have a dual reporting line.
· On one hand, they would be assigned to academic colleges or, when scale requires it, departments, so that these staff get to understand the culture and teaching needs of the disciplines being taught.
· At the same time, they should have a reporting line to the eLearning office so that they can keep abreast of new technologies and learn about—and extend--innovations created in individual courses.
· We also need well-defined policies with regard to costs and revenue distribution and related administrative areas. These need to come from the institution-wide policy groups, like the Faculty Senate, etc.
Learning Communities
This year, Penn State’s World Campus is celebrating its 25th year. When we were getting started back in the 1990s, a good colleague of mine, who was also an associate dean in one of the colleges, gave me this advice:
“Gary,” she said, “ if you want to be successful in this, you will need to be a scholar in this field. You will need to be the person faculty and deans turn to in order to learn what other institutions are doing, what new innovations are emerging, and what employers are thinking about eLearning. They will look to you for information and good ideas that will meet the test of being respected by both faculty and administrators.”
It was good advice. It is one reason why organizations like MOLLI are important. It is vital that you have a professional community where you can learn from your peers what faculty at other institutions are doing and what opportunities may exist for collaboration, but also how other institutions are solving problems--dealing with policy issues, funding issues, etc. Bringing these administrative innovations into the mainstream is essential to long-term success.
Colleges and universities are complex organizations, with multiple academic cultures and a complex organizational and budgetary system that makes it difficult sometimes to innovate at large scale. Some of the things I’ve talked about—
· the willingness to partner with other institutions on curricula and services that meet student needs,
· creating systems to help faculty develop and make available online and streaming resources,
· micro-credentials that extend learning to working professionals, exploring how to use technology to improve the educational pathway from high school to college,
· and the willingness to create new kinds of learning communities—
are hard to do in isolation. They are better seen as steps in an institutional evolution.
It promises to be an interesting decade ahead.
