I was privileged
to participate in the first generation of online learning. The shift from print and broadcast television
to satellite to online delivery was a true revolution in how colleges and
universities define distance education and engagement in the 21st
century. Today, as a new cadre of
leaders step forward to guide the field into its second generation, I’d like to
share some thoughts on where the field might go.
What follows is
not about technology. I am sure we will
continue to see technological advances in the coming decade, as we saw in every
decade since the 1960s. Instead, I want
to focus on the larger issue of how the second generation of online learning
can contribute to an institution’s traditional mission of community outreach,
service, and engagement. The first
generation of online learning made every institution capable of reaching well
beyond its physical campus to serve individuals with undergraduate and graduate
courses, certificates, and degree programs.
This is now a mature function at many of the pioneering
institutions. However, other aspects of
outreach and engagement have suffered.
Noncredit professional development and research and technology transfer,
for example, have lost what once was a central position in the outreach mission
at many institutions. The strategic
question for the next generation is: how
can the strategic use of online learning revitalize—perhaps even revolutionize
– the institution’s engagement with important communities that it serves? I’ll
focus on three kinds of engagement that can be strengthened by online learning.
1. Supporting K-12
Education
For
three decades during the Cold War—from the 1960s into the 1990s—colleges and
universities—especially university public TV licensees—supported K-12 education
by creating video lessons at all grade levels that were then broadcast over
both university-owned and community-owned public television stations. At Penn State, for instance, we developed
instructional series such as Investigative
Science in Elementary Education (ISEE), which offered video demonstrations
of various natural phenomena; What’s in
the News, a weekly social sciences series for middle grades; and Art for the Day, a series on artistic
expression. We broadcast these and many
other series that we acquired from other sources, every weekday from 9 a.m. to
3 p.m. during the school year and supported those broadcasts with teacher guides
and in-service professional development programs for teachers. That service faded as nonbroadcast
media—videocassette and videodisc, primarily—became easily available for
teachers, obviating the need for a centralized distribution system.
Today,
the issue is not the Cold War but technology-driven globalization, which is
bringing new social and economic challenges to communities that now have to
compete in a global information society that has made it essential for young
people to leave high school with skills in science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics—the STEM disciplines—that they will need in order to move into
careers that require these skills. We
can envision several ways in which colleges and universities can use online
learning to help K-12 schools address these curricular needs and, in the
process, produce graduates who can move on to advanced study in the areas most
needed by the new global information economy:
Dual Enrollment Courses Online learning makes it relatively easy for
high school students to take online courses from a college/university and
simultaneously earn both college credit and credit toward high school
graduation. It requires an agreement
between the two institutions. Students
benefit by earning advance credit toward their college careers, reducing the
time to degree and reducing the overall cost.
Some states provide funds to support the cost of tuition and fees. The offering college/university benefits by
filling vacant “seats” in an online class, by creating a relationship with
potential future undergraduates, and by visibly serving the needs of their
local communities.
Curriculum Support through Open Educational Resources In addition to offering full courses,
colleges and universities can support K-12 education by providing curriculum
support through OERs—online lectures, demonstrations, simulations, experiments,
etc.—much as they did in the days of broadcast instructional TV. In some cases, these could be excerpted from
full courses. In other cases, faculty
(with support from the same instructional media design teams that work with
them on full courses) could prepare material that address specific
instructional needs at different grade levels.
When done at scale, this kind of effort requires a close working
relationship between schools and the university, to identify needs, to evaluate
available OERs, and to organize online delivery and support for the final
products. In the days of ITV, production
of new materials was often funded by the state Department of Education, while
delivery costs were shared by the schools and the originating public TV
station. While online learning has become
a source of new revenue for many institutions, this service would be
self-supporting but not necessarily a source of net revenue, unless the
institution could tap into a national system for distribution of OERs.
2. Engaging Professionals
and Employers One advantage of
online learning is that it allows us to build communities, to bring together
people of similar interests across wide geographic areas. This offers a special opportunity for
universities to engage employers to ensure that all employees, regardless of
location, have access to professional development opportunities. This can operate at the state level or
nationally and internationally. It can
bring together specialists who otherwise would be too sparsely distributed to
be able to justify a traditional classroom activity. Online learning has already been well used to
deliver undergraduate and, especially, postbaccalaureate certificates and
degree programs that target dispersed professional specialties in a particular
employer or group of employers. It can
also include more targeted services—OERs, TED-type presentations, and webinars
that communicate new research findings and technology transfer opportunities,
noncredit management or process training, updates on new regulatory policies,
etc. The range of services and delivery
modes can be grounded in an agreement between the university and the employer
or group.
3. Promoting Inter-Institutional
Collaborations
Both of the
initiatives described above can benefit from inter-institutional
collaborations. In fact, institutional
cooperation and collaboration may be critical to achieving sustained
success. In the K-12 area, for
instance, collaborations that allow one institution to bring to its local
schools OER resources from multiple institutions around the country, making it
easier for the institution to meet curricular needs across grades and
disciplines. Equally important, working
within a network of institutions also will help to reduce cost and duplication
of effort, while building quality standards and opening opportunities for collaborative
content development, bringing faculty from multiple institutions together to
improve the K-12 curriculum and to respond to regional needs.
Inter-institutional
collaborations built around the needs of specific professions and/or employers
can also provide additional value to both the participating universities and
the client organizations. Such
collaborations can help faculty from participating institutions identify
opportunities for collaborative research and consulting with the client, as well
as opportunities to develop courses that complement those of other
institutions, so that a student can work toward a major at one institution and a
minor at another. The opportunities for
collaborative teaching, research, and technology transfer targeted to real
needs in the profession are significant.
Similarly,
multi-national collaboration among universities offering online programs can
serve to internationalize the students’ experiences, providing new insights on
subject matter, better preparing students to succeed in a global,
multi-cultural workplace. At the same
time, employers will come to know that their local university will meet their
needs by bringing the best expertise available, not just what is available
locally.
Collaboration is
not a new idea in our field. Over the
decades there have been several important inter-institutional collaborations
around media-based distance education.
Examples include the National Technological University (NTU), the
American Distance Education Consortium, the To Educate the People Consortium,
etc. The early days of the online era
saw collaborations around the needs of the nuclear power industry and other
industry groups. The Great Plains
Inter-Institutional Distance Education Alliance (IDEA) stands as a model for
institutional collaboration to improve access to needed disciplines across
state lines. The Worldwide University
Network (WUN) is an excellent example of research universities that have come
together to collaborate around applied research needs in areas such as climate
change, public health, and understanding cultures. It is not difficult to identify institutions
that are innovating in one area or another.
What is missing today, however, is a national organizational
infrastructure that encourages and supports innovation by providing policy
structures and business models for collaboration. The K-12 OER environment, for instance,
would greatly benefit from national partnerships among producing universities
to coordinate access to OERs from different institutions and manage the sharing
process. We need a system that is
focused specifically on K-12 curriculum needs and through which we can help
teachers identify needs, evaluate materials, share lesson plans and support
materials within the community and, perhaps, offer professional development opportunities. In the days of video, PBS and several
regional networks provided that umbrella.
We need to build an infrastructure to support different kinds of
collaboration today.
Developing a Strategy
A useful first
step would be for a foundation or other recognized leadership organization to
convene interested institutions to explore the internal and inter-institutional
policy, planning, and business issues that must be resolved in order to develop
successful collaborations at the national level. The result would be a community of institutions
committed to working together to use our now mature online learning systems to
meet the needs of schools and employers at a scale that will open new
opportunities for innovation.
No comments:
Post a Comment