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Tainted learning

By Gilly Salmon (October 2004 Issue)
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Have you heard the sad story of taking the excellence of UK universities to a much wider international audience? The idea was to export learning rather than to import students, using information and communication technologies.

The UK e-University (UKeU) was set up in 2000 at the height of the one-stop shop era to promote and deliver higher education (HE) on a worldwide basis. Good intention, wasn’t it? Unfortunately, it wasn’t well ‘sold’ to the e-learning community and the students failed to queue up. Recently, the UKeU’s request for more time and money was refused by the government. It tottered painfully to a halt, too late to save.

Providing learning costs £33,000 of tax payers’ money for each of the enrolled students. Think of that in your training budget! You could fully sponsor 15.5 students on the Open University’s Certificate in Management or try out a virtual learning environment.

Actually, the money went on developing the UKeU’s new ambitious technology platform and on salaries and bonuses. The e-learning platform intended to bring together students and different partners, including the universities. But any big ‘architecture’ project is out of date before it gets going. And many universities that had invested heavily in provision of their own choice were resistant to a fresh start.

Will naively executed stuff put you off working on low-cost ways forward for e-learning? Perhaps we can learn from success as well as failure. Enter the University of Phoenix!

While most colleges fight over 25 per cent of the students, Phoenix addresses an enormous appetite for vocational qualifications in the USA. The teaching and learning approach is small on and offline classes, and functional technology enabling mediation between people. In other words, it supports the strength of the learning model. Content is through digital readings rather than delivery of complete learning ‘objects’. The tutors are most carefully selected, trained, mentored, supported and reviewed, based on their performance – a model based on the same roots as the successful OU approach.

Phoenix had to struggle with the traditionalists in the HE sector looking down their bespectacled noses at its for-profit business model. But with no government subsidies or endowments, the University of Phoenix makes money for shareholders and continues to rapidly increase its student numbers.

At the point the plug was pulled on the UKeU, the directors and board claimed that ‘much had been learnt’. For example, they said that students want a mix of on and offline, and that many don’t speak English. Surprise! However, I’ve not seen a clear view of who has learnt what from their expensive tumbling. So here is my attempt to summarise the strategies for e-learning, based on the movers such as Phoenix and the mucky bits such as the UKeU. For good e-learning planning, it is essential to do the following.

* Have a clear business model based on realistic estimates of student registrations. Almost no potential student will be attracted by the technology itself.
* Have a mission beyond cost savings. It takes ages before return on investment can be realised – often too long for funders and sponsors.
* Be aware of consultants’ predictions, which are rarely reliable. It is very hard indeed to research a ‘market’ for products or processes that don’t yet exist. The scene is dynamic and fickle.
* Ensure that the significant individuals providing the driving force behind steering or sponsoring groups understand the special nature of e-education.
* Have a clear and appropriate model of teaching and learning.
* Choose technologies after your choice of learning strategies, not the other way round.
* Pilot and test on a small scale before there’s too much investment.
* Use technologies that are reliable and accessible. Whizziness is diverting and expensive. Use immediately available technologies before even dreaming of creating your own.
* Work with partners with similar missions to yours, but with more experience. There is plenty around now. But note that many existing providers will be wedded to their existing technologies and very resistant to the upheaval, costs and time involved in changing.
* Put whatever money, time and energy you have into: – staff development to enable e-tutors to design for participation and intervene for learning; they’ll make it work for you and the learners – marketing or internal promotion; blatantly sell benefits, but make sure you know what they are first.

Don’t taint e-learning any more, please. Good luck.

Surf it
UKeU commentary
www.bath.ac.uk/elearning/auricle.html
Scroll through for UKeU articles.

University of Phoenix
http://welcome.phoenix.edu

Kirkwood report
‘Why big Government IT projects go wrong’
www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmworpen/311/31102.htm
 


Dr Gilly Salmon is Professor of E-learning and Learning Technologies at the University of Leicester. Prior to this appointment, she worked at the Open University Business School for 15 years. Gilly can be contacted at gilly.salmon@le.ac.uk

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