Reactions to On-line Higher Education Learning
I haven’t yet put together a coherent reaction to this report, but others have. Some important points are recorded here. DIUS Review of HE - Online Innovation in Higher Education 18th November 2008, 02:28 pm by Sarah Bartlett. In this post Sarah feels “the nub of this report is the pressing need for what Cooke calls a “visionary thrust” to guide the education and research sectors to the technological framework they desperately need. This is the most important point in the report, I think […]. Sarah thinks this is a job best done by JISC. She then goes on to take issue with the idea of the proposed Centres of Expertise. In the report these will be clusters of universities. Sarah feels it would be more realistic and effective for there to be a number of ‘lighthouse’ institutions adopting key technologies and demonstrating the way forward for others, much in the way they already are. Sarah’s final point is about how the report does not engage in any critical discussion of current e-learning technology, particularly insitutional VLEs. She was taken aback by the ridicule heaped on their VLE by lecturers at a Russell Group university recently - I’d love to know which Uni and which VLE!! The report seems to put the burden of improving e-learning on academic staff encouraging them to impove their on-line teaching skills.
Another useful response has been posted on the OUseful.Info blog by Tony Hirst. Perhaps not surprisingly this focuses mainly on the report’s views and recommendation on open source learning resources. Tony agrees with the general notion that more high quality open learning content would be a good thing but “but just making more content available under an open license won’t necessarily mean that anyone will use this stuff… free content works when there’s an ecosystem around it capable of consuming that content, which means confusion about rights, personal attitudes towards reuse of third party material, and a way of delivering and consuming that material all need to be worked on (my emphasis). All I can say is ‘hear hear’. Tony also is ambivelent about National Centres of Excellence and feels that “networked communities” would be better to take on this role as “the good will out”. This post has much else to think about - whether HE is best seen as a business, the problematic relationship between the notion and reality of ‘networked learners’ and traditional teaching and assessement modes, as well as the notion that the development and reuse of open content could follow the research model of building on previous efforts.
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2 Responses to “Reactions to On-line Higher Education Learning”
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Terry, Thanks for the mention - I appreciate it. The overarching point I was making in my blog is that we look to JISC to provide technological leadership at the ideas level, and then to find existing exemplars to fund and generally encourage at the grass roots level. To me, this is the only sustainable way forward.
One related question that’s occurred to me since I wrote that blog entry is how a “subject centre of expertise” approach fits in the context of an increasingly multi-disciplinary paradigm.
Sarah
Hi Sarah. I agree with the point you make about developing exemplars at the grass roots level. To the extent exemplars are emerging it is mainly within individual institutions and this is likely to continue. If so, what is needed is more efficient methods of communicating these and enabling take up in other institutions. JISC has an established role facilitating this already. As far as multi-disciplinary programmes are concerned these still are largely hosted and delivered by single institutions. However, several of the reports seem to be encouraging partnerships between HEIs to povide transnational programmes to, one assumes, dispersed international students. This adds another layer of logistical complexity to the notion of centres of expertise although these were characterised as clusters of key instititions with expertise in educational technology and e-pedagogy rather than necessarily subject specific (I may have missed something here!). It seems that partnerships, intra- and inter-national, to deliver multi-disciplinary degrees will have some cognitive overlap and may well be strategically attracted to one another because they are similarly endowed with e-learning expertises. Or there may be a major/minor partnership where an institution’s home degree programme taught on-campus is supplemented by a number of distance taught modules from a partner insitution who may have more e-learning expertise. I think we are only just beginning to see what the possibilies would be if there is sufficient investment in e-learning infrastructure, pedagogy and staff development.