You take the high road: National Programmes for the Development of e-Learning in Higher Education

by Terry Mayes, and Derek Morrison in Reflecting Education, Vol 4, No 1 (2008), 6-16

Abstract

The central question addressed by this paper is the effect of national initiatives in e-learning within the Higher Education sector. Two national programmes for the promotion of e-learning in UK higher education are described, and some tentative lessons are drawn from their comparison. One is the English Benchmarking and Pathfinder programme, still ongoing, in which £8M has been distributed widely across over 70 HE institutions, and the other is the £6M Scottish e-learning transformation programme, involving six large-scale collaborative projects. The scale of these two programmes is comparable to the Pew Grant programme in course redesign in USA higher education, which claimed both improved learning and reduced costs through the introduction of technology enhancements. This paper considers how these claims influenced the UK initiatives, and how divergent strategic considerations led the national programmes to be defined differently. A conclusion is that the way the initiatives were framed has influenced their outcomes. However, both programmes have succeeded in building a cross-institutional level of capacity development that offers a policy direction for the future.

Reflecting Education, Vol 4, No 1 (2008), 6-16; You take the high road ... (PDF)

Reflecting Education, Vol 4, No 1 (2008),  Table of Contents

Commentary by {Title}  {Forename} {Given name}  {Affiliation}

Date: 7/23/08

Since I have only a passing acquaintance with the English Benchmarking and Pathfinder program and the Scottish e-learning transformation program, I will restrict my comments to references in the paper to the Pew Grant Program in Course Redesign, which I developed and led through its completion.

1) "The Pew Grant program duly demonstrated evidence of savings without a decline in assessed levels of achievement, and in some cases succeeded in demonstrating real improvements in student learning."

The Pew Grant program demonstrated increased student learning in 25 of the 30 projects with the other five showing no significant difference between traditional and redesigned formats.

2) "Looking at the Pew course redesign program overall a number of key points emerge, obscured perhaps by the implication in the overly-simple conclusion that introducing e-learning leads to improved learning and decreased costs."

We would be the last to claim that introducing e-learning (how I hate that word!) leads to improved learning and decreased costs. Indeed, it is course redesign (changes in the pedagogy and structure of the course) that takes advantage of the capabilities of information technology that achieves the two goals.

3) "The main characteristic of the pedagogical redesign in most of the Pew institutions is a move towards a more activity-focused pedagogy, usually involving an increase in formative assessment. The research evidence would support the idea that such change will lead to significant gains in learning whatever the methods or tools used to achieve it "

It is certainly true that a focus on active learning is a key ingredient of all of the course redesigns, but without technology these pedagogical changes cannot be scaled to the numbers of students affected in each course, ranging from 100s to 1000s. Good pedagogy itself has nothing to do with technology. What is significant about these redesigns, however, is that they were able to incorporate good pedagogical practice in courses with very large numbers of students, which would have been impossible without using technology.

4) "The cost benefits were largely achieved through delegating dialogue with individual students to lower-paid staff or to peers."

This is a complete mis-statement of what happened. Delegating dialogue with students to lower-paid staff or to peers was only one of seven cost-reduction techniques used by the institutions in the Pew program (see http://www.thencat.org/PCR/R1Lessons.html, http://www.thencat.org/PCR/R2Lessons.html and  http://www.thencat.org/PCR/R3Lessons.html for an elaboration of these techniques.)

5) The article seems to contrast the Pew program's approach to individual institutions with the partnerships achieved in the two UK programs. To prodivide an update, since the conclusion of the Pew program in 2003-04, our Center has conducted two national programs involving 80 additional institutions and six state-based programs involving another 74 institutions. We have also founded an organization of 70+ institutions and companies called The Redesign Alliance to support collaboration in course redesign. We have held two national conferences of 400 participants each, again to support cross-institutional collaboration. We have clearly moved beyond those "ready" Pew pioneers. Course redesign in the US is now beinh called a "movement" - that is, it is taking on a life of its own and growing rapidly. We have been able to achieve these successes because we are building on a clearly demonstrated, documented methodology to increase student learning while reducing instructional costs. All of these programs are described on our web site at www.theNCAT.org.

6) "The measurable benefits of the two UK programs are not yet clear."

While the article asserts "the value of partnerships," it provides no data to support that assertion. The US has had many, many programs that focus on inter-institutional collaboration that have resulted in very little, other than lots of meetings.

The Pew Program and all subsequent course redesign programs conducted by our Center emphasize measurable benefits--i.e., we measure both student learning improvements and reductions in instructional costs. Having measurable benefits is, in my view, the most important product of a national demonstration program. Having measurable benefits moves us beyond opinion to demonstrated fact. The Pew program was, from the beginning, not about introducing technology per se but rather about achieving increased learning and reduced costs and how technology could assist in achieving these goals.

About the commentator(s)

Dr. Carol A. Twigg is President and CEO of the National Center for Academic Transformation and an internationally recognized expert in using information technology to transform teaching and learning in higher education. Winner of the McGraw Prize in Education, she is former Vice President of Educom (now EDUCAUSE), where she advanced the need for new models of student-centered, online teaching and learning, now commonly accepted in higher education. She also initiated the IMS Global Learning Consortium, which is establishing interoperable technical standards for online education and training. Before joining Educom, she was Associate Vice Chancellor for Learning Technologies for the State University of New York and held a number of senior academic administrative positions at Empire State College.