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 Harvey Mellar, Institute of Education, University of London

Date: 14 July 2008

Mayes and Morrison point to the role of partnerships in the two UK initiatives, and to the importance of recognising a cross-institutional level of capacity development.  It is worth putting this in a wider context, and reminding ourselves that UK Higher Education Institutions are increasing finding that they are having to re-align themselves with respect to other institutions (with only a very few are believing that they can go it alone), and that this is quite a general phenomenon, with no specific connection to e-learning.  Indeed, maybe the formation of the Higher Education Academy itself in 2003 should be seen as related to this process of re-alignment. At the time of the Pilot Benchmarking Call in 2005 one of the crucial factors for my institution in deciding to bid was a recognition that we had been somewhat slow in getting involved with the then fairly newly formed HEA, and that this call was an opportunity to engage. The desire to engage with the HEA was just as important a motivator as the e-learning aspects of the programme. For many other institutions in the Benchmarking and Pathfinder Programme the desire to engage more effectively with other HEI institutions was also a driver in itself. Our colleagues in the University of London External System specifically saw involvement as a way of engaging with the wider HE community from which they had begun to feel somewhat isolated.

The crucial e-learning conclusion of the Programme is summed up in the sentence: “Overall, the picture that emerges is of a sector still struggling to find a central role for e-learning as part of mainstream provision, and only now starting to come to grips with fundamental issues of e-pedagogy.”  Indeed  one of the crucial aspects of many of the Pathfinders I have seen close up has been this  involvement in thinking about pedagogy  – and even in an institution like my own, devoted to the study of education,  pedagogy does not always get the attention it should. This also is not purely an e-learning issue, pedagogy is poorly thought through in many courses, and course redesigns using e-learning often merely highlight areas of existing poor pedagogy.

Related to pedagogy is the issue of any claimed ‘savings’ The savings described in the PEW Programme often seem to be thought of as on the provider’s side, looking to provide courses with less staff time or cost, and we often ignore the issues of student time (though the PEW reports do talk about students getting through course materials more quickly). Indeed the historical move from content based courses, to more process based courses means that whereas courses were once defined  in terms of the amount of information  a student needed to master,  they are now defined  in terms of notional learning hours. So for students supposedly committed to their course for a fixed number of hours improved quality of teaching has to mean something like better grades, but perhaps some of our students would be interested in achieving the same result in less time and then going home (metaphorically if not physically if they are on-line).

The authors mention but perhaps do not stress enough in this paper a fundamental but unusual aspect of the Benchmarking and Pathfinder Programme “ building capacity as much in areas of weakness as of strength. This is a consequence of allowing institutions to base their proposals on their own analysis, through benchmarking.” We are used to bidding for projects building on existing areas of strength, and indeed that is usually part of the criteria for funding them. To build proposals around acknowledged areas of weakness was an interesting and vital element of this programme. The programme might be thought of as having embedded the process of formative assessment (one of the paper’s recommended pedagogical strategies)  into the programme structure itself.

About the commentator(s)

Harvey Mellar is Senior Lecturer in Educational Computing at the Institute of Education, and leads the Learning Technologies Unit. He was involed in a Pilot Benchmarking Project, a Pilot Pathfinder (PREEL - Pedagogic Research into Embedded E-Learning) and  a Pathfinder Pilot Newtork Project on Quality Assurance and Quality Enhancement in e-learning.

Personal web-page: http://ioewebserver.ioe.ac.uk/ioe/cms/get.asp?cid=16582&16582_0=5006