Syllabus2002 Conference Review: Innovations Battle Budgets for eLearning Market Share
- By Paul McCloskey
- 09/13/02
In a recent survey of university students asked to react to an online study
companion for a course on Homer, a student at the U.K.’s Open University,
said, “I wish I’d had (the CD-ROM) before—there’s no other
way to pick up certain things ... you can be like a scholar.”
For the teacher, the comment captured the essence of eLearning: not only to
make learning more convenient, but to give students tools for exploring material
in personal and active ways, like scholars do. “When you’re sitting
there in a lecture, when you’re sitting there reading a book, you can’t
deconstruct it,” said eLearning evangelist Diana Laurillard. “The
whole point of these great technologies is that they make the student more active
in their learning. They’re not just transmission of an idea ...but facilitating
their coming to an understanding of what we know.”
Laurillard is pro-vice chancellor for learning technologies and teaching at
the U.K.’s Open University and was the opening keynote speaker at the Syllabus2002
summer conference, where educators met last month to assess the state of eLearning
in higher education and hash out strategies for maintaining eLearning programs
during the current downward economic spiral.
Most educators at the conference said they believe that while the eLearning
market is fertile with innovations like the Homer companion, it is also fraught
with economic and technology challenges. “If you were comparing eLearning
with film as a medium, I think we’re still pre-Keystone Cops really,”
said Laurillard. “We’re a long way back, there’s a hell of a
long way to go before we really exploit these media.”
For Judith Boettcher, executive director of the Corporation for Research and
Educational Networking, an eLearning think tank, it will be 2012 before campus
infrastructures are sufficiently digital to support pervasive electronic learning.
“When we get there, we will look back with awe, wondering how we navigated
our way from the analog to the digital world,” she said. “We’ve
had a rough ride in the last five years, but I think we have another 10 to go.”
The path has been made rougher in the last year as U.S. economic engine continues
to sputter. State budgets are down dramatically across the country, with IT
projects at state-supported colleges and universities under pressure to cut
costs and justify investment. The University of California system alone is facing
$29 million in tech budget cuts, while Cal State must whittle $43 million from
its bottom line.
At the same time, education IT expenses are soaring. Consulting firm Dun &
Bradstreet estimates expenditures for IT in higher education will rise 13 percent
this year, to $3.3 billion—$4.4 billion when outsourcing is counted. In
many cases, IT costs on individual campuses will reach or exceed 20 percent
of their instructional education budgets.
In this environment, educators are being frequently asked—and often forced—to
justify every dollar spent on eLearning. According to conference-g'ers, the
situation reflects not only the new realities of the economy, but the maturing
of the eLearning marketplace.
“During the Gold Rush you didn’t necessarily need a business model,
you needed three PowerPoint slides and a sales pitch and you could raise $5
million,” says Gary Brown, director of the Center for Teaching Learning
in Technology at Washington State University. “Since it went bust, there
is a much more sober conversation occurring that is tied to evaluation and assessment.
Because of that, I think some of the hype has been peeled off and we’re
moving toward things that really can make a difference, create change, and have
meaning in the every day working reality of what we do as educators.”
For Laurillard, cost-control are part and parcel of innovation. In a presentation
on “Form & Content in Pedagogic Design,” she outlined the case
for developing “customizable standard design tools,” generic electronic
teaching forms that educators could adapt easily to create their own interactive
learning tools. While using standardized tools tends to make some academics
nervous, Laurillard argues the strategy is pedagogically sound and financially
prudent.
“One of the reasons we should do it is [because] it’s actually terribly
difficult to afford doing all this ourselves. And as you compare the costs of
eLearning with the costs of traditional learning, it begins to become frighteningly
expensive.”
The solution, she says, lies partly in the idea of partially standardized applications.
“Instead of doing your own Web tools, instead of doing your own version
of conferencing, instead of doing your own interactive marked assignments, you
base it on some standardized form in which you put your own data. If you wanted
to reduce cost, it would be possible through that sort of customization process.”
‘PowerPoint’ of eLearning
One example she cited, a technology called Digital Document Discussion Environment,
or D3E, would enable instructors to rapidly graft an electronic forum onto a
Web site. With D3E, documents—a research paper, a policy proposal, a multimedia
student assignment—could be transformed in minutes from HTML into an interactive
document tightly integrated with topical discussion threads.
Laurillard called D3E the “PowerPoint of interactive media.” She
said, “We all know how to work with PowerPoint. There’s a structured
format there. It works very well for presentation. You just put your own content
in. It should be as easy as that.... You should just be able to fill in the
form, link to the Web sites, define your argument, and there you are. You’ve
got something which works, and you know works because other people have tried
it.”
The simplicity of the tool—”we’ve got to make it as easy to
use as the blackboard,” Laurillard says—is to create a community of
practice “so that teachers become professionals in the sphere of teaching
as much as they are professionals in the sphere of research.”
Straight to Bottom Line
In the economics of eLearning cost control is king, but many also believe distance
education programs can still add positively to the bottom line. “The technology
is not only empowering us to do more things in research and teaching, it’s
allowing us to do some things economically that I think are very, very powerful
and useful in these times for our universities,” Bill Riffee, associate
provost at the University of Florida, told the conference.
In the midst of state revenue shortfalls and the university’s resulting
budget cuts, Riffee said UF’s distance executive education programs are
adding $8 million to university coffers, up from $200,000 just four years ago.
“And that money is funneled back in to the colleges...to help supplement
faculty, to help do some interesting things. And it’s not a revenue stream
that should be dismissed. It’s a very healthy one.”
The other way to find money for new programs is the traditional method: beg,
borrow—or institute an in-house tax. The University of Washington has a
program called the University Initiative Fund, which levies a 1 percent progressive
tax on all departments on campus to create a pool of money to fund innovative
new projects.
“As you can imagine, it’s not without its controversy,” said
Scott Macklin, director of the “Educational Transformation Through Technology”
program at the university. “Some people call it the most precious money
on campus. But one of the ways to get campus buy-in is to take their money,
because they’re going to follow it [and that] has given us the possibility
(to demonstrate) the impact of what we’ve been doing research-wise.”
Of course, once money is found for eLearning, administrators and budgeters
are increasingly focused on ways to measure the return on those funds. Jack
McCready, associate chancellor and chief information officer for the University
of California at Berkeley, which conducted extensive cost studies of a first-year
chemistry course, said that while there was an increase in total set-up costs
for building eLearning infrastructures, the school expected to see higher performance
outcomes.
“I think when you are on the innovation side of many of these experiments,
that the costs are definitely higher to develop these things,” he told
the conference. “But certainly the initial results are showing that the
outcomes are certainly higher. Certainly the outcomes on student enthusiasm
and excitement are higher. Whether true outcomes on performance are higher is
a little harder to measure, but I think the preliminary indications on this
are that yes, they’re getting results in that area also.”
Gary Brown, director of the Center for Teaching Learning in Technology at Washington
State University, said a more pertinent analysis might be to look the cost of
not investing in technology. “How would you calculate that cost?”
he said. “I suppose there’s an Amish university somewhere that can
get away with that, but I don’t know where else we might be able to do
that.”
Brown said Washington State has been involved in a number of cost studies,
which yielded some interesting cost relationships. “We found...that more
time on design saves time on development. And development time is more expensive
than design time. So faculty time is always the key cost driver there. And the
number of students enrolled is the other cost factor that drives the effectiveness
of this.”
Another possibly controversial finding: “faculty time d'esn’t significantly
change,” says Brown. “But their perceptions of their time certainly
change ... We found it to be true with students too. They will tell you that
they spend twice as much time reading as they do looking at the same material
when it’s in video, when in fact, video takes twice as long. So technology
d'es change your perception of time, if not the amount of time that you spend.”
The university is now examining at the relationship between cost and learning.
“We’re interested in...looking at what teaching means, and how new
technologies change the activities in teaching. How much time are you spending
correcting people, teaching them technologies? Saying, ‘no, not that button.
Press this button.’ And how much time are you spending interacting with
the students on ideas?”
Technology as Trojan Mouse
Conference speakers pointed out that eLearning can produce returns on investment
outside of the purely financial sphere by fostering innovation even in out-of-the-way
pockets of the campus. “Technology is the Trojan mouse,” says Scott
Macklin, who described working on technology projects that spawned trained staff
who then teamed with other campus groups, even forging links with the K-12 community.
“These are [outcomes] that we can then capture as return on investment,”
he said.
But sometimes return on investment has to be assumed. Berkeley’s McCready
cited Digital California, Governor Gray Davis’s project to link all state
K-12 schools to the Internet. “This was a really very important thing to
do.... And there is no way that beforehand he’s going to understand what
the return on investment is. I mean this has to be done essentially on an understanding
of what technology can do with some intelligent guesses...then making a decision
and taking a leadership role.
Whither Virtual Universities?
If the performance pressure faced by many campus eLearning programs is high,
the virtual university movement has gone through even harsher times, with many
ventures swept away in the dot-com meltdown. Yet some programs are thriving.
UMass Online, a two-year-old non-profit tied into the University of Massachusetts
system, is currently growing enrollments at 58 percent per year. Last year it
had revenues of $6.1 million with projected revenue growth of 50 percent a year.
Jack Wilson, chief executive officer of UMass Online, said one of the factors
in the success of the program has been its modest investment in content relative
to faculty, technology, and marketing. “Content has always been one of
the smallest pieces in the value chain,” says Wilson. “That’s
not to say it’s not important.... It’s just that it’s the smallest
piece in the value chain because it’s basically the same everywhere you
go.”
Instead, investment in branding, teachers, and technology are far more critical,
according to Wilson, who worries that “a lot of our distance learning programs
attempt to just push the back wall of the lecture hall out further” via
video-conferencing, streaming video, or satellite transmission. Rather, distance
learning must adopt a “distributed collaborative model” where there
are many types of interactions between students, research teams, faculty, and
resource centers.
What’s more, the system needs to focus more on the investment made by
the students themselves. “Today we organize ourselves according to a model
in which a faculty member g'es in and works very, very hard while the students
rest,” says Wilson. “What we really need to do is organize ourselves
so that the students are working very hard, while the faculty members can rest.
Its as simple as that...if the students aren’t doing the work, learning
is not occurring.”
Ultimately, the success of eLearning will turn on the commitment of the entire
higher education community, not on the tools of the trade, educators said. Faced
with a skeptic who claimed he had not seen a significant impact eLearning in
the last five years, Diane Laurillard said: “The assumption is that somehow
the mere application of technology changes something. Everything that I’ve
been saying shows how difficult it is to use the technology and exploit it well
enough to make that shift, to do something really magical and different for
the student.
"It’s like saying something like I’ve been using books for five
years and I don’t see that the students are any different from when I was
using lectures or something like that. It’s not the medium that makes the
difference, it’s the particular way in which you use it."
Spotlight on Industry:
The Future of Course Management Systems
"It takes a lot more than a course management system to drive a successful online program."
That was diplomatic response of eCollege chairman Oakleigh Thorne when
asked to assess the future of course management systems during a panel
discussion with three of his competitors at the Syllabus2002 conference
last month.
Thorne was flanked on the panel by Matthew Pittinsky, chairman of Blackboard; Barbara Ross,
chief operating officer of WebCT; and Phil Long, senior strategist for
academic computing at MIT, who was representing the Open Knowledge Initiative
(OKI)
"I think we're really on the verge of the third-generation
of course management systems," he said, "after a first generation
of stand-alone applications like grade books and a second generation
of enterprise systems that featured portals with interfaces
to other applications on campus.
Looking ahead, Thorne believes "a third generation will start to emerge this year,
characterized by moves into Web services and distributed applications,
with customizable subsystems."
Operating System for Education
Matthew Pittinsky, chief executive officer of Blackboard Inc., says course
management systems will mature to become "the operating system
for education." eLearning platforms "... are going to be the
underlying technology with which you not only experience grade
books and chat tools and quizzing tools, but lots of specialized
learning applications" like biology textbooks on dissection
or pedagogically driven approaches to assessment.
Barbara Ross, chief operating officer of Web CT, also believes integration is the development
to watch. "We know that 72 percent of our customers either have or
plan to integrate their course management system with their backend systems,"
she said. Increasingly integration with library systems will occur, particularly
for managing content and digital rights, she predicts. Such integration
will lead to K-20 information management. "We see more and more of
our states’ systems working from kindergarten to death, and tying
in even their library system."
Phil Long from MIT aid that given the integration under way it will be increasingly important
to consider the architecture underlying the systems. "The one thing
that we know for sure is that there will be a constant change in each
of these particular software areas," he said. "Therefore, it
becomes increasingly important to figure out how to build between those
particular enterprise systems and the learning environments that are dependent
and feed them so that the change can be managed (and) we can continue
to get good and productive development going on...."
A Call to Arms on Digital Copyright
Law professor Lawrence Lessig used the Syllabus2002 conference to encourage educators to join
the battle brewing between content creators and distributors who he believes
are improperly extending controls over copyrighted material in the digital
age.
In an often impassioned keynote speech, the Stanford professor, who will argue the case against
extending the terms of copyright protection before the U.S. Supreme Court
this fall, said the academic community's silence on the issue has
"produced a struggle in Washington that is doing nothing more than
closing off the potential for knowledge and creativity that technologists
gave us 10 years ago."
Lessig argued that since the copyright laws were enacted, copyright holders have been permitted
to gradually extend their hold over intellectual property in the name
of protection against newer creative forms of distribution. "We always
build on the past," he said. "The past always tries to protect
itself against the new creativity. We define ourselves by the extent to
which we assure the past d'es not have this power. Yet we are increasingly
incapable of guaranteeing the future its freedom from the past."
Time and again, copyright holders, from makers of piano rolls to broadcast television programming,
have argued their industries were at risk from newer distribution technologies,
such as sheet music and cable television. In most instances, a compromise
has been struck that allowed the newer technologies to go forward in exchange
for compulsory licensing fees to compensate the copyright holder.
Today, such compromises are not even being considered, Lessig argued. In the recent Napster case,
for instance, Napster claimed it possessed a technology that could guarantee
that 98 percent of its music transfers or downloads were legal. But the
court upheld the injunction against the company, saying Napster’s
protection was not good enough.
"Now would there have been a copying machine if the Xerox Corp. had to promise that 100
percent of the copies made on a copying machine were legal? Would there
have been a VCR if the VCR had to guarantee there were zero non-infringing
uses? I mean obviously the past would not have been allowed if this had
been the standard that governs new technology. Yet this is the standard
now."
Lessig said the same inflation of copyright had infected the law of patents, an area higher
education is particularly vulnerable. "Where before the process of
innovating was an open process where people shared their ideas freely
with each other, increasingly lawyers are saying 'you’re not
permitted to share your paper with so and so before we’ve filed the
following patent application,' or 'don’t talk to so and
so about these ideas because that might jeopardize our ability to get
works patent.'"
"We've never lived in a time where creativity has been more subject to control,"
he told the conference. "When you add the extension of copyright
term to the expansion in copyright scope to the concentration in the control
of media that we’ve seen just now, this means that we have never
seen a time when fewer actors are able to control more of the creative
process than now."