Impact of e-learning on the
21st century university –
deriving a strategy
Paul Bacsich
Director, Matic Media Ltd
Senior Consultant, Sero
Project Manager on EU projects
Paul Bacsich - general
 Former Research Director, Re.ViCa –
virtual campuses
 Benchmarking Consultant, Higher
Education Academy (4 phases)
 Project Manager, POERUP – national
policies for OER uptake
 Visiting Fellow, University of Canterbury
 DEANZ conference Keynote on 11/4/12
 Have advised Chester, Glamorgan,
Aberystwyth, Gotland, KTH, OU and AOU
“Spaghetti junction” for universities
 Broad or narrow focus?
 Lack of clarity on purpose – national and for
students/parents
 Retention
 Funding
 Effectiveness
 Research – role, funding and relevance to teaching
 Will foreign students continue? And why?
 When will the “rite of passage” become too costly?
Analytic methodologies
 Comparative education
(countries then institutions)
 Benchmarking (institutions or
groups of institutions)
 Costs and time studies
Types of Higher Education
Institution (Europe)
 University (typically old)
 University of Applied Sciences (typically new,
less oriented to higher degrees) – former
polytechnics
 University college
 College (on margins)
Diagram of UNESCO ISCED
taxonomy
5A - uni
5B – poly
4 - college
3 – upper secondary school
2 – lower secondary school
A world tour...
 Virtual universities/polytechnics (outside NZ)
 Definitions:
 Virtual = more or less fully distance
 Hybrid = mostly distance, some f2f (eg Saturday
schools, study centres, etc)
 Dual-mode = “half” is virtual, other half f2f
Virtual universities
Teaching all (or almost all) at a distance:
 Many countries have a “state” single-mode
provider – an open university
 Many countries eg UK, Australia, Canada etc –
in fact most – have many other dual-mode
providers
 VUs go well beyond OECD and BRIC, right
across Latin America, Middle East (AOU), Iran,
China (in profusion), Japan less so but growing
fast, patchy across Europe
Failures
 UK e-University
 Scottish Knowledge, Interactive University
 Most university e-learning consortia
 Dutch Digital University
 Many US virtual university consortia
Partial successes
 NKI but clouds gathering
 DL in trouble across the world (President of
ICDE) – Latin America, UK, Sweden, NZ, etc
 Many DL operations within UK universities never
achieve “second stage ignition”
 The Campus does not “wither away”
 Dutch Ou – more than one Houdini episode
 But some Canadian organisations reconfigure
and then thrive – TechBC>SFU, OLA>TRU
Successes
 UKOU (discuss)
 Open Universities Australia (discuss – only
consortium that works)
 Several other Australian unis
 Too soon to tell: OER u
A more granular analysis
BENCHMARKING
Benchmarking in tertiary education:
the five systems
 eMM (NZ, Australia, UK) – you know well
 Pick&Mix (UK, Sweden, EU – bit in Canada)
 ACODE (Australia mainly) – current work?
 E-xcellence (EU only)
 Quality Matters (QM) (US) – hard to break in
 See http://www.virtualcampuses.eu
UK experience of
benchmarking e-learning
 Higher Education Academy (like Ako A or ALTC)
funded four phases of benchmarking
 Across 82 institutions using five systems
 Including PnM and eMM – other three have died or
been subsumed
 Pick&Mix continues as a commercial activity in
UK and Sweden and as part of EU projects
(Re.ViCa and VISCED) now and to come
 eMM recent phase in NZ just completed
Distance Learning Benchmarking
Club (Pick&Mix)
 Ran from 2009-2011
 Members were:
 University of Leicester (UK) – founder
 Thompson Rivers University (Canada) – dual-mode
 Lund University (Sweden)
 KTH (Sweden)
 University of Gotland (Sweden) – dual-mode, late entrant
 Drop-outs for various reasons:
 Liverpool, USQ (Australia) and a NZ university
 Results also correlated with Liverpool John Moores and
University of Northampton
Weak areas: from Pick&Mix
benchmarking and the DLBC
 Cost analysis
 Market research (all except TRU)
 Staff reward and recognition
 Accessibility
 Note that in UK Pick&Mix was chosen mainly by
institutions active in e-learning operationally
who wanted to improve their provision
Big DL providers in UK apart
from OU
 London External
 Leicester
 Staffordshire, Derby
 Wales: Glamorgan only
 Scotland: Robert Gordon?, Heriot Watt?
 Many others have “faded” or were minimal
 Ufi sold off, declining
 Colleges doing essentially nothing or fading
 Several virtual high schools and A level providers
Costs
 Why is so little work done on costs of learning?
 Outside the US, in many countries there is no
overall articulated and evidenced case for
blended learning on-campus that is acceptable
to “full time” students yet cost-effective long
term in the days of adversity
Retention
 A problem in universities in many countries
 Usually worse when distance learning and/or
adult students are involved
 Often not so much of a problem to the students
as the universities or Ministry
 Because students may want to exit and maybe return
later – or use part-qualifications as entry to a job
 New developments such as content-rich courses
and modular funding are likely to make it worse
 But OER may improve things!
Quality
 Often used to avoid issues, not solve them
 Close link with benchmarking (ENQA talk)
 Do need a special scheme for e-learning but
correlated with general guidelines for nation and
global schemes
 Institutional guidelines too
 No need for separate scheme for OER – and no
energy for one in most institutions (note to OER u)
The quality pyramid (for ENQA)
 Critical Success Factors ------
Leadership level
 Benchmarking ------------------
Senior
managers
 Quality ---------------------------
QA mgrs
 Detailed pedagogic
guidelines -----------------------
Criteria are placed
at different layers
in the pyramid
depending on their “level”
Effectiveness and study time
 “Academically Adrift” in US and some similar UK
work suggests that students come out of
university with analytic skills not much better
than those they came in with
 In a nutshell, they do not do nearly enough reading
and writing of long assignments – as they used to
 In England, student study times have dwindled
and vary wildly between institutions and
courses (HEPI, OU for HEFCE) – much lower
than in rest of Europe and for a 3-year BA Hons
 Crudely, there are no full-time students any more in UK
(in a diffident way)
SUGGESTIONS
Study time
 Do studies on study time to ensure that
students, parents and ministers are not shortchanged
 Part of “knowing your students” (now and in future) –
see later
 Can the NZ 4-year honours programme resist
for long the pressure to make it 3-year as in
England? To do a 4:3 compression would likely
require e-learning
Effectiveness – make them think
 Reconceptualise assessment (good idea
anyway)
 Ensure students can assimilate large amounts
of information, analyse it and communicate
their conclusions verbally, and in printed
reports and presentations, to the satisfaction of
employers
 Applies to all subjects in relevant ways
Know your current and future
students
 There is always a role for market research
techniques – especially when students pay fees
but even when the state pays all costs (as then
one is competing with other HEIs for
government funding)
 Student satisfaction is only one dimension of
understanding students
 Must also understand their life-situation
Research-teaching links
 Research has value for the nation but not
necessarily for all students/courses/institutions
 The elite universities have so far managed to
avoid any detailed analysis of the researchteaching synergies – but can this last?
 More studies are needed on the finances of
tertiary institutions and to what (non-teaching)
purposes student- and other moneys are put (cf.
TRAC in UK)
 The “research institute” (separate institution)
model might be worth detailed investigation
Breadth
 The evidence from the for-profit sector suggests
that breadth of provision beyond “traditional” HE is
key to success of e-learning
 But can this be a route for research-led institutions
(RLIs) under the cosh of PBRC
 There is a role for specialised institutions (e.g. art
& design, though many are being absorbed)
 but narrowing is often a “weak move”
 Should RLIs mentor/own specialised institutions
including more vocational ones? Look at UTCs
Vision: The Multeversity
5A
5B
4
3
keynote
Multeversity features.
 Broad-spectrum yet full university range of work/features
 Multi-mode according to student demand: pure DL, hybrid
e/f2f, trad f2f+e (if really justified); multi-site if need be
 Highly cost-aware yet transparent to clients
 Covers poly and college areas which are synergistic (e.g. Cisco
Academy, fashion design)
 Bridges into and from upper secondary school, so as to
minimise drop-out and leverage on schools-level knowledge
 Generates “liberal arts” thinkers (in all fields) yet who are
“(e-)business-ready”
 Links with international partners to lobby governments
 Joins with other unis/entities to control school-leaving exams..
Discussion....
Paul Bacsich
Re.ViCa/VISCED/POERUP
Canterbury Visiting Fellow
PS 1: Key URLs
 http://www.virtualcampuses.eu/index.php/Re.ViCa
 http://www.virtualschoolsandcolleges.eu
 http://www.virtualschoolsandcolleges.info/project/outcomes
 http://poerup.referata.com/wiki/POERUP (OER)
 http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/paul-bacsich/
PS 2: Comparative ICT in learning
– phases of Paul’s research
 1995: US 3-week tour with Robin Mason, for UKOU
 1996: Finnish govt support for RA 6-month study
 (1997-1999: developing a Virtual Campus)
 2000-2005: e-University country/provider studies
 2007-2009: EU Re.ViCa (virtual campuses)
 2009: Becta international and other reports
 2010: studies for UKOU on retention and on VLEs
 2011-2013: VISCED (virtual schools and colleges),
then POERUP (OER policies)
PS3: Sources: specific
papers and studies
 Virtual Campus Handbook, 2009 (Re.ViCa)
 “Impact of E-Learning on the 21st Century
University”, book chapter in International
Perspectives on Higher Education: Changing
values & practice (ed. Trevor Kerry), Continuum
Books, May 2012
 “Time and microlearning”, Microlearning 2011
 Student Retention and the Value of Higher
Education (with Ormond Simpson), 2010, for OU
 Distance Learning Benchmarking Club