Online Education’s Great Unknowns

News: Online Education’s Great Unknowns – Inside Higher Ed

The Campus Computing Project and Eduventures conducted a study earlier this year that asked many of the most pressing questions about online learning. Eduventures was kind of enough to forward me an advance copy (of their version), but I understand the report will be made available very soon. The article in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed smartly focusses on one of the most interesting insights from the report: the lack of knowledge within our colleges and universities as to the financial impact – current and future – of online programming. This is something I’ve made a point of touching on in a number of conference presentations during the last 3-4 years. The lack of understanding of the financial impact of online learning is particularly odd given that many schools invest in online learning for financial reasons.

The report from Eduventures is a gem; it reflects a deep understanding of key issues in online higher education.

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Are Google and Blackboard an Item?

Are Google and Blackboard an Item?

Didn’t we hear something like this a year ago?

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Some Context for the Government’s 500 Million: Digital Media in Online Higher Ed

Frederick M. Hess wrote an interesting piece for Inside Higher Ed in which he questioned the logic and fairness of the U.S. government’s initiative to “provide $500 million to develop free, and ‘freely available,’ online college courses.” He suggests that the initiative is short-sighted and serves to undercut existing commercial providers:

“It’s one thing to encourage providers to develop ”open source” wares and to promote measures that encourage publishers, colleges and universities to reduce costs and save students money. But it’s another thing entirely for the federal government to use taxpayer dollars to provide services that will undercut those offered by self-sustaining private enterprises.” . . . “More than half a dozen major textbook publishers, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Cengage, W.W. Norton & Co., and John Wiley & Sons, as well as hundreds of smaller providers, develop and distribute online educational content.”

Questions about the sustainability of the initiative and the role of government in higher education are obviously important; Dr. Hess provides a valuable service by addressing these issues. But, as they say, “context is everything”. If we take a closer look at the specific state of content development in online higher education, we can see that the government initiative may ultimately serve the interests of the commercial sector.

Digital Content Development in Online Higher Education

At its core, the government initiative involves sponsoring the development of digital content that will be used for free by colleges and universities. The more educational institutions that use the content, the more successful the initiative will have been deemed to be. This approach to content development is very different from how the vast majority of our traditional colleges and universities produce and finance digital content for online education.

Traditional colleges and universities build online course content according to the organizational and financial logic of what Tony Bates once called the “cottage model”. The cottage model of content development is derived from classroom higher education. It has two essential features. One, individual instructors assume primary responsibility for the design and development of course content. While virtually every educational institution in North America now includes a service department charged with assisting instructors with course development, in all but exceptional cases, these departments have not disrupted the traditional breakdown of roles and responsibilities for course design and development.  As any number of instructional designers will tell you (behind closed doors), they have relatively little control over the final product. These are service units, fundamentally; designed to respond to decisions that reside in the hands of faculty. Success is measured as much by the level of satisfaction of faculty, as by the quality of the course.

Two, the content created through the cottage model is typically used for only a single course at a single university. It is not shared or sold to other educational institutions that offer similar courses. The effect of this practice is to severely limit the financial investment that can be made in the development of course content. Without economies from scale (i.e. volume), investment must be restricted to the revenue generated by a single course. (In some universities, there can be two versions of a single course because more than one instructor teaches it.) While this approach has little impact on the quality of classroom education, it places great restrictions on what is possible for digital education. Educational media, like other forms of media, is highly dependent on the level of investment and the skills brought to its’ development. Without the involvement of a team of specialists and a significant financial investment, higher education will not be able to explore and ultimately exploit the tremendous potential of digital media for educational purposes. Today’s text-based courses, using simple graphics and group discussions, can be effective if well designed. But they are just one piece of a broader set of opportunities that digital educational media offers. As of 2009, simulations, games, dramatizations, and other possibilities remain rare in higher education.

It likely won’t surprise anyone to learn that it is the larger online proprietary schools that were first to recognize that the cottage model is inappropriate. Many of these schools – such as the U of Phoenix, ITT Technical Institute, The Art Institute – have put in place large and sophisticated teams to develop course content. Some have chosen to outsource parts of course development to companies like Learning Mate Solutions and Tata Interactive, both of India. Others have turned to the most familiar source of instructional media in higher education: textbook publishers, who continue to migrate, albeit slowly and awkwardly, to digital. (Pearson Education, for example, is working with Walden University, part of Laureate Education Inc.) (It’s interesting to note that the textbook industry is founded on the premise that a great deal of higher education curriculum is common, something traditional colleges and universities have yet to come to terms with.)

Frederick Hess may be correct, then, when he argues that the Obama initiative is anti-competitive, and that there are companies already providing these services to our schools. However, the vast majority of our colleges and universities do not take advantage of this model. It is this aspect of the online higher education market that changes the broader significance of the government initiative.

The government initiative actually mimics the production model of the private sector. And, as such, it serves as a very large and well-publicized demonstration of a different approach to content development – one that opens the door to course development being done outside of university walls. Consequently, the initiative may actually serve to encourage traditional colleges and universities to adopt this new industrial approach (new to higher ed) for online learning. Once traditional schools recognize the advantages of the new model, more will be open to working with private companies to acquire content. Ultimately, the government initiative may increase the total size of the commercial market for digital content providers. It is the private sector – those that Dr. Hess sees as victims of the initiative – that will benefit from the government’s intervention.

So, the government’s initiative may be, technically speaking, anti-competitive, and unfair to the companies that operate in this market. But in the longer term we may find that is these same vendors that are reaping the rewards.

If I were in the business of building and selling educational media, I wouldn’t complain too loudly.

An Old-Fashioned Debate. E-Learning at Oxford Union

The E-Learning Debate at Oxford Union

Dr. Chandru Rajam, New Approaches to Evaluation in Higher Education

This blog and the associated Linked In group were created, in part, to highlight the innovative work of university management and entrepreneurs in higher education. I’ve been lucky enough to interview people like Jeff Shelstad, CEO of Flat World Knowledge, who founded a business that addresses the problem of rising textbook costs, without reducing quality. And Neil Allison, whose work in the emerging field of educational analytics will almost certainly be part of the future of higher education.  Dr. Chandru Rajam is another education professional seeking to bring innovation to higher education.

Chandru (PhD, Penn State) served as a business school professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and at the National University of Singapore, then served as regional Director for Advisory Services at the Economist Intellligence Unit, a division of The Economist Group. He then went on to become one of the founding Deans at Universitas 21 Global, the online graduate business school based in Singapore. His current passion is Edumetry, a company that provides grading and evaluation services to colleges and universities.

KCH: Chandru, can we begin with a brief explanation of the fundamental idea behind your business?

Fundamentally, I imagined a system of instruction in which teaching and grading are decoupled for the sake if improving the efficiency and effectiveness of both activities. On the face of it, such a goal presupposes a number of things: that these activities are currently inefficient and ineffective (a fairly broad charge that many will contest), but those were—and continue to be—my points of departure.  I am a business-school professor by doctoral training; so, it’s not hard to see why I analyze higher education through the lens of efficiency and effectiveness.  For better or for worse, industry has made great strides in the pursuit of division of labor and in deploying technology for achieving efficiency and effectiveness.  So, whether professors and administrators like it or not, the benchmarks were set and the comparisons with the way Business did things became inevitable.  Eventually, the contrast and the case for revisiting the idea of grading and instruction has become more and more compelling.  Take the most recent example of the law-school dean at UC-Berkeley extolling the virtues of a cyber-campus as a strategy to deal with that state’s fiscal crisis.  Clearly, online education offers a number of advantages, not the least of which is efficiency, but it took a fiscal crisis for “the greatest public university” to discover online education as a serious undertaking, not just as something lesser-mortal institutions offered!

Simply put, by decoupling grading from instruction and treating them as distinct sub-systems that can be performed by different people, both activities can  become better and less costly.  Grading is among the least-liked of a faculty member’s activities and has come to receive short shrift. Good instruction requires more time and energy to be devoted to the cause. By requiring faculty to do both well, neither has flourished. The time has come to face the dual-mediocrity that instruction and grading have become.

KCH: What is the common way in which grading and feedback is managed within colleges and universities? What do we know about the effectiveness of this approach?

Unfortunately, and at the risk of oversimplification, students do NOT receive the feedback they need to close the learning loop. To be effective, feedback on student assignments must be timely, detailed and point out strengths and weaknesses in student understanding.  Even a student who received an A-minus deserves rich feedback that points out why s/he missed an A.  The truth is that almost no faculty member has the time to provide that kind of feedback.  In the absence of such feedback, students muddle through their concepts or, at best, struggle through more advanced material. Even when faculty provide detailed feedback, the typical delay in getting it to students means that the student has long since forgotten the context surrounding the assignment, thus, losing the opportunity to learn from such feedback. There has simply flowed too much water under the bridge for them to revisit the material.  Most students are lucky if they received more than a few scrawls of comment within, say, two weeks of submitting a written assignment. Forget higher-order learning theories like double-loop learning (Argyris, 1974), which remain a distant dream. In out system of mass higher-education, we have come to accept a kind of mediocrity that accepts the premise that good teaching and good grading are somehow incompatible and, worse, that good professors teach, but couldn’t be expected to provide rich, timely feedback. This is the kind of mediocrity that plagued Detroit before the onslaught mounted by the Japanese automakers: a state of malaise that poses low-cost and high-quality as somehow incompatible and even unworthy of pursuit. After all, the Europeans were there to make high-quality. high-performance cars, while Detroit simply served up mush to the mass-market. The twain simply co-existed in their separate continental world, until great, inexpensive cars rolled off ships to challenge these behemoths. The result: GM and Chrysler went into bankruptcy this year!

KCH: Virtual-TA serves a function normally handled by academics. How has the market responded to the business concept? Which segment of the market is most inclined to use these services?

Most faculty privately wish they could simply outsource their grading to somebody else, but only the elite, research institutions have the budgets to pay TAs to do the grading.  Occasionally, even at non-research institutions, large classes are allotted TAs, but that’s nota guarantee.  Virtual-TA changes all that.  We offer to grade student written assignments within 3-5 business days and embed the document (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) with detailed commentary. We also color-code the feedback by student learning-outcome (SLO), an added bonus for instructors and administrators. Using a rubric (blessed by the faculty), we score student work on the SLOs, thereby, generating learning-outcomes data.  We’ve in effect turned the graded output into a high-quality, high-impact outcome, something faculty simply cannot do.  Our TAs/ graders are all Masters or PhD holders and are trained in the art of providing rich feedback and working with rubrics.

As for market reaction, the sad reality is that administrators in public institutions are timid about outsourcing grading. They fear that it will be frowned upon by students, parents and/or their legislators. And, so they labor on, almost fearful of their own shadow!  When I proposed the idea to the provost of a large state university, he remarked “I can just imagine the headlines in the [state capital's] newspaper…”  That pretty much summed up the sentiment.  He also holds the tile of Executive Vice President, presumably in line for the presidency, which begs the question “Why do something risky from a political/ career perspective?”

But, the online and for-profit institutions see the logic and are much more receptive to the idea of improving the learning experience for their students, saving on instructional costs (by having the grading done by less expensive resources) and harvesting of learning -outcomes data from student assignments. I guess for-profit institutions have a sharper nose for these benefits than do traditional institutions.

KCH: My experience is that institutions actually have little knowledge of how their courses are being graded and the quality of feedback. This is typically a very decentralized activity, without much monitoring (attention is paid when something goes horribly wrong). Nevertheless, having these functions managed by an external organization likely makes convention-bound education professionals cautious. How have you managed to ensure that clients maintain the level and quality of control to which they are accustomed?

All aspects of Virtual-TA are designed to put the instructor at the center of the equation. They design the assignments and provide broad guidelines. They can edit or reject all of the feedback. They assign the letter grades based on SLO scores. We carry out an interim-check after a small sample of papers have been graded to ensure that we are on the right track.  With all these safeguards in place, instructors are reassured of their control over all academic and pedagogical decisions.

Additions to our blog directory: Sept 25 2009

Links recently added to the Higher Education Management blog directory:

Vander Ark /Ratcliff is a strategy and communications firm based in Seattle. The firm’s Principals have backgrounds in higher education, government, and education-industry investment. The company’s blog – Ed Reformer - touches on government-sponsored initiatives, investment news, and branding issues for colleges and companies. Intelligent, concise, and values-driven.

International Higher Education Consulting is a blog by David Comp, a Senior Advisor for International Initiatives in The College at The University of Chicago and a consultant for international education-related projects. The blog is a mix of items on international higher education, student programs, government initiatives, and the field of diplomacy. Thoughtful and eclectic.