Lessons for Public Education from a US For-profit University

"The Idea of the Digital University: Ancient Traditions, Disruptive Technologies and the Battle for the Soul of Higher Education" by Frank Bryce McCluskey and Melanie Lynn Winter (2012) is a book which is thought provoking, but does not quite live up to the subtitle's promise of "Ancient Traditions, Disruptive Technologies and the Battle for the Soul of Higher Education".

The authors describe the traditional university, with the professor as a sole practitioner, with no formal training in education, teaching in an isolated classroom of students, year in year out. They discuss the push for on-line education and performance indicators threating this professor. The author's solution appears to be some sort of hybrid system, where the professor accepts a form of team teaching with their colleagues and some  monitoring by professional administrators, but with the academics retaining control of the curriculum.

While the authors start with the idea of a university in ancient Greece, the Library of Alexandra and medieval universities of Europe, the quickly jump to higher education in the USA. The point that the US university is strongly influenced by the German model of 200 years ago is well made. But much has happened with universities in Europe and elsewhere outside of the USA in the last 200 years, which the authors do not address.

The book is from a very narrow perspective: academics involved in a US for-profit US university, suggesting how the US university system can be improved . This book is really about what the "American Public University System" (which is a for-profit company, not a public system), can teach the US state based non-profit universities. The book has some points which may be of global interest, but with insufficient detail.

The description of the European universities of pure centers of learning uninterested in profit seems to not accord with reality. Institutions such as Cambridge University have been making money from their intellectual output and inventions for hundreds of years. Also tutoring was a private for-profit business at Oxbridge for hundreds of years.

The authors also seem to have skipped over significant non-US distance education institutions, such as the UK Open University, which has adapted its techniques from paper and post, through TV to the Internet.

The issue of inclusiveness is an important one covered by the authors. They point out that the metrics on student completion used to measure the effectiveness of universities assume students enroll, study and complete at one institution. Universities which cater for students who would not previously been able to attend university, such as military personnel who are moved so often they can't maintain a program at one physical campus, either rate badly on the conventional measures or are excluded from them.

While an interesting read, there are some problems with the structure of The Idea of the Digital University". The very short chapters are written in a style which reminds me of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (which is also about the nature of education in the USA). The numerous summaries are repetitive (I am sure I read some sentence at least three times). There also appear to be some problems with the Index, referring to incorrect page numbers.

University preparation courses

The UK Open University (OU) has an "Access to Success Route". The starting fee of £25 (US $38) for a semester long course, to those with up to £25,000 income (US $38,000) looks very generous. The course content appears similar to university preparation courses run in Australia.

Mobile Learning Future for University Education In Australia

In "E-learning: Supplementary or disruptive?" (Telecommunications Journal of Australia, February 2013), James Barber Vice-Chancellor of the University of New England, concludes with the hope that "Australian universities embrace the opportunity that the NBN provides before it becomes a threat to them". However, I suggest the evidence in the paper supports the use of lower speed communication, suitable for mobile devices. Concentrating on the use of the NBN's higher speed fixed infrastructure would lock Australian universities out of most of the education market and in particular the Asian professional education market.

Barber reviews progress with electronic learning over the last two decades and its effectiveness. They cite research showing e-learning produces better results than traditional classroom instruction, but blended learning (classroom combined with e-learning) is better than e-learning on its own.

Barber traces the idea of open courseware back to MIT's decision in 2001 to uploading course materials, but notes ‘Massive Online Open Courses’ (MOOCs) only became commonly discussed in 2011 with Stanford's robotics course. This was quickly followed by the establishment of Udacity in 2012, then coursera.org six days later and then edX two weeks after. What I found curiously absent from this analysis was any mention of Open University UK, which had been offering free on-line courses since at least 2010, using its own and others free open source software.

Barber describes the rapid proliferation of mobile devices, particularly in developing nations such as India and its use for education. The paper provides a very good overview of e-learning development and I agree with the findings, apart from one point which is not supported by the evidence presented. Barber ends with the hope that Australian universities make use of the NBN. However, the NBN is not designed to support mobile devices and will primarily provide fixed fiber-optic connections.

If universities design their e-learning for the NBN's fixed high speed fiber, then students using mobile devices and some on the rural and remote wireless NBN connections, will be excluded. In addition this would exclude Australian universities from providing courses on-line to students in the Asian region, using mobile devices. Instead I suggest universities should aim to support lower speed connections. Lower speeds can be accommodated by careful course-ware design and this can support an updated form of blended learning where the class is synchronized with asynchronous communication.

UK Open University FutureLearn MOOC Initiative

The UK Open University has been providing free on-line educational materials for decades. I looked at some of OU's courses and tools in 2010. It is a little sad to see that the hype about MOOCs has overshadowed OU's good work, to the point where they need to "launch" open on-line courses. Hopefully OU will not forget all it has learned about delivering quality on-line education with its new FutureLearn initiative and not simply ape the fashion for MOOCs.

Kerouac and Burroughs on Instructional Technology

I was surprised to find Beat Generation authors Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs expressing a view on instructional technology for delivering open university courses in 1945. This is in Chapter 7 of their early, and not very good, semi-autobiographical novel: "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks". One of the characters expresses the view that recordings of university lectures will be broadcast by radio 24 hours a day, allowing access for anyone. The narrator of the story expresses skepticism over this idea.

Handbook of Online Learning

The Handbook of Online Learning by
Kjell E., Judith Schoenholtz-Read (SAGE Publications, Second Edition edition May 2009) provides an overview of e-learning well grounded in academic theory and research.

Some e-learning handbooks provide essentially a cookbook step-by-step guide to using a particular software package the teach little about education, whereas others are so full of pedagogy jargon that they are all but unintelligible. This work is at the latter end of the scale, with free use of terms and numerous references. However, it is readable and provides useful ammunition for those (such as myself) defending e-learning against the charge that it is shallow and lacking in academic rigour. The introduction provides a good overview of where adult e-learning is at and how we got there. It should be noted that this book is about adult learning (that is androgogy), not teaching children.

After the introduction, the chapters can be read in any order, being grouped into themes but largely independent. I found "Revisiting the Design and Delivery of an Online Graduate Program" by Judith Stevens-Long and Charles Crowell, of particular value. This discusses the use of online discussion for small groups of mature students. This is how I teach and it was very useful to find the history and intellectual underpinnings of this approach, derived from the UK's Open University, so well laid out.

The book is not perfect, in particular Moodle is mentioned several times, but the description of its origins a little odd. It acknowledges Martin Dougiamas as having created Moodle. But it suggests that he was only vaguely aware of the pedagogy it related to. Anyone who has read the Wikipedia entry for Moodle will see that Martin set out to write a PHD thesis on "The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry" and that there was a very clear theory underpinning Moodle. As to if Moodle actually depends on any such theory is a separate issue. ;-)

Table of Contents

Preface
1. The Flourishing of Adult Online Education: An Overview	Kjell Erik Rudestam and Judith Schoenholtz-Read
Part I. Changing Philosophies and Theories of Online Learning
2. Presence in Teleland	Gary Fontaine and Grace Chun
3. The Challenges of Culture and Community in Online Academic Environments	Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shelley K. Hughes
4. Evolving Technologies	Robin Mason and Frank Rennie
5. Applying Social Systems Thinking and Community Informatics Thinking in Education: Building Efficient Online Learning Design Culture in Universities	Pierre-Leonard Harvey
6. Media Psychology Controls the Mouse That Roars	Bernard Luskin and James Hirsen
7. Globalization in Online Learning	Janet Poley
8. Online Learning Research	Yolanda Gayol
9. Uncertain Frontiers: Exploring Ethical Dimensions of Online Learning	Dorothy Agger-Gupta
Part II. Implementation of Online Learning
10. Revisiting the Design and Delivery of an Interactive Online Graduate Program	Judith Stevens-Long and Charles Crowell
11. Candlepower: The Intimate Flow of Online Collaborative Learning	Barclay Hudson
12. Designing and Developing Web-Based Intelligent Tutoring Systems: A Step-by-Step Approach With Practical Applications	Kay Wijekumar
13. Synthesizing Higher Education and Corporate Learning Strategies	Bruce LaRue and Stephanie Galindo
14. Teaching Action Research at a Distance	Jenny Edwards and Sue Marquis Gordon
15. Beyond the Looking Glass: What Faculty and Students Need to Be Sucessful Online	Rena M. Palloff and Keith Pratt
16. Teaching Professionals to Be Effective Online Facilitators and Instructors: Lessons From Hard-Won Experience	Leni Wildflower
17. Leadership and Management of Online Learning Environments in Universities	Anna DiStefano and Judy Witt
18. Accrediting Online Institutions and Programs: Quality Assurance or Bureaucratic Hurdle?	Ralph Wolff
19. Virtual Libraries in Online Learning	Stefan Kramer
Index
About the Editors
About the Contributors

From: Handbook of Online Learning, Kjell Erik Rudestam and Judith Schoenholtz-Read, Sage, 2010

Open e-Learning Course on Open e-Learning

As mentioned previously, the UK's Open University is now providing free online course materials under a open access licence. One lack in online learning has been the scarcity of course on how to create and run online courses (train the trainer). OU has some which would be relevant: Creating open educational resources, Accessibility of eLearning, Repurposing Open Educational Content, Developing good academic practices and Learning, thinking and doing. Add a few more and this might be enough material for a full 12 week university course.

Open University e-Learning Tools

In addition to the tools in the Moodle Leaning Management System (particularity Forums), the UK's Open University is now provides a number of other online tools. Cohere is a web based knowledge mapping tool, FlashVlog video diary, FM Adobe Flash based video conferencing tool and the Lab Space

There is also the Compendium is a knowledge map software provided. I was not able to work out what the difference between this and Cohere was.

Some of the OU facilities are implemented with the basic Moodle tools. As an example "Learning Clubs" are simply Moodle forums set up for students to discuss topics and help each other.

One tool central to the online courses is the Learning Journal. This is for the student to collect notes about the course. This is similar in nature to the idea of an e-Portfolio, but seems to have been implemented by OU more like a Blog, using the Moodle Forum module.

One aspect which sets OU's approach from other educational instutions is that Re-use of content is encouraged. Materials is provided under an open access licence. OU provide instructions on how to download the course content. Content is provided is several different formsts (mostly some varaiatuion on XHTML or XML zipped files), including Connon Cartridge 1.0 and SCORM, as well as a Moodle backup file, plain Zipped file and as an RSS feed.

Open University OpenLearn Free e-Learning

The UK's Open University is now providing some free open access online course materials using Moodle. But the system is not without some problems. Each time I log in I have difficulty finding my way back to the courses I have enrolled in (which are at "My Learning Space"). If I try to change any of the details recorded about me I get "Incorrect sesskey submitted, form not accepted!".

While a free unviersity course sounds like a bargan, these are only short courses (3 to 18 hours) and all self paced. That is you are presented with a few pages of notes to read, some exercises to do and then told to record it in your journal. There is no tutor to help you and no assessment.

Open University Courses

The UK's Open University is now providing online course materials under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence. After trying for much of the day to register with OU ( and getting "Unable to process your request at the moment, please try again later.") at 9:30pm I was able to get into the system. What I see is a Moodle based learning management system, which has been carefully skinned with an elegant OU style.

Some of the courses I would like to investigate are Creating open educational resources, Accessibility of eLearning, and Repurposing Open Educational Content.

Open University Open Access Courses

The UK's Open University is now providing online course materials under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence. This allows the material to be used for free, changed and the changes distributed, as long as the original author is acknowledged and copies are not sold.

The OU's materials look comfortably familiar. As an example for "Environmental factors and organisations", a 6 hour course, with about ten pages of notes. As well as bring provided as a set of web pages formatted like an electronic book, there is also a printable version of the notes, all on one web page.

OU appear to be using Moodle 2 and perhaps the Moodle Book module, to produce these notes. This is similar to the book format I use for my Green ICT course. The quantity of notes OU is providing is similar to that for my course (about 1.5 pages of notes per hour of course).

Unfortunately I was unable to see what the actual OU Moodle based courses look like, as when I attempt to register I get: "Unable to process your request at the moment, please try again later.". Perhaps OU need to carry out some optimisations of their Moodle system (a few tweaks can make the system much more efficient).