Epic show report

ELRC 2005

e-Learning Research Centre Seminar
e-Learning: From Cottage Industry to Mainstream
Venue: HE Academy, York
Date: Tuesday 22nd March 2005

Report by John Harris, Director of Education, Epic

The e-Learning Research Centre is an organisation with its focus on e-learning research in Higher Education. The eLRC started life as one of the ill-fated UkeUniversities “public good” activities and now continues under direct funding from Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).

The opening address was given by Sal Cooke of the JISC TechDis service. Sal forcibly brought home the point that lecturers today really don’t understand the language of their students. She brought up a slide of bands and singers and asked the audience to shout out the name of a song associated with said band or singer (Frank Sinatra? My Way; Bob Dylan? Blowin’ in the Wind). She then brought up another slide with names like Limp Bizkit and Rasmus. Could we name a single song? Of course not. This highlighted the enormous challenge facing institutions as they try to create a learning relationship with people who speak an alien language.

Keith Baker of the e-Learning Industry Group spoke on e-Learning as a process. This involved huge diagrams with very small type that tried to encapsulate what an e-learning process might look like for an institution in the future. The address by Dr Hilary Dexter, an eLRC Research Fellow was in a similar vein. Her research looked at how Unified Modelling Language (UML) can be used to map the process of creating e-learning in a university. Unfortunately, there were more large diagrams with very small type. Both these approaches had an ambitious, blue sky feel to them. They made me think of the way systems approaches in the 80s and 90s led to huge, runaway projects with inexhaustible scope creep.

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Dr Chris Jones of the Centre for Studies in Advanced Learning Technology (CSALT) at Lancaster University then gave a fascinating talk on “What can we design? The conditions for networked and e-learning”. He raised some interesting questions on why educationalists force people into online communities for the purpose of learning (a practice that is common in a networked or collaborative e-learning environment). Many people prefer to study on their own or, if they are undertaking Continuing Professional Development, prefer to identify with the community they work with rather than the community they “e-learn” with. He called into question why lecturers even bother to design activities for collaborative e-learning when research tells us that the outcomes of such activities are almost always completely unexpected (sometimes in a good way and sometimes in a bad way). He then expanded on some ideas on “networked individualism” (Castell) and how an understanding of the ways networks work might help people improve the conditions for learning. He sees learning design as “situated” and, practically speaking, sees great value on lecturers designing “on the hoof”, modifying their plans to suit the situation as the learning experience progresses. If nothing else, I hope Dr Chris Jones’ ideas signal a move away from an over-emphasis on learning as a social activity undertaken in artifical communities and move towards recognising that learning is often a private and rather mysterious activity. Once this is recognised, institutions can start addressing it in learning design terms.

In the afternoon Professor Aldwyn Cooper told his version of Roald Dahl’s story “The Giraffe, the Pelly and Me”. Professor Cooper is the Pro Vice Chancellor of the University of Glamorgan Business School and his unusual (and very funny) take on the Roald Dahl story concerned his experiences setting up online business courses for students living in inaccessible corners of Wales. The significant amount of EU funding received to help him set up the courses has allowed the University to experiment and learn from its mistakes. Some of these lessons include the fact that students preferred really small modules of study (a technique used by the very successful online University of Phoenix in the US); students who did not finish a course often left when they had got what they wanted out of it but were not in any way unhappy with the course; students did not like the “virtual classroom” approach, with live lessons by the lecturers, however, when the virtual classrooms were abandoned, they took them over themselves for peer-to-peer sessions; students relish the opportunity to learn at their own pace and in their own time if they have to go to work during the day – particularly if they are hill farmers! The University of Glamorgan’s successful approach echoed that of other successful online approaches such as the University of Phoenix, the Interactive University in Scotland and the fascinating work undertaken by Carol Twigg in the US (See Epic’s white paper on Higher Education and e-Learning). What have all these approaches got in common? To my mind, they are all business-like, demand-led and make teaching and learning, rather than research, the primary focus of their activity.

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Dr Bernard Scott followed by showing some examples of the e-learning content that Cranfield University has been producing for army officers at the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham. Dr Scott has been using an “industrial” approach to create many hours of interactive content. From what we saw, the content looked comprehensive and engaging. There was some excellent use of Flash to navigate documents in the course on Defence Writing. The MOD is currently spending serious money on e-learning development (see Epic's White Paper on Defence and e-learning), including the commissioning of a fully bespoke Defence Learning Portal. Let’s hope it doesn’t go the way of the UkeUniversities platform.

My own talk was on mitigating the risk of failure when moving from small projects to large-scale projects. Epic’s approach seemed to strike a chord with many people in the room. For Epic, a project failure can lead to business failure, hence the need to ensure that robust processes are in place to mitigate the risk of this happening. With the growing recognition that the nation’s universities are £100M-turnover businesses, there is also recognition that university projects can no longer afford to fail.

Overall the day was worthwhile and generated some interesting debate. It’s a shame that the failure of UkeUniversities has cast such a shadow over e-learning in Higher Education. However, I sensed a growing confidence that it still has the potential to transform the learning experience for staff and students alike.

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