Epic show report

Online Educa, Berlin

InterContinental Hotel, Berlin December 1-3 2004
Report by Donald Clark, Epic

Online Educa is 10 years old this year and remains the leading European e-learning conference with:

• 1700 registered participants from 60 countries
• attendees from 63 countries
• 344 speakers from 43 countries
• 71 themed sessions

It’s an eclectic mix of researchers, educationalists, corporates and policy makers. Note that this doesn’t mean any real interaction between them. Indeed there were some fractious sessions and more than the odd culture clash (more of this later). In many ways this is what makes this an interesting event.

A strong feature of the conference is the short speaker slots. Three or four speakers per session means they’re limited to about 20 mins each. This lowers the odds on boredom, and as the speakers still have to pay to attend the quality can be variable. In fact, this year, there was some disgruntlement around ‘presentation skills’.

Keynote speakers

Jane Massey chaired this session well and told a nice anecdote about Simon Schama, Professor of History at Columbia University in New York. One of his students sidled up to him with a pained expression and complained that his parents weren’t paying all this money for him to end up more confused than he was before he started. Schama explained that this was exactly why they were paying so much money. Her point was that a conference is more likely to open up questions than close them down.

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Dr. Tayeb A. Kamali, Chief Executive Officer, CERT, United Arab Emirates, Vice Chancellor of a Petroleum University gave a simple but ultimately weak talk on higher education in the Middle East. It turned out to be an advert for his institution - Abu Dabi’s College for Men! I thought from this that their e-learning may not include women in the Middle East but Jay Cross later explained that he had been there and seen e-learning delivered by foreign staff through the wall into rooms for women students to avoid face-to-face contact. A fascinating use of e-learning based on cultural sensitivities (discuss). He’s holding an interesting conference in Feb in Arab Emirates on borderless education featuring 1600 students – a sort of reverse conference. Nice idea.

Nancy DeViney, General manager of IBM Learning Solutions, USA. Really the standard IBM talk. Old chestnuts like 75% of CEOs think employee education is the most critical success factor relative to other people issues (research source –an IBM survey). The usual stuff about defining and measuring success. Target learning investments to a ROI and align with business objectives and create a scalable, flexible, open infrastructure – all from IBM.

She had some good comments on innovation. Relentless cost pressures and increased global competition means that innovation is less about things and more about ideas, collaboration and expertise. At the heart of this ability to innovate is our ability to learn.

Current happenings:

• We have a skills gap ALL of the time
• Increased time pressure
• Less time for formal learning
• Internet content doubling every 2.8 years
• Seamless blending of work with life
• Activities becoming less compartmentalised
• Increased mobility and self-employment
• An emerging e-lance economy
• 26% of workforce freelancers in US
• Multigenerational workforce

Future happenings:

• Connections – always on infrastructure
• Information – explosion, broad availability of content, contextualised
• Smart stuff – chips in jewellery, toys, clothes etc.
• Interfaces – engagement of more senses
• Biolinks - biotech meets infotech

Also a couple of interesting comments around embedded learning. Learning, she claimed, helps people establish relationships across the organisation. Good point. Learning may indeed be a form of bonding and play a significant role in teamwork. She also suggested that you couple your learning with marketing – absolutely, learn with your partners and customers.

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Robert Cailliau, CERN, Switzerland. This guy is little known but a big hero for techies in the know. He helped build the web at CERN, second only to Tim Berners-Lee (some would say more important). He rushed us through a history of the universe from the Big Bang onwards then drew an analogy with the growth of the internet. This was OK but an analogy is an analogy and this one smacked of a physicist searching for a point. The gist of it is that the web started with a bang at CERN then coagulated into small nodes run by webmasters (atoms), then expanded through specialist companies (planets) with graphic designers, programmers. Companies provided these services then specialist companies provided specialist services (e-learning). Overall things have split up into functionally separate things creating a great deal of complexity.

He drew on evolutionary theory to make the sensible claim that our brains have evolved to learn about certain things in a certain way. We have had no time for evolutionary adaption to our new world. In fact what we need are better brains. But brains are not at all like computers. Gerald Edelman (Nobel prize winner ) has a model that proved that brains were nothing like computers. Robert pointed out that the model has to be run on a computer (discuss).

Can we change our brains? No.
Are we in control? Maybe not.
Is the web using us to get built? Interesting question.
Are we reaching the limits of the complexity that we can understand? Maybe.
Are their limits to what education can convey? Yes.

His practical point was that technology will always be difficult. It needs experts, don’t expect it to be easy. Technologists don’t believe in kings, presidents and voting. They believe in working code. When the internet was invented at CERN they cut across all of the proprietary software and protocols and introduced common protocols – http, html and URLs. This was not easy.

I had a half hour, one-to-one, with Robert after his session, which was fascinating. He told me about the fights in the corridor at CERN around whether html should have been part of the deal. He was dead against it and still regards it as a disaster. He’s extremely pessimistic about what will happen in the world generally and sees us heading for a ‘systems crash’ from which we will have to reboot. The election of George Bush, he thinks, may accelerate the crash. He also dismissed open source as a ‘hairy geeks’ phenomenon. This was his last speech before retiring from CERN – he’s off to chill out and reflect in some remote location for a year.

Dr. Nicolas Balacheff, CNRS, Director Laboratoire Leibniz-IMAG, France. “Who forgot the learner?” was the title of this talk, but he then promptly forgot the audience. He made some interesting observations around significant errors not being mistakes, but symptoms of knowledge. However, this then became a set of rambling thoughts about the social nature of knowledge. It was only a matter of time before semiotics reared its ugly head – and it did. It was pointed out that I may be viewing this from an anglo-saxon perspective. This may be my mistake, or merely a symptom of knowledge. I saw lots of non-Anglo-Saxons walk out of the session.

Session 1 Quality and e-learning

It sometimes seems as though there are more people working in research and policy making in e-learning than in actually delivering the stuff. My suspicions were confirmed in this session. At European and country level there are small armies of people who want to describe, prescribe, certify and kitemark e-learning.

Anne-Marie Husson from the Paris Chamber of Commerce outlined the French e-learning quality standards:

1. Analyse
2. Construct
3. Equip
4. Implement
5. Evaluate

These five Processes had sub-processes and then 282 recommendations. Their design guide has sold 700 copies and she hopes that it will be adopted internationally as a design guide, self-evaluation, negotiation and regulation tool. She also hoped that it would lead to the certification of e-learning content. This was fine and the recommendations were sensible, but there’s no way that the French or any other set of national standards will be adopted on any wider scale, and the move from descriptive to prescriptive is a mistake.

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Dr. Giovanni Fulantelli, Italian National Research Centre.
The Italian approach was radically different (no surprises here) as they had created standards around formal systems theory. This smacked of a theoretical bias by the academic who designed the initiative, nevertheless, it was a good presentation as it threw all talk of quality up in the air. He claimed that it is impossible to separate e-learning from its context, usually a complex system making most efforts on quality redundant. They had gone ahead with a feeder approach, designing and delivering high quality courses for e-learning practitioners. A thoroughly sensible approach given his analysis.

Prof. Chundri Kistan, University of Kwazulu-Natal
Improving the quality of e-learning through evaluation – whose interest is being served. He started by listing the stakeholders:

• Learners
• Designers
• Developers
• Employers
• Purchasers
• Institutions
• Policy makers

then usefully defined quality as ‘fit for purpose’ or ‘value for money’. I was warming to this guy. He then explained the models that exist for evaluation:

Arbough (2001)
Pedagogical issues
Quality of material

Zhao (2003)
Course effectiveness
Access – infrastructure
Student satisfaction
Academic satisfaction

Kirkpatrick (1994)
Reaction
Learning
Application of learning
Return on investment

Philips (2000)
Methodology same for e-learning and conventional learning

In South Africa there seemed to be an organisation NADEOSO (National Association for Distance Educational Organisation for South Africa) who will scrutinise e-learning. However, as he usefully added at the end, e-learning is not such an issue in South Africa as most schools have no running water and many have no electricity. That was that.

Barbara Hildebrand presented the EQO model from the European Quality Observatory. What is quality in e-learning? Good question. Barbara confused me further by outlining a huge number of quality criteria: accessibility, interoperability, flexibility, strategic input, ergonomics, ROI, market share etc.

It’s about decision making. This is why the EQO designed and built the EQO Decision Cycle tool. This is a tool that allows you to decide what quality criteria you may want to apply to your project, an analysis of your quality needs. This is because there’s a huge variety of quality approaches and no one model fits all.

The EQO will publish a survey on quality in e-learning by mid-January 2005.

www.eqo.info

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Thoughts
I was by now, like Schama’s student, completely confused. To what problem is this a solution? The perceived problem is that there’s a lot of dull e-learning about and if we policed it properly, we’d improve the quality. It’s the Hall of Shame approach. Name and shame to improve quality. This is one possible approach but hardly encouraging and constructive.

Problem
Who defines e-learning? Is a TV documentary e-learning? Is a spoken audio file on an iPod e-learning? Is a document found on Google e-learning? E-learning is difficult to pin down because the technology is constantly changing making the delivery channels a little fuzzy. Even the definition of learning content is changing. There is a general recognition that learning objects may be as simple as a document, image or animation. Learning itself is now seen as including lots of informal learning, especially on the web. It’s a slippery concept that evades capture.

Problem
Why pick on e-learning? If quality is an issue, it’s a general learning issue. Why not apply these quality standards to classroom, print, videos, etc. You now need to look at blended learning, not e-learning and that means learning interventions as a whole, not just the e-learning component.

Problem
Who defines the quality standards? The problem with quality in e-learning is that there’s no real objective standards. It’s a medium that’s changing and morphing. It’s all very well demanding that the objectives of the learning are put at the front of a programme but this may be the dullest possible approach to an exciting learning game. And who are these people who set themselves up as the arbiters of standards? Why trust them?

Problem
Which standards do we choose from? The problem with standards is that there’s so many to choose from, national, European, international. Everyone’s reinventing the wheel and no one standard has become the de facto, never mind the de jure standard.

Problem
Who’s listening? Even if you did create such quality standards and kitemarks, where’s the demand. There’s already too many options, a multitude of standards with no clear winner.

The search for standards has become a hot topic, but NOT among those who buy and develop content. Trade associations. Government bodies and academic groups all want to position themselves as experts, usually with some idea of selling their services as auditors and kitemark vendors. It is hard enough making this stuff and meeting tight deadlines without an additional period of quality checks.

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Session 2 Games and simulations

I won’t review all of the speakers as there was nothing new in this session. Lots left before the end. James Gee, Marc Prensky and games people in general have published lots in this area and have lots to say on the subject. This was low level but only OK as a primer.

Session 3 E-learning research

All I can say about this session is WOW! Professor Gilly Salmon and a panel of four academics put forward the idea that e-learning should now be treated as a discipline (or is it just a community). Jay Cross laid into Gilly almost immediately questioning the choice on the panel – all academics. He felt that this was non-representative. There was even a Professor of Online Learning! It made me wonder if there’s a Professor of Online Auctions or Professor of Online Porn.

After a few rambling words from someone called Claudio (apparently a big cheese in European e-learning research) and a plug for the Professor of E-learning’s forthcoming book, it turned into a battle between the academics and private sector people. Jay Cross was brilliant.

The result on a vote at the end:
Is e-learning a discipline?

Yes 5
No 18
Maybe 7

Well that’s that then.

Conclusion

This conference is always interesting for the range of attendees. Although the quality of the presentations is variable, there are so many speakers you’re bound to walk away having learnt something new. Best of all you bump into lots of people you haven’t seen for a while.

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