"In the long run we are all dead". I can't remember who said that but I'm wondering how much more time we have in higher education before the world-scale mega-providers of education and training put us out of business. This is a "lightening talk" I'll be delivering at the EdTech2019 in Dundalk at the end of May. As there is no time for discussion at the end of each talk I'd be happy to discuss this over a drink after the conference dinner. Or you could join the debate in the comments below.
Scale has been a major contributor to modern prosperity. In both the private and public sectors, achieving scale, particularly using technology, has allowed us to provide existing services and products at lower unit costs, and use the savings to access further products and services. Some of these we consider necessities, such as improved health services, and some we consider luxuries, such as international holiday travel.
Contrary to this trend, the cost of providing higher education has grown over time. However, some institutions are working to reverse this trend. Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) is delivering online degrees at a lower price tag than other online providers and is the fastest growing online provider in the US. Some edX members are now delivering full masters degrees in MOOC formats at a fraction of the cost of regular online masters degrees.
So how will this affect higher education? Well there may be some immediate impact on online education. There is some indication that small scale online programmes in the US are not growing and the growth in online learning is mostly distributed among large-scale providers like SNHU and Western Governors University (WGU). Even recently other regional online providers such as University of Maryland University College (UMUC) and UMass Online have announce their intention to scale up nationally.
But what about campus-based learning? As you might expect, online learning may hit the campus based programmes initially at masters level . The original MOOC style masters degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech has around 5,000 enrollments and has had a major impact on both campus and online masters in computing around the US. Even now edX has announced its intention to deliver MicroBachelors. Just as the edX MicroMasters have developed into full, low-cost online masters degrees, will this develop into full low-cost bachelors degrees. Would the high levels of reported dissatisfaction with the value-for-money of degree courses in the US drive young people to take these online programmes rather than attend college full-time?
So much for the US, what about Ireland?
I tend to find that we all consider the increase in the cost of delivering higher education to be a negative development. By the same token, I would assume that any effort to reduce the cost to both the state and individuals as a positive move. Not necessarily so. I have often asked academics in higher education, "If we could replace lecturers with computer systems, should we?" The response is generally "No". When asked for a reason I am generally told it can't be done for one reason or another, which belies either a misunderstanding of the question or a refusal to answer it. (Remember I said "if") No more than barrels existed for the sake of coopers, higher education does not exist for the sake of lecturers. If the national objectives, which are currently being addressed by our higher education system, could be achieved in another more cost-effective way, why would we not change the way we do it.
Low-cost education from abroad may not be particularly successful if expensive education in Ireland is highly subsidised. But there is some reason to believe that these high levels of subsidy may not continue indefinitely. As the population of Ireland grows older, both the numbers requiring healthcare and the increasing sophistication of healthcare available will drive up costs enormously (not to mention pensions). The state will most likely look for efficiencies and savings elsewhere in order to increase healthcare spending. If they can purchase higher education online from elsewhere, more cheaply than it can be provided locally, why would they not choose to do that? And perhaps it would indeed be the best thing to do.
In conclusion, I believe that large-scale providers will dominate the future of higher education and that institutions in Ireland will not ultimately be protected from such competition. However, I do believe that there will be ways for our higher education institutions to remain relevant. To do so will require significant innovation, way beyond what we are now considering, and what emerges will look a lot different to what we have now. That's a discussion for another day.
P.S. In the interests of brevity I have not mentioned mega-providers in the non-accredited sector. Organisations like Coursera or Microsoft (who own Linkedin Learning - formerly Lynda.com) are making skills based training with verifiable certification available at low cost to millions. If employers start valuing such courses in the same way as degrees, this will also be a threat to existing higher education.
Thursday, May 9, 2019
Tuesday, April 2, 2019
How I lost my faith in Open Education Resources (OER)?
This is more or less the script for a lightening (6-minute) presentation for the OER19 conference in Galway next week. I've recorded it with slides as well. (recording:http://bit.ly/2U9UhN0 - slides )
As someone who once thought that OER was a great idea, I first became aware of an ideological tinge in the movement when I listened in to an online debate (argument?) about the need for Non-Commercial (NC) to be included in open licencing. I had been putting my teaching materials on the web since the nineties with a note saying that anyone could use them any way they wanted and that a note of attribution would be nice. To be honest, I wondered what all the fuss was about open licencing but I was certainly on one side of the argument, in that if anyone wanted to make money out of my materials, fair play to them, as I certainly wasn’t going to. I wondered why Downes opposed commercial use of materials and following the debate I was firmly on the side of McGreal and had come to the conclusion that Downes had an ideological distaste for people making money out of education.
In the early noughties I attended seminars by legal experts on the use of third party materials on the web and concluded that if I followed their advice I’d never get anything done, so I generally advised my colleagues to use whatever they found that was useful and put a note on their web page stating “If I have inadvertently breached copyright with any materials here, please contact me immediately and I will remove them”. In general I have said “Stop worrying. No academics have been fired or gone to jail yet, so you are unlikely to be the first”. In general I attribute my limited success in online learning to a list of things I avoided doing rather than particular things I did, and this is one of them.
Quality Assurance (QA) in general is an issue that I have a problem with in higher education. Higher Education has accreted a set of tedious bureaucratic processes that in no way guarantee a high quality learning experience for students. Such an approach is deterministic in that it claims that if you follow a specific methodology there will be a good outcome. QA professionals in industry have long since admitted that this is unreliable, and that Continuous Improvement (CI) is a much faster and more reliable route to Quality. It is also inimical to innovation as it assumes that the experts know what will achieve quality even when they are unaware of new techniques. Although my opposition to QA in OER is somewhat based on the unreliability of “expert review”, mostly it is that such review systems are too tedious and represent too little “bang for the buck”. I volunteered to be a MERLOT reviewer some time back but had to give it up as the effort for individual learning object was just too much. It would be better to encourage academics to release their materials on the web and to let users, students and teacher, review and share them. This is the way videos become viral on Youtube. To paraphrase my daughter: “No matter what difficult concept my engineering professors present in class, I’ll find an Indian professor on Youtube that explains it better”.
For the same reason I have issues with repositories, granularity and reusability. We had the National Digital Learning Repository in Ireland some time back. Something like €8m was spent on the assumption that if we built an infrastructure for storing and sharing OER people would use it. It was a IT person’s idea that did not seem to understand how academics (or people in general) really work. As people were not naturally inclined to share materials, and technically it was somewhat of a challenge to upload materials, it essentially had to pay people to do so. In order to theoretically improve reusability, it encouraged breaking down materials for a fine granularity (e.g. single images), further increasing the workload for academics. Then people had to be encouraged to use the materials in their courses. This involved getting to grips with the technology of the repository, hoping it had materials suitable for your students, and then integrating them together and into the course. As my daughter has suggested, it was easier just to search the Internet for good materials to link to, often Youtube videos. During this time as well, very simple recording and publishing options were emerging, making it easier to create the materials yourself.
When MOOCs hit the big time in 2012, I was surprised at the negative reaction within the e-learning and OER communities. The courses were open but they were simple and did not use more advanced educational approaches. They were not granular so you could not reuse individual parts of them. The may have been open but did not contain openly licenced material. The last objection seemed to me to be ideological in nature. You can learn almost anything from the Internet, but learners need structure. MOOCs added structure to open learning. Surely that was of value to learners and educators, even if the materials themselves were not openly licenced. Micromasters and “MOOC style” masters degrees are offering even more structure, and though not free, may do more to achieve the same objectives as the OER movement: Lowering the cost of higher education.
Which brings me to my final observation: Are we addressing the wrong problem? With two children of my own in Higher Education I have estimated the costs per year in the following categories:
The book and courseware business is essentially commercial and profit driven while higher education institutions are largely non-profit. It fits the ideological perceptions of those within higher education better to oppose the profit-making publishers than to challenge the inefficiencies within our own system.
But to be fair, some within the system are doing just that. My personal view is that we should stop sending kids to college. Apprenticeships and alternative credentials may provide them with more employable skills and hopefully employers will move towards more competency based recruitment rather than relying on the expensive signalling from college education. I believe that MOOC style courses and degrees will do more to reduce the cost of education than any other method and that is why I, personally, would prefer to work on what can be achieved through open courses and work-based learning than through OER.
Slides available at: http://bit.ly/oer19bm
As someone who once thought that OER was a great idea, I first became aware of an ideological tinge in the movement when I listened in to an online debate (argument?) about the need for Non-Commercial (NC) to be included in open licencing. I had been putting my teaching materials on the web since the nineties with a note saying that anyone could use them any way they wanted and that a note of attribution would be nice. To be honest, I wondered what all the fuss was about open licencing but I was certainly on one side of the argument, in that if anyone wanted to make money out of my materials, fair play to them, as I certainly wasn’t going to. I wondered why Downes opposed commercial use of materials and following the debate I was firmly on the side of McGreal and had come to the conclusion that Downes had an ideological distaste for people making money out of education.
In the early noughties I attended seminars by legal experts on the use of third party materials on the web and concluded that if I followed their advice I’d never get anything done, so I generally advised my colleagues to use whatever they found that was useful and put a note on their web page stating “If I have inadvertently breached copyright with any materials here, please contact me immediately and I will remove them”. In general I have said “Stop worrying. No academics have been fired or gone to jail yet, so you are unlikely to be the first”. In general I attribute my limited success in online learning to a list of things I avoided doing rather than particular things I did, and this is one of them.
Quality Assurance (QA) in general is an issue that I have a problem with in higher education. Higher Education has accreted a set of tedious bureaucratic processes that in no way guarantee a high quality learning experience for students. Such an approach is deterministic in that it claims that if you follow a specific methodology there will be a good outcome. QA professionals in industry have long since admitted that this is unreliable, and that Continuous Improvement (CI) is a much faster and more reliable route to Quality. It is also inimical to innovation as it assumes that the experts know what will achieve quality even when they are unaware of new techniques. Although my opposition to QA in OER is somewhat based on the unreliability of “expert review”, mostly it is that such review systems are too tedious and represent too little “bang for the buck”. I volunteered to be a MERLOT reviewer some time back but had to give it up as the effort for individual learning object was just too much. It would be better to encourage academics to release their materials on the web and to let users, students and teacher, review and share them. This is the way videos become viral on Youtube. To paraphrase my daughter: “No matter what difficult concept my engineering professors present in class, I’ll find an Indian professor on Youtube that explains it better”.
For the same reason I have issues with repositories, granularity and reusability. We had the National Digital Learning Repository in Ireland some time back. Something like €8m was spent on the assumption that if we built an infrastructure for storing and sharing OER people would use it. It was a IT person’s idea that did not seem to understand how academics (or people in general) really work. As people were not naturally inclined to share materials, and technically it was somewhat of a challenge to upload materials, it essentially had to pay people to do so. In order to theoretically improve reusability, it encouraged breaking down materials for a fine granularity (e.g. single images), further increasing the workload for academics. Then people had to be encouraged to use the materials in their courses. This involved getting to grips with the technology of the repository, hoping it had materials suitable for your students, and then integrating them together and into the course. As my daughter has suggested, it was easier just to search the Internet for good materials to link to, often Youtube videos. During this time as well, very simple recording and publishing options were emerging, making it easier to create the materials yourself.
When MOOCs hit the big time in 2012, I was surprised at the negative reaction within the e-learning and OER communities. The courses were open but they were simple and did not use more advanced educational approaches. They were not granular so you could not reuse individual parts of them. The may have been open but did not contain openly licenced material. The last objection seemed to me to be ideological in nature. You can learn almost anything from the Internet, but learners need structure. MOOCs added structure to open learning. Surely that was of value to learners and educators, even if the materials themselves were not openly licenced. Micromasters and “MOOC style” masters degrees are offering even more structure, and though not free, may do more to achieve the same objectives as the OER movement: Lowering the cost of higher education.
Which brings me to my final observation: Are we addressing the wrong problem? With two children of my own in Higher Education I have estimated the costs per year in the following categories:
- Cost of tuition (including fees, government subsidies and scholarships) €13k
- Accommodation €9k
- Food and entertainment €5k
- (Opportunity costs - they could have been working) €20k
- Books and courseware €0.6k
The book and courseware business is essentially commercial and profit driven while higher education institutions are largely non-profit. It fits the ideological perceptions of those within higher education better to oppose the profit-making publishers than to challenge the inefficiencies within our own system.
But to be fair, some within the system are doing just that. My personal view is that we should stop sending kids to college. Apprenticeships and alternative credentials may provide them with more employable skills and hopefully employers will move towards more competency based recruitment rather than relying on the expensive signalling from college education. I believe that MOOC style courses and degrees will do more to reduce the cost of education than any other method and that is why I, personally, would prefer to work on what can be achieved through open courses and work-based learning than through OER.
Slides available at: http://bit.ly/oer19bm
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