I read
this article the other day and commented on twitter that I felt it had flaws and that I'd comment in more detail what I felt they were later as I didn't think a tweet would be long enough to capture what I wanted to say. Eventually got around to that today, but didn't realise just how much I wanted to say! :-)
Firstly, I should note I'm not an expert in this subject and I'm specifically commenting in the context of the UK, and it's entirely likely that the flaws I perceive are erroneous - in which case I would welcome the feedback :-)
Secondly, while I do see some of the arguments as flawed, I believe I completely agree with the conclusion and recommendation.
I'll go through this in the order the points occur to me through the article, so probably best read along side the article.
Bloom, 1984 is cited and appears to underpin much of what the rest of the article is based on. While undoubtedly most students can achieve better results academically with individual tuition, are academic results really the only measure of the effectiveness of an education system? As one alternative metric to consider, would the sheer number of students who now go on to achieve a degree have been possible without the technological innovations adopted in education at all levels? Hence, rather than increasing the attainment of a similar number of individuals to meet their absolute potential, it could be argued that the education systems are now guiding a much higher proportion of students to reach more of their potential.
It is then argued that the improvements in education to delivery better academic results have not been delivered subsequently. However, the ever higher pass rates of students in exams and improving grades could be evidence to the contrary surely? It would seem obvious to me that as resources are limited (so you can't just throw money at the problem) and society needs to accept any changes made (e.g. employers need to trust the accredited certificates students are awarded mean something), any changes are going to be slow by necessity.
My individual perception of education systems is that education
has been transformed with the use of technology, beyond simply automating the past - but by
evolution not
revolution and hence perhaps is not as obvious. As an example, with the advent of the Internet and search engines, the question of assessing information literacy and research skills rather than simple knowledge retention and regurgitation of 'facts' has undoubtedly had an impact on not only how teaching is assessed but also the very skills which are seen as most valuable in a knowledge based economy.
The limiting factors in implementing innovative technologies in education are not technological or even necessarily pedagogical, they are societal, and changes in society tend to be slow...very slow. Revolutions in society tend to be associated with periods of major unrest and hardship, while in periods of relative stability and peace 'people' tend to prefer slow small changes to the status
quo. It is therefore little surprise that parents, employers, educators, administrators would all apply pressure on education to "stick with what we know".
Often groups will not accept significant change unless the status
quo is obviously broken. With increasing grades in schools and drastically increased numbers obtaining further education, there are no obvious signs of that (although the current economic outlook could change that view!)
The article then argues that
CMS/
VLE have been focused on improving the administrative tasks of instruction rather than changing the dominant learning modality (from classroom based instruction to online/hybrid courses). However, this to me misses the key point that educators are often also required to perform course administration functions, and that by liberating them of that overhead, they can be more productive in the individual support and tuition identified by Bloom as being of such benefit.
I would also argue that even simply putting course materials online breaks the modality of teaching of the past, especially if those materials are made available in advance of the traditional classroom based sessions. Students can and do then have the opportunity to study in advance on a subject, to engage more with the content when delivered in the lectures and potentially for those "lectures" to become much more interactive and discursive with many benefits as a result.
I do not feel that the importance of the
CMS/
VLE as a simple content repository should be underestimated in the impact this can have on education. Without knowing the content of lectures in advance, the power in the lecture theatre was clearly with the lecturer, but when students have the power to have studied in advance, at least some of that power has been handed to the them. That can radically change the dynamic in a group, it can increase the likelihood of building personal learning networks which can be sustained outside and beyond the formal education setting too.
While on the subject of personal learning networks and personal learning environments....these are things I believe students have always had, but they have now been given a label. Students have always discussed subjects with others, they have always read books outside of the proscribed reading materials (or watched TV/radio/opera etc). The difference that technology and social networking/Web 2.0 brings is the breadth and visibility of these things. As such, they are another evolution in learning rather than a revolution, and in the same way that universities have always had social spaces for students, it should be obvious and trivial that by extension this should extend to the virtual world too now.
It is argued:
"...one possible characterization of the CMS is a very effective, albeit very expensive, course content distribution and teacher-student communication platform. While improvements in efficiency are certainly beneficial to faculty members and students, the CMS has yet to yield consistently demonstrable, replicable, significant improvements in learning outcomes."
Expensive? That appears subjective and depends on a lot of details, particularly in the implementation locally. I have argued previously (at ALT-C 2009) that the
VLE could equally be an amalgam of 3rd party tools, many of which are "free" to an institution such as Google Apps or MS Live@edu, which could mitigate the capital costs and many of the revenue costs too.
That aside, the simply huge increase in the number of students now progressing through HE in the UK must point to some significant benefits which would not have been possible with the resources available otherwise. Surely that is a clear improvement in learning outcome for those additional students, and would not have been possible without the simple administrative efficiency improvements (amongst other factors too of course).
I do agree that there is much more potential for improvement in the use of technology to facilitate learning, but dismissing the benefits already made with the doorstop analogy is mistaken. I would feel it more appropriate to use the analogy that while a desktop computer can be used to read War and Peace, it can also be used to pay your bills online, control the heating, do the shopping etc. It is these tedious admin rolls that by facilitating can give one the time to eventually read War and Peace though.
While we would all probably like to imagine students as being keen to adopt a self directed approach to their life long studies, this doesn't appear to be a reflection of reality. The vast majority of students are studying to get a certificate which acts as a free pass in later life to better pay, more interesting jobs, better social standing. They are not actually that interested in "learning", instead wishing to be "taught" how to get through the gates that HE makes them navigate to get to their real goals in life. Anecdotal comments suggest to me that it's still as little as 5-10% of students entering HE which have any interest their life long "learning".
While HE could adapt an alternative approach that insists on students owning the learning, would this really fit with most of them? Would drop out rates actually increase if it became a barrier too far for the majority of students to be motivated to climb? I agree it's possible, and that it is sad that more students don't already enter HE with that mind set, but I believe it naive and dangerous to expect radical change, at least in the short term. Any such changes need to be established and embedded in education before students reach HE, and need to be sold to parents and employers even before that.
RE: Artificial Time Constraints in the
CMS - I agree that the automatic registration of students on modules is a great boon, and also that "De-registering" at the end of a module breaks the learning network etc. However, that doesn't have to be the case and is not something that I see as philosophically linked with the
CMS/
VLE as a concept. I've seen an example in the US (built on
Sharepoint the same as we use at
UoP) where module sites persist and previous students engage with current and even future students within the sites. This would seem to have all the benefits while avoiding the pitfalls. Currently at
UoP, we create new module sites for each cohort, but retain previous sites - we do however "lock" them which has the same problems. This is currently being discussed and may change though.
I see your learning network diagram as hopefully flawed. Each semester, the students learning network (which includes those parts outside of the
VLE in my view) should be starting at a slightly higher level and should grow again more steeply than the semester before as they gain proficiency in the skills of developing such a network. There should therefore be a general improvement overtime while keeping the same general saw tooth shape in my view.
I agree that social networks like
Facebook tend to have more persistence, but it is flawed to think they are perpetual either. Ask anyone who established a network on
MySpace and then found everyone else flocked to
Facebook instead. The drivers of the demise of the networks are different, but no such social network is permanent, and neither are employment networks. Much work involves the creation of small, transient groups to contribute to a common goal and such networks rarely have a persistence although producing outputs which may. As such it could be argued that forcing students to practice the skills of re-establishing such networks over and over in the
CMS/
VLE is actually a positive learning outcome :-)
I agree that there is a human desire to "leave a mark" - and that it is appropriate for these to be outside of the
VLE/
CMS in the same way that the classes I took in wood work were transitory, but the things I made in it were more permanent and persisted longer (still all gone now though). This is where I see an e-portfolio part of the total
VLE being appropriate. An area where students can have clear ownership of persistent "assets" which they can take with them when they leave. This could equally be entirely outside the provision of the institution, but in the same way that e-mail was previously seen as a luxury and valued by students, I believe a e-portfolio is currently.
In the same way, if we are arguing that knowledge-able is now more important than knowledgeable (to borrow from Martin Bean at Alt-C I think it was), then perhaps removing the crutch of having the previous semesters module folders available as a short cut to information in later modules is also a positive benefit? If students could simply refer back to a module notes online rather than utilising the skills to find information "from the ether" whenever its needed then are we really building the right skills still? Now of course, they'll have their own notes to refer back to, but that means they've taken ownership of that information - it's part of
their toolkit for future problems and is helping them move away from relying on answers from the tutor?
RE: Learners as Co-Instructors, Instructors as Co-Learners
Again, while many current
CMS/
VLE do not facilitate this sort of activity, I do not see this as a fundamental philosophical issue. If anything, it's a legal liability issue. If students are publishing things in a system owned by an institution then that institution accepts some liability for that content. If it were to prove contentious in any way, the institution needs some mechanism in place to react to that. That could be costly in either admin or legal fees to mount a defence - particularly with the current libel laws in the UK (e.g. see #
libelreform on twitter). It is even a minefield if the institution were to require students to create content on 3rd party sites where the liability would lie.
At
UoP, we are currently rolling out the ability for sub parts of a module site to be made visible externally, either for specific named access or anonymous viewing (not contribution though), and the limiting factors are almost entirely legal not technical or
VLE specific issues.
This is regrettable, but is perhaps best addressed with a change in the law limiting liability for such materials in the same way as the exemptions for copyright when used for academic assessment etc.
Costs - license costs for
CMS/
VLE - I suggest this is simply part of market forces and suppliers will charge what the market will stand. If institutions begin refusing to pay, prices come down. There are options which do not have licensing costs but have other costs instead (e.g.
Moodle where skills and tech support costs are hidden in staff time rather than up front), or the approach
UoP has taken which has been to use
Sharepoint which we has strategically decided to adopt as the collaboration and
extranet tool anyhow, so using it to build a learning environment didn't include additional license costs (at least, that was part of the argument although various add
ons and the significant additional staff resource to develop things in house mean it's not a "free" solution either).
Hosting costs are potentially decreasing recently with the advent of cloud computing and outsourcing - it's a cost benefit consideration.
RE: having a single
VLE for the whole institution and the issues of "...fundamental philosophical and pedagogical problems with this monolithic approach." - I'm sure the same argument goes for general purpose teaching rooms, having a single library etc. If the cost and other benefits outweigh the problems, then it's a case of "suck it up". If they don't then the institution needs to firstly recognise that, and secondly adapt to allow flexibility. The fact that more institutions are adopting the single monolithic approach either means the benefits are seen to outweigh the issues or the decision makers are isolated from the issues and/or are not listening to the people they should be, or those people are not speaking up.
As I argued at the ALT-C event, if your institution isn't giving you the tools you need then either the issues aren't as big as they seem to you, or the decision makers are incompetent, or you've not told anyone what the issues are. In all three cases, the issue is not really with the
VLE, it's with how the institution operates.
RE: Social Learning and the Network Effect - The only real issue I have with this section is that not everyone learns best through discourse. Some people are fine with the "download learning" approach.
In addition though, I would say that the innovative part of things like the MIT materials being available comes not from them putting them out there but from how other institutions can re-use them and provide the space (physical and virtual) for the discourse around them.
This brings me to "the future of HE" - is there a role for physical campuses if everything is available online? Well, I strongly believe there is as HE is also about learning social, face to face skills, building "real world" social networks, and perhaps most importantly, it's important for those inspirational
performances which really good lecturers can deliver.
Has TV marked the end of theatre? (OK, nearly might be the answer to that one!) Did the radio and records mark the end for live bands? No. There is something very human about seeing a performance in person, and unless/until virtual reality can become indistinguishable from being there, then I see campuses having a valuable part to play in HE.
Online social interaction is great. Is it a replacement for all face to face interaction? No way, and I speak as a geek :-)
RE: The open Learning Network - I agree, there is probably too much inertia in the commercial
CMS/
VLE offerings to easily make significant changes (and little evidence of the dialogue between practitioners and developers being healthy - perhaps with procurement and management in between too much now they are established).
Similarly open source projects have the problem of gaining enough consensus to make such changes (or fork off and then probably suffer the doldrums of lack of critical mass).
So, I can see therefore that something outside might be needed to maintain momentum now - but does that really mean it needs a new name?
I completely agree that it is a false dichotomy between
VLE and
PLE. I argued at Alt-C that a
good VLE would allow individuals to use their
PLE with the
VLE as just one part of it (akin to using the library as well as chatting to other students or watching TV in the past).
I agree that we need content in the
VLE to be open, but as noted earlier - the problem there is mostly legal, not technical, pedagogical, or philosophical.
Where I disagree is that staff and students should be wasting their time picking any old 3rd party tool practically at random. Sure, use 3rd party applications to supplement the
VLE, but don't imagine that is a trivial exercise which should be dumped on every member of staff and every student. This perpetuates the myth that because it's easy to use
Facebook that everyone could use it for teaching and learning. Or that there are no legal or business risk issues to consider in the choice of 3rd party tools.
Yes, some of the 3rd party tools out there could be useful, but if their terms of service mean they'll share every one's private data with the world, or if their business model is flawed and they're likely to go belly up before the end of the first semester then they're probably best avoided. Similarly, if each system requires staff/students to create and maintain a separate
username/password, don't for a second think that won't have technical support and teaching and learning issues when they can't remember which
username/password was for which site.
And business continuity - imagine a course that's heavily using a 3rd party site and all the students have put all their work in there, but then the only academic that has rights to access the work is knocked down by a bus?
I know you allude to IT providing bridge applications for single sign-on etc, but these are non-trivial developments, and to justify the costs of developing each for a 3rd party tool, there would need to be a clear business case justifying the separate additional cost (and it's a revenue cost just like those horrid license fees for the CMS/VLE as it'll need maintaining over time too). It would need legal agreements with each 3rd party organisation with the costs that would involve and the time to implement.
Instead, what is needed is an open network that allows academics to use a Personal Teaching network (mostly to "squirt" content into it), and for students to use a Personal Learning network (mostly to grab content). Both would also need to be able engage in dialogue etc too using their preferred tools. So a lecturer might tweet something - that gets picked up by the VLE because the academic has configured it to pick up the RSS feed, and it's re-published within the VLE (or the RSS feed is just re-directed with a VLE address). The student then picks that up in Google reader from the RSS feed published through the VLE. Ditto for documents, dialogue etc.
So yes, the VLE acts as the glue between the PTN and the PLE, but using open standards and as a cohesive role for business continuity etc too.
I've already covered why forcing students to re-build learning networks is not necessarily a bad thing, but actually I do agree that building on existing networks is preferable :-)
RE: reliability/stability - it's interesting that you note that these are not likely outcomes of this proposal as of course, they would be reliant on multiple points of failure and therefore probably inherently significantly less stable/reliable. As I noted at ALT-C, feedback from students in the paper presented there is that reliable, stable and consistent were the key things they want from an institutional learning environment. Without a research paper on it, I would suggest that these would be the priorities for 90% of academics too!
Similarly, you note that this proposal would not be likely to save money. In the current economic climate facing HE in the UK in particular, the significant additional investment needed to develop such an infrastructure would therefore seem reckless at best.
RE: "...we believe teachers have a moral obligation...to be the best teachers they can be." I agree of course. However, I believe part of doing so is to take an holistic view, which includes understanding the business risks, the reality of the financial situation, the need for sustainability in education, the place of employers etc in determining what should be done, and actually - what students want.
If (most) students want to be
taught to pass an exam to get a better job rather than dragged kicking and screaming into being life long learners and into doing they best they possibly can academically but maybe not in life generally, then maybe, just maybe,
that is the moral thing to do?
(this last point very much tongue in cheek!)
- let the flack begin.
(I will just emphasise again, these are not necessarily the views of my employer - they're not necessarily my views if someone points out I've made a glaring error of judgement, in which case I'll deny I every really meant any of it ;-)
