New Benchmark for Online Courses

For a glimpse of the future of eLearning in higher education take a look at the app Yousician. Yousician is an integrated software package for teaching music. Now the market for people wanting to learn the guitar is clearly larger than that for learning CHEM101 but consider there are by some counts 20,000 universities in the world teaching first year chemistry, assembling their own primitive content. Its therefore no surprise that increasingly these learning packages are emerging for the higher education market (consider Sapling Learning).Yousician is disruptively more advanced than anything a busy higher education lecturer has time to build on their own, and disruptively more advanced than what entire collaborations of universities are doing with MOOCs presently. What sets products like Yousician apart is they are built from the ground up as integrated systems, and they are built by commercial teams set up with the skills resources and know how to serve, survive and lead in a global market.
I suspect these fully integrated multi-media learning packages are the future because they offer massively personalised learning that adapts to the student’s strengths and weaknesses and their personal rate of learning. For motivation they are very effectively gamified, providing constant personalised feedback on progress, with ways to improve and positive reinforcement for success. Developers are increasingly using these techniques to motivate students. The interface is built on rich media and very intuitive… with animations, video, audio, progress bars, and very short presentations by real people at the right moments. Because Yousician have deliberately built their app for a global market the income can sustain a significant team of the professionals required to build and maintain such a high quality experience. This team updates the app with new material monthly so there is no reason the model wouldn’t work with the most cutting edge post graduate disciplines that need to evolve with new research. 
To my mind the global eLearning market will increasingly supply these fully integrated learning packages across more and more disciplines simply because they are so much better, and they will be much cheaper than each university trying to develop their own integrated packages. Commercial integrated learning packages may therefore become the new minimum standard across university courses. Because they will be so much better it will be almost impossible to avoid being a customer. Trying to sustain the current model would be like insisting on writing your own word processor instead of using Word or Google Docs. Universities should really therefore be spending time thinking about how they can add value around this new smart content. Here are some thoughts on what activities might be redundant, and some that might be useful.

Possibly Redundant Activities

• Advanced content development may be a waste of time. Most universities are still stuck with eLearning 1.0 content (pdfs, text, pictures and some very basic quizzes) with insufficient resources to advance far beyond this in any sustainable way without tapping into global economies of scale.  Any piecemeal efforts invested by 20,000 universities to each build their own advanced eLearning 3.0 learning content will arguably be wasted and only give temporary gains, unless they can be turned into globally competitive products that are fully integrated smart learning packages (eLearning 3.0), which would require professional teams well beyond the affordability of any single university. For the content to survive it would not just have to be expensive eLearning 3.0 contennt but also sustained by a marketing and distribution business operating globally to share the production and maintenance cost and keep it sustainable.
• Most bespoke application development will struggle to survive unless they a) clearly serve a local-only requirement, b) fill a global hole and resourced to beat well-resourced global competitors. 
• Building many more traditional lecture theatres may be a waste of time when more content will be delivered online. Spaces need to be converted for study and collaboration, with some left for the fewer more significant event style presentations.

Useful Activities

• Work out your vision and competitive advantage in light of the emergence of fully integrated advanced learning packages. Identify and develop services that complement the global digital learning market.
• Collaborate with publishers or other organisations in the development of fully integrated advanced learning packages.
• Build greater awareness of off-the-shelf learning technologies and packages and build processes that allow them to be absorbed rapidly (start with the publishers because they are resourced to create higher quality material and keep it up to date). 
• Investigate other disaggregation opportunities like examinations.
• Build attractive and functional study and collaboration spaces for self-study and project based active learning.
• Build residential, social, cultural and sporting facilities, that can’t be delivered in a software package, and then target marketing at students that might be willing to pay the premium price for those experiences (this may be slightly different to your current cohort). Provide a precinct for industry to come on campus and build research collaboration and student work exposures.
• For universities that are underpinned by international students’ migration aspirations, clearly offer and market cultural and support programs to enhance integration and international employment prospects.

Thoughts?