Collaboration Initiative

Far and away the most important initiative would be to build coalitions with other institutions equally renowned in your areas of expertise, in order to co-create programs of very high quality content capable of being rated in the world’s top 20. Cocreation of very expensive high quality learning content will save money but more importantly the co-marketing will make them attractive. Create Chunks of courses (E.g. 6 weeks) so they can be shared, leaving space for:

• Localisations
• active learning and group work.
• Sharing common content between different programs (e.g. leadership skills)

Other key initiatives would include

• Competency based (self paced assessment)- Move from credit hours to credit competencies
• Personalised adaptive learning (e.g. Cerego)
• Micro Credentials (open badges)
• Experiments with Models for the Future

Catch up with established Tech

This list is written for a blended learning university that is going to offer a face to face experience for students to not only enhance learning but expose them to cultural, friendship, networking and sporting experience. It is a list of proven working technologies and pedagogies that represent the bread and butter of what should be on offer right now. I would argue should be considered Maslow hygiene factors.

Technologies · An LMS with courses with enrolled students and instructors. Should include learning materials, communications, formative assessment and a grade centre, online assignment submission
· Compulsory online presence policy for all courses, with due dates.
· Best practice course design principles.
· Online assignment marking
· Plagiarism detection system
· Discussion board
· 100% recorded lectures for didactic presentations *which typically might only be 30-50% of the course.
· Ability to pre-record lectures to free up class for active learning
· Soundproof recording booths for students and staff
· BYOD laptop policy
· Ubiquitous study space design standards that include (wireless, screens for BYOD laptops, power, a combination of cubicles and collaboration rooms.
· Ubiquitous classroom design standards that includes wireless, power for students, classroom control technology that includes central control panel for lighting and screes and visualising, recording, and lecture computer with apps including screen sharing from students)
· Electronic examination system – based on BYOD laptops
· Active learning technologies (e.g. polling tools) and group work collaboration for classrooms (co-editing tools and screen sharing tools) that run from BYOD laptops
· Video assignment system for student assessment
· An eportfolio system for reflections, work examples, and skills accreditation

Pedagogy
o Include a few very high value seminars from academics and practitioners that is promoted to the public and can be attended in person or streamed. This is intended to improve community engagement, but also useful as a marketing tool.
o Include group learning activities that help simulate authentic work place activities. This will require the provision of more work-like collaboration environments.
o Includes regular formative assessment to maintain engagement and reduce cramming.
o Report to both students and coordinators on individual students progress (engagement analytics)          
o Include inquiry based learning
o Provide regular feedback in many forms including from: intelligent tutors; badges; written and audio feedback from coordinators or tutors.
o Assess students with authentic tasks            
o Authentic assessment     
o Link to employability experiences and skills
o Be vertically and horizontally integrated into programs   

Associated Elements
o Work placements
o Overseas exchange experiences    
o Very rich cultural, entertainment, social and sporting lifestyle.
o Creates students that are employable
o Commercial and industry collaborations on campus
o Predominantly students will love on campus

The Current eLearning Landscape

Speed and Globalisation

The pace of technology enhanced learning change is accelerating, driven by the globalization of higher education, information technology, and deregulation. Technology is changing at a rate that is faster than universities are presently absorbing. The unfolding reality in higher education is uncertain, ever changing, and unpredictable. As the world moves to an ever faster clock cycle, so must we change our management to keep pace (Boyd 1996, Hodgson and White 2003). Most welcome this phenomenon for its ability to expand the availability of educational resources to students throughout the world, and deliver improvements in learning outcomes.

There is now a global market of thousands of universities with LMS’s that advanced technology can be plugged into. Technology advances in smart learning objects like adaptive quizzes will require more investment than traditional learning materials. Large global vendors are able to make these investments and are increasingly offering advanced intelligent learning content to serve this market (consider Wiley, Pearson Education etc.). It will not be economically feasible for individual universities to rebuild entire programs of courses with advanced open content on their own. In order to compete with commercial providers, collaborative efforts to build and maintain full programs of advanced open content will be required. SPOCS and MOOCS are a suitable platform for achieving this goal, and should be part of any plan. MOOCs and SPOCS are expected to a) increase the marketability of courses (‘get an MIT certification your local university’) but also help disrupt-proof a university through their ability to share course material and credit, thereby achieving the sustainable economies of scale required to build and maintain this material.

While much of this technology has the ultimate goal of enhancing student learning, there are also important innovations that enhance the student experience or improve efficiency or catering to flexible learning or different learning styles. This plan therefore includes the pursuit of educational technology that benefits wider organizational objectives such as: student equity, industry connection, access to services, global engagement, cultural engagement, learning convenience, and peer networking. Efficiency benefits are however particularly important for their ability to redirect scarce resources towards other University objectives such as personal contact, research, cultural activities, and community engagement.

Technology disruptions are unlikely to impact the international student market since many of these students are aspiring for citizenship or a western job, and need to attend a Western institution to do so. Technology disruptions do however have the ability to impact the domestic market where students have an increasing array of online options available, often linked directly to job sites (e.g. SEEK, Linkedin). To remain competitive for these students may require collaborative efforts to create shared degree programs full of advanced rich intelligent (expensive) learning content and technology, but delivered with a high value face to face component. Having 20,000 around the world, investing time, each creating the same programs is not sustainable in a globalised system. For those concerned about homogenisation, we are currently well too far down the wrong end of that scale to remain sustainable.

Figure - Global ELearning Technology is more rapidly solving problems and providing opportunities

Keeping Pace in Higher Education

The chair of the Group of Eight Universities once lamented a “technology  tsunami sweeping across our campuses” (Young 2014) suggesting  technology is changing at a much faster rate than universities can presently absorb. Since then we have increasingly needed management approaches suitable for dealing with rapid change. The benefits of technology enhanced learning (TEL) have already been established (JISC, 2008; US Department of Education, 2010), and studies show that neglecting broad technology adoption in favour of individual innovation, risks significant productivity losses by as much as 45% (Comin, 2012). The need for new governance structures, support practices and change management are now far more important imperatives for universities than innovation in what has become a global market of new elearning technologies and competitors (Diego and Mestieri, 2010; Ertmer, 2005). Below I've listed management principles for keeping pace in Higher Education.

If you are looking for the slides from my presentation at EduTECH2015 they are available here. The full video of this presentation will be available again soon.

Course Design First
Before we focus too much on technology I’d like to tell a story. In the late 90's I completed a 100% online master’s degree that won an award for the best program in its discipline in the world. It was delivered on the now antiquated Web CT system, and it was the most effective, efficient and enjoyable learning experience I’ve ever had, and far superior to my face to face undergrad degree and far superior to most of the online courses I see even today, simply through thoughtful course design. It was very engaging and interactive, exposing me to discussions with students all over the world, all with decade old off-the-shelf technology. So before we invest too much in “innovation”, perhaps we can invest in instructor support and training to use the tools already available.

Strategy and Governance
It makes a difference if you know where you’re going. The decisions you make on technologies will be different if you have a pure online strategy versus an enhanced classroom strategy. Encourage leadership to decide and articulate their strategy. Education is on IT time now. Decisions and restructures can’t take years any more.

Add Missing Mature Technologies
Organisations don’t need to take risks with bleeding edge ideas any more when there is so much value in simply catching up with the many mature technologies available. While there is always a place for bespoke development, vendors have woken up to the fact that higher education is a large global market ripe for change in a way that better leverages technology for genuine benefit. The biggest issue by far is that organisations have been very slow to leverage what is available. Its natural to worry about where its all going, which emerging technology to we need to embrace, but put I it to you that any organisation that consistently and fully leverages the available mature technologies will be a stand-out leader. By contrast if you asked most organisations for a list of proven effective learning technologies they would not have one because it requires governance and resources to actively scan and evaluate the market. Organisations need only educate themselves about what is already available and has already been successfully used around the world, with a focus on proven mature capabilities.

Focus on Mature technologies - not fake innovations
When are looking for technologies adopt be careful to filter out 'innovations' that people are playing with and spruiking for marketing or research gain. Institutions and researchers can be loath to admit their innovation is not working out or was ill conceived. Many of these tools are not ready and suitable for broad adoption and may ultimately fail. In the new global market, for nearly any new technology idea you can think of, someone else has tried it before. Its always perplexed me that literature reviews are a standard part of research papers, but market reviews are allowed to be completely inadequate for nearly all internally funded development proposals. One need only search using “<idea> site:.edu”and find out what others have done and learn from that first. Of course some experimentation is ok but not at the expense of the ‘bread and butter' required for broad institutional progress. Be careful to look at the roadmap of new features planed from your existing primary vendors. I can give many examples of where 'innovation' efforts absorbed large amounts of time and resources before being completely overtaken by a free features added to existing products. A consequential lesson from that is to hurry up and make fuller use of the tools that you have, because the dream tools you want are probably coming faster than you can cope with. Furthermore , innovations are often competing with multinationals so it might be better to collaborate. If you truly believe you have an idea worth writing bespoke code for, make sure the cost does not outweigh the likely short lifespan. If you want to take it to the world and give it a chance of survival, open-source it or build it as SAS with open standard integrations (e.g. LTI for LMSs).The bottom line... if you put your innovation on the market and its not lapped up.... think twice about inflicting it broadly at home because it will take as much work to unravel as it took to build and deploy. We spend far too much time on deploying and unravelling bespoke failures, which arguably is causing institutions to fall behind.

Studies show that neglecting broad technology adoption in favour of innovation, risks significant productivity losses by as much as 45% (Comin, 2012). Its tempting to chase that high profile 'innovative' edge, but excessive focus on innovation steals scarce resources from much higher value mature initiatives, and when the innovation fails it gives technology a bad reputation, crippling adoption of useful ideas. Catching up with ‘the present’ is enough to be a leader. When you dig below the surface of many organisations touting innovations it turns out to be lipstick on their failure to maintain broad pace. So some experimentation with unproven technology is ok but not at the expense of mature technologies. A mature technology is one that past the hype hump on Gartner’s hype cycle. So its proven to return benefits that outweigh its cost, at at least multiple institutions.

Realise Benefits
Realising benefits is a bigger opportunity than innovation because most organisations have not done it very well. Benefits realisation is therefore a great way to get ahead of other organisations. Once you have all your missing mature technologies on board, find out how many people are actually using the technologies. Find out how many people even know about the functionality available to them. You might be surprised. Apply change management principles to help staff find out about and appropriately adopt the technology you have. Catalogue the capabilities you have; survey the staff to find out how many instructors know; demonstrate the capabilities at many staff meetings; survey to find out how many are interesting in training; provide the training and design support; monitor adoption rates. Make a small amount of adoption compulsory (because students want and need a consistent predictable minimum) and then let the rest of the adoption be voluntary, letting the staff make professional judgements. Trust that if they are aware of it and it makes sense they will use it.
Its tempting to get that high profile innovative edge, but really its sub-optimising when most Universities have failed to leverage all the mature learning technologies available like lecture recording by default, online marking, active learning tools etc. Catching up with ‘the present’ is enough to be a leader in a world obsessed with innovation and neglectful of genuine pervasive change support. Chasing the latest shiny thing at the expense of mature technologies sub optimizes limited resources.  Structured experimentation is important, but after mature technology implementation and benefits realisation is done right.



Vanilla is Fastest
Vanilla implementations allow you to maintain a faster pace over time. Custom developments and customisations give a short term advantage but slow down upgrades that deliver the most value. Over time your core system vendors will deliver more functionality faster than you can develop because they have greater economies of scale. You might get a six month jump on your vendors with bespoke projects but more often your little dev-team will get left behind and run out of money. With increasing globalisation and more than ten thousand clients, the education market is very attractive to vendors so expect it to be very well serviced in the near future. There is little little value in writing custom applications unless you plan to commercialise and compete or sell off. What ever you imagine you need will land in your lap soon enough, and meanwhile your time is more effectively spent making better use of what is already out there. Yes you might have brilliant coders on campus and there is a place for that but: have they properly scanned for existing or upcoming solutions; do they have proven experience writing enterprise class usable systems; are they aware of the big picture corporate issues or just solving 1% issues (30 courses instead of 3000); will this end up another millstone around your corporate neck; does supporting research and innovation really outweigh the need to truly catch up with technology enhance teaching possibilities by funding staff training and course design support?
Consider Off The Shelf (OTS) systems instead of bespoke development. OTS functionality will overtake bespoke, so over time it can be better to spend precious resources leveraging mature vanilla technology than building and then decommissioning bespoke systems. There is a 45% productivity benefit for broad adoption and only 22% for innovation. Organisations that innovate after they have fully leveraged mature technologies will stay father ahead, and be faster overall. Some customisations are necessary and justifiable, but don’t let them slow down the pace of core system upgrades which deliver the most new capabilities.
Don’t be fooled into believing OTS technology can’t do the bulk of the work required. I completed a fully online masters degree on the ancient WebCT platform more than 10 years ago and the program won an international award for the best program in its field, online or face-to-face. Technologies were already good enough for delivery of world class degrees in 2005, so don’t be listening to people who say we need better technology to deliver high quality course design. In the words of one of my university's most awarded instructors “I hear lecturers listing off things they say you can’t do in <our LMS> and for every one they mention I know how it can be done. They just don’t know how to use it”. Communication, training, design support, leadership, vision and guidelines for aspiration are much more likely the missing ingredients, not technology.

.. only then actively scan for and test immature technologies
After you have added all the missing mature technologies, actively scan for and maintain high levels of awareness of new technologies. Actively test new ideas in your environment. Try a portfolio of experiments so you can re-deploy scarce resources from failed ideas into the most promising ideas.



... and manage your  experiments as experiments... not deployments
Manage immature technologies as experiments, not deployments, or they will deplete your precious resources when they fail. Don’t make promises. Don’t over commit. Collect feedback and have an open mind. Have a clear stage gate at the end to review and kill or explore further. Treat ANY new technology (even mature ones) as experiments for your environment initially. Openly acknowledge they are experiments and don’t give them higher priority than fully leveraging the bread and butter mature technologies.



Prioritise by Value
Prioritise solutions that offer widest enterprise value. Something that helps 30 courses might sound important but that might only be 1% of your course base. If you can’t fund 100 equal projects, consider something with broader value. Leave minority projects to the schools or marketing teams. If you deliver a series of niche projects the broader organisation will eventually question the value being added.  Deliver broad value and show you deliver broad value. Questions might include: Does it genuinely improve efficiency or improve learning outcomes? Is this what staff at your university actually say they want (else run a pilot)? How many courses will it benefit?

Be Evidence Based - Data Driven
Show you are evidence based by not making decisions based on a few anecdotes. Run lots of surveys to find out what the instructors and leaders really think of your services, and what they really want.  Use that data to make and show improvements and progress. Defeat anecdotes with active data collection, or your valuable work will be vulnerable to very poorly informed opinions.

Leverage BYOD
To move faster, leverage the combination of software and BYOD. Minimise dependence on hardware in learning spaces.  Software technology develops faster and is faster to deploy than hardware, so minimise use of hardware in learning spaces else you are stuck with embarrassing out-of-date hardware that no one knows how to use and frankly is a waste of $. Lab and library desktops are a student equity problem, because poor students can’t take desktops to class. Pay attention to the bread and butter. Do you have enough power points to support BYOD in your lecture theatres? Flat learning spaces might be the future, but meanwhile you can use collaborative and active learning software to achieve the same thing much faster at much lower cost, than very expensive refurbishments.

Think about Cloud Services?
Software as a Service (SAS) should theoretically be updated more quickly as we move into the future. Its not always a clear cut decision though so take it on case by case basis and consider the impact on integrations and customisations.

Thoughts?
Simon Collyer

References
Comin, D., & Mestieri, M. (2010). The Intensive Margin of Technology Adoption HBS Working Paper 11-026.
Comin, D., & Hobijn, B. (2012). How early adoption has increased wealth—until now. Harvard Business Review, 90(3), 34-35.
Ertmer, P. A. (2005). Teacher pedagogical beliefs: The final frontier in our quest for technology integration. Educational Technology, Research and Development 53(4). 25-39.
JISC. (2008). Exploring tangible benefits of e-learning: Does investment yield interest? Newcastle, UK: Northumbria University. Retrieved from http://sitecore.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/bptangiblebenefitsv1.pdf
U. S. Department of Education. (2010). Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies. Retrieved from: https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf
Young, I. (2014). Imagining an Australia built on the brilliance of our people, National Press Club. Retrieved from: https://go8.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/article/national_press_club_speech_-_ian_young_pdf_version.pdf

An eLearning Procurement Model

Global ELearning technology is moving at a faster pace than most universities can absorb. In fact most universities don’t have any kind of methodical structured process to become aware of and make use of technologies as they emerge. This post outlines such a process.

Solutions for enterprise wide problems should initially be sought by leveraging the rapidly evolving educational technology market where vendors can deliver far greater quality than in house through economies of scale. Start with requirements and an opportunities scan, then a solutions scan, and in the odd case there is no Off The Shelf (OTS) solution its usually better to wait and refocus than go bespoke. Going bespoke is not only expensive but slows down your upgrades and usually has to be undone when better OTS solutions are made available.

Use a top down approach to enterprise projects to deploy new broadly applicable capabilities lead by identified broad problems and opportunities. Local Custom Solutions deliver local course, school and faculty level needs.

Under the ELearning Sponsor at your institution have a regular meeting with:

· a standing item to hear and revise top problems and opportunities – and prioritise the list in line with the strategy.

· a standing item to hear status of formal reports on projects to address the above.

Appoint Resources to:

· stay abreast of eLearning capability opportunities internationally (i.e. new technologies) – producing formal reports: e.g. adaptive learning; analytics; competency based learning;

· stay abreast of broad teaching problems at your university – again producing regular formal reports on the key issues: e.g. grades processing errors; lack of feedback; ePortfolios; placements;

· interpret these capabilities and problems through the lens of the institutional strategy to inform and educate sponsor – with a list of the key problems and opportunities;

· give the Elearning Sponsor the responsibility for prioritising new capability development or acquisition and hearing reports on progress;

· conduct new capability development investigations, in collaboration with schools and faculties, using a standard IT procurement model which involves: collecting requirements; scanning for options; evaluating options; shortlisting; piloting options with coordinators; deploying solutions

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?

Before you put your program fully online…

 

If you are putting your program online you might get a jump for a few years but ultimately if everyone does this you have to consider how you will compete as a program ‘author’ in a massive new global market:

· Do you have an international reputation in research in that discipline?

· Are you a leader in serving local market needs (e.g. accounting in Australia)?

If the answers are no, then the options might be to give up being a content author by:

· Going online using content developed by one of the above, delivering the program as a franchisee;

· Going online and piggy backing off higher-quality higher-reputation publisher learning content.

I suspect that ultimately the publishers will have the development skills and the marketing skills to win the competition for content authoring. They should deliver better quality learning materials at  a lower cost. The key advantages for higher education would be:

1. Economies of scale delivering higher quality rich multi-media learning experiences that student will demand;

2. Personalised adaptive learning that represents content according to the personal learning needs and progress of each student;

3. Analytics to help coordinator understand student progress;

4. Assessment, both formative and summative.

Finally if you don’t like any of the options above, you can focus on offering a premium face to face learning and campus based cultural experience with high value active learning in attractive classrooms, with on campus residences, clubs, societies, and events. It seems to be a bonus these days if you can also offer westernisation services that open the door to an international career, and the possibility of citizenship in an attractive country.