DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS
IMPROVING QUALITY AND
EFFICIENCY OF TEACHING
AND LEARNING
Dirk Van Damme
OECD/EDU/IMEP
A FEW INTRODUCTORY QUESTIONS
3
Tertiary-level attainment rate and labour
productivity across countries
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Canada
Chile
Czech Rep
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
GermanyGreece
Hungary
Iceland
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan
Korea
Luxembourg
Mexico
Netherlands
New ZealandNorway
Poland
PortugalSlovak Rep
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Turkey
UKUS R² = 0.1972
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
55
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Pe
rce
nta
ge
of
the
25
-64
ye
ar-
old
po
pu
lati
on
th
at
ha
s a
tta
ine
d t
ert
iary
ed
uc
ati
on
(2
011
)
Labour productivity: GDP per hour worked, current prices, USD (2011)
• Higher education contributes to productivity
increases in economy and society, often through
research-based technological innovations
• But why has productivity inside higher
education not increased to a similar degree?
Question
Expenditure per student, 2008 and 2011
80
90
100
110
120
130
140
150
Esto
nia
Slo
vak R
epu
blic
Chile
Hung
ary
Kore
a
Czech R
ep
ub
lic
Fin
land
Slo
ven
ia
Denm
ark
Ru
ssia
n F
ede
ratio
n
Isra
el
Ja
pa
n
Un
ited
Kin
gd
om
Italy
Pola
nd
OE
CD
ave
rag
e
EU
21 a
vera
ge
Ne
the
rla
nds
Sw
itze
rla
nd
Fra
nce
Sw
ede
n
Germ
any
Austr
alia
Bra
zil
Spa
in
Norw
ay
Me
xic
o
Belg
ium
Port
ug
al
Austr
ia
United
Sta
tes
Ire
land
Icela
nd
Index of change (2008=100)
Change in expenditure Change in the number of students (in full-time equivalents) Change in expenditure per student
Tertiary education
• Per student expenditure (public and private)
starts to decline in many countries
• Is higher education becoming relatively more
costly than comparable sectors where
technology-supported productivity increases
have taken place?
• Can technology – by realising digital learning
environments – help to raise efficiency and
quality in higher education?
Question
FASHION, WINDOW-DRESSING OR STRATEGY?
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 Feb 2015
‘The MOOC hype fades…’
‘The MOOC hype fades…’
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 Feb 2015
INSTITUTIONAL RATIONALES
11
•Widening access•Enhancing quality of on-campus learning•Increasing efficiency, lowering cost•Branding in the global reputation race
• E-learning allows opening opportunities
– To non-traditional, part-time students – with a social
mission to connect to disadvantaged students and to
let learners benefit of top-quality lecture(r)s
– By asynchronous delivery: independent from time and
place restrictions
– Allowing scaling up of existing course provision at low
cost
– Increasing market share of universities in continuing
education market
Institutional rationale 1.
Widening access
12
• ICT can greatly enhance the quality of on-
campus teaching and learning:
– Blended modes of instruction are mainstream
– Stronger student-faculty and student-student
interaction
– Activating, self-directed learning, use of problem-
solving, enhanced learning activities
• Cfr strategic view on ‘guided independent learning’
at Catholic University Louvain
Institutional rationale 2.
Enhancing quality of on-campus learning
13
• Promises of e-learning include an increase in
cost-effectiveness through economies of scale
– Higher student/faculty ratio, especially in
undergraduate classes
– Scaling for off-campus, online students
– Several elements of teaching & learning process
are not compressible, especially the most
innovative and personalised ones
– Little empirical evidence of massive cost-savings
14
Institutional rationale 3.
Enhancing efficiency and reducing costs
• One of the most powerful rationales probably is the opportunity for institutional profiling to showcase excellence and to brand the institution’s name in the global reputation race
– E-learning (especially MOOC) offers new opportunities to make excellence visible in a rapidly expanding global education market
– Complementing the market for mobile students with virtual mobility
– Networking as ‘joining the club’ of excellence, e.g. edX
Institutional rationale 4.
Branding in the global reputation race
15
CRITICAL CHALLENGES
•The business model•The pedagogical challenge•The student•Faculty and institutions
16
• Typically, institutions overestimate benefits and underestimate costs of e-learning
– Investment estimates usually limited to technological requirements
– Although highly scalable, the initial investment cost for high-quality online courseware and learning resources are huge
– Blended modes require high student-staff interaction and offer limited prospects for increasing student/staff ratios
– IP regulation and licensing should not be neglected
– Business model of MOOC provision still very unclear
Challenge 1.
Defining the business model
17
• Still, digital learning environments have the potential
to generate cost-efficiencies mainly by distributing
content widely at relatively low cost
• Some ways forward
– Creating communities of practices with a clear goal to
evaluate and enhance materials (e.g. better
procedures for peer-review and user feedback)
– Improve ability to search for high quality materials
(e.g. meta-tagging)
– Design resources flexibly for adaptation to new
environments, new students, etc.
Challenge 1.
Defining the business model
• Issues:
– Large majority of online courses are still traditional lectures and courseware in digital format, ill-adapted to the 21st
Century skills development (non-routine skills)
– MOOC may in fact slow down the trend of pedagogical innovation of e-learning
– One-way course delivery often has very poor learning outcomes
– Very few online courses use ICT creatively to design adaptive courseware, apply learning diagnostics, challenge the linear design of courses, including new assessment tools, etc.
– Completion rates of online courses is still very low, according to publicly available statistics
– Obsession with scaling goes counter to the pedagogical need for interactivity, social learning and personalisation
Challenge 2.
The pedagogical challenge
19
• Institutional strategic approach
– Massive use of ICT requires institutional transformation in its curriculum planning, course design policies and delivery mechanisms
– Need for an institutional support centre for course development and instructional design
• E-learning support centres exist in Columbia, MIT, Princeton, Oxford, Bristol, etc.
– Huge need for effective support of faculty and staff
– But well designed e-learning can provide huge benefits over traditional delivery
Challenge 2.
The pedagogical challenge
20
• Some opportunities of online learning in improving pedagogical quality
– Expand access to content –e.g. specialised materials well beyond textbooks, in multiple formats, with little time and space constraints
– Support new pedagogies with learners as active participants –e.g. as tools for inquiry-based pedagogies and collaborative workspaces
– Collaboration for knowledge creation –e.g. collaboration platforms for teachers to share and enrich teaching materials
– Feedback –make it faster and more granular
– Automatize data-intensive processes –visualisation
Challenge 2.
The pedagogical challenge
• Some opportunities of online learning in fostering collaborative teaching and learning practices:
– Creating communities of practice purposefully evaluating and enhancing quality of resources through user feedback, adapting and modifying resources, etc.
– Improving access to and sharing of high-quality materials
– Providing targeted search tools to high-quality materials
– Flexibly adapting resources to new environments
Challenge 2.
The pedagogical challenge
Virtual and remote labs
• iLab Central at Northwestern University, USA:
– Students use real lab equipment via a web browser and do lab assignments from any location with internet access
– Impact on content understanding and on science enquiry skills (better quality experiment designs and resarchquestion formulation) (effect size: 0.8)
Gaming and Game-Design Methodology
(GDM)
• University of Norwich – Eco Virtual Environment project: island with growing energy demands require students to specialize and collaborate to design an energy network, while getting real-time feedback on their decisions in terms of power, finance and environment
• GDM: Even more learning
Real-time formative assessment
• Colorado School of Mines, USA
• Use of tablet PCs and « InkSurvey » software allowing interactions in the style of clickers for hand-written and drawn feedback
• Positive impact on creativity (as measured by Torrance Creativity Test) and critical thinking – and new possibilities of collaborative problem solving
• Regular on-campus students:
– Are considered to be ‘digital natives’ but it would be
wrong to assume that by definition they have the skills
to effectively integrate technology in learning
– Most of them do not want technology to change
radically the learning experience or to decrease the
value of human interaction in the academic
experience
– Have very different profiles, interaction needs
– Have a high preference for ICT enabling social
learning and building ‘communities of inquiry’
Challenge 3.
The student
26
100 80 60 40 20 0 20 40 60 80 100
Poland
Ireland
Slovak Republic
Estonia
Korea
United States
Austria
Czech Republic
Average
Flanders (Belgium)
Japan
England/N. Ireland (UK)
Germany
Canada
Australia
Denmark
Norway
Netherlands
Finland
Sweden
Level 2 Level 3
Young adults (16-24 year-olds) All adults (16-65 year-olds)
27
Proficiency in problem solving in technology-
rich environments
%
Adults at Level 3 can• Complete tasks involving multiple applications, a large number of steps, impasses, and the discovery and use of ad hoc commands in a novel environment. • Establish a plan to arrive at a solution and monitor its implementation as they deal with unexpected outcomes and impasses.
Adults at Level 2 can complete problems that have explicit criteria for success, a small number of applications, and several steps and operators. They can monitor progress towards a solution and handle unexpected outcomes or impasses.
Profiles of students with regard to Internet
use
OECD (2012)
Data Italy, 2008
28
• Regular on-campus students:
– Set limits to technology use in classrooms
– ICT familiarity does not automatically translate into better learning
• Research shows that ICT skills and ICT social contact skills do not predict academic success
– Have a limited view on how technology might enhance their learning and conform to teachers’ views
• Adaptive courseware and appropriate support needed to realise the potential of technology
Challenge 3.
The student
29
• Off-campus online students
– Often lack the learning skills (meta-cognitive skills, perseverance, etc.) to successfully engage in self-directed learning
– Receive little support and student-teacher interaction
– Are deprived of the social and cultural experiences which impact on the academic skills, identity development and the formation of the ‘academic mind’
– Very little is known about the factors which impact on academic success of online learners
Challenge 3.
The student
30
• To make e-learning a success, the support from faculty and institutional leadership are critical
– Not only the pioneers and early-adopters, but also the mainstream, the pragmatists and the sceptics
– Institutional strategic thinking and leadership are critical
– Unexpected increases in work load, not accounted for, jeopardise adoption and support
– Skills deficits are often hidden, but can have great impact – need for appropriate training
– Incentives and rewards are necessary
– There are also benefits for face-to-face teaching resulting from working on e-learning courses
Challenge 4.
Faculty and institutions
31
CONCLUSIONS:BENEFITS & OPPORTUNITIES
• Many aspects of the teaching & learning
environments in universities cannot be
compressed, but technology will be part of the
answer to address efficiency challenges
– Provided a sustainable business model can be
developed for online learning
– Provided hybrid course delivery will increase
economies of scale
– Provided students are equipped with the skills to
take benefit from self-directed learning
Efficiency gains
• Online learning offers both new challenges and
new opportunities for quality improvement in
teaching and learning processes and content
– Adaptive courseware, new interactive learning
tools
– Collaborative development of courseware,
content and delivery modes
– Creating communities who take responsible of
teaching & learning processes
Quality improvement
• …some words of caution
– Dramatizing language often used in this context
is inappropriate and unnecessary
– Online learning and technology in general seem
to raise huge expectations, while realities are
much more mundane and sobering
– As any other academic activity it requires great
care, rigour and effort…
– …and, especially, a very intensive research
backing!
Finally…