I attended the Elearning for remote adult learners - What can we learn from the UKeU experience? post conference workshop at ALT-C 2004 wondering if I would be alone with the presenters. After three days of sitting through many presentations this could be one workshop too far! I need not have been concerned, the room was well populated with interested participants and it helped shine some more light on the ill fated UKeU. The comments and interpretations that follow are very much my own and do not necessarily represent those of any other members of the team at Bath.
The main presenters were Jonathan Darby and Annamaria Carusi of the e-Learning Research Centre (eLRC), a partnership of the University of Southampton, University of Manchester and the Higher Education Academy. Jonathan was previously the Chief Architect at the UKeU and as such was very involved in development of the UKeU learning platform. Annamaria Carusi was not previously involved with UKeU, she presented some of the eLRC's initial impressions about the UKeU experience.
My interest in attending this workshop was to try and glean a little more understanding of why this project did fail and to learn how we can (perhaps) help such mistakes be avoided in the future. I know much has been written on this topic, not least in Auricle, but this was an opportunity to hear an account for the first time from one of the major personnel within the UKeU.
Before the workshop started, Jonathan asked if any members of the press were present. The very act of asking this question probably resulted in their silence if any were present. I am not sure what effect a positive response would have had on the presentation.
Jonathan listed a number of reasons that have been proposed as to why the UKeU failed, these include:
- Platform problems
- Wrong courses
- No real need
- Poor market research
- Flawed business model
- Failure of management
- HEFCE interference
Jonathan Darby did seem to feel that given some more time the platform could have been developed into a robust product and commented that Sun Microsystems are interested to make the tool available to the wider educational community. I will comment on this point later.
The UKeU did seem to have placed itself into a difficult position regarding the pricing of their courses. Apparently the UKeU courses were approximately twice those being offered from other competing institutions notably in the USA and Australia. Also the marketing people felt that it was important to have an MBA. However there is huge number of providers worldwide and the UKeU would simply be just one more with potential students having no way to know if the UKeU was special and not one of the many poor examples that dominate. A fairly successful course was described as coming from a niche market as this attracted relatively large numbers of students. It does seem to me that concentrating on such markets would have been extremely risky.
Jonathan took the opportunity to provide some slides of the learning platform for a course that was being offered by the Open University. Although this was a live course with fee paying students the platform was still being developed and it was feedback from the students at the end of the course that influenced further changes and development of the platform. I wonder who should have been paying the fees in this case? Even with these changes the platform still had not reached production version 1.0.
This prompted a contribution from the floor. David Beagle from Sun Microsystems, stated that there were in fact a number of versions of the platform including 1.0 and version 2. So did this suggest that platform development has continued since the demise of UKeU through all the stages to now have a significantly new product at version 2? This did surprise me especially as this development does not appear to have involved the UKeU Chief Architect. Where has the testing occured? Which UK universities have been involved? Should we not know about this?
I also wondered what the working relationships had been between the UKeU and Sun during the life of UKeU. A possible tension? David Beagle then stated that Sun are currently in talks with HEFCE to see if the platform can be made available as open source to the wider educational community through JELC, the Java Education & Learning Community.
But … I wonder, do we need really need yet another VLE? Or … as various former UKeU/Sun actors seem to be suggesting is there is an unrecognized killer product out there? It would be good to hear the views of those institutions who have actually used the UKeU platform or to get input from those many others who were involved in the actual development of the platform, but who were forced to (or chose to) move on by the UKeU's imminent demise.
Jonathan Darby certainly seems to remain convinced that UKeU was on track to develop a very powerful learning environment to realise a high standard of elearning. He is understandably very disappointed that more time was not allowed for the development, not least from a personal point of view, because he feels that he has wasted two and a half years of his life.
Jonathan was asked to reflect on given the time again would he do anything different. He indicated that he would have taken a more organic approach to the development of the platform for example producing in the first place, a discussion module and a content management system. David Beagle of Sun Microsystems commented that this would not have been the way to go, e.g. “With government money involved you take it when it's offered”. He asserted other projects have faltered when the anticipated 'stage-payments' suddenly stopped and the project is then left high and dry.
As I mentioned earlier the eLRC presented some initial findings of their investigations into Learning from the UKeU Experience. The outcomes from the first study will be based on two data sources: interviews and a study of documents. A extensive quantity of UKeU documents can now be found at The Higher Education Academy which has produced a compendium of eUniversity documents; be warned, a lot of it is not bedtime reading but, as Derek Morrison comments in his article, perhaps forms part of a valuable historical archive. At this early stage the eLRC suggests six themes have emerged: context, eLearning, Relationship with Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and with Sun, UKeU organisation, and the Platform.
I will just make a few comments from the findings as presented at the workshop. A tension seems to have existed between the HEIs and Sun. I sensed that this tension was still present during the workshop.
The UKeU organisation appears to have had difficulties in a number of ways:
- As reported there was a lack of understanding by many UKeU personnel of the HE culture, of education, of elearning in general and elearning pedagogy in particular.
- The marketing personnel of the UKeU often did not understand the principles of elearning.
- The HEI teams that would be expected to deliver the courses had in some cases not been formed at the time of a contract being signed between an HEI and the UKeU. If that is not basing the decision on a whim and a prayer then what is?
- The platform was being developed with the learning object being the cornerstone of its development. However there were different interpretations of a learning object throughout the project which had a direct effect on the development of the platform.
A lot more will undoubtedly be revealed when the research at eLRC is complete. Let�s hope that the findings become a set of recommendations to prevent this painful experience being repeated again. We will report in Auricle when the more substantive report is available.
