At the moment our thinking about e-Learning and information systems is usually predicated on the assumption that the institution knows best. In UK higher education, the assumption usually translates into designated centrally or faculty-supported vehicles for e-learning delivery and support, i.e. MLE/VLE/LMS 'xyz'. A situation which offers at least some comfort to increasingly hard-pressed institutional directors of information and communications services. Perhaps they shouldn't rest too easily. Read on if you want to find out why. It was a recent interesting lunchtime conversation with Brian Kelly who holds the JISC-funded UK Web Focus post based at UKOLN which stimulated this post.
In the UK higher education sector, although they are required to present audited financial statements to the governing body each year, Student Unions usually have a fairly high degree of autonomy on how they spend their budgets and usually view their primary constituency as their membership rather than the institutions which host their facilities. Many Student Unions provide good physical and pastoral/support facilities but may also provide facilities which can be considered 'educational' in their own right. Here then we have consumer power at work. Here is a body which is very close to its constituency, listens to its members and tries to meet their needs.
So what's the relevance to the sleeping patterns of directors of information and communications services?
Now things are generally fine when students continue to do student-type things, listen to loud music, protest, drink a lot, study now and again:), and above all pass examinations.
But students, or their parents, are now paying tuition fees and are going to be paying considerably more in the future. And so, students and their funders are undoubtedly going to be taking an increasing interest in what is provided for them. More than this, they may decide that the mainstream institutional systems don't meet their needs sufficiently and so will provide their own component services via their portal.
So how would (and should) your institution feel about the development of student-controlled learning object repositories, archives of past examination papers (perhaps incorporating commentary), file uploads, and peer sharing facilities etc? Facilities which may run in parallel, or even become, ultimately, the student-preferred alternative, to the institutional offerings. Indeed, do we actually know what's the level of student-led provision already? Should we know?
Is there any evidence for such a trend? Well, there is at least one company, UniServity, who have very cleverly and effectively targeted the Student Union market in Australia and the UK, starting first with portals/websites but increasingly moving into backend services, e.g. polls, and ePortfolios.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Well, the tidy concept of a centrally-driven ICT and Learning/Teaching Strategy which students willingly consume may need revision in the next few years. The quid pro quo for increasing tutorial fees is that students, or their parents, may increasingly expect ever more influence over what is provided for them or if the institution cannot, or will not provide, then the freedom to provide for themselves. So for the directors of information and communication services the concept of one central system, delivered via one central portal and delivering a strictly prescribed set of services may be compromised by student consumer power.
An what if student consumer or parent power proves to be very conservative? What if the demand is for more didactics and less active learning? More tell than sell? More 'sage on the stage' and less 'guide on the side'?
That's one possible future, but of course I could be totally wrong:)
