In July 2003 the UK Department for Education and Skills (DfES) published the consultation document Towards a Unified E-Learning Strategy (July 2003). Today the DfES published the Analysis of Responses to the original consultation document. I've extracted a few factoids and expressed some views, so if you are interested click The respondents identified the key weakness and barriers to implementation of a unified e-Learning strategy as:
- Lack of long-term non-fragemented funding
- Access and adoption impediments (digital divide, lack of broadband, technophobia, lack of training, lack of IT resources, lack of environment, lack of language, disabilities, special needs, personal costs of e-learning)
- Need for incentives and time allocation (career progression, professional development).
Although 310 (83%) of the 430 respondents agreed that education/industry collaboration would be vital to carry forward the strategy apparently only 7 employers had responded to the original consultation document.
Technophobia in managers/leaders is of particular importance since it is they who will carry the strategy forward. To quote from the analysis:
“… it was very often those in a position to influence and change who lacked the IT skills to appreciate the benefits of e-Learning.”
It's perhaps relevant to the above that of the 430 respondents only 19 were Vice Chancellors or Principals and only 23 were teachers/lecturers or trainers.
There's a certain irony in the following statement within the analysis:
“55 (15%) respondents were concerned that time must be made available to all staff to develop e-Learning skills and gain qualifications. A number of respondents made the link between educating and convincing leaders of the benefits of e-Learning and the need for staff to have time away from the workplace to undertake this training.”
Now, I'm not supporting this view but some of these leaders may very well only perceive cost-benefit if e-learning actually reduces the time away from the workplace. Of course we should surely counter this with the bootstrap/capability building/blended learning argument. But what of the students? What is done to help them develop e-Learning skills?
It was interesting to see that 30% of respondents viewed e-Portfolios as an important aspect of learner support, but that some concerns were expressed about the impact of current data protection legislation on information sharing between providers. Perhaps some of these concerns arise because respondents were taking an institutional view of information sharing, i.e. Institution A wishes to share a student's portfolio with Institution B. If it was the student who decided who could see what and when, then many of these issues may disappear (see, for example, my recent article on ePortfolios). The development and standardization of infrastructure and mechanisms for storing information doesn't necessarily need to remove the person who is the information target from the equation.
The section of the analysis dealing with building a 'better' e-learning market still seems to me to imply we are still fixated on a content-centric perspective of a market. Surely MIT's OpenCourseware initiative example has shown us that you can actually give your content away. Why? In the educational context, what the e-learning market is actually based on is the perceived value added by the institution, e.g. one or more of: provision of superb facilties and resources, contact with significant figures in a discipline, excellent support and pedagogy, interaction with peers, a qualification with 'status' which offers employment potential. That's not to decry content; I do see a 'market' for reasonably-priced, appropriately granular, interoperable, perhaps distributed, content which doesn't lock institutions into one supplier or environment. There is, however, also surely a market for interoperable tools and services?
The section of the analysis dealing with technical and quality standards also gave me pause for thought. The document states:
“… several key respondents commented that whilst data exchange should be possible across all boundaries , creating standards for the design of software and systems would suppress innovation.”
Whilst I tend to agree with the sentiments expressed I'm unclear who the key respondents were and what the attributes you required to become 'key'. Also, we tend to get very hung up about 'standards' compliance. Our collective experience of standards compliant systems so far suggests that this doesn't necessarily translate into content or tools from system 'x' will work with system 'y'. Different systems can claim to be standards compliant but they are using, say, version 0.9 of the standard whereas you are perhaps using version 2. More imaginatively, they are using part of an international specification as part of their application profile and you are using another part of a specification as part of your application profile. Also, again, much of the specifications and standards work tends to get very hung up on content instead of educational and learning process support.
What may make an educational environment or tool a 'killer application' is not the content it contains per se, but the way that content can be found, aggregated, processed, shared, enhanced, reflected and commented upon. If standards help this process then well and good, but, so often, the design of putative standards-compliant systems still seem to be grounded in a centralized monolithic model where content is perceived as belonging to that host system and which, at best, offers to export a standards compliant package. A package which may, or may not, be usable by another host system without further adaptation.
