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Quality Assurance in Distance Learning: some micro, macro and mega issues.
Filed Under Topics for debate
Quality Assurance in Distance Learning: some micro, macro and mega issues.
Alexander Romiszowski
(Educational Technology 46/4, July-August 2006, pp57-59)
Promoting Quality in Distance, Flexible and ICT-based Education.
This rather lengthy title is the theme of the next ICDE World Conference on Distance Education, to be held September 3-6, 2006 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is significant that this theme and its sub-themes, as explained on the conference site (www.icde22.org.br), were generated in debate between representatives of over a dozen distance education institutions from nearly so many countries. Obviously, a large number of practitioners of distance education consider the issue of quality assurance to be worthy of debate.
To start the ball rolling, let’s analyze how the ICDE conference planners view the topic. First of all, it is significant that they felt the need to use a somewhat lengthy title for the main theme – one that highlights the relatively new ideas of flexible learning (anytime, anywhere, etc.) and e-learning (ICT-based) in addition to the basic idea of learning at a distance. This raises the question, in my mind, of the extent that the “new”, ICT-based approaches have changed or raised new quality-related issues, as compared to the “old” methods of distance education, or indeed of education in general. Are we facing new challenges, or the same old ones that we have never adequately addressed? Second, it is interesting to see how the planners have subdivided the overall theme into sub-themes, to reveal the complexity of the topic and its systemic structure. This structure will help us to organize our own thinking and discussion with respect to the many issues involved. In the following sentences, I will follow the example of the ICDE22 website and shorten the full version of the conference theme to the acronym “DFICTE”.
One sub-theme is described as the “Value of DFICTE in relation to: national development needs; educational capacity building; lifelong and workplace learning; international collaboration”. This sub-theme addresses DFICTE from a national/ international perspective, focusing on the political and philosophical aspects. Note that I have highlighted two words, used by Tom Gilbert way back in the 1970’s as two of the six principal vantage points that may be adopted in the analysis, or the debate, of almost any complex issue. A second sub-theme is defined as “Institutional quality issues regarding: developing quality standards; developing methods for promoting quality; accreditation issues; meeting the challenge of fake universities and false on-line degrees, etc”. This addresses DFICTE from a management vantage point, focusing on client-system preparation (change management), implementation (project management) and sustainability (process management). The third main sub-theme is described as “Promoting educational quality regarding: faculty; pedagogy; student learning outcomes assessment; technology and delivery; cultural and linguistic diversity; etc.” By adopting the three remaining vantage points suggested by Gilbert - strategic, tactical and logistical - we may view these design-related issues in a more organized manner.
This short column will allow me to mention only a few of the factors that may be impeding the march towards quality in distance learning. I will select one issue perceived from each of the vantage points mentioned above. I hope that other related issues will emerge in later discussion.
The logistical vantage point: putting the ”E in E-learning” into perspective.
The bulk of recent literature on factors that lead to success or failure of E-learning projects focuses on the role of ICT’s in the provision of online learning: the importance of state-of-the-art Learning Mangement Systems; issues of networking, bandwidth, access speed and memory; the role of multimedia and hypermedia; interoperability standards and learning object reusability. But the literature also presents case examples of E-learning projects using the latest technologies that are suffering (learning) quality problems, and other projects that are achieving high levels of learning effectiveness whilst using technologies that are far from state-of-the-art. It would seem that ”high quality of learning” may not necessarily correlate closely with ”high tech”. I suggest that excessive emphasis on technology as the solution – on ”the E in E-learning” – may often in reality be a part of the problem.
For example, current E-learning system standards, such as SCORM, focus on issues of course interoperability across platforms and reusability of previously developed learning objects, but they offer us little in terms of learning quality assurance. Indeed, the reuse of learning objects facilitated by such standards may promote the easy replication of past instructional design blunders and may contribute to a general lowering of quality. I have seen many so-called learning objects, SCORM-compatible of course, that from an ID standpoint should be banished to obscurity, rather than reused in other contexts. So, what steps do we take to ensure ”quality before reusability”?
The tactical vantage point: can teachers handle the E-learning workload?
One often-repeated argument is that the quality of learning is enhanced in online environments through the increased possibilities for collaborative small group learning, higher levels of human-to-human interactivity, and methodologies that promote the construction of knowledge. I agree with this argument and its theoretical foundations. However, such methodologies tend to require higher levels of teacher involvement, as well as higher levels of expertise and skill on the part of the teachers, and very much more time. Studies suggest that teachers spend at least twice as much time teaching online as they do in an equivalent face-to-face course.
This raises the question of how many students an online instructor can handle. In collaborative classroom activities, teachers can comfortably handle from 20 to 30 students, depending on the nature of the content and the teacher’s skills. In a web-based course that is highly individualized and uses colaborative small-group learning intensively, student numbers may have to be deliberately limited to somewhere in the range of from 12 to 15 students in order to allow teachers to handle the workload. But such levels of staffing are not economically sustainable. Some analysts suggest that distance learning has to exceed staff/student ratios of 200/1 in order to be economically sustainable over the long term – this is a whole order of magnitude beyond the typical face-to-face ratios. Distance learning systems have often achieved and sustained such ratios in the tele-course and correspondence modalities. But these are rightly criticized, from a pedagogical standpoint, for not providing opportunities for individualized small-group collaborative learning.
So, we seem to have a paradoxical quality-sustainability trade-off situation. What can we do to make teaching online less labour-intensive than teaching face-to-face, and at the same time ensure that the quality of learning, both as an experience for the student and in terms of learning outcomes, is enhanced? One possible approach is providing the teachers with sophisticated productivity and performance support tools. This seems a promising use of technology in support of learning quality. But is technology-based teacher support achievable in time and at an affordable cost? What will it take?
The strategic vantage point: so what’s new about blended learning?
Another current bandwagon is blended learning – originally defined as a combination of traditional instruction conducted in groups under a teacher’s supervision and E-learning or web-based training, where participants study individually or in virtual groups. However, a glance at the literature reveals that blended learning now means different things to different people: combining different modes of web-based technology (e.g. synchronous and asynchronous modes), various pedagogical approaches (behaviorist, humanist, constructivist), any form of instructional technology with face-to-face instructor-led training, and even formal classroom instruction with on-the-job training. The term has become “hype” – so popular and so misused as to be in danger of becoming valueless. But when we get “beyond the hype”, did it ever have any value in terms of instructional innovation or quality? I think it did not. Let me illustrate my point by reference once more to the literature base.
A review of a whole bunch of articles on blended learning identified five often quoted situations when it makes sense to implement blended learning. Four of these are driven by practicality and expediency factors: cost, convenience, and the availability of time and human resources. Only one of the five may have something to do with the quality of the learning experience: “matching delivery method to content and instructional need”. Beautiful words – but how do we actually do this matching? The literature reviewed presents many examples of courses that use different delivery methods for different components, and also some models for the planning of blended learning systems. But, the examples do not throw any light on why specific modules were delivered be specific methods and the planning models are restricted to describing the procedural steps that should be followed, saying nothing about exactly how to decide what delivery method to select for what content or instructional need.
Let us reflect on what is really to be decided – nothing else than the systematic selection of media – which was the “hype of the day” in the 1960’s and 1970’s, with dozens of decision models being proposed. This particular bandwagon was slowed down, if not halted completely, in the 1980’s when Richard Clark in his now famous (some say infamous) research review relegated instructional media to the category of “mere vehicles” for the intended instructional design. So, is the current hype-of-the-day bringing something new and improved to our instructional decision-making toolbox? Can we expect the blended learning bandwagon to lead us to higher levels of learning quality? I am yet to be convinced.
The institutional mangement vantage point: quality vs. cost – no free lunch.
Traditional approaches to institution-based education are highly labour-intensive and therefore have high operating costs. The “traditional” methods of distance education, such as the corrrespondence and telecourse models, are capital-intensive, but permit low per-capita operating costs, and therefore have proved to be lower-cost alternatives for large student populations. But, E-learning involves varying patterns of financial investment – the costs involved in developing and delivering a three credit hours Internet course have been estimated as varying from US$6,000 to $1,000,000, depending on the technologies and approaches used. So, the potentially higher quality of E-learning systems as compared to earlier distance learning modalities, is offset by very variable and sometimes not fully understood cost structures.
Let’s look at the case of South Africa, a country that now graduates more than half of all its higher education students through distance-learning courses. The ministry of education has for years provided higher education funding to institutions on the basis of a fixed annual amount per full-time-equivalent student enrolled, but distance students were valued at half the annual budget allowance of campus-based students. This may have been a reasonable policy when most universities were conventional single-mode campus-based institutions and the one large single-mode distance-learning institution – UNISA – operated on a low-cost correspondence course model. Today, the other universities have in most cases moved from a single-mode to an ICT-based dual-mode operational model. The cost-quality structure of the higher education scenario has changed dramatically. But recently the ministry of education was undertaking a study to even further reduce the per-capita funding for distance students. So how can we work to balance the often-opposed forces of cost and effectiveness?
The political / philosophical vantage points: distance education and globalization.
In this section I would like to introduce the first of my occasional collaborators - Professor John Tiffin, well known for his writings on the concept of a ”Global Virtual University”. In a recent article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, John points out that in 1950 there were 6.5 million enrolments in tertiary education worldwide and over three quarters of them were from the developed world, but today there are approximately 100 million and half of these are from the developing world. This demand is being met by building new universities, expanding old ones and also, by rapidly increasing use of distance learning. But this expansion process often also results in the dropping of academic standards. And the developed world is largely to blame.
At the present time, students in developing countries, who cannot find places in their own universities, spill over into the universities of the developed world, who gladly accept them as ‘full fee paying’ students. This growing global trade in tertiary teaching between the developed and developing worlds is, as in so many things, one-way. Few students from developed countries go to the universities of the developing world. John observes that “Adam Smith the founder of the idea of free trade argued that if a person has learned their lesson very well, ‘surely it can be of little importance where or from whom they learned it.’ …. Will we, then, one day see the pages of The Guardian Weekly filled with advertisements offering degrees on the Internet from the universities of the third world? Or will we find that Adam Smith was wrong. That it is not what is learned that matters but the brand name on it.”
The brand name of higher education is often established more on the basis of excellence in research rather than teaching. Could one maybe reverse this trend and in the process modify this one-way trade in higher education? If excellence in teaching were to be accepted as the prime criterion of institutional quality, and if such excellence were to be clearly defined as a set of globally accepted standards and effectively implemented in a globally accessible virtual university, then such institutions could in fact be based anywhere - and with greater cost-effectiveness in the nations of the developing world where operating costs are lower.
This is indeed an intriguing line of argument. If we explore it further, could we not argue that rapid globalization, which is itself a consequence of the rapid worldwide impact of ICT, could lead, not only to the phenomenon described by John Tiffin of some developing nations offering higher learning quality at lower cost and so reversing the current direction of the trade in higher education, but that in the process, the globally oriented planners and promoters of such a trend will establish globally relevant and verifiable standards for the quality of higher education. Is it thus possible that at some point in the future, international E-learning initiatives will become the benchmarks for educational quality? Will we see the day when distance education will take the lead and force conventional education out of its complacency and satisfaction with the abysmally low quality standards that have for centuries been accepted as normal and inevitable?
Conclusion: “all things are intertwingled”
I borrow this phrase from the writings of Theodore Nelson, the “guru of hypertext” and protagonist of the idea of global interlinking of all world literature repositories into a universally accessible and universally useful global library. But I use it here in order to emphasize that the various “snaphot views” discussed in this column, each one from a different systemic vantage point, but each one relevant to the promotion and assurance of quality in distance learning, must be considered as a whole. They are interlinked local pictures of a “hyperpicture” of the issues that need attention in order to achieve real improvements in quality, not only of distance education, but of all education systems. There are many more such snapshot views that shoiuld be added and interlinked in order to form a complete vision of the road to the future. I hold out the challenge to debate not only the future of distance learning, but the future of teaching and learning in general, and to consider the motion that future distance education developments, if properly planned and managed, might lead to the revolution in provision of quality education that both the developed and developing world is (or should be) waiting for.
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