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Technology revolution stops at classroom doors, report says
23 June 2009
Demos says universities have yet to realise potential of technological innovations as Government launches drive to make the UK global leader in online learning. Rebecca Attwood writes
Mobile internet and social networking have found their way into the everyday lives of those on campus but have not yet followed university students and teachers into the classroom, a think-tank has claimed.
A report published today by Demos argues that technology needs to become better ingrained into universities’ thinking about teaching and the student experience.
It came as the Government announced a new task force that will aim to make UK higher education the first choice across the world for online distance learning. In support of that, the Government also launched a £10 million match-funding scheme.
The Demos reports says many academics find it hard to envisage the possibilities technology affords, not least because they often “lack the basic skills” to use the new tools.
“Despite a rapid uptake of all the trappings of a connected world in recent years, the transfer of these technologies into a learning setting in higher education has not followed,” the report says.
The Edgeless University: Why Higher Education Must Embrace Technology argues that technology is making profound changes to the ways people can learn and research.
Universities are becoming defined by their function, not their form, and knowledge is no longer restricted by campus buildings, it explains, but this does not make institutions redundant.
“The noise of information and knowledge needs filtering; students need guidance and expertise. They also need the ‘brand value’ of institutions and the validation they provide. Universities have to capitalise on the connections and relationships made possible by the new information technologies,” the report says.
It suggests that the value of universities lies in their “institutional capital” – “the spaces they create for learning, the validation they provide for learning and research, and the returns people get from it”.
Get strategic
So far, investment in technology in higher education has been driven by the initiative of enterprising academics and advocates within institutions. The next stage of investment must be “more strategic”, the report asserts.
Universities could work towards new kinds of accreditation that would allow those engaged in informal learning to validate their progress, it suggests.
It calls for government policy to help higher education institutions develop new ways of offering education seekers affiliation and accreditation, such as shorter “pick-and-mix” courses.
Technology, the think-tank argues, provides universities with the means to accommodate the increasing diversity of students’ learning needs, and institutions “could make far greater use” of tools such as Twitter and online forums like the StudentRoom to better understand the student experience.
The fact that today’s students arrive at university having already “assimilated the internet and connectivity into their everyday lives” demands new learning and teaching techniques, it believes.
Although it offers examples of good practice, Demos’ report argues that innovations in learning are “by no means the norm”.
“Some institutions already share knowledge and communicate with their students in alternative ways, opening up new approaches to learning and research. Some universities distribute lecture recordings for free on iTunes U, or use virtual learning environments to complement modules and courses. Some are experimenting with bringing learning to virtual worlds such as Second Life… But these examples do not add up to a sector-wide appreciation of the role technology could have in the future of higher education,” the report states.
However, collaborative learning tools, voting machines, interactive games, online support and other new technologies cannot just be “dumped” into classroom settings, it warns.
The vision thing
“Time, effort and support are needed to make them effective. While technology opens up many new possibilities, matching these possibilities with a vision for teaching and learning is the real challenge. Being able to develop new ways of teaching depends on the capacity to experiment. That requires resources, incentives and time, which are often not available,” the report says.
Demos calls for technology advocates in universities to be given “far greater” recognition for their teaching and leadership.
It also backs a culture of open publishing, shared resources and open course material.
“The sector should capitalise on the work of institutions such as University College London and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to distribute their content as widely as possible. There should be investment to promote the sharing of resources and the creation of stores of resources from institutions in the UK,” the report says.
But it also notes that “one of the greatest challenges” facing the knowledge economy today is “reconciling openness and collaboration with competition”.
Task force for transformation
The task force announced by the Government today will be chaired by Dame Lynne Brindley, the chief executive of the British Library. It will be backed by a new Open Learning Innovation Fund of up to £10 million from the Higher Education Funding Council for England; because it is a competitive match-funding scheme, is worth up to £20 million in total.
The Government hopes that universities will collaborate with each other and with the private and third sectors to bid for money “to develop projects to help transform the way people can get a degree”.
In a statement, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said the fund could help groups of universities “pursue new business opportunities” and promote online learning and the development of open resources.
“Universities will also be able to develop greater expertise in online teaching and create centres of excellence for the delivery of online learning,” the statement said.
The Government said it would continue to develop the role of The Open University as a national resource “so that all universities can benefit from the OU’s specialist expertise, developed through public funding”.
Joining Dame Lynne on the task force will be Martin Bean, the next vice-chancellor of the OU, and senior representatives from Microsoft, the British Council, Hefce, the Joint Information Systems Committee and Universities UK. The BBC has agreed to advise the task force when appropriate.
Led by the task force, Hefce will develop the Open Learning Innovation Fund and then consult the sector on the practical details.
David Lammy, the Higher Education Minister, said: “Advances such as 3G, webcasts and Web 2.0 will allow UK universities to reach out to communities as far flung as Africa and Hong Kong and to deliver high-quality, student-centred higher education across the globe.
“The use of mobile technologies such as PDAs and MP3 players means that this can be done at a time and place that is convenient for students wherever they are in the world.
“This Open Learning Innovation Fund will help institutions develop new initiatives and exploit new opportunities to ensure that we remain at the forefront of online distance learning as the international market develops.”
Dame Lynne said: “I am delighted to have been asked to chair the task force and to consider the many opportunities for UK higher education to excel in online learning and meet the changing demands of students.
“The British Library is itself committed to innovative, high-quality digital services, including public and commercial partnerships, and I look forward to making recommendations for action to stimulate growth in this important area.”
rebecca.attwood@tsleducation.com
• Read the full Demos report at www.demos.co.uk/publications/the-edgeless-university
• Twitter tag #edge09
Readers' comments
Distributing lecture recordings for free is a bad idea. It encourages students to miss lectures, which deprives them of the opportunities for interactive learning with their tutors. Lectures then become fixed commodities instead of dynamic experiences that are capable of shifting direction/focus depending upon the interests of participants.
"Distributing lecture recordings for free is a bad idea. It encourages students to miss lectures". The evidence base is entirely to the contrary; provision of good online materials encourages rather than dissuades attendance.
Distributing lecture recordings for free is an excellent idea - the information dissemination part of the lecture can be taken care of in advance while the lecture itself focus on interaction and discussion.
I agree - good online teaching and learning materials does not dissuade students from attending university. I make extensive use of web 2 resources and get full classes. Students only miss lectures delivered by teachers who are boring and only adopt one or two basic teaching strategies.
This kind of misses the point. Videoing 1 person talking for 1 hour with a single camera makes for an exceedingly dull experience. It's not about capturing existing methods, its about developing new methods that will require the formal lecture to take second place to small, interactive elements of digital content. That is what students are familiar with and that is the grammar and vocabulary they engage with. Its no longer about our knowledge, its about their assessment.
Technology provides great opportunities for learning. Web 2.0 technologies are allowing the collaboration of individuals around the world in order to learn. In order to understand more about the future of learning, read http://brenna22.blogspot.com/2009/06/other-day-i-stumbled-across-article-by.html
As some one with computing background and teaching computing I do not support technology willy nilly. I would stop at students recording lectures in the classroom using the digital voice recorder. There are certain skills which are ncessary even if technology takes over such as notes taking ( using hand or lap top). Where technology is useful is when the students have attained a certain level of knowledge and have become proficient in its usage. I am a firm believer in the old fashioned way of learning and which some of my colleagues do not agree with. But then the students that I have produced by teaching in my way of constrained technology usage have gone on to become some of the best experts in areas in computing.
I agree that there has been evidence that students still go to lectures, even if they are made available; and if they didn't, we'd just have to change the way we deliver lectures to add more value to them. And simple recordings would only be useful for catching up with the lecture, not as a separate learning tool. Shorter podcasts would be better for that. There is a place for technology, but it shouldn't be applied blindly. Not everything is good, just because it is new, but at the same time we need to be open to change. After all, we need to prepare our students for a world full of technology; they will not get the feeling that universities are still relevant if we stick to out-dated pedagogical methods. And I believe web 2.0 tools can enhance the learning process through active student involvement.
Just because a pedagogical method is "outdated" doesn't mean it is not useful and effective. As they say, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it.' This having been said, I stand by my previous statement that students will tend to miss classes where lectures are made available in recorded form. It is just so much easier to stay in bed listening through one's computer than to drag oneself into university to attend a lecture. This is a sad development, as the opportunity to engage in one-to-one interaction among students and lecturer is missed. I'm all in favor of using new technologies to engage in online discussion sections, to distribute handouts and AV materials, to provide interactive assignments/quizes, and to perform research. But there is no replacement for people coming together in person to engage in learning and teaching. These technologies should remain as adjuncts.
Do you have any evidence for students not coming to lectures? I can dig out a reference to a study here at Birmingham which shows they *do* still attend lectures. By 'outdated' I mean not useful and ineffective (otherwise it would just be 'old', but not be 'outdated'). And I believe a lot of methods are broken, as life has changed, and so have student expectations. We need to move with the times to keep engaging students, otherwise learning will not happen. And students will rightly be asking why they're paying so much money for the privilege of listening to some guy talking to a room full of 300 people for an hour and 2 further hours per week in overcrowded seminars.
World-famous institutions like MIT gain prestige from their online presence -- it enhances the value their "brand." The regional and less-specialized colleges are the ones whose usefulness is most at risk of being marginalized to the point of being superfluous. It seems to me that there's a tremendous opportunity for someone to come up with a means to disconnect two parts of the university-as-service model: education and accreditation. If there were a dependable means to certify someone's education -- however they acquired it -- separated from the process of attending classes over X years at university Y, then that would be of great value to students and society -- less so, of course, to many tenured staff.
I think that technology already has the flexibility to be used intelligently by tutors. At the Uni where I work I have seen tutors totally change their delvery style, by providing short podcasts beforehand, and using the extra time saved to reorganise seminars into smaller groups. it it recognised by all that face to face contact is probably the most important thing for learning, and tutors embracing technology to change their delivery methods could improve this end. Also by using instant messages or virtual spaces, tutors could probably deal with more students in their office hours. Its about being intelligent with your choice of technology, and confident in its use. Students will vote with their feet, and the short podcast/ seminar model has majority approval in student surveys. We are living in an information age; students do not have to wait until the lecture to get at the information - they can read e-journals, and online reports, to get a feel for the topic. Contact time is best spent discussing that information with the expert, and finding a way through it that suits your learning style. Tutors who fail to respond to this expectation will let down the 'digital native' generation.
Hope this does not go down the path of just developing and sharing content we do not want to do go down the TLTP (Teaching and Learning Technology Programme) again.
Memcatch.com has recently launched a software platform that will be facilitating both online (for profit) and Open Learning initiatives globally. What is unique about this website is that in one area you can collect [Personal Knowledge], by copying information into a bin from web searches, in another area you can start a group [Group Knowledge], and collaborate on research and discussions with those you invite via e mail to the group, and in a third area you can you [Personal Knowledge] bin or [Group Knowledge] research into an [Open Knowledge] bin, and it acts like a blog broadcasting the material to any one that does a web search on that topic. Video will soon be added to the platform. It is all drag and drop movement. Let's hope that there are sufficient IT infrastructures in emerging countries to take advantage of this technology. Peter Sabbagh - Writer Blogcritics.org a Technorati Magazine