Technology has created a new phase for higher education over the past few years as more and more educational institutions adopted emerging technology into their curriculums and systems.

1) Redrawing the boundaries of space and time.

One of the most critical achievements of educational technology is the fact that it has managed to make education accessible to people all over the world irrespective of time zones and hemispheres. It has helped millions of people who can’t physically go to schools get an education. Be it after work, or waiting at a station, in your room, learning can come to you. Single moms, struggling workers, and every other person can get an education because of educational technology. You can study for a however long or short amount of time per day as per your schedule. No matter what corner of the world you are at or whatever time the clock shows, you can get your education anytime, anywhere.

2) Effective teaching and learning

Incorporating technology into the educational systems have been found to have multiple benefits on both learning and teaching. For example, there are many ways to teach students with the pedagogy tools provided by technology like videos, powerpoint presentations, and so on. These tools, in turn, enhance the learning experience of students in both traditional classrooms as well as online classes. The multiple ways to impart knowledge will help students to retain information better. Technology has also provided means for the students to access their course material anytime!

3) Collaborative and individualized learning

Technology can give collaborative learning to students through peer-based education, group activities, and interactive chat rooms. This will lessen the burden on the teachers by reducing the amount of information that they are expected to teach. When teachers have lighter workloads, it will help them devise strategies to help individual students based on their competence and performance. This can help them meet their personal and career goals.

4) Better quality with lower costs

Another significant contribution made by the educational technology that is currently available is the fact that education becomes affordable. The one-time investments made on technology will provide cost-effective education in the future. It will also improve the quality of education that will now be accessible to a broader audience of students.

5) Innovation

Educational technology has made learning an innovative process through the use of stimulations, game-based activities, hands-on experiences, and so on. It helps students develop their interests very early on in life and to improve upon them. With such innovative techniques, technology inspires students to be creative themselves. Solution-focused learning helps them to understand the world better and to apply their skills effectively.

Online learning has now become recognized as an effective method of education, just like traditional education systems. As the approval for the online learning programs increased progressively, more and more number of people have started applying for the same. Some even claim that online learning methods to have more significant impacts and benefits than conventional ways.

Here are some of the reasons why you should pursue online learning.

1) Innumerable Courses

Universities and colleges usually have a specific number of courses or subjects that they offer. Every student is expected to adhere to the particular amount and the kind of subjects. For example, a biology student rarely gets the opportunity to learn finance and vice versa. Such flexibility can, however, be attained through online learning.

2) Concentrate on your careers.

Online learning enables you to plan your study time around your working hours. It helps you to continue learning and getting educated even when you have to go to work. It provides you with the opportunity to expand your knowledge and skill set required for your career even without having to take a break from work. Being able to choose specific subjects and concentrate only on that adds to the advantages that online learning can have on working individuals.

3) Time and cost-effective

Online learning can both save your time as well as money. This is because the students don’t have to worry about wasting their time commuting or at any other time-consuming college activities. They can directly go into studying in their very rooms. Online learning is also much more cost effective as most of the courses available are affordable.

4) Convenience and Comfort

The major pro that most people report about online learning is the fact that they can study, any time, any place. Whether it’s a long wait in an airport, if you’re a morning person or night person, online learning is for you. You don’t have to worry about fitting into someone else’ schedule. Your education fits right into your schedule. You don’t have to wait for any teacher or student. You can take a neuroscience class in your pajamas too.

5) Increased one-on-one time.

In the online setting, as opposed to the conventional classrooms, students get the individual attention of the teachers. They can work on personalized problems with tailor-made goals for the academic year.

6) Networking

Online education opportunities allow students to interact with fellow students and teachers all over the world. The number of people that you know engaged in your field of interest will increase and only help you gain a firm peer ground in the area.

This morning I was unfortunate enough to attend a vendor presentation for a series of online academic staff development modules. Basically a series of SCORM packages (so HTML pages, images and Flash content with a little xml thrown in). I won’t mention the vendor’s name for fairly obvious reasons.

The pitch was as follows; here is some prepared content that we got a bunch of professors from overseas to put their name to, that is ‘ideal’ for academic staff development and can be contextualised (read re-written) by you. Oh you have a license for three years so even if you do rewrite all of the content then you still can’t use it after the license expires. Oh and quite a lot of the content is Flash based so it’ll be no good for all of you iPad packing academics wanting to do something on the go. Oh and you just pay us x thousand dollars for the privilege.

Having recently re-discovered the BBC’s Dragon’s Den program in which hopeful entrepreneurs pitch to multi millionaires I could only imagine what Douglas Ballantyne and the other Dragon’s would make of this proposal.

Now all of this could have been forgiven if the content reflected contemporary practice (dare I say forward looking) but it doesn’t. It is entirely based on traditional face to face delivery. Two of the modules deal with the practice of lecturing, others deal with facilitating discussion and feedback. Good topics but wholly focussed on face to face situations.

Now the conservative amongst you will say there is nothing wrong with that and I would go along with the idea that having academics that are more skilled in delivering face to face learning is better than having academics that are less skilled in the same. My point really is that we should be focussing academic staff development of whatever type it is on contemporary and anticipated future practice.

The irony of using online learning modules to develop face to face teaching skills is just too delicious. I almost wonder if the whole enterprise is just some sort of cruel joke being played on unsuspecting universities.

Over the last couple of months I have been asked to help a university (that will remain nameless) in its transition to a newer version of of its Learning Management System (LMS). As part of this I have had to access many LMS course spaces to check that content has migrated successfully and that that things are working as they should.

It has been a profoundly depressing experience. I knew it would be and you’ll appreciate why I knew if you look at my current full time occupation.

Let me begin begin by saying that there are a few dirty little secrets about online learning at traditional universities. Here are two:

1. Not many courses have any form of content online whatsoever (even when the university promotes a policy of minimum online presence).

2. When a course does have online content it is invariably rubbish.

Here are some things that typify the courses I have seen recently:

Poorly structured sites with no narrative, no instruction, no guidance for the student.
Un-capitalised headings and grammatically incorrect sentences in mixed and garishly coloured fonts.
HTML using deprecated tags and with strange symbols that are presumably the remnants of copying and pasting from MS Word.
Links to PDF, DOCX and PPT files that are often way too large with no indication of the size or file type before the user clicks on the link.
Discussion forums that are not used or are used in very strange ways indeed.
Student blogs where the student is expected to print their blog out before submitting it for assessment. Although it should be said that I’m impressed that course was using blogs at all because I reckon only maybe 2-3% of course sites would have a blog set up.
But worst of all perhaps is the content itself. I had the misfortune to visit one site that was being used to teach web design. You’d think that this site would be really good but sadly no. It displayed many of the features I’ve listed above but worst of all the content of this site was at least three years old and made reference, in many cases, to information that was 8 or 9 years old. From this site I learnt that Alta Vista was the third biggest search engine and Netscape Navigator 4 was a major browser. If this was a human anatomy course then older content might be fine but a course like web design needs to be updated almost monthly the pace of change is so rapid.

To put the icing on the cake, this course was a wholly online course being offered to students as part of an Information Systems degree. I kid you not.

All of this brings me to the title of this post and the observation that there appears to be no quality assurance applied to elearning at most universities. The only surprising thing about this observation is how little it is spoken about. Senior academic managers appear to be totally unconcerned. I suspect they don’t know and probably don’t want to know. If they knew about it then they would have to do something about it and then all of a sudden you have to deal with academic staff who cry ‘academic freedom’ at the drop of a hat and we all know how much fun that is.

What has happened is that academics have been allowed to continue into the online environment their thousand year old practice of engaging in a secret communion with students that happens in the classroom . I remember, as a young course leader at a university in the UK, being asked a question by a very respected Professor and external examiner (now there’s a novel thing). He said “Mark, how do you know that the lecturers are teaching what you want them to teach in the classroom?”. I, of course, had no idea so I mumbled something about outcomes and assessment. I could have said to my teaching staff that I thought it would have been a good idea to have some peer observation of their teaching but that would have gone down like lead balloon.

And there is the problem. Academics don’t like non students (dare I say, people who are not beholden to them and therefore are more likely to be critical) in their classroom and they don’t like them in the online course spaces.

Of course a really brave Vice Chancellor or President would say, right we are going to have all of our content as open courseware in five years time and the first thing we are going to do is allow every member of the university, staff and student, to be able to see the content in every course. Not sensitive data but just the learning content itself. We’re going to identify and reward the staff members working on the best courses so that everyone can see good practice. Finally we are going to provide course development resources to help you transition your content to an engaging online format and to ensure it is only made available when it has been through an appropriate QA process to meet some mutually agreed standards.

Such academic leaders are few and far between. Many (most) senior academic managers don’t understand online learning at all. I remember being at a meeting of Deans of Faculty who all thought that uploading Powerpoint files was the same as blended learning.

In the meantime student expectations increase continually as they engage with high quality content from many other providers as part of their daily online activities. Something is going to give and it may be sooner than we think.