Learning Strategy for a Research Focused University

As discussed in my post on university types different universities have different imperatives, and different strengths and challenges. This post outlines the case for a learning strategy suitable for a research focused university. I’ll start with my recollection of a presentation by the head of the Group of Eight universities at a conference in 2014, where she lamented how the value proposition for students at research focused universities was unclear. It was a sentiment many people secretly shared, or not so secretly in the case of school guidance counsellors, and it was slightly disheartening to hear it spoken about openly without an answer. It made me think…

What can the advantages be for students attending research focused universities?

Research universities face two significant challenges in delivering their mission in the face of competition from other university types. Research universities typically have to divert some of the tuition fees to research, which means they require a different value proposition for their learning experience, compared to teaching focused universities. Secondly high performing research focused universities are typically saddled with large and old and expensive physical campuses that pure online competitors are not. So with the growing threat of students being attracted to teaching focused or online universities, another question is…

How do research focused universities provide a clear and real and marketable value proposition for their students and their employers that other university types cannot plausibly deliver as well?

I remember reading a study that showed how the United States generated intellectual property at a far higher rate than China, but that China had now realized how IP and marketing were far more profitable parts of the value chain, compared to manufacturing. Think iPhone. This led to the question:

What is different about Asian education systems and cultures and business environments that makes it harder to generate IP? What type of education would be attractive to Asian students, who are driving Australia’s third largest export industry?

Next came a ‘climate survey’ that showed general dissatisfaction with University strategic plans. I have to admit I found they had unclear vision statements had more than their fair share of motherhood statements. Together they provided little guidance for making decisions at lower levels, and left universities somewhat rudderless, so…

What ARE the competitive advantages of a research focused university?

What is a teaching vision that students and staff, and the public, could all know and believe in?

Lastly I recall a comment made by someone very senior at my own university. An employer had commented “look its great that your university is getting so good at research, but that’s not really making your students are more attractive for us to employ”. Personally I remember how I managed to get all the way through my undergraduate degree without knowing my lecturers actually spent time on research, let alone what they researched, and least of all HOW they did their research. This all led to the question…

How is it possible for a research focused university to add value to teaching in a way that a teaching focused university can’t? Teaching universities can read research papers, but are they as good at research methods?

Are research methods useful to students in a rapidly changing and uncertain future?

We know there are some very successful universities focused on pragmatic teaching for “the real world” but increasingly that world is the one of three or four years ago when students started their degree, and so they graduate and discover they are already behind and need to catch up to be useful, and not just at the start of their career but all the way through.

How can we prepare students with real skills they can use on a daily basis to deal with a rapidly changing world?

I therefore propose the following learning strategies for research focused universities.

The value proposition for learning at a research focused university should be how it uses its unquestionable research prowess to imbue students with research skills and higher order learning skills (inquiry based learning) – focused on creating/evaluating/analysing, according to Blooms taxonomy. These skills will make them unquestionable leaders in evidence based decision making and in life-long learning. A successful research focused university can plausibly do this better than any university that attempts to copy this strategy.

Employers will be attracted to graduates that are therefore problem solvers and leaders and knowledge creators for an uncertain future.

Potential students will be attracted to the clear unique and advantage for them in the jobs market, not just on graduation but through many years of an uncertain future.

University staff will see a clear and unique and appropriate purpose, that fits their culture… a purpose they would be proud to fulfil, that they can do better than other universities, using skills they already have, and importantly makes sense to them.

Lastly this focus on knowledge generation skills is known to be key to future economies, especially Australia’s, and for IP generation, and a key selling point to international students who are still faced with education systems based on rote learning in didactic classes.

Of course a campus based university should sell culture, sporting and high value – active learning - face to face experiences. Often they need to catch up with teaching focused universities in these areas. These are the bread and better, but the competitive advantage comes from fusing research with teaching, by moving courses and programs from research led to research based, using inquiry based learning elements. Of course the graduates are leaders in raw knowledge and in leaders in practical application of their knowledge, but what sets them apart is their strength of their skills in generating new knowledge and solutions in a dynamic future.




Thoughts?
Simon Collyer

Building Content– Faster with better quality

With new eLearning technologies course coordinators can build more effective learning experiences for students. For example they can build short videos followed by quizzes, to pre-load students for a high value active learning experience on campus. Increasingly universities add more advanced technologies to allow course coordinators to improve the student’s learning experience. Is that sustainable for busy coordinators? How do we keep pace with content quality improvements? Perhaps some of the principles applied in research can help us move at a faster pace and build better quality.
There is no doubt more advanced tools will help with learning. Consider adaptive learning quizzes versus dumb quizzes. A dumb quiz does not know about past attempts by the student and may not even give feedback on mistakes. An adaptive quiz can remember past attempts by students to identify weak spots for individual students, then provide formative feedback and personalised sequences of questions during retesting to enhance missing competencies. Personalised adaptive learning provides a faster and much effective learning experience. Why isn’t this common in higher education when these tools have been common practice in the IT industry for decades with industry training and certifications such as CISCO and Novell in the 1990s. I coordinator told me one how it tool three years to build up a quiz question bank of 3000 questions. This was clearly
In academia research papers begin with a thorough review of past work, in an effort to focus on building genuinely new knowledge, and avoid duplication. These reviews are based on the full global market of research. Shouldn’t we apply the same principle to higher education content and technology? Under what circumstances should any one of 20,000 universities need to write their own learning tool, and do all 20,000 universities really have to assemble their own learning content?

Bespoke Tools?
To provide more advanced learning tools, the tendency in the past has been for universities to write their own, and while this can still make sense in some cases, its increasingly faster to adopt off the shelf tools. The idea that every one of the 20,000 universities can and should keep pace writing bespoke tools makes less and less sense in a globalized market. A single vendor will be able to deliver more functionality faster and at a lower cost. Yes you can get ahead for a short time with a big investment but the majority of these efforts fall by the wayside. If you want an app on your iPhone how often does it make sense to write it yourself before even looking on the app store? So to acquire more advanced content generation tools with a lower cost, perhaps we should start to moving away from custom development towards COTS tools that plugin using standards such as LTI.

Bespoke Content?
Having better tools is one thing, but they still require time to generate the content. Adaptive quizzes require large question banks that can take an instructor a few years to accumulate. When you consider there might be up to 20,000 coordinators around the world slaving away to build the same learning materials for a similar course you start to wonder if there might be a better way. In fact you might even wonder if efforts to generate bespoke content might be a futile waste of time, doomed to be overtaken before they are even complete. Consider if a publisher has already gathered the top 1% of those coordinators together, with a team of learning and multimedia specialists to create learning materials for that course, funded by global economies of scale. The production quality advantage would be quite dramatic. Already somewhere in the world students are being exposed to and addicted to blockbuster quality learning materials. Home grown content will look like home movies by comparison. Highly respected schools are already have already engaged with publishers to incorporate their material on the basis of it being cheaper and better quality than they can achieve.. You can see how at some point it would be prudent for many universities to start adding mixes of high production quality off-the-shelf content from publishers and other commercial vendors where possible. If universities can get together and collaboratively develop high quality content all the better, but the ideas that each of 20,000 universities should continue assembling primitive text content on their own, with no adaptive feedback is probably dead.

What has changed in Higher Education

For a long time the main learning tools were a book and lecture from that book. Later on we had power point slides, and a syllabus, recreated disparately at 20,000 universities around the world. The book and the lecture model is 500+ years old. With the advent of personal computers and the internet and increasing globalisation there is far less need for coordinators to individually create what essentially amounts to lower quality homemade courses. Publishers how have large multimedia development teams informed by the best professors, pumping out globally relevant learning materials that work better and cost less.

• Improved quality of learning technology and learning materials: New itelligent multimedia  learning materials offer dramatically improve learning through. These materials and systems usually cannot be created by individual instructors any more. New electronic learning materials allow personalised learning, customising material presentation to the needs of the individual student.
• Lower Cost: new electronic learning materials are dramatically cheaper to acquire than the old materials cost to build homemade, because they are sharing cost across 20K universities.
• Access: Universities are no longer the repositories of knowledge. Information is now in the cloud. Universities used to be relevant as a repository and transmitter of knowledge… but in the future students will not be reliant on 3/4/5/6/7/ year uni educations to build a career.

Strategies to take advantage of economies of scale:

Strategy	Advantages	Considerations
Sit on your hands	Saves $ in the short term	Soon other providers will get a reputation for having more effective and flexible leaning experiences.
Participate in MOOC production and incorporation of MOOC materials into degree courses.	Gain some economies of scale	In the global internet world the top 10 win, and if you don’t have a program already in the top 10 its going to be hard to make an online version that makes the top 10, let alone get the investment required to make that so. Soon other more serious providers will get a reputation for having more effective and flexible learning experiences through use of professionally built publisher materials made by large multimedia teams combining with experts from around the world and established distribution networks. Try to pick one program and fund it properly, or get out and focus on adding clear value to a local market.
Participate in publisher production and consumption	Higher quality materials. Chance to enhance reputation through contributions. Save $ on learning materials. Likely to survive.	Not open access unless you can get the publisher to agree to that.
Bet on the Gates Foundation LMS of the future project or changing your LMS.	May save LMS costs and give a better user interface.	The learning experience is still delivered by traditional unis saddled by campus costs. LMS costs are tiny compared to campus and generation of learning materials, and labour costs for coordinators. The key concepts of the ‘LMS of the future’ already exist in most commercial LMSs e.g. Interoperability, collaboration, analytics etc. so the only advantage may be a slight saving on the licence which is an irrelevant cost already. Any personalisation may require more labour than the average course coordinator can deliver. A better model is to leverage economies of scale by inserting global learning materials from a MOOC or a publisher or a LOR (learning object repository), or some kind of app store for LMSs. Migrating LMS will set a uni back 2-3 years.
Cull courses and specialise in the most viable programs.	Focus on areas where the university is a clear leader in face to face teaching, or research.	The demise of the generalist university.
Focus on a residential learning and cultural experience for students.	Clear distinction in a global market. Leverages sunk costs in the campus. Trains future national leaders.	Expensive and elitist.

One line of thinking is that technology should only be used where it enhances learning outcomes. While learning outcomes are clearly part of the picture, it may also be a dangerous over-simplification of what is happening in higher education. We have to accept that technology creates opportunities where problems had not been identified, and a missed opportunity can be a big problem. The problem becomes especially big if a competitor is leveraging that opportunity. Higher education may have two problems in combination:
1. While we have established that technologies can be used to improve learning outcomes, and in some cases improve efficiency, universities are poorly positioned to leverage this capability. They are saddled with legacy support structures and resourcing focused on the physical environment, and in some cases a significant focus on research at the expense of teaching.
2. We have discovered that new technologies increasingly pit all universities against each other in a national or global market, where once they were comfortable and protected in geographical markets. The problem is that some level of rationalisation may occur, and new players are gunning for a share of the market. The flip side is that technology opens up opportunities for collaboration and outsourcing to protect or grow market share, or achieve efficiency gains. While the education market is growing, cost expectations may be going down. A university’s vision and strategy might do well to articulate where its emphasis will be, noting it must hold up against competitors. For instance, will it have a focus on:

• enhancing learning outcomes while retaining a face to face component (e.g. flipped classroom),
• enhancing research, or community engagement (e.g. MOOCs) through efficiency gains,
• simply giving more learning options to increasingly busy students, or
• lowering costs to students.

The crux of the ‘problem’ we are trying to solve therefore is which combination of the above will best allow our respective institutions deliver on our charter in five years' time, noting this may significantly depend on our ability to retain or attract students in an international market of providers making full use of technology enabled opportunities. Have a read of Scenario Planning Delivery Models for Higher Education for ideas on this.
Thoughts?
Simon Collyer

Which Platform, or Wrong Question!

Can the choice of elearning technology give you a strategic advantage in higher education? To focus on platform selection without a major change in organisational culture and structure may be missing the crux of what is happening in our industry. We are moving to technology time, where change does not happen all at once and then stop, it gets faster and faster. There is no perfect and correct end-point to discover when you are on technology time. Platforms will come and go. Wherever you get to you will have to leave very quickly. A static organisation that  bets on the right platform and then languishes will be overtaken very quickly. A dynamic organisation will keep pace with a well articulated vision that does not include technology choices.
Technology is raining down, and most institutions are struggling to keep up. A more important strategic advantage might be a vision combined with the ability to keep pace. Do you have the structure and culture and strategy to avoid being left behind? Are your eLearning units on the same page, under the same management, working to a well articulated vision? Are they using well established change management techniques to deal with this once in a lifetime transformation? For the things they don’t know is there a structured program of experiments that  gives some hope of finding them out?

Thoughts?
Simon Collyer

Technology Enabled Learning - Myths

 
MYTH – There is a Single End-Point we have to Guess
Now that teaching and learning is significantly technology enabled, and in many ways driven, like any technology dependant function, it will continue to evolve rapidly, and certainly at a much faster pace than higher education is accustomed.
There will therefore be no single end-state that we have to guess, and then race to. The gap between what we can do now and what most instructors know how to make use of has been allowed to grow to the extent we need a significant change management to catch up, but this does not mean we have to guess the future. It is enough to catch up to the present, and then know that anywhere we get to we will have to leave very quickly. They key is to experiment in many different areas, without betting the house on them until they are proven. Past the ‘bleeding edge’ is where the most failures are. We were standing still for 1000 years, and now we all need to be jogging, without succumbing to a temptation to sprint.
MYTH - Our technology is not good enough to justify changing things yet
Pure online degrees were winning awards ahead of face to face degrees with the technologies available in 2005. Adding more technology should not get a higher priority than simply adding blended learning course design to take advantage of what is already available. Lack of technology is not an excuse for moving forward.
MYTH – We need to wait for MOOCs
Open Universities have been teaching very profitably to international markets for years. MOOCS are just one tool at the end of a spectrum from face to face to online. MOOCS extend the spectrum in the direction of online, towards a more efficient teaching model. MOOCs, or perhaps a hybrid MOOC/LMS may lower costs at some time in the future.
MYTH - Online is not as good as face to face
Sadly many face to face courses have little student-instructor or student-student interaction and rather rely on the student making notes at a dull lecture before sitting a multiple choice exam. Most students report more interactions in online courses than they get in a face to face courses. Yes we can do better at face-to-face, but a half decent online course can easily beat what we have relied on in higher education for hundreds of years. If we snub online we have to snub many of our on-campus degrees.
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Thoughts?
Simon Collyer

Forces at Play for Technology Enabled Change in Higher Education

What is really driving real change now?

• Globalisation and economies of scale through sharing courses. The possibility of large global providers entering the market.
• Efficiency e.g. assignment handling and online marking – but this is not being translated into lower fees yet.
• Learning Outcomes: e.g. flipped classroom – but this may actually create more work and may not drive down costs
• New markets – online courses are used to reach into the territory of competitors
• Convenience – online courses reach new demographics

Other Forces

• There is a lot of concern about the cost of higher education and the ease with which our children are given loans, that burden them when they are trying to establish families.
• We are currently not leveraging technology very well with most institutions not providing:
• self paced learning.. start any time and go any pace;
• personalised learning – where students are presented material according to a system’s understanding of your understanding of the material, and your optimal learning approach;
• choice of University on a course by course basis;
• online learning option for any course.
• Generation of quality learning material is not achieving economies of scale – with tens of thousands of universities duplicating course material, but at a much lower quality than could be achieved with consolidated resources.
• In some economies education is in the top five 'export' industries (e.g. Australia), while other economies are rapidly building capacity that might threaten this, but if the product is really citizenship (rather than education) then the University will not be threatened and should sure up its services to international students. These countries are not really exporting education, they are importing wealth and high quality new citizens. 
• Degrees are progressively increasing in cost, but decreasing their impact on learning potential.
• As technology accelerates, and technology is increasingly incorporated into course material, the three year degree format becomes a problem. By the time a course is developed, and delivered, and the student completes their degree, what they have learned is out of date.
• Educational technology is raining down faster than ever, meaning an organisation’s ability to development custom software is no longer a competitive advantage. An organisation’s ability to manage change is the new key differentiator. Simply catching up with what the commodity market presents a sufficient challenge, and would make any successful institution a leader.
• The pedagogical skills of instructors have fallen behind technology development
• Pure online degrees are starting to win awards ahead of face to face degrees.
• elearning opens up new geographic markets to all institutions. Universities can teach online, or in blended intensive mode, to reach regional and international students.
• The ability to reach new geographic markets pits universities against each other regionally and internationally.
• An international database and agreement for credit sharing would enable student mobility across institutions.
• An international repository for learning materials would help achieve economies of scale in generation.
• elearning opens up new demographic markets, such as busy working professionals, and the disadvantages or disabled.
• Technology enabled self paced learning, allows students to study at their own pace (get a degree faster or slower).
• Self paced learning requires new ways to enable student to student interactions and collaborations.
• Self paced learning enabled staggered assessment, alleviating traditional exam space pressures at the end of semester, but may required technology enabled testing centres, or online invigilation services with a BYOD policy and equity program.
• Self paced learning across a program would require abolition of semesters.
• MOOCS are just one tool at the end of a spectrum from face to face to online. MOOCS extend the spectrum in the direction of online, towards a more efficient teaching model.
• Credit hours may be replaced with competency based assessment. At Western Governors University you earn your degree based on what you’ve learned, not how long you’ve spent in a classroom.
• Professional degrees are now being taught online http://www.wgu.edu/degrees_and_programs 
• There is a perception that online degrees are inferior, but that is not necessarily so given the low standard of on-campus teaching.
• If an institution demonstrated that learning outcomes were as good or better for an online degree, and it was much cheaper, on-campus degrees would be far less attractive, and that institution would have a significant competitive advantage for a period.
• If a technology enabled degree (e.g. online or blended/intensive) was more in tune with modern technology enabled employer needs, and employers preferred its graduates, on-campus degrees would be far less attractive.
• Caps on student numbers have been removed. If discounted courses were allowed, for online education, with a proven better learning outcome, traditional course student numbers could drop rapidly. 
• Technology can be used to enhance personal learning where for example adaptive tests offer more questions in areas where the student requires development.
• If an online degree provider translated and offered traditional on-campus culture and social interactions into the modern world, the traditional on-campus culture would be less of a competitive advantage.
• A new degree granting organisation not saddled with a campus would be able to deliver degrees at a much lower cost.
• If high school students could try before they buy, it might increase re-enrolment rates.
• The current didactic lecture format dates back thousands of years to when books were so scarce we needed one person at the front to read out the book. We have better options now.
• Flipped classroom has been around for a long time, but both the off-campus and on-campus components are now more empowered with technology.
• In-class collaboration tools depend to some extent on all students having a smart device, which in turn may require an equity program.
• A BYOD device policy with an equity program may be cheaper than fitting out many labs, and provide a much more powerful learning environment for students.
• High school teachers are professionally trained. Higher education teachers very rarely have teaching qualifications.
• In research focused universities student fees are used to significantly subsidise research. Teaching quality suffers.The theory is that research leads to better learning, and research leads to a higher ranking which attracts better quality students, but are students being mislead? Its not been established that using student fees to subsidise research is really in the interests of the students paying the fees and the loans that come with them.
• Open Universities Australia believes it is starting to lose students to MOOCs (Aug 2013).
• Now that teaching and learning is significantly technology enabled (and in many ways driven), like any technology dependant function, it will continue to evolve at a much faster pace than instructors are accustomed to. There will therefore be no single end-state that we have to guess, and then race to. Anywhere you get to you will have to leave very quickly.
• Predicting the future of technology is notoriously inaccurate and unwise, and an unnecessary risk, generally not attempted with other technology dependant functions. The same now applies to elearning.
• Some universities have had experience with the bleeding edge. Most of these endeavours were not practical or economically sustainable, and were quickly left behind by the commodity market, and at the same time diverted scarce resources from central initiatives.
• Academic freedom to use leading edge tools must be balanced against consistency, quality, visibility and the need for support and training at a reasonable cost.
• 44% of post-secondary students in the USA were taking part of their course online in the USA this is predicted to be 81% by 2014 (Ambient Insight Research 2009). e-learning has now moved from the margins to be a predominant form of post-secondary education.
• There has been an increase of around 12–14 per cent per year on average in enrolments for fully online learning over the five years 2004–2009 in the US post-secondary system compared with an average of approximately 2 per cent increase per year in enrolments overall (Allen, I. E. and Seaman, J. 2008)
• With ongoing growth in demand for higher education in China and India, the current face-to-face model may not scale adequately.

Thoughts?
Simon Collyer