Digital environments improving quality and efficiency of teaching leru - brussels, 6 feb 2015

DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS

IMPROVING QUALITY AND

EFFICIENCY OF TEACHING

AND LEARNING

Dirk Van Damme

OECD/EDU/IMEP

A FEW INTRODUCTORY QUESTIONS

3

Tertiary-level attainment rate and labour

productivity across countries

Australia

Austria

Belgium

Canada

Chile

Czech Rep

Denmark

Estonia

Finland

France

GermanyGreece

Hungary

Iceland

Ireland

Israel

Italy

Japan

Korea

Luxembourg

Mexico

Netherlands

New ZealandNorway

Poland

PortugalSlovak Rep

Slovenia

Spain

Sweden

Switzerland

Turkey

UKUS R² = 0.1972

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

55

10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90

Pe

rce

nta

ge

of

the

25

-64

ye

ar-

old

po

pu

lati

on

th

at

ha

s a

tta

ine

d t

ert

iary

ed

uc

ati

on

(2

011

)

Labour productivity: GDP per hour worked, current prices, USD (2011)

• Higher education contributes to productivity

increases in economy and society, often through

research-based technological innovations

• But why has productivity inside higher

education not increased to a similar degree?

Question

Expenditure per student, 2008 and 2011

80

90

100

110

120

130

140

150

Esto

nia

Slo

vak R

epu

blic

Chile

Hung

ary

Kore

a

Czech R

ep

ub

lic

Fin

land

Slo

ven

ia

Denm

ark

Ru

ssia

n F

ede

ratio

n

Isra

el

Ja

pa

n

Un

ited

Kin

gd

om

Italy

Pola

nd

OE

CD

ave

rag

e

EU

21 a

vera

ge

Ne

the

rla

nds

Sw

itze

rla

nd

Fra

nce

Sw

ede

n

Germ

any

Austr

alia

Bra

zil

Spa

in

Norw

ay

Me

xic

o

Belg

ium

Port

ug

al

Austr

ia

United

Sta

tes

Ire

land

Icela

nd

Index of change (2008=100)

Change in expenditure Change in the number of students (in full-time equivalents) Change in expenditure per student

Tertiary education

• Per student expenditure (public and private)

starts to decline in many countries

• Is higher education becoming relatively more

costly than comparable sectors where

technology-supported productivity increases

have taken place?

• Can technology – by realising digital learning

environments – help to raise efficiency and

quality in higher education?

Question

FASHION, WINDOW-DRESSING OR STRATEGY?

The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 Feb 2015

‘The MOOC hype fades…’

‘The MOOC hype fades…’

The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 Feb 2015

INSTITUTIONAL RATIONALES

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•Widening access•Enhancing quality of on-campus learning•Increasing efficiency, lowering cost•Branding in the global reputation race

• E-learning allows opening opportunities

– To non-traditional, part-time students – with a social

mission to connect to disadvantaged students and to

let learners benefit of top-quality lecture(r)s

– By asynchronous delivery: independent from time and

place restrictions

– Allowing scaling up of existing course provision at low

cost

– Increasing market share of universities in continuing

education market

Institutional rationale 1.

Widening access

12

• ICT can greatly enhance the quality of on-

campus teaching and learning:

– Blended modes of instruction are mainstream

– Stronger student-faculty and student-student

interaction

– Activating, self-directed learning, use of problem-

solving, enhanced learning activities

• Cfr strategic view on ‘guided independent learning’

at Catholic University Louvain

Institutional rationale 2.

Enhancing quality of on-campus learning

13

• Promises of e-learning include an increase in

cost-effectiveness through economies of scale

– Higher student/faculty ratio, especially in

undergraduate classes

– Scaling for off-campus, online students

– Several elements of teaching & learning process

are not compressible, especially the most

innovative and personalised ones

– Little empirical evidence of massive cost-savings

14

Institutional rationale 3.

Enhancing efficiency and reducing costs

• One of the most powerful rationales probably is the opportunity for institutional profiling to showcase excellence and to brand the institution’s name in the global reputation race

– E-learning (especially MOOC) offers new opportunities to make excellence visible in a rapidly expanding global education market

– Complementing the market for mobile students with virtual mobility

– Networking as ‘joining the club’ of excellence, e.g. edX

Institutional rationale 4.

Branding in the global reputation race

15

CRITICAL CHALLENGES

•The business model•The pedagogical challenge•The student•Faculty and institutions

16

• Typically, institutions overestimate benefits and underestimate costs of e-learning

– Investment estimates usually limited to technological requirements

– Although highly scalable, the initial investment cost for high-quality online courseware and learning resources are huge

– Blended modes require high student-staff interaction and offer limited prospects for increasing student/staff ratios

– IP regulation and licensing should not be neglected

– Business model of MOOC provision still very unclear

Challenge 1.

Defining the business model

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• Still, digital learning environments have the potential

to generate cost-efficiencies mainly by distributing

content widely at relatively low cost

• Some ways forward

– Creating communities of practices with a clear goal to

evaluate and enhance materials (e.g. better

procedures for peer-review and user feedback)

– Improve ability to search for high quality materials

(e.g. meta-tagging)

– Design resources flexibly for adaptation to new

environments, new students, etc.

Challenge 1.

Defining the business model

• Issues:

– Large majority of online courses are still traditional lectures and courseware in digital format, ill-adapted to the 21st

Century skills development (non-routine skills)

– MOOC may in fact slow down the trend of pedagogical innovation of e-learning

– One-way course delivery often has very poor learning outcomes

– Very few online courses use ICT creatively to design adaptive courseware, apply learning diagnostics, challenge the linear design of courses, including new assessment tools, etc.

– Completion rates of online courses is still very low, according to publicly available statistics

– Obsession with scaling goes counter to the pedagogical need for interactivity, social learning and personalisation

Challenge 2.

The pedagogical challenge

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• Institutional strategic approach

– Massive use of ICT requires institutional transformation in its curriculum planning, course design policies and delivery mechanisms

– Need for an institutional support centre for course development and instructional design

• E-learning support centres exist in Columbia, MIT, Princeton, Oxford, Bristol, etc.

– Huge need for effective support of faculty and staff

– But well designed e-learning can provide huge benefits over traditional delivery

Challenge 2.

The pedagogical challenge

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• Some opportunities of online learning in improving pedagogical quality

– Expand access to content –e.g. specialised materials well beyond textbooks, in multiple formats, with little time and space constraints

– Support new pedagogies with learners as active participants –e.g. as tools for inquiry-based pedagogies and collaborative workspaces

– Collaboration for knowledge creation –e.g. collaboration platforms for teachers to share and enrich teaching materials

– Feedback –make it faster and more granular

– Automatize data-intensive processes –visualisation

Challenge 2.

The pedagogical challenge

• Some opportunities of online learning in fostering collaborative teaching and learning practices:

– Creating communities of practice purposefully evaluating and enhancing quality of resources through user feedback, adapting and modifying resources, etc.

– Improving access to and sharing of high-quality materials

– Providing targeted search tools to high-quality materials

– Flexibly adapting resources to new environments

Challenge 2.

The pedagogical challenge

Virtual and remote labs

• iLab Central at Northwestern University, USA:

– Students use real lab equipment via a web browser and do lab assignments from any location with internet access

– Impact on content understanding and on science enquiry skills (better quality experiment designs and resarchquestion formulation) (effect size: 0.8)

Gaming and Game-Design Methodology

(GDM)

• University of Norwich – Eco Virtual Environment project: island with growing energy demands require students to specialize and collaborate to design an energy network, while getting real-time feedback on their decisions in terms of power, finance and environment

• GDM: Even more learning

Real-time formative assessment

• Colorado School of Mines, USA

• Use of tablet PCs and « InkSurvey » software allowing interactions in the style of clickers for hand-written and drawn feedback

• Positive impact on creativity (as measured by Torrance Creativity Test) and critical thinking – and new possibilities of collaborative problem solving

• Regular on-campus students:

– Are considered to be ‘digital natives’ but it would be

wrong to assume that by definition they have the skills

to effectively integrate technology in learning

– Most of them do not want technology to change

radically the learning experience or to decrease the

value of human interaction in the academic

experience

– Have very different profiles, interaction needs

– Have a high preference for ICT enabling social

learning and building ‘communities of inquiry’

Challenge 3.

The student

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100 80 60 40 20 0 20 40 60 80 100

Poland

Ireland

Slovak Republic

Estonia

Korea

United States

Austria

Czech Republic

Average

Flanders (Belgium)

Japan

England/N. Ireland (UK)

Germany

Canada

Australia

Denmark

Norway

Netherlands

Finland

Sweden

Level 2 Level 3

Young adults (16-24 year-olds) All adults (16-65 year-olds)

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Proficiency in problem solving in technology-

rich environments

%

Adults at Level 3 can• Complete tasks involving multiple applications, a large number of steps, impasses, and the discovery and use of ad hoc commands in a novel environment. • Establish a plan to arrive at a solution and monitor its implementation as they deal with unexpected outcomes and impasses.

Adults at Level 2 can complete problems that have explicit criteria for success, a small number of applications, and several steps and operators. They can monitor progress towards a solution and handle unexpected outcomes or impasses.

Profiles of students with regard to Internet

use

OECD (2012)

Data Italy, 2008

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• Regular on-campus students:

– Set limits to technology use in classrooms

– ICT familiarity does not automatically translate into better learning

• Research shows that ICT skills and ICT social contact skills do not predict academic success

– Have a limited view on how technology might enhance their learning and conform to teachers’ views

• Adaptive courseware and appropriate support needed to realise the potential of technology

Challenge 3.

The student

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• Off-campus online students

– Often lack the learning skills (meta-cognitive skills, perseverance, etc.) to successfully engage in self-directed learning

– Receive little support and student-teacher interaction

– Are deprived of the social and cultural experiences which impact on the academic skills, identity development and the formation of the ‘academic mind’

– Very little is known about the factors which impact on academic success of online learners

Challenge 3.

The student

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• To make e-learning a success, the support from faculty and institutional leadership are critical

– Not only the pioneers and early-adopters, but also the mainstream, the pragmatists and the sceptics

– Institutional strategic thinking and leadership are critical

– Unexpected increases in work load, not accounted for, jeopardise adoption and support

– Skills deficits are often hidden, but can have great impact – need for appropriate training

– Incentives and rewards are necessary

– There are also benefits for face-to-face teaching resulting from working on e-learning courses

Challenge 4.

Faculty and institutions

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CONCLUSIONS:BENEFITS & OPPORTUNITIES

• Many aspects of the teaching & learning

environments in universities cannot be

compressed, but technology will be part of the

answer to address efficiency challenges

– Provided a sustainable business model can be

developed for online learning

– Provided hybrid course delivery will increase

economies of scale

– Provided students are equipped with the skills to

take benefit from self-directed learning

Efficiency gains

• Online learning offers both new challenges and

new opportunities for quality improvement in

teaching and learning processes and content

– Adaptive courseware, new interactive learning

tools

– Collaborative development of courseware,

content and delivery modes

– Creating communities who take responsible of

teaching & learning processes

Quality improvement

• …some words of caution

– Dramatizing language often used in this context

is inappropriate and unnecessary

– Online learning and technology in general seem

to raise huge expectations, while realities are

much more mundane and sobering

– As any other academic activity it requires great

care, rigour and effort…

– …and, especially, a very intensive research

backing!

Finally…

Thank you !

[email protected]/edu/ceri

twitter @VanDammeEDU

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