Future of Education in Canberra in an Online World in Canberra

Professor Armando Fox, Faculty Advisor to the UC Berkeley MOOCLab will speak on the future of education in an online world, at the Australian National University in Canberra, 5pm, 26 November 2014

In today’s classrooms academics and teachers are increasingly expected to incorporate new communication technologies into their curriculum. However, by adopting these new mediums are we reducing the quality of students’ educational experience or is this just the way of the classrooms of tomorrow? ...

• What digital resources can we harness to enhance our massive open online courses (MOOCs)?  Are there any resources that need rapid development?
• What is our single most relevant hurdle to fully harnessing digital education
• What are the key target populations for ANU in online learning?
• What do you think are the measures of success for MOOCs?

e-Learning: Australia's Next Major Export Industry?

I will be speaking on "Teaching Students to Work Together Online" at the ACS e-Learning Special Interest Group, in Canberra, 3 September 2014. Between now and then I will be on a panel and presenting a paper at a conference for Chinese academics on how we can teach our students jointly online. Here are some thoughts on the subject:

Australian International Education Export Industry at Risk

Education is Australia’s fourth largest export industry, according to the Australian Government's International Education Advisory Council, earning $15.7B in 2011. For May 2014, the federal Department of Education estimates Australia has 405,000 international students, with 117,000 from China, 40,000 from India, 109,000 from other Asian countries, and 140,000 from other countries.

The government's Ministerial Coordinating Council for
International Education (MCCIE) expects international enrolments to increase 30% by 2020, adding 117,000 students. However, such predictions assume that students will continue to be educated largely as they are now: on-campus. Higher education is changing to a blended and on-line model, where students learn the basics on-line and then (perhaps) go into a classroom.

My rule of thumb is that about 80% of Higher Education can be done online.The typical student will only need to come to the campus for one day in five. If Australian educational institutions do not adopt this way of working, instead of increasing 30% by 2020, I suggest international enrolments could drop 80%. At the same time domestic enrolments could also drop by 80%, with most students studying at off-shore on-line universities.

To remain competitive, Australian educational institutions need to learn to teach students on-line. These students can then spend part of their time studying in their own country and part of their time in Australia.

Move the New Colombo Plan On-line

Australian Government is providing $100M over five years for the New Colombo Plan for Australian students to study in Asia and the Indian Ocean region. However, this is only being offered for students who physically travel and study in a classroom in another country.

This year the ANU commenced the bilingual (English and Hindi) online course ANU Engaging India for Australian and international students. Those students undertaking professionally accredited courses, such as computing, already learn internationally defined skills (IP3). Students also undertake the same online courses in different countries (ICT Sustainability). 

Part of professional training is to learn Ethics, Teamwork and Professional Communication. I propose the New Colombo Plan could be expanded online, with students in different countries learning professional skills in multi-lingual online groups. Assessment could be by e-Portfolio and courses run jointly by Australian and other institutions. 

In this way Australian students would learn to wok with their regional neighbours, fulfilling the aims of the New Colombo Plan. This would also provide a competitive advantage to attract overseas students who would learn in a culturally sensitive environment, designed to introduce them to an international working environment. This would be attractive compared to courses which simply try to package on-line the on-campus courses of a foreign university.

See paper for ICCSE 2014: Worthington, T. (2014). Chinese and Australian students learning to work together online: Proposal to Expand the New Colombo Plan to the Online Environment.

How Australian Universities Survive an Online World

In "Seven lessons of survival in an online world" (The Australian Higher Education Supplement, 9 April 2014), Dr. Jim Barber, former VC of UNE, notes that Georgia Institute of Technology is offering a Master of Computer Science through MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). The MOOCs are provided by Udacity at a cost of about US $7,000.

As Dr. Barber points out, this on-line Masters is much cheaper than conventional face-to-face university courses. It is also much cheaper than current on-line university courses. The online Masters I am currently enrolled in costs about $35,000. Dr. Barber attributes part of the lower cost to course fees not subsidising research at universities and the cost of buildings.

Dr. Barber claims that "academics are paid to spend about 40 per cent of their time on research" and that "funding for this work derives largely from teaching revenue". So assuming that 40% of my course fees were eliminated by not finding research, that would reduce them to about $21,000.

As I am undertaking an online course, hopefully my fees are not paying for classrooms (as I don't need them). But there are still costs in administration of the course. But that can't account for the bulk of the cost. What else might be in course costs?

There is is the cost of designing and maintaining the course. However, with a large number of students on-line the cost of course design and maintenance should not be more than $1,000 per student per year. MOOCs typically provide no tutor assistance to individual students: unless you can get another student to help (or you pay for your own tutor), then you are on your own. Partly for this reason, MOOCs typically have a completion rate of about 5%, about one tenth the rate for more conventional courses.

The low completion rate is a large hidden cost for MOOCs: they may be on tenth the cost of conventional courses, but if the completion rate is also one tenth, then MOOCs are no cheaper than conventional courses.

The cost for courses which Dr. Barber does not mention is tutoring. The courses I study and teach online at universities have human tutor to help the students. The ANU's casual tutor rates are around $100 per hour.

It would be possible to drastically lower the cost of Australian university degrees by providing them online with no human assistance and using academic staff at universities which undertake no research. However, the reputation of Australia's university sector would suffer as a result.

I agree with Dr. Barber that Australian universities need to embrace on-line courses if they are to avoid the fate of the car industry. But just as the Australian car industry found it could not compete on price with low value cars, Australian universities should avoid trying to compete on price with low quality degrees. Instead Australia should address the premium on-line and blended education market, providing a quality product for a reasonable price, from a country known for its research.

Video of MOOCs with Books: Technology Plus Traditional Teaching for an On-line Education Revolution

The recording of my webinar "MOOCs with Books: Technology Plus Traditional Teaching for an On-line Education Revolution" is now available, courtesy of the SA e-Leaning Unit of the National VET E-learning Strategy. Also available are the notes and slides. See the National Calendar for other National VET events. My next presentation on ICT trends in Education is scheduled for 4:45pm, 12 November 2013, in Canberra, hosted by the Australian Computer Society. I will be in Perth 23 September to 18 October and available to speak there in person.

Princeton Professor Pulls Out of MOOC

According to a media report, Princeton Professor Mitchell Duneier, has stopped participating in the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) "Introduction to Sociology" via Coursera.

From my reading of the news item (‘Star’ Coursera prof stops teaching online course in objection to MOOCs, By Ki Mae Heussner, GAGAOM, 3 September 2013),  Professor Duneier had three concerns:

1. MOOCs being used as an excuse for cuts in government education funding,
2. Educational funding being diverted to MOOCs,
3. Educational effectiveness of MOOCs.

These are reasonable concerns. However, these are not new issues. The effectiveness of on-line education has been debated for at least a decade. The effectiveness, effect on conventional education, and funding of distance education has been debated for at least 100 years.

Professor Duneier cannot have been unaware of these issues before agreeing to provide a MOOC. But I would like to hear what Professor Duneier  has to say himself about his reasons for stopping the MOOC, rather than relying on a few press quotes.

Costs and Economics of Open and Distance Learning

Greville Rumble's "The Costs and Economics of Open and Distance Learning" (Routledge, 1997) was written in the early days of Internet based education, but is applicable to today's MOOCs. At the time the book was written, Rumble was a planning manager at UK's Open University (OU). This experience shows in the books non-nonsense analysis of the cost of design and delivery of large scale distance education.

Rumble first provides a gentle introduction to budgets, costing, the effect of volume on cost, attribution and activity costing. Academics might ask what any of this has to do with their design and delivery of education, but resources for education are always limited and so it helps to plan for their use.

Rumble then discusses costing the design of courses, comparing traditional face-to-face courses with distance education. While this was written at the dawn of the Internet age, where dial-up modems were new hot technology, the concepts and approach are still relevant. The central point of distance education, including today's MOOCs, are that you need a large number of students to make them cost effective. The materials must be designed carefully, most likely by a team of people and then tested.

Rumble discusses the cost of developing text versus multimedia (audio, video). Open University was conceived as being reliant on broadcast TV, with full professional program making by the BBC. But the point is made that the production quality of the video makes no difference to the educational outcomes. High quality professional video production does not help the students learn any better (although I suggest it may influence their perception of the quality of the course).

Surprisingly, given OU's comprehensive approach to course material design, Rumble suggests that simple conversion of face-to-face courses is cost and educationally effective. This involves conversion of lecture notes into a booklet and recording of lectures on video.

One area Rumble does not explore at length is the cost of assessment. This is a significant part of any course and teaching techniques which use progressive assessment preclude it being simply relegated to an examination at the end.

Academics do not need to know all the detail of costing courses, particularly not the equations presented in this book. But the general principles should be part of the basic training of all of those who design university courses.

Many institutions pioneers of distance education are mentioned by Rumble. Some which caught my attention are Athabasca University (which offers my Green IT course), University College of Southern Queensland, which is now the University of Southern Queensland (I was an online higher education student there last year) and Indira Gandhi Open University (which I was presented with a tie from by Professor Uma Kanjilal, Director of the School of Social Sciences, INGOU on a visit to ANU).

Opportunities for Academic Librarians with MOOCs

Cameron Barnes' paper "MOOCs: The Challenges for Academic Librarians", (Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 1 Aug 2013) provides a useful checklist of issues raised with Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs) for academic librarians.  As Barnes points out, MOOC have no formal entrance requirements, are free, delivered on-line and have thousands of students. But the issues MOOCs raise are not new and have been addressed by universities offering online courses (and distance education on paper before that) for decades.

Recently I have been working my way through some of the books written about the UK Open University decades ago, which I found while wandering down the shelves at the ADAF library. All the issues brought up by MOOCs, to do with courses with no formal entrance requirements, low cost, students with disability, copyright clearance  and having tens of thousands of students are covered there

MOOCs with Books: Technology Plus Traditional Teaching for an On-line Education Revolution

I will be speaking on "MOOCs with Books: Technology Plus Traditional Teaching for an On-line Education Revolution" in a webinar hosted by the National VET e-Learning Strategy, 1pm AEST 17 September (12:30pm Adelaide time). There will be a face-to-face version of the event hosted by the Australian Computer Society in Canberra, 4:45pm 12 November 2013.

TOPIC: MOOCs with Books: Synchronisation of large scale asynchronous e-learning
PRESENTER:  Tom Worthington,  Adjunct Lecturer, Australian National University

A quiet revolution is taking place in Australia's schools, TAFEs and universities, with education moving on-line. Award winning education designer Tom Worthington will provide an overview of the trends and its implications for education:

1. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS)
2. Social media for education
3. Open Source e-Portfolio software
4. Cloud based Learning Management Systems (LMS)
5. e-Book textbooks
6. Portable course-ware formats

See also:

1. Synchronizing Asynchronous Learning: Combining Synchronous and Asynchronous Techniques
2. A Green Computing Professional Education Course Online
3. On-line Professional Education For Australian Research-Intensive Universities in the Asian Century