Having returned from the WCOL on Thursday, thought I would add two final blogs in regard to the Conference. This one relates to the keynote from Prof. George Siemans, who on Thursday morning delivered a very challenging and thought provoking presentation on the role, rise and concerns of digital technology and the inadequate response of higher education to that change.

 The title of the paper was ‘Moving Beyond Happy, but not Hopeful: The role of higher education in meaning making in human and artificial cognition’  and the full paper can be located from the link below.

Here are some selections from the full paper..  well worth a read… for anyone interested in  the digital future and the roles that universities might play in that.

We have two learner populations in the higher education system: the traditional 17-24 year old group, and the emerging lifelong adult learner group. We have failed both, but in different ways. 

But let’s be realistic. We are giving our students what we wanted and needed for the world in which we grew up. 

We have failed youth by creating an education system that supports existing power structures in society and does so in a most pernicious way: don’t go through us and you can’t get a job. Go through us and become conditioned to existing systems and, heavily in the USA but also in numerous other developed countries, you will be locked into years, decades or even a life debt. This is a failure of purpose. A failure of opportunity. A failure of meaning.

Another concern arises in that learning is a coherence forming process and networks are fragmentary. This fragmentation provides serendipity AND it produces knowledge frameworks that often don’t cohere. This results in an effect called the Illusion of Explanatory Depth. This is the appearance of understanding but on even slight questioning, it becomes apparent that the knowledge pieces don’t fit.

We are entering a post-learning era……   …Where what we know is less important than how we are connected for ongoing knowledge development. Where attributes of collaboration replace attributes of individual performance. And where sensemaking, meaning making, and wayfinding become primary knowledge activities

A post learning era is one where traditional learning is better performed, or exceeded, by technology and existing institutions are inadequate for the learning task needed.

Here is the link to the full paper,

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YP2t4aCkYtIDnkq8MHALPisltlUqIlrS/edit#

The first key note of the World Conference on Online Learning was Simon Nelson Head of FutureLearn (FL), and  below is a summary of the key points made by Simon in a thought provoking presentation.

Simon introduced himself in Irish by going to a free FutureLearn course (Irish 101) and listening to and repeating audio clip of how to say Hello in Irish!

First up the figures….

FL was founded 7 years ago as a commercial offshoot of the Open University and was a UK response to the rise of MOOC’s. FL has 175 partners (32 UK Universities), 2000 ‘courses’, 10 million registered users and 25 million enrollments with some courses with over a million enrollments (English Language Proficiency) and others with 20-30. Simon stated that FL was ‘scratching the surface….’

He highlighted that FL has just  become a partner of SEED who have invested $50 million into FL

He identified three key issues

1. World Reports highlight that 13.9 million new students per year until 2030 are needed which in traditional money would equate to 700 new universities of 25,000 per university to meet the demand and concluded that physical campus based education CANNOT meet this demand, but online learning CAN.
2. Acknowledgement of a Global Skills Gap (especially in Digital Skills) with 14% of the global workforce (375 million) switching job categories – so the need for training/retraining is massive
3. Governments starting to get in on the act e.g. UK government ‘Get Help to Retrain’ 2019 initiative.

The above represent opportunities for universities to rethink their audience and move beyond the 18-24 market and that’s what FL is trying to do, support Universities and other providers on this.

Simon concluded by identifying key current agendas for Future Learn.

1. Getting partners to work together – scale is so big, it has to be approached via collaboration eg Deakin and Coventry now offer an MA Entrepreneurship
2. Unbundling of big degrees, so students can study for a few weeks to a few years
3. Work on micro credentialing… short courses approved by employers with standardised credentialing are necessary. FL is doing significant work on micro credentialing aligning for example the European Credit System and the US credit system, so a common language of credit can be used for all courses offered

I came away from the key note with the following thoughts/questions..

As Staffordshire University moves forward as a digitally connected university, we need to look at the markets we wish to tap into.

1. Should we be offering a far greater variety of online ‘chunks of learning’ to meet employer demands for training and especially re-training?  
2. Do we need to move toward credentialing/micro credentialing for each and every online/blended unit that we offer?
3. Do we want to attract students from beyond the region and can we do this by ourselves, or do we need to consider collaboration with other universities  in  online settings ( virtual/transnational!!) 
4. Do we need to be looking for agencies (such as FL) to support attempts to offer learning not just  to regional audiences but to national and international audiences.
5. If any of the above is considered necessary, how can we best use the  pockets of expertise that we have in delivering blended and online content to learners to move some/all of the above forward.

Dublin rain welcomed over 800 delegates from over 80 countries to the first day of the World Conference on Online Learning https://wcol2019.ie/

It was opened by the Minister of State for Higher Education who  was keen to praise the work  of the co hosts Dublin City University  and the National Institute of Digital Learning (do we have something similar?.. not really..). The minister  focused on ethical matters in regard to online learning and on keeping students at the heart of matters and even had a gentle dig at waiting for the UK to make up its mind about Brexit!!  Three thoughts came to mind during this and other welcome presentations

1. In regard to online learning, will we ever get global reach on our courses without global partners?
2. That we need to use free access courses as a marketing tool to grow online numbers
3. That we need to engage with professional organisations in the field of online learning .e.g International Council of Distance and Online Education (ICDE) … European Network of Distance Education (EDEN)

On day 1 decided to focus on areas I felt I knew something about and flitted in and out of presentations happening across 10 parallel sessions, during 3 presentation slots in the day. So I selected presentations dealing with three issues; quality assurance and OPM’s (Online Programmer Management) providers and the Community of Inquiry (COI) model. I will comment on probably he most enlightening presentation of the 7 I attended on Day 1.

Jennifer Matthes from the US based Online Learning Consortium (OLC) outlined ‘Global Best Practices in Online Learning to Support a Quality Student Experience’ and reminded us that credibility is still an issue, with QA still not widely implemented. She argued that QA was needed as a baseline to improve form and to reflect an institutions commitment to quality of online provision. This certainly struck home as S.U. has not adopted any QA online specific processes, to my knowledge. Jennifer outlined the slightly different approaches of 4 QA online frameworks, those provided by the OLC, the European Assoc. of Distance Learning Universities (EADTU), Quality Matters (QM) and the American Council of Distance Educators (ACDE) and highlighted  the different course design rubrics (including some that are freely available) from the OLC and QM and from ASCILITE (Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education).

If online learning is to be a strategic part of our offer at Staffs, then we need to take QA seriously and need to move to approaches that capture and assess the online bits of online learning.

Two final observations… The conference has a lot of presentations from (a) North America (not surprising) and from the African sub continent (more surprising). Well maybe not, as the WCOL s partly under the auspices of the ICDE, which has always has a strong international focus. Secondly, for such a large conference  the number of  Sponsors/Affiliates seemed rather small, approximately 15.. I spoke with 3 to date and will comment on these later, they were FutureLearn (OPM) provider (www.futurelearn.com) commercial offshoot of the Open University;  Urkund  www.urkund.com (Plagiarism Detection) and Studiosity ( 24/7 online study support see www.studiosity.com).

  Am getting quite excited about attending the World Congress on Online Learning in Dublin from this Sunday to the following Thursday.  The plan is to post a daily blog about my experiences and reaction to this rather large conference…nine parallel sessions… 4-5 presentations per session…4 sessions per day.. for 4 days.. .. 8 Keynotes, including George Siemens and  Simon Nelson (Chief Exec FutureLearn). Where’s the Guinness?!!!!