Stella Porto's List: DE Management

• Open and distance learning (ODL) and eLearning are increasingly seen as key to providing access to the wider student population now seeking higher education, especially to working adults and those in remote rural areas. In 1988 there were only ten open universities in the whole 53-nation Commonwealth; by 2005 there were 13 open universities in India alone. Our focus here is on the fundamental question of how these new providers, mostly in the public sector but including a growing number of private institutions, can offer high-quality higher education at an affordable price
• Much of today’s higher education remains a blend of student community and lecture bazaar, each of which contributes a particular notion of quality. In the community model, quality is largely a matter of the characteristics of the entering students. If the student community is difficult to get into, it must be a place where excellent education occurs. Quality is identified with exclusivity. The lecture bazaar model brings in another dimension of quality, namely expenditure per student: the more the better.
• Quality assurance, usually done at the institutional level, is generally meant to verify that institutions are fulfilling their declared missions. If they are doing so, the process may then, in some jurisdictions, culminate in institutional accreditation or re-accreditation. In some countries, quality assurance also includes evaluation at the discipline level.
  Although they instigated the drive to more quality assurance, a number of governments now express disappointment with its impact for various reasons. Some had hoped it would shake up the higher education system and squeeze weaker institutions more vigorously. Some have concerns about self-referential nature of much quality-assurance work, which they believe needs some external point of reference; in a globalized world, governments like to compare their performance internationally. And finally, the emphasis is increasingly shifting from how advanced education is offered to the learning that results from it.
• But the key factor is the shift of emphasis from residence and lectures to outcomes and examinations. If the trend to delink testing from teaching continues, it will lead to more flexible and less expensive models of higher education, with the result that the aspiration of giving people access to high-quality higher education worldwide may not be an illusion.

  • this could be used as a conclusion and a discussion of how openness can lead to a system that is accepted and legitimized.
• In terms of the access-quality-cost triangle, the examination system is a major breakthrough. Access is only limited by the availability of examiners, quality and standards can be set at the level required, and students are spared the costs of residence and instruction.
• However, instead of expecting students to enroll for a complete package of teaching and assessment, institutions will need to unbundled and personalize the different elements of their support, allowing students to pick the amount and kind of assistance that they need and can afford.

  • The aspect of unbundling education is in a way what happening with OER, MOOC, badges, etc.
• hey distinguished three types of interaction: student with content; student with student; and student with teacher. They then analyzed all the studies to find which type of interaction made the greatest difference to student performance when it was increased. The results showed clearly that increasing student-content interaction had much the greatest effect, with student-student interaction coming next and student-teacher interaction last.

  • this is a major point... we know that student-instructor is the expensive part of online education... this means that we can reduce the cost of teaching and learning with technology and good instructional design
• Support through distance learning is particularly appropriate for reasons of convenience and economics. The costs of reproducing and distributing eLearning materials are tiny, so it costs little to widen access to them. An examination system, allied to elements of distance learning, could give wide access and consistent quality at low cost. Supporting examination candidates and distance learners is much easier today because of the development of the Web, eLearning, and open educational resources.
• But much less effort has been devoted to enriching student-content interaction, although this is potentially the most cost-effective strategy. ELearning provides new and inexpensive ways to do this—websites with answers to frequently asked questions being a simple example.
• The requirements for a model that could allow higher education to expand rapidly in the developing world are that it be readily scalable (wide access), academically credible (high quality) and affordable (low cost). This could be achieved by building higher education networks around credible examination systems run by national or independent bodies or established institutions and then encouraging a market of support providers to aid in development. Although the range of examinations would need to match the wide array of higher education programs on offer, there is considerable room for aggregation and for some existing institutions to act as examining bodies for others.

  • I see a possibility of taking this model and partially using this within the developing world for students that come from less privileged background and need to catch - the typical adult student, who later in life returns to academic preparation and might need remedial work. This kind of system could exist to in fact bring students to an existing track that already exists. not necessarily the entire system offered within a testing system and a flexible open learning system.
• Adapting examinations to the new teaching and learning environment and to technologies such as gaming also requires special skills. These are examples of the new division of labor in higher education.  
  

  • This is a HUGE point. The point of bringing back the division of labor that will reduce the cost of education per student, necessary for the demands of the world today.
• Examining institutions can draw on the evolving work on standards to ensure relevance and make their curricula fully transparen
• Placing the functions of teaching and examining in different institutions makes issues of quality and standards much easier to address
• Teaching institutions are challenged to raise their teaching to the level of the external examinations, rather than softening their examinations to fit their own teaching
• What should be the relationship between examining bodies and support providers?
• The best way of protecting the student, which the Internet facilitates, is for examining bodies to make public as much information as possible about the costs and success rates of the various support providers.
• Although our focus is on developing countries, we suspect that elements of the systems we describe will gradually be adopted within established systems in wealthier countries—after all, they are not new.
• This is not to predict convergence on a common worldwide model. National differences thrive in a globalized world. Concepts of quality in higher education will vary between countries and regions, and the styles of the regional quality-assurance networks will reflect these differences.
• But perceptions of quality are changing, and the growing emphasis on outcomes and standards heralds the possibility of a model of higher education that could achieve the ministerial aims—one that centers on examinations and allows students to choose different ways of preparing for them

  • Can this evolve to competency-based instead of outcomes based? This would bring all the discussed trends together. Are badges the bridge between these two different perspectives: outcomes and competencies?

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