Challenges for policies, strategies and leadership in an increasingly more open and online world. Distance and e-Learning Policy and Strategy, EDEN Annual Conference 2012, Porto, 7 June 2012. Gard Titlestad, Secretary General, ICDE

1. Challenges for policies, strategies and
leadership in an increasingly more open
and online world
Distance and e-Learning Policy and Strategy
EDEN Annual Conference 2012, Porto
7 June 2012
Gard Titlestad
Secretary General
ICDE

2. Outline
• Introduction
• Global and European context
• Opportunities, trends and disruptive initiatives
• Two Books
• Need for a facilitating framework, firm policies
and leadership
• Conclusion

3. Need for education
- Education For All
• Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO
“Higher education: In less than 40 years,
enrolments have increased fivefold. Globally it
is estimated that demand will expand from
less than 100 million students in 2000 to over
250 million students in 2025.”

4. ”People with
university degrees
have suffered far
fewer job losses
during the global
economic crisis
than those who left
school without
qualifications.”
”Good education and skills are crucial to improving a person’s
economic and social prospects.” OECD 2011

5. School failure
– system failure
• Reducing school failure pays off for both
society and individuals. More education
attainment provides better labour market
prospects and contributes to economic
growth and social progress. The highest
performing education systems across OECD
countries are those that combine high quality
and equity.
Overcoming School Failure: Policies that Work
February 2012

6. One of five don´t complete
”Drop outs”
Or ”Push outs” (Hal Plotkin)

7. University drop-outs (or push outs?) cost 660
million Euros per year in Spain alone

8. Education has to contribute to
bringing youths back to the
labour market

9. Dr Qian Tang, Assistant Director-General for Education, UNESCO,
Flexible learning for inclusive education
• Yet all people, regardless of their sex, race, religion,
disability or national, ethnic and social origin, are entitled
to a quality education. Denying them such an opportunity is
not only an infringement of their fundamental human
rights; it is also a serious waste of society’s human
resources. Indeed, education that is restricted to certain
social groups deprives a country of significant assets and
skills that could be tapped to build prosperous
communities. Furthermore, it limits the impact of national
efforts to create peaceful, just, fair and cohesive societies.
• Inclusive education is therefore non-negotiable.

10. Opportunities

11. Technology as
facilitator
The rapid development of
information and
communication technology
(ICT) offers tremendous
educational opportunities to
provide new innovative,
accessible and more affordable
ways of learning.
Mansoor Al Awar,
Chairman, Middle East e-
Learning Association.

13. Internet is hitting
Education
• "The investing
community believes
that the Internet is
hitting education,
that education is
having its Internet
moment,"
– Jose Ferreira,
founder of the
interactive-learning
company Knewton.

14. "Going the Distance:
Online Education in the United
States, 2011"
• Almost one-third of
enrolments in HE in the
autumn of 2010 in the
USA were online
enrolments, with more
than 30% of the
students taking at least
one course online.
Allen, E. I., Seaman, J. - Sloan Consortium, 2011

15. The Future - USA
• College presidents predict substantial growth in
online learning: 15% say most of their current
undergraduate students have taken a class online,
and 50% predict that 10 years from now most of
their students will take classes online.
• Nearly two-thirds of college presidents (62%)
anticipate that 10 years from now, more than half of
the textbooks used by their undergraduate students
will be entirely digital.
• The Digital Revolution and Higher Education. 2011. By Kim Parker, Amanda Lenhart and
Kathleen Moore

16. India
25% of Indian students are now
covered by distance education
Lakh = 100.000

17. ”Higher education, is vulnerable
to disruption.”
Clayton M. Christensen, professor of
business administration at the
Harvard Business School.
Harvard Conference Seeks to Jolt University Teaching, February 2012

18. Will elite institutions have to
change or lose in competition
with Online start-ups?
Case: Stanford Professor Gives Up Teaching Position, Hopes to
Reach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up
”We believe university-level education can be both high quality
and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we've
connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of
thousands of students all over the world.”
http://www.udacity.com/
Professor David Evans and
Professor Sebastian Thrun

19. Purpose? Direction?
Sustainable?
• “I have waited many years to see something
like this that would empower working people,
poor people, and isolated ones, to learn at the
top level from the best in a more accessible
way.”
Benoit Ambry
Udacity student, USA

20. Certificates for free online courses –
what impact could that have for HEI?
Case: MIT granting certificates for free online courses.
• Participants will watch five- to 10-minute
video tutorials, read an e-textbook, and
complete homework assignments, virtual
laboratories and two exams. At the end of the
course, they will receive a cumulative grade
and a certificate from MITx.
• http://mitx.mit.edu/
MITx MIT’s new online learning initiative

21. Coursera
nanoHUB-U

22. Disruptive innovation
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Disruptive innovation does not make a good product or service better,
but makes it more affordable and accessible, so more people can
purchase or use it.

23. Disruptive innovation — in education
For Anant Agarwal, MITx, the Institute’s
new online-learning initiative, isn’t just a
means of democratizing education. It’s a
way to reinvent it.

24. Two books
The Academic world
shows the way, Göran Bexell

25. Two books
• Comphrehensive
overview of challenges
for universities.
• In 416 pages: almost
nothing on the
opportunities and
challenges from a more
open and online world
• One sentence: ”Internet
offers an unused
revolution in the thinking
with regards to
The Academic world education.” End of story.
shows the way, Göran Bexell,
Lund University, Sweden

26. Two books
• Several articles, carefully
analysing how future
opportunities could be
met. Blended learning.
Experiences from the
Open Universitiy, UK, and
much more. Strong
innovation in the
university approach.
• Discussed with a holistic
approach to the future
university
Universitat Oberta de Catalunia,
Barcelona, Spain

27. • The examples, the trends, the system failure, the opportunites call for firm
governmental policies to facilitate a wanted development! But also call for firm
strategies and strong leadership by higher education institutions, to develop
inclusive high quality open and online higher education.
• The private and public sectors, which demand relevant and timely knowledge
supply, need to play an active role in future policies and strategies.

28. Urgent needs
• Strong need for a professional, policy-oriented debate
throughout Europe, throughout the world, on the
opportunities and challenges for higher education and
governments coming from a more open and online world.
• Strong need for innovative examples to be fed into the
debate, fed into the development of the learning system.
• Strong need for research on distance, online, eLearning, in
particular to have an oversight of where are we, what do
we know, and what are the great challenges which need to
be explored and researched.
• Need to be met by a “Partnership for inclusive, high quality
open and online higher education”

29. Studies and tools to
support the debate
• Idea: Global monitor, every second or third year
– Open, distance, online, flexible, e learning
– Descrition of the area and the latest developments
– Statistics and trends
– Innovative examples
– Research overview – where are the research frontiers?
• What do you think?

30. Conclusion
• I believe we are at the beginning of a big
debate about the future learning system.
• Educational systems will be decided nationally,
but the direction will be a global issue.
• ICDE will be a visible and eager player in this
debate.

31. Thank You!
titlestad@icde.org
www.icde.org