Presentation at LERU Open Seminar 'Online Learning at European Research-intensive Universities' - Brussels, 6 February 2015

1. DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS
IMPROVING QUALITY AND
EFFICIENCY OF TEACHING
AND LEARNING
Dirk Van Damme
OECD/EDU/IMEP

2. A FEW INTRODUCTORY
QUESTIONS

3. 3
Tertiary-level attainment rate and labour
productivity across countries
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Canada
Chile
Czech Rep
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Iceland
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan
Korea
Luxembourg
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Slovak Rep
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Turkey
UK
US R² = 0.1972
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
55
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Percentageofthe25-64year-oldpopulation
thathasattainedtertiaryeducation(2011)
Labour productivity: GDP per hour worked, current prices, USD (2011)

4. • 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

5. Expenditure per student, 2008 and 2011
80
90
100
110
120
130
140
150
Estonia
SlovakRepublic
Chile
Hungary
Korea
CzechRepublic
Finland
Slovenia
Denmark
RussianFederation
Israel
Japan
UnitedKingdom
Italy
Poland
OECDaverage
EU21average
Netherlands
Switzerland
France
Sweden
Germany
Australia
Brazil
Spain
Norway
Mexico
Belgium
Portugal
Austria
UnitedStates
Ireland
Iceland
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

6. • 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

7. FASHION, WINDOW-DRESSING
OR STRATEGY?

8. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 Feb 2015
‘The MOOC hype fades…’

9. ‘The MOOC hype fades…’
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 Feb 2015

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

11. • 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
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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
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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
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Institutional rationale 3.
Enhancing efficiency and reducing costs

14. • 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
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15. CRITICAL CHALLENGES
•The business model
•The pedagogical challenge
•The student
•Faculty and institutions
16

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
17

17. • 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

18. • 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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19. • 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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20. • 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

21. • 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

22. 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 resarch
question formulation) (effect size: 0.8)

23. 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

24. 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

25. • 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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26. 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.

27. Profiles of students with regard to Internet
use
OECD (2012)
Data Italy, 2008
28

28. • 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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29. • 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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30. • 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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31. CONCLUSIONS:
BENEFITS & OPPORTUNITIES

32. • 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

33. • 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

34. • …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…

35. Thank you !
dirk.vandamme@oecd.org
www.oecd.org/edu/ceri
twitter @VanDammeEDU
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