Blended learning and learning communities: opportunities and challenges

Journal of Management Development
Blended learning and learning communities: opportunities and challenges
James Fleck
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James Fleck, (2012),"Blended learning and learning communities: opportunities and challenges", Journal of
Management Development, Vol. 31 Iss 4 pp. 398 - 411
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ALTERNATIVE MODELS
Blended learning and learning
communities: opportunities
and challenges
James Fleck
Open University Business School, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the nature and development of blended learning
and the emerging notion of learning communities, with particular reference to management and
business education.
Design/methodology/approach – In total, four specific models are explored to highlight some
of the issues involved and the challenges and opportunities arising. These models draw primarily
on experience with the UK’s Open University, arguably the most successful exponent of blended
learning and widely emulated around the world. In particular, the simplistic idea of “content” versus
delivery is critiqued, the primacy of technology rather than pedagogy is challenged and the
importance of fine operational details in achieving an appropriate fit for the required purposes is
stressed.
Findings – There is no doubt that blended learning will become more prevalent. Even conventional
face-to-face campus-based teaching operations will use on-line activities as important supporting
elements, and information and resources available over the web will take over from printed library
resources.
Originality/value – The challenges and opportunities of blended learning are summarized in this
paper.
Keywords United Kingdom, Distance learning, Learning methods, Teaching methods,
Business studies, Open University, Blended learning
Paper type Viewpoint
1. Introduction
In recent years interest has increased in “blended learning”, in which traditional face-
to-face teaching is combined in varying mixes with other elements, notably on-line
supported activity.
The role of technology has been crucial in enabling these developments. There is
often considerable excited anticipation that some new innovation – video on demand;
the web; virtual presence or most recently social media – will usher in a major
breakthrough in educational provision. This, it is sometimes suggested, might even
amount to a “disruptive innovation[1]”, which will render obsolete the traditional ways
of doing things and enable new organisations to dominate the educational arena. At the
very least it is expected that existing conventional providers will have to adopt the new
methods in order to survive[2].
In this paper, I examine the development of blended learning and the emerging
focus on the notion of learning communities, with particular consideration of
management and business education. I will explore some of the issues involved
and conclude with an outline of what I believe to be the challenges and opportunities
afforded by these developments[3].
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0262-1711.htm
Journal of Management Development
Vol. 31 No. 4, 2012
pp. 398-411
r Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0262-1711
DOI 10.1108/02621711211219059
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To this end, I first briefly introduce the nature of blended learning and of learning
communities. In order to ground the discussion, several different models are described
in greater detail to surface the pertinent issues. These models draw primarily on
experience with the UK’s Open University (OU), arguably the most successful exponent
of blended learning and widely emulated around the world. The key issues are then
addressed before a conclusion, which summarises the challenges and opportunities.
2. Blended learning and learning communities
The term “blended learning” usually refers to a mix of conventional face-to-face
elements combined with on-line elements. However, this is at too general a level for in
depth analysis, while the term “blend” perhaps suggests too homogeneous a mix: in
practice the mix is more “lumpy”, more a chunky fruit salad than a blended smoothie.
At one extreme it is becoming routine for campus-based virtual learning environments
(VLEs) to be used to provide additional notes and materials supporting conventional
lectures. At another extreme, on-line processes may be supplemented by episodic
face-to-face, often residential, events. Another relevant dimension is the synchronous
vs asynchronous character of the on-line provision and distinct advantages can be
identified for each approach. Yet another pertinent aspect is that of so-called “content”
vs delivery processes. With the advent of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement and
the availability of vast amounts of information over the web, content or “knowledge
assets” are becoming commoditised, if not free. As a consequence, the emphasis is
shifting to consideration of how to help students navigate through the huge stores of
information available, and how salient information might be delivered in a timely and
compact way.
With the advent of “Web 2.0” and the varieties of social media now emerging, the
social dimension of on-line interactions is attracting considerable attention and indeed
increasing concern. These approaches intrinsically involve communities, or at least
social groupings of various forms, such as “followers” on Twitter or “friends” on
Facebook. The potential power of these groupings both for emancipatory democratic
expression as well as for criminal physical destruction has been amply illustrated
by their use in the organisation of rebellions in the Arab spring of 2011 and riots in
London over the summer of 2011. However, the potential of such groupings to promote
educational goals is still at an early stage, certainly as far as their systematic
incorporation into teaching and learning processes is concerned.
3. Different models of blended learning
In this section a series of four models are outlined. As well as illustrating the range of
possibilities, the series incorporates a developmental dynamic, through which it is
suggested many providers will eventually pass. The models are drawn from experience
with the UK’s Open University Business School, which has exhibited this
developmental pattern.
The OU was set up in 1969. It had an explicit social mission to provide educational
access to those who were otherwise denied the opportunity for learning. There is
no doubt that it has succeeded beyond expectations. Indeed, the Prime Minister
responsible, Harold Wilson, reckoned it as the greatest contribution of his premiership,
his “proudest legacy”. Its success continues today. Despite having about 250,000
students, it regularly features among the top three universities in the government
National Student Survey of satisfaction, alongside such illustrious institutions as
Oxford and Cambridge Universities[4]. The OU has been widely emulated around the
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world, with some 50 or so organisations set up along broadly similar lines, albeit with
widely varying reputations for quality. These include IGNOU, the Indira Gandhi
National Open University in India with two and a half million students, the world’s
largest university, and the Arab Open University, which provides education for
disadvantaged students across seven Arab nations in the Middle East.
3.1 Correspondence and broadcast models
In order to deliver its mission the OU adopted a radically different approach to
teaching and learning than conventional universities of the time. From the outset, this
explicitly involved a combination (or blend) of elements. This included broadcast
lectures in association with the BBC (indeed the new university was first dubbed the
“University of the Air”) together with printed course materials sent by surface mail in
correspondence course style. It also included, vitally, tutor support for students,
delivered through tutorial meetings and the celebrated OU residential “summer
schools”.
In the early days of the OU, the BBC lectures, famously featuring longhaired earnest
lecturers in “talking head” format, were broadcast in the early hours of the morning
when normal TV programming had finished. It was also originally expected that the
OU would have no permanent academic faculty of its own, but would be able to draw
on external conventional faculty from other universities. This model thus comprised a
blend of the following four elements:
(1) use of external conventional faculty;
(2) “talking heads” broadcast lectures;
(3) “correspondence” printed materials; and
(4) face-to-face tutorials and summer schools.
Variants of this initial mix or blend are still the standard for many if not most blended
learning operations today, although increasingly delivery of the written course
materials is achieved by means of the internet rather than via surface mail[5]. And
typically, the “talking heads” videos are delivered on-line using off the shelf packages.
However, the Chinese television and radio educational operations still use broadcast
to reach their vast audiences. And many operations, especially private and for-profit
organisations such as the University of Phoenix and Universitas21, routinely make use
of contracted external faculty to prepare their written materials.
3.2 Purpose-designed quality distance education model
As the OU gained experience during its early development, a distinctive approach
emerged, latterly to be termed “Supported Open Learning”. Various insights
contributed to the creation of this model. First, it was discovered that dedicated faculty,
explicitly focused on distance education and its specific challenges were to be
preferred. This enabled the institution to build its knowledge and apply it
systematically to the production of courses. Second, the experience with BBC TV
production, even though the programmes were relatively simple, provided a
compelling team-based exemplar of production that transferred naturally to the not
too dissimilar application of producing entire distance education courses. This gave
birth to what was probably the key innovation that has driven all subsequent
operations at the OU; namely courses produced by “course teams[6]”. This was and is
in sharp distinction to the conventional method of academic course production where a
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sole academic devises a set of lectures and essentially “owns” the courses in their
entirety, from conception through teaching to assessment.
The team approach ensured that not only was the subject matter well founded and
timely rather than idiosyncratically reflecting the views of one individual, but it
enabled the systematic consideration of pedagogic principles, professional editing
and explicit design for effective delivery over a variety of media. All of these factors
contributed to the production of courses to a very high and consistent level of quality.
The team approach also facilitated the development of a specialist division of
labour, which further underpinned quality. In particular, the role of tutoring and
facilitating the students’ learning became identified as involving a specific set of
skills, quite separate from the course subject definition and production phases. The
careful selection and training of tutors with relevant backgrounds (of industrial and
business experience in the case of management education) enabled a more consistent
level of support for students that has been reflected in the OU’s high scores for
satisfaction in the government National Student Surveys.
A final crucial element for delivering a quality educational experience was a
developed infrastructure for supporting the logistic and technology aspects of the
overall blend. The technology (servers, electronic forums, VLEs and so on) has to be
extremely robust. Otherwise, the experience of the students is massively impacted
and they rapidly lose faith in using the technological facilities, tending to opt for other
alternatives. Likewise the processes and protocols for allocating students to tutors and
for ensuring the integrity of the assessment processes have to be rigorous,
necessitating a highly sophisticated operation. Just ensuring the timely and accurate
postal delivery of printed course materials requires careful planning, warehousing and
incurs considerable costs. In a conventional face-to-face campus operation, errors can
be easily recovered by issuing corrections at regular class hours.
The blend of these elements constitutes the OU Supported Open Learning model,
which arguably sets the standard for quality delivery at scale, and comprises:
. dedicated faculty focused on course design;
. course team produced materials;
. structured support from associate lecturers (tutors); and
. professional logistics infrastructure for scale delivery.
As noted this model embodies a distinctive division of labour in what is effectively a
factory production style of operation, very different from the traditional “craft-based”
face-to-face lecturer who covers all aspects of the course from conception to assessment
and reporting. At the OU course teams typically involve several to several dozen
academics who collectively wrestle with the ideas and devise original and effective
ways of presenting them in concert with the other specialists, with primacy over the
value chain accorded to the academic component. This involves considerable
investment in new course development, amounting to several millions of dollars for a
year’s equivalent study, and contrasts with cheaper alternatives in which a “good
enough” academic base (often a standard textbook) is serially processed by
“instructional designers” and other specialists into the finished product.
The precise division of labour associated with this model varies widely, but typically
the tutor’s role becomes separately defined, and specialists in various aspects of media
production can also be identified. Notably the term “SME” (subject matter expert) is
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widely used by commercially oriented providers, usually to refer to subcontracted
providers of the basic content, which is then processed by other production specialists.
Thus Universitas21 and other for-profits deploy production teams who take the raw
academic input and process it with “instructional designers” and other designated
specialists to produce the end product.
With an articulated division of labour it further becomes possible to “unbundle the
value-chain” to break up the process and farm out different bits to specialist
subcontractors. This is the basis for the emergence of a range of specialist educational
providers. A recent confidential survey for the OU by The Parthenon Group (2010)
found that the majority of online and distance learning specialist providers were from
the USA, where competitive pressures have also led to more innovation and a greater
degree of disaggregation across the value chain. A leading example in the Business
School world is Laureate, who provide dedicated tutors and marketing services, as
for example in their partnership with the University of Liverpool. Another example is
SunGard Higher Education, who identify SMEs at the partner institution and then
undertake course development and production with their own in-house team of
instructional designers. They have worked in this way with Pepperdine University
to produce a Masters Course in Social Entrepreneurship and Change, made up of
60 per cent face-to-face and 40 per cent online[7].
3.3 Practice-based model
In the Open University Business School, another element has recently been introduced
into the blend, by explicitly harnessing the students’ working contexts into the
learning process. Through careful design of the learning experience as a whole and by
incorporating activities and exercises that directly require the participants to reflect on
existing working practices or actively initiate new ones, the blend can be extended
beyond the immediate teaching context into the students’ own professional practice.
In order to do this effectively, students have, perforce, to negotiate and involve
their working colleagues in the overall learning process. This has the effect of creating
a dynamic learning community that is integrated through a variety of dialogues:
between learning materials and students; between tutors and students; between
student peers; and above all between students and their work colleagues. The methods
and details for doing this effectively are still being explored and refined. A wide range
of pedagogic techniques is available: action learning; work-based learning; peer
learning; problem-based learning; and project-based learning[8]. Ultimately, everyday
work becomes the platform for learning, while teaching becomes a form of
management coaching which sensitises participants to the key issues and enables
them to understand those issues in wider theoretical, industrial and cultural
contexts.
Not only does this lead to a powerful form of learning that is directly relevant to
practical business life (an excellent thing for management education) but it
fundamentally shifts the focus of course development from writing materials to
devising the sequence of activities that students need to undertake to complete
their learning journey; that is, to designing explicitly the learning experience.
Serendipitously, it turns out that this is exactly the type of discipline that is necessary
for crafting on-line interactions, as opposed to simply using the internet as a delivery
channel for printed materials via pdfs, for example[9].
It also turns out that the simple yet demanding discipline of identifying the desired
learning outcomes is precisely what is needed to provide the design specification for a
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set of activities as well as “writing a course”. Moreover, assessment is in its own right
yet another highly pertinent (especially for students) activity and needs to be explicitly
designed as part of the learning experience at the outset, not merely inserted as a
tedious afterthought (as is all too often true of conventional examination setting).
Students typically devote more than 25 per cent of their overall workload to
assessment. In a very real sense, then, there is no such thing as “summative
assessment”; it is all formative and should therefore be designed into courses as such.
Further, a practice-based orientation suggests a distinctive role for face-to-face
events. Rather than just being occasions for teachers to transmit knowledge to
students, such events as residential schools can be designed to maximise interactions
between student peers with relevant experience to share, and to facilitate the
development of real-world business relationships that can offer considerable value
beyond the merely didactic benefits of transmission teaching.
This practice-based learning model thus adds yet another major element to the
blend and is particularly appropriate for management education. In summary, as
followed by the Open University Business School, this model is characterised by:
. professional practice as a platform for learning;
. a focus on design of the learning experience;
. learning goals that drive design and assessment;
. an emphasis on student centred learning;
. routine use of facilitative tutor support, using both VLE and face-to-face events;
. careful design of face-to-face residential schools;
. production of educationally sound documentaries (BBC) and other “knowledge
assets”; and
. elaboration of quality assurance and enhancement.
Currently, following the many well-known criticisms of business education in general
and the MBA in particular, there is a “turn to practice” and many providers now stress
how they are incorporating practical aspects into their programmes. Of course the
original Harvard case method was designed precisely for this purpose and recently
they have explored how to take this online (Sensiper, 2002), but few efforts go so far as
to shift the focus radically onto the work community.
3.4 Learning community model
The practice-based model starts explicitly to harness the dynamics of learning
communities. Even in conventional face-to-face lecturing there is an implicit community
dimension. Indeed, students often report that they learn more from their peers than from
the lecturer. However, such community aspects are usually accidental or at best
opportunistic, as happens with group work for instance. With the shift to the explicit
design of the holistic learning experience, community aspects have to be explicitly
accommodated throughout the process. Peer pressure is a powerful force, but has to be
carefully considered to avoid undesirable behaviours, such as group bullying.
We are only at the beginning of understanding how learning communities work,
and how powerful and sometimes even dangerous group dynamics can be ethically
and effectively harnessed. The analysis provided by Etienne Wenger has proved very
helpful (Wenger, 1998). One approach systematically considers the conditions needed
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to create a learning organisation, one in which not only the students engage
continuously with learning but all the personnel involved[10].
At the same time, thanks largely to the web and readily accessible search
procedures, raw information and data (i.e. “content”) is available very easily and
increasingly at little or no cost. Various OCW initiatives are making well-crafted
educational materials more widely available: the celebrated MIT OCW project[11],
OpenLearn at the OU[12], iTunes U from Apple[13] and others; all these are effectively
rendering “content” a free or cheap commodity. Together these developments are
fostering a shift in teaching and learning from simple knowledge transmission in
which “content” is transferred, to the devising of processes and activities that enable
deep learning to take place. A crucial part of these activities involves the various
dialogues noted above, and therefore emphasises the importance of communication
between the various protagonists involved in the learning process. Web 2.0
technologies are making it far easier for communities to coalesce around a range of
interests, by facilitating anytime, anywhere, anyone communication.
Accordingly, we can now see more clearly the lineaments of the next generation of
learning models. In short this emerging model is likely to feature the following:
. the creation of a learning community;
. emphasis on process and activities, not content and assets;
. use of a wide range of existing and specially designed assets: the web,
educational documentaries, open educational resources, iTunes U;
. focus on student-driven learning;
. use of Web 2.0 and mobile devices to support communication; and
. design of face-to-face residential schools for business networking.
4. Key issues
These four different blended learning models cover a range of possibilities. But success
and failure is determined at a fine level of operational detail. There is no silver
bullet that guarantees universal success. The very dependency on communities
necessarily means that the configurations of elements in any particular blend need to
be sensitively adapted to the context and expectations of the learning participants
involved for success to be attained. Nevertheless, some general observations can be
made.
4.1 The role of technology
Much of the current interest in blended learning has been stimulated by recent
developments in technology. But technology is not an end in itself: pedagogy must
lead. One must beware the “gee whiz” factor. It is very difficult to avoid being seduced
by the excitement of new technology into thinking the technology itself holds the
complete solution. In reality the solution lies in the minutiae about how the technology
is used[14]. Here it is worth reflecting on the false promise of video conferencing.
Experience shows that the audio carries most of the meaning. When the audio signal
degrades communication becomes severely limited, whereas when the video element
degrades useful information may still be gleaned. Another important general lesson is
that systematic training for effective use of any new technology is necessary to take
users beyond their customary habits and “lock in” to routines shaped by the older
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technology. Thus the familiar “qwerty” typing layout has survived despite being
relatively inefficient compared with improved alternatives such as the Dvorak layout.
4.2 Issues around face-to-face vs on-line blends
The term “blended learning” is often taken just to refer to the balance between
face-to-face and on-line interaction, though this is a very restricted perspective.
Nevertheless, there remains considerable prejudice in favour of face-to-face interaction,
and indeed, a certain minimum face-to-face interaction is required by many educational
regulatory regimes, such as Singapore’s. Moreover, we sometimes find a blurring
of the distinction. For example, in Saudi Arabia, a video link is required if men are
teaching women even if in the same building, and this is regarded as equivalent
to face-to-face teaching. Here synchronicity is being considered as crucial rather
than immediate personal contact.
Yet it is clear that face-to-face is not always naturally superior. The no significant
difference (NSD) web site carries a running summary of many studies (355 to date)
comparing alternate modes of education delivery[15]. The title offers the conclusion:
there is NSD. This surely must give pause for thought given that face-to-face pedagogy
has been around for at least several thousand years whereas on-line methods have only
been around for at most several decades and are still rapidly evolving. The situation is
clearly a matter of “horses for courses”, which approach is to be preferred depends on
the task and the context – again the minutiae, how the experience is managed in detail.
For example, in comparing asynchronous text forums with face-to-face tutorials,
forums have certain advantages. The text format tends to even out status and gender
differences, while the asynchronous nature helps to level linguistic differences. Without
the need for immediate real-time replies, there is more opportunity for non-native
speakers to understand what is going on and to work out how to respond and what to
write. By the same token, it can also enable deeper, more reflective contributions.
Further, it is less easy for one individual to dominate the session, unlike in a face-to-
face context, and thus helps to offset “hogging”, enabling more equal contributions.
Finally, the full written record that ensues facilitates revision and note checking.
Another generic issue concerns the timing of respective episodes. It is often thought
best to start with a face-to-face event – “to give people the chance to get to know one
another” – and then to follow with the on-line sessions. This is a common pattern in
executive MBA programmes for instance. But this may not always be the best
approach, as the initial experience of participants helps to set expectations and to
define an implicit learning contract. By holding a first meeting face-to-face, primacy
can be accorded to that mode with the on-line relegated as supporting or secondary.
The key here lies in carefully managing the “socialisation” into a particular mode so
that expectations are appropriately framed. If course participants are first introduced
to one another via an on-line event, this can help to establish on-line as the primary
means of communication. Moreover, when participants eventually do meet at a
subsequent face-to-face event such as a residential school, the experience can be
dramatic and memorable. These can be powerful consolidating educational
experiences in their own right, which can be deployed to good effect with careful
design.
4.3 Operational requirements
Very different operational details are required for different modes of teaching and
learning. A robust technology infrastructure is required for on-line delivery as so much
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depends on the technology always working effectively. Technology mediated systems
are more “brittle” than human-mediated systems. A range of different protocols and
processes is also required for nearly every aspect of the operation: How to establish
the identity of the students when on-line? How can assessment be validated? What
standards and what means for monitoring “attendance” are needed? What
assumptions can be made about the students’ access to the web? What assumptions
can be made about the equipment they are using? All these operational details and
many other have to be resolved for effective and consistent on-line delivery.
4.4 Frameworks for design and comparison
The shift from craft-based to factory production can have strong pedagogic benefits.
The dependency on explicit design of the learning experience means that pedagogic
issues have to be surfaced and clearly addressed. Articulated structuring of the
learning processes with specific attention given to the needs of the learner can only
improve the educational process from the default that often characterises conventional
face-to-face teaching. This default is the information transmission model, where the
lecturer transfers what he or she considers to be the important content through talking
directly to the student. As has been remarked: “traditional lectures are frequently
means of transferring the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without
passing through the brains of either”.
The challenge is to capture such beneficial insights for both face-to-face and on-line
modes. In order to avoid the need for lecturers to be disproportionately absorbed into
becoming specialist educationists or essentially full-time teachers, thereby neglecting
their other responsibilities to originate and critically assess the body of knowledge in
which they are engaged, some means of providing structured guidance for course
creation and design is useful. A starting point is the provision of frameworks for
comparing and analysing the activities that students are required to complete for
different courses. One key principle is to consider the student workload and its
distribution over the various activities. It is surprising how often this is not done,
resulting in the students’ reading workload becoming impossible in practice. Indeed,
often such overload is regarded as a virility symbol by the lecturer, rather than the
students’ real learning requirements being considered. Figure 1 provides an example of
one such framework.
4.5 Creating learning communities
As noted above, we are still at the relatively early stages of understanding how to
create, manage and appropriately harness learning communities to good educational
effect. At base, communities are bound together by common interests or practices
and integrated through rich communication about those interests. Information
and Communication Technologies (ICT) especially Web 2.0 are directed at facilitating
communication and can therefore be employed to support and strengthen learning
communities. Moreover, ICT enables communities to persist more radically distributed
over time and space, and this can enrich the learning experience in several ways.
It enables flexibility, facilitates real time interventions and collates a variety of
geographic and industrial perspectives, all of which demand careful design to
maximise their potential.
One of the particular challenges in harnessing learning communities is that they
readily become autonomous entities driven by the common interests that gave them
birth. Such autonomy can develop in tension with the desired direction planned for the
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educational process. It is easy for the community to coalesce around criticism of
deficiencies in the learning experience, or to pursue irrelevant avenues of discussion.
Careful and sensitive management is required. Too directive an approach can induce
negative reactions, especially if a strong contrary dynamic is already underway. Strong
educational goals underpinned by assessment requirements can help align interests
and efforts.
In certain areas such as innovation studies, where sharing of the varied practical
experience of the participants constitutes an important part of the learning, the
traditional asymmetry between teachers and learners is challenged. Even with
business management more generally, the range of experience brought into the
learning process by the participants leads to a symmetry with the teachers. The
teachers may offer the broader chronological and theoretical contexts, but this is
balanced by the students’ provision of more detailed and specific contemporary
examples. Although this can be experienced as a threat to the traditional authority
of teaching, it also offers strong prospects for harnessing community dynamics for
co-producing knowledge, and ensuring the direct relevancy and timeliness of what is
being learned.
5. Conclusions: challenges and opportunities
There is no doubt that blended learning will become more prevalent. Even
conventional face-to-face campus-based teaching operations will use on-line activities
as important supporting elements, and information and resources available over the
Experiential
Total hours
Percentage
194
53 6 0 5 13 3 20
1Course guideWeek 1
0.25Podcast
0.2Web site
0.2Web site
1Course books
0.4Course guide
0.4Web site
1DVD
0.5Web site
10Forum
10My stuff
1.5Web site
6Course bookWeek 2
Notes 0 1.5
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
Distributionofactivities
24 0 19 47 10 73
Assimilative Information Adaptive Communicative Productive Assessment
Source: Connole et al. (2009/2010)
Figure 1.
Framework for design and
comparison – pedagogy
profile tool
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Blended learning

web will take over from printed library resources. However, serious barriers do face
more radical and disruptive blends. The challenges can be summarised under the
following headings: costs; intellectual property rights; custom and practice; and
preconceptions and perceptions.
5.1 Costs
A distinct division of labour and developed infrastructure is required for the more
radical blends. It is not so much a matter of the absolute costs (which are in any case
high) but of the lack of an appropriate budgetary base for the different operations.
Most conventional campus-based business schools have cost structures organised
primarily around the employment of academic staff, whereas at the OU a far greater
proportion is allocated to administrative personnel and a range of specialised support
services from units elsewhere in the university. With the prospect of disaggregating
the value chain and the advent of commercial providers addressing specific segments,
increased competition in the sector may drive the development of different cost regimes
and a more articulated distribution of activities between conventional and commercial
providers[16].
5.2 Intellectual property rights
While increasingly content is becoming available for free, the intellectual property
inherent in the explicit design of courses is embodied in the teams of specialists
required to produce and maintain the learning processes. And where student input is
formally harnessed, performing rights have to be addressed. Even in terms of course
production, in conventional operations, the ownership of courses lies with the sole
academic who convenes the course, whereas in full blown on-line operations
the ownership is institutionalised and lies with the organisation not the individual.
New forms of academic contract may therefore be required in order to move to the new
institutional base for intellectual property.
5.3 Custom and practice
For conventional university business schools, the prevailing custom and practice
among academics and the overall mode of operation of the institution will not
necessarily fit the exigencies of the new blended approach. This goes beyond the cost
barriers noted above, and includes the patterns of work organisation, the structures of
approval and decision making and the governance arrangements, to touch on very
basic issues of academic autonomy and freedom. Conventional academics are used
to deploying their own judgement as professionals, and are not always ready to fit in
with a more industrial team-working approach in which they are required to comply
with rigorously set external requirements. In these cases, new purpose developed
institutions, many of them private, may be able to take the lead over traditional
operations as they will be able to set the required modus vivendi from the outset.
5.4 Preconceptions and perceptions
As well as barriers that are internal to the education providing institution, there is still
considerable resistance embedded in national regulatory systems, with a clear
preference accorded to conventional face-to-face operations, or to particular non-radical
forms of on-line delivery such as video broadcasting of lectures for instance. On-line
and distance learning is also frequently viewed (despite the NSD evidence cited above)
as second choice to face-to-face operations. These perceptions are widely held among
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the general population of potential students, and also among employers of graduates
from such programmes. The OU in the UK, for instance, despite its undoubted success,
is often dubbed “the University of the Second Chance”, and is implicitly seen as not
quite comparable to more established and conventional operations. These prejudices
are if anything more embedded in other countries around the world. Overall such
perceptions could well restrict the speedy and extensive development of more radical
forms of blended learning.
5.5 Opportunities
Despite the serious challenges and barriers, the opportunities for different forms of
blended learning are also very clear. These include the following.
The potential for using blended learning to improve the effectiveness of teaching
and learning, on account of the surfacing of basic pedagogic principles necessitated by
the explicit design of the learning experience.
Extending the deployment of technology to enable greater flexibility in the
provision of education. This flexibility covers both time and geographic dimensions
and amounts to the provision of more convenient education for students who have
other severe constraints on their lives which limit how they can study, whether arising
from disability or working constraints.
Suitable configurations of blended learning can provide wider access to learning
for the learners, and to new markets for the providers.
Blended learning that includes practice-based elements offer great scope for far
more immediate and directed relevance of what is learnt.
The harnessing of learning communities through appropriate forms of blended
learning provides scope for “co-production” of effective knowledge, by enabling
practitioners, academic analysts and observers to work together in forging a more
powerful, as well as theoretically and pragmatically integrated body of management
and business knowledge.
Finally, the design of appropriate blended learning solutions could provide scope
for the more systematic integration of diverse geographic, cultural, economic and
political perspectives, thereby giving a direct voice to different, and often overlooked,
viewpoints through learning community processes, in contrast to the monolithic
promulgation of the current dominant Anglo-American paradigm for management.
Notes
1. See Christensen (1997) for the definitive account of disruptive innovations.
2. See, for instance Dutton and Loader (2002) or van Lieshout et al. (2001) for collections of
critical analyses of the implications of information and communication technologies for
education.
3. This paper develops the presentation given in a previous paper: Fleck (2008).
4. See http://unistats.direct.gov.uk/
5. See the papers presented in Open University of Sri Lanka (2010), for accounts of the situation
in south east Asia, and Barsky et al. (2008) for accounts of the situation in Europe and the
USA, this latter specifically addressing business education.
6. Due to a change in terminology, “course teams” are now known as “module teams” in the OU.
7. See Edelson and Pittman (2008) and Smith and Bramble (2008) for further pertinent
overviews of the history and funding of distance learning in the USA.
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8. See Boud et al. (2001), Coghlan et al. (2004) and Schwartz et al. (2001) for details about some of
these specific approaches to learning.
9. See details about how this may be done in Stephenson (2001) and Laurillard (1993).
10. See Garvin (2000) and DuFour and Eaker (1998); the latter exploring the development
of learning communities in school rather than higher education.
11. See http://ocw.mit.edu/
12. See http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
13. See www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/whats-on.html
14. Stephenson (2001) provides several useful papers focused on such minutiae, while Laurillard
(1993) provides one of the first and most robust theoretically well-founded frameworks for
ensuring that pedagogy leads the technology.
15. See www.nosignificantdifference.org/
16. See Newman et al. (2004) for a comprehensive examination of such pressures and risks for
Higher Education more generally.
References
Barsky, N.P., Clements, M., Ravn, J. and Smith, K. (Eds) (2008), The Power of Technology for
Learning (Advances in Business Education and Training 1), Springer, New York, NY.
Boud, D., Cohen, R. and Simpson, J. (Eds) (2001), Peer Learning in Higher Education: Learning
From and With Each Other, Kogan Page, London.
Christensen, C.M. (1997), The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms
to Fail, Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, MA.
Coghlan, D., Dromgoole, T., Joynt, P. and Sorensen, P. (Eds) (2004), Managers Learning in Action,
Routledge, London.
Connole, G., Fleck, J., Jones, M., Russell, A. and Weller, M. (2009/2010), Course Business Models
Project, Open University, Milton Keynes.
DuFour, R. and Eaker, R. (1998), Professional Learning Communities at Work: Best Practices for
Enhancing Student Achievement, National Education Service, Bloomington, IN.
Dutton, W.H. and Loader, B.D. (Eds) (2002), Digital Academe: The New Media and Institutions of
Higher Education and Learning, Routledge, London.
Edelson, P.J. and Pittman, V.V. (2008), “Historical perspectives on distance learning in the United
States”, in Bramble, W.J. and Panda, S. (Eds), Economics of Distance and Online Learning,
Routledge, London, pp. 72-87.
Fleck, J. (2008), “Technology and the business school world”, Journal of Management
Development, Vol. 27 No. 4, pp. 415-24.
Garvin, D.A. (2000), Learning in Action: A Guide to Putting the Learning Organization to Work,
Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.
Laurillard, D. (1993), Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of
Educational Technology, Routledge, London.
Newman, F., Couturier, L. and Scurry, J. (2004), The Future of Higher Education: Rhetoric, Reality,
and the Risks of the Market, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.
Open University of Sri Lanka (2010), “OUSL 30th anniversary international research conference:
the role of open and distance learning in the 21st century: challenges and possibilities”,
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Schwartz, P., Mannin, S. and Webb, G. (Eds) (2001), Problem-Based Learning: Case Studies,
Experience and Practice, Kogan Page, London.
Sensiper, S. (2002), “Making the case online: Harvard Business School multimedia”, in Dutton,
W.H. and Loader, B.D. (Eds), Digital Academe: The New Media and Institutions of Higher
Education and Learning, Routledge, London, pp. 50-5.
Smith, M.J. and Bramble, W.J. (2008), “Funding of distance and online learning in the United
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Further reading
Newman, F., Couturier, L. and Scurry, J. (1994), The Future of Higher Education: Rhetoric, Reality,
and the Risks of the Market, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.
Corresponding author
James Fleck can be contacted at: J.Fleck@open.ac.uk
To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: reprints@emeraldinsight.com
Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints
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