Challenges for policies, strategies and leadership in an increasingly more open

and online worldDistance and e-Learning Policy and Strategy

EDEN Annual Conference 2012, Porto7 June 2012

Gard TitlestadSecretary General

ICDE

Outline

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

and leadership• Conclusion

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.”

”Good education and skills are crucial to improving a person’s economic and social prospects.” OECD 2011

”People with university degrees have suffered far fewer job losses during the global economic crisis than those who left school without qualifications.”

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 WorkFebruary 2012

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

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

Education has to contribute to bringing youths back to the

labour market

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.

Opportunities

Technology as facilitator

Mansoor Al Awar, Chairman, Middle East e-Learning Association.

The rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT) offers tremendous educational opportunities to provide new innovative, accessible and more affordable ways of learning.

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.

"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

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

India25% of Indian students are now covered by

distance education

Lakh = 100.000

”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

Will elite institutions have to change or lose in competition with Online start-ups?

Professor David Evans andProfessor Sebastian Thrun

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/

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 AmbryUdacity student, USA

Certificates for free online courses – what impact could that have for HEI?

• 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

Case: MIT granting certificates for free online courses.

Coursera

nanoHUB-U

Disruptive innovationWikipedia, 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.

Disruptive innovation — in educationFor 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.

Two books

The Academic worldshows the way, Göran Bexell

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 education.” End of story.

The Academic worldshows the way, Göran Bexell, Lund University, Sweden

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

• 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.

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”

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?

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.

Thank You!

titlestad@icde.orgwww.icde.org