Distance is still distant

• Article 1 of 15
• EducationInvestor, July 2010

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Indeed, in many cases, online educators have had to work with partner providers to cut costs. One such partner is E-learning provider CrossKnowledge, which has invested €40 million (£32 million) in developing content in 15 different languages for MBA courses. This content includes video sequences involving actors in various scenarios, rather than simply lectures; over 50% of it is available on mobile devices, making it more popular with younger learners and those in countries that have poor broadband connections. CrossKnowledge licenses this content to other educators, including five business schools in the UK.

In cases where a course cannot be totally online – law degrees that require students to be assessed in person, for example – private partners can provide some of the necessary physical resources as well. AEC Education has partnership agreements with universities such as the University of Birmingham and Manchester Metropolitan University to provide learners in Singapore with facilities. Private partners can also help with marketing, something few UK universities are good at, particularly with overseas students. “If you want to increase the revenue from non-home, non-EU students,” says AEC’s executive chairman Liam Swords, “you need people with major access to those students and who market to those students.”

There’s also the IT infrastructure necessary for online learning to consider. Storage and internet bandwidth to convey content to students can be expensive. So can the support staff necessary to manage the hardware and software: online learning requires ‘virtual learning environments’ (VLEs) to give students a way to talk with one another, find out their timetables, look at lessons, download course material, and interact with and be assessed by their tutors.

Most universities have a hotchpotch of systems for their VLEs; the most popular paid-for virtual classroom systems include Blackboard, while the free Moodle and Wimba Classroom are also popular choices. Some universities, such as Hamburg in Germany, have even turned to virtual reality system ‘Second Life’. Microsoft’s Sharepoint server, while not explicitly a virtual classroom, is used by 78% of UK universities either by itself or in combination with Blackboard as a way to organise and collaborate on work, according to Microsoft’s Ray Fleming. Adobe’s Connect, Microsoft’s Live Meeting and Skype are used for video conferencing and video streaming of lectures in some cases.

To keep costs down, some educators turn to managed ‘hosted’ services such as the one provided by Blackboard, although these are relatively rare. Rather than pay a licence fee for the software and running it on university resources, the host company provides all the resources necessary; the university just has to show up with the content.

“Managed has really taken off in the last three to four years,” says Blackboard’s director of academic innovation, Demetra Katsifli. “We’re seeing bigger adopters, and have about 800 customers, increasingly in further education, especially in the UK – we’ve heard the pain around the budget cuts, particularly in the last four months.” Blackboard’s service delivers every aspect of support, training for teachers on how to use the system, as well as consultants who advise universities how to use the system.

Those who’ve gone for the managed option include BPP and German training provider TeleLearn Akademy (TLA). TLA’s director Olaf Dierker says the reason was clear: “We wouldn’t have to manage our own technology. We don’t have an IT pro and they’re hard to get and expensive.”

Blackboard’s Katsifli says that many university bosses she’s spoken to are looking to invest in online. “I recently spoke to nine vice-chancellors of London universities and they all said the same thing: increasing online provision to increase revenue is one of their major objectives. The challenge is to set themselves up for the new way of working.”

But a big shift is yet to happen. “The biggest problem,” says RBI’s Holden, “is cohesion. Unless there’s a very strong vice chancellor who can pull the university together, it’s doomed to failure from the start.” The staff turnover at universities precludes the possibility of taking big projects to fruition, he says, and the lack of the “entrepreneurial spirit” in the higher education sector makes it hard to get support.

Many universities are indeed conservative on the issue. “There are opportunities being missed at the moment,” agrees Mike Waterston, managing director of the Waterstons consultancy, who works with universities in the north east of England. “I’m meeting with IT directors and they want there to be a clear difference between the Open University and them. They’re dreadfully traditional and don’t like change.” Many universities don’t recognise the power of technology to reduce costs; even the idea that budget cuts will force job losses isn’t being acknowledged. But he adds that business schools are far less conservative, and predicts that pressures from the student body will force change, even at those universities that are reluctant to make the move.

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