Distance is still distant

• Article 1 of 15
• EducationInvestor, July 2010

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It seems an obvious solution to a growing problem. More and more people, both in the UK and overseas, want to study undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at UK universities. Campus and staff resources are already overstretched, though, and the combination of soaring demand and shrinking budgets mean that as many as 200,000 look set to miss out on places this year.

But what if the campus were virtual and all the students remained at home for most or all of their degree courses? Costs could be kept lower and there’d be the potential to increase student numbers. And if a course were to prove popular, universities would no longer have to turn so many students away because of lack of places. This – and the fact that successful distance learning organisations such as Kaplan in the US can earn billions in revenue – is why many universities are looking to shift their teaching model to include more distance and remote learning.

Looking, but not yet moving
The model already has proponents in the UK, the Open University (OU) being the most obvious example. The new government, too, seems keen. In a recent speech university minister David Willetts was openly pushing the idea that students should be able to study for a degree at any university in England, by attending lectures at their local college.

Even before Willetts spoke up, the OU’s vice-chancellor Martin Bean was already suggesting that other universities may soon be following in his own institution’s footsteps. “We might be different but the rest of the sector is coming our way now,” he told the education technology conference JISC 2010. “We might have been looked down at historically but I think we are the trendsetters now where most of higher education needs to go.”

The Online Learning Task Force (OLTF), of which Bean is a member, was created by the government last year to look at ways to foster online learning. The OLTF, which reported in June, says that the government understands that the market for online learning has “huge potential for international growth in UK market share over the next five to 10 years, for both existing and new models of HE”.

Making the shift is not going to be easy, however. The University of London’s External System has been awarding degrees to remote learners for over 150 years and currently has 49,000 students studying for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees off-campus. Professor Jonathan Kydd, dean of the system, says distance learning requires a strong infrastructure and considerable expertise. “It has high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs.”

To generate enough content for a purely online degree course takes considerable time and money. As a result, many online educators have focused purely on vocational courses, in particular business courses. John Holden, executive chairman of Resource Development International, says, “We’re definitely market-drive and business courses represent 80% of demand”. His company had to make a considerable investment three years ago to adapt its systems, content and staff to true online learning.

BPP, which was the first private company to be able to award UK degrees, had similar obstacles to overcome. Its blended learning model allows students to move from purely online learning at the same speed as the rest of the class, to face-to-face learning, to mixed learning at whatever speed they want. Such a complex system, though, means it’s had to invest millions of pounds in computer systems and course materials.

“We’re in this for the long term and we want to offer maximum flexibility,” says Peter Crisp, chief executive of BPP Law School. “To achieve that, there has to be a long-term investment case.” He adds that a lot of the investment has been in ensuring the quality of the teaching materials and resources available for students, as well as training tutors: the skills necessary to lecture to an audience are different from those needed to lecture to camera, for example.

The University of London’s Professor Kydd says the resources and investment required to start offering online learning are too high for individual departments and colleges to “commit to distance learning on a scale that allows them to do it well and in a way that makes it financially viable”. In other words, for most universities to make distance learning viable, they’ll have to work together in groups.

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.

John Brennan, professor of higher education research at the Open University, says that most universities still attach a lot of importance to face-to-face elements of education. “That’s not just the formal teaching, it’s the social aspects of a university education.” He accepts there’s likely to be more mixed-mode teaching and more online learning, but it’s unlikely to be even the majority of the average university’s teaching.

Fortune favours the brave, though. The University of Derby has been running distance learning degrees for nearly 10 years. But when it invested in its online infrastructure and courses two years ago and began to run “virtual open days”, it saw the number of enrolled students double – and the university’s online distance learning project lead, Julie Stone, says that “trajectory is likely to continue for” the foreseeable future. It could be those universities that fail to adapt that will lose out.

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