Article in Distance Learning in China on Obama's technology-centred vision for education reform

This is the full English Text of the Distance Learning in China article mentioned in the blog article about the growing role for education technology possibly posing a risk to US Government.


Obama puts e-learning at the centre of US education politics. Good or bad ?


A five-year agenda for e-learning in American universities was set by President Obama in a vision he outlined just before the students and teachers returned to college for the 2013-14 academic year. During a three-day marathon of speeches at Universities from Buffalo, New York to Lackawanna, Pennysylvania in August 2013, the President outlined proposals and published documents which faculties and learning technologists have been digesting ever since

Obama has trained his guns on the quality of US Higher Education, and the rising cost of access to it. No surprises in that: we all knew there were problems, as tuition fees have risen about twenty times faster than average incomes and a clear majority of students require more than six years to graduate. The system needs a fix and everyone knows it.

The big news for American education technology professionals is that Obama in his vision is tasking them to deliver the change. From now on, e-learning practitioners will not deal with just learning, but also with a social and political agenda around equality, competitiveness, and maintenance of standards. Previously this would have been the job of legislation. Now the ball has been thrown to e-learning.

The origins of the challenge lie in the success of recent education technology innovations that solve deep problems in the system. Obama’s paper praised online teaching breakthroughs such as MOOCs, which offer access to high quality learning at no cost to millions, and “flipped” or “hybrid” classrooms where students watch lectures at home and online and go to campus so that faculty can challenge and extend their learning. The US administration is optimistic about the power of these technologies to revolutionise education, and the paper suggests new benchmarks on cost and efficiency. Good use of technology is now expected to reduce costs by between 40 and 70% and improve the efficiency of learning by between 10 and 25%.

This puts e-learning at the heart of university reform because, as Obama points out, modern online systems make it possible to measure and compare Universities as never before. Online learning at its back end yields massive data outputs on course access, learning progression, and cost per qualification. That data is to be harnessed and colleges are to be assessed for funding on the basis of performance data. The old funding model – payment by size of student roll – will be killed dead after 2015.

We are already seeing a scramble to install so called “learner analytics” tools inside Universities. I work for the leading provider of these products, Desire2Learn, which was singled out by Obama as an e-learning tool that helped students to do better. The phone has been ringing non-stop from Universities in UK and USA with enquiries about their statistical optimisation software for learning. The tools use advanced business intelligence methods to track and improve every learner’s progress by machine learning algorithms. Without such tools, colleges know they will lose money.

It was never the vision of the pioneers of e-learning, that their platforms would provide the data that makes the measuring-stick for financing their schools. But in these cost-conscious and quality-obsessed times, that is what has happened. Even the learners are joining the party: clever private operators are taking the data from e-learning systems and launching commercial applications to help students to evaluate and select colleges.

There’s an irony here which only the professional community of learning technology will appreciate. E-learning had its birth as a radical tool for extending education to those who had no access. Now it is to be harnessed for the security of the bourgeoisie – the Obama slogan for this initiative was “a better bargain for the middle class”.

What have been the reactions?

Concerns were immediately raised about the quality and fairness of the data on which University performance will be measured. Other critics charged that the ideas were not really radical: the Higher Education sector has for a long time used scoreboards to monitor quality. The technology-led innovations such as MOOCs and “flipped classrooms” have been familiar for many years to e-learning professionals.

However, these were grumbles. By and large the Universities now accept that data from their learning systems will drive their financial futures, and that costs must be controlled based on performance. Score after round one: Obama 1, Universities 0.

But in this contest, much is still to play for. The real question is whether American politicians would really have the courage to close off the funds for the institutions that are not measuring up to standards. To cut grants to colleges whose students aren’t learning well enough will create very bad headlines – it won’t be the students’ fault, yet they will suffer the consequences. However, as Chinese colleagues already know, it is sometimes necessary to shake the weaker players out of the system, in the interests of everyone. This is all about politics – which should not not be our concern as e-learning professionals.

However, there is a risk which does concern the e-learning community more closely, that these new financial pressures could distort the way we use e-learning systems. When data from online learning platforms start to influence a college’s cash flow situation, their value to professors and the e-learning community becomes less. What would you do, if your college president asks you to push the students to log more hours on the system in order to save the college budget ? Me too. But is that right for the learner ?

E-learning’s greatest asset, its transparency and uncorruptibility, may be at risk in America as the technology of learning moves into the centre of education politics.