Question and Answer with Rt Hon David Willetts MP, 12 Dec 2013

Questions asked to Rt Hon David Willetts MP and note of responses.

Q: What is the role for the Private Sector ?

A: Private Sector engagement is essential. Mr Willetts loves the UK’s public sector university traditions with their fine campus settings and charitable status. But they are not suited to delivering education to 250,000 Indonesians annually. Needs a different scale of financing and management. The scale of investment required for delivering borderless education is different. Futurelearn – we have discovered that it is high cost for partners to get a course on to the platform. There will be a role in the future for private partners to help to meet these costs.

Q: When will extend UK financial aid to overseas-based students studying for UK degrees ?

A: this is an interesting issue. We are looking into it. I was talking about it with David Greenaway during the recent Shanghai missions.

Q: Is there a colonialist dimension in your vision of British satellites beaming down British content and services into African classrooms ?

A: Fair point. The days of nationalism in Education are gone. It will be increasingly a competitive challenge between institutions to supply the best into each market.

After his speech on MOOCs and internationalisation of education, David Willetts took questions. This is my live blog of it. Apologies I have not given names of questioners - but please comment if you want me to add them.

Q: Language is a barrier. Could US and UK deliver content in other languages ? – it would create a huge opportunity, is this feasible.

A. The MOOC movement faster moving in STEM disciplines than Humanities, may be because of ready made international language. It is a genuine concern which Mr. Willetts often hears from Emerging nation ministers. They don’t want their cultures eviscerated by arrival of a bland universal globalized education. Must be a respect of national traditions. This includes languages.



Q: Which African countries will be receiving most UK-based educational services ?

A: My view is Africa is the next big thing. The big opportunities for British HE are in Uganda Nigeria, South Africa. There may also be countries where mobile coverage is weaker which will pick up in importance, as satellite coverage spreads.



Q: What is the potential impact of MOOCs for university administrators, bursars, registrars.

A – We are seeing how much supervision and management is required in the new forms of education. Khan Academy has now processed 50 million students, with staff at 50. The ratio is very different to conventional education. There are peer review opportunities from education analytics. Also, the comments of 5 students aggregate to an assessment as reliable as one experienced academic. Role for conventional staff in HEI is not clear. This is a journey. We don’t know the end. Book industry 10 years ago would not have predicted Amazon and Kindle. MOOC is a force for good and I hope Britain and our HEIs will play learning role with other partners.

DAVID WILLETTS MP, UK Minister for Higher Education, on MOOCs. LIVE BLOG

Live Blog on Rt Hon David Willetts MP's speech on 12 Dec 2013 to the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education conference: "The International Higher Education Revolution".

David Willett's talk is entitled: "The importance of MOOCs and their impact on international students, qualifications and partnerships"

Speech started approx 09.30 am

UK is ccelebrating the 50th anniversary of the Robbins report. There remains, even after 50 years, unsatisfied suppressed demand for Higher Education. The UK’s moment of reflection is a microcosm of a larger surge in Developing Economies worldwide. Ministers from emerging nations express to Mr Willetts that massive investment in HE extension is the crucial step to escaping the middle income trap. This is an opportunity for Britain as a global HE leader. What are the ways to respond ?

Students studying in Britain is one way forward. 435,000 foreign students are in Britain today for courses. There are no limits on the number of legitimate students. There will be no limits. But flying people into Heathrow, however great the capacity of runways or universities, doesn’t give a solution that will match the demand of, for example, Indonesia’s additional quarter of a million of students’ yearly.

Setting up foreign campus is a solution that has been developed by several UK HEIs. In China: Liverpool, Nottingham, whose chancellors were with Mr Willetts on the recent Cameron mission to China. Many foreign Governments he has met have strategy of hosting foreign Universities as a way to stimulate these kinds of arrangements. Malaysia a good example.

Third option is: study at distance, from abroad, for a British qualification, like Nelson Mandela at University of London. The total number abroad studying for British qualifications is 570,000.

MOOCs by happy coincidence have arrived as the technology advance that enables HEIs to reach more students, further afield, with better education.

What is underestimated in MOOCs debate, is that while there are poor quality MOOCs, which are merely lectures, there is also a huge advance by MOOC leaders through the use in education analytics. Keystroke studies, seeing patterns of learning, allow educators to see where students are learning best. The educational resource from this is massive and is only just beginning to be harvested. Interactive textbooks and peer group allow better learning. More and more MOOCs will live up this standard.

Implication of MOOCs for the conference theme. Education disintermediation is an opportunity for existing providers. Indian universities are possibly too dependent on Agents – now they can offer direct experience by allowing students to contact them through MOOC sampling. MOOCs will be test of how much Universities are willing to expand and recruit.

Qualifications issue: how credentialise MOOCs. These will use intelligent technologies like iris recognition to offer a compelling evidence of achievement with integrity.

Futurelearn. This is not a winner takes all market (Amazon style) – Futurelearn is not too late into the market. Mr Willetts attended launch of Futurelearn and launch of Inmarsat Alpha a UK satellite aimed at African market to deliver broadband to uncovered territories. African countries are desperate for education content and the satellite can potentially beam learning content of British educational services beamed direct to African classrooms is Mr Willett vision of the future of borderless education.

Report of questions and discussion in next post.

Copyright and MOOC article in MOOC NEWS AND REVIEWS

MOOC News and Reviews has my post on Copyright issues, arguing for a tighter hold by academic institutions on the content in their MOOCs, and on learners' grasp of their data rights.

Looking at language learning technologies for conversation

I have been examining some online language learning tools focussing on conversational English, assessing whether they offer a good experience. And talking to several colleagues about the issues of instructing in accent, tone, personal interplay and so on over the internet.

First up, DuoLingua.



I created an ID as a French speaker wanting to learn English. The whole effort seems to drive to obtaining my Facebook login. I didn't give it. The test and pedagogy were mickey-mouse. The premise that my friends in social media would support me was laughable.

Next, Telelangues (Berlitz recently bought them)

This is full of gimmicks and false promises about support and community. A tracking pentagon representation of progress - these are functions, not products. The idea of communication has become lost. It treats language as a technical skill, and speaking as a subset of that. You can't help feeling that the aim of aggregating eyeballs on site is never far behind its teaching goals.


Language Lab was my next visit. This is a virtual world simulation based approach, focussing on sectors such as Oil & Gas, and Aviation, and Higher Ed, where there is known demand for English communication. There is a principle behind it - immersion, which they compress into the acronym VERITAS. But it's not a pedagogical framework that any educator or course-publisher would recognise. The monetisation model is simple (you pay) so you don't have the annoying feeling that you are being pulled in to support someone's revenue-generating aim.

The feedback on pronounciation is detailed, excellent even, but I wonder how many students can take in a panel of instruction like this:




Pearson is the one to watch, however. What is Pearson's play in this space ? They have Versant, Voxy and Global Education Technology Group (GETG) [Chinese] as the spoken language technology brands, and I can't yet see a single vision for conversation training across the Pearson stable. But a birdie tells me they are surely working on it.

The Economist reports education technology as an opportunity leveler

This week The Economist reports on the use of Desire2Learn's Degree Compass analytics technology for supporting wise course choices.

This is a technology-triumphs-where-policy-has-failed story. And without doubt a triumph for the students whom it liberates from the pain of bad guidance.

I am contrasting it with a small local story this week, which is the inverse. My children's school had been consigned (along with hundreds of others) to "Special Measures" in 2011, a measure either of failure (not my view) or a trick played by those with political determination to inflict painful change on state education. This week parents and teachers celebrated the successful emergence from this grim regime, and the restoration of the school's official reputation as "good".

That was a story of the triumph of old fashioned effort by dedicated human beings, over the manipulation of categories that those in power like to resort to.

MOOCs are the forcing-house for Learning Analytics

The current Times Higher Education podcast gathers at the microphone the brains behind University of London International Programme's recent slew of Coursera MOOC.

What stands out for me is the assertion that the MOOCs are the forcing-house for Learning Analytics technology. With such a standardised and large pool of data gathered in a unified platform, we have a perfect scenario for building powerful statistical models of learning, and data-driven approaches to personalising learning.

Interestingly, the expertise on this is going to go to the course producer, not the platform.

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.