Quality Assurance and E-Learning
FT.com / Business life / Business education - Clicks and bricks work together in the world of corporate teaching: "There is a lot of very poor e-learning around and the introduction of accreditation that gives a quality signal is a very important thing to be doing, says Mark Fenton-O'Creevy, director of programmes and curriculum at the OU Business School.
The e-learning products that have crashed and burned, he adds, are those that have based their product on technology, rather than on teaching and learning.
Technology is merely an enabler for e-learning says Mr Fenton-O'Creevy; e-learning should be about the teaching and learning processes and the quality of students' experiences.
The CEL accreditation, he says, looks at the processes by which learning is delivered as well as the institutional support."
It was a bout time that someone raised up the issue of Accreditation or Certification of e-learning. For too long we have had a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly in e-learning. Yes, it is true that, in the United States, if the institution offering he e-learning is an accredited college or university they must be regionally approved. Having headed the first e-learning approved by the Middle State Association to offer full programs online, I know the issues we had to address. Among those, show that what we were doing online was equivalent to what we were doing in the traditional classroom. Still, there seems to be a need for more checks. It’s not merely enough to see that what is being done is equivalent to traditional instruction.
There should be a new set of standards for e-learning programs. Standards that are appropriate to measure the effects of the technology, continuously push it towards excellence, and guarantee the learners that the instruction will provide the desired outcomes.
The European CEL might not be enough itself but it is a start. It clearly says that we need to do more in this area other than simply jump on the bandwagon of e-learning.
In Europe Corporate universities can turn to Clip, the Corporate Learning Improvement Process, as a quality benchmark, while customers will be able to turn to Certification of e-learning (CEL) for standards. Another model would be Japan’s E-Learning Consortium which offers a variety of services including:
1. Provision of information concerning e-Learning
2. Education of the people engaging in construction, operation, and administration of e-Learning systems
3. Certification of e-learning systems and contents as standard-conformed products
Hopefully we will see something of a similar nature in the United States or so learners can be provided with quality assurances while institution and individuals issuing the instruction and be recognized for their achievements.
2 Comments:
Nice to be quoted in such an interesting and useful blog. I would like to pick up on one point you raise - showing that e-learning programmes are equivalent to face to face programmes.
I absolutely agree that there must be equivalently high standards, but to say that the programmes must be equivalent is to miss the opportunity afforded by new approaches to teaching and learning: they should transform how we enage people in learning. For example properly structured online asynchronous dialogue is not the equivalent of discussion in the classroom, it is often much more reflective, engaging of individual attention, and allows drawing in a wide range of resources, so that the discussion can take on characteristics which are also akin to a project or assignment.
Face to face and e-learning modes are each better for different things. To insist an e-learning course must be equivalent is to condemn e-learning to often being an inferior learning mode. To allow each to play to its strengths can only enrich the learning possibilities.
Dr Mark Fenton-O'Creevy
Open University, UK
I agree with you, if we had been told all we could do was be equivalent with the traditional classroom we would have given up the leverage provided by the technology. I should have said during the accreditation process we had to show that our e-learning approach was at least equivalent to the traditional classroom offering. While it wasn’t worded like that to us, no one was preventing us from doing more and we did.
Our e-learners were experiencing what you described in your posting. They were being much more reflective that in the traditional classroom given the time one has online to read, think and respond, vs. in the classroom where there is little time to react to a comment from an instructor or a classmate. This was one of the reasons why soon after launching the e-learning program we had requests from faculty in the on-campus classes to use the online discussion forums.
Anther interesting thing that happened was that the college was simultaneously launching programs to remote sites via videoconferencing. Students in the videoconfereneced courses quickly moved online causing that program to close. The moved was for two reasons, first was the added flexibility, the second was the word-of-mouth information about the learning advantages of the online medium. It would have been interesting to capture the data but unfortunately we did not.
Post a Comment
<< Home