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Proliferation of e-learning

E-learning might be one of the disruptive innovations in education. It now has a presence in most large corporations and in an ever-increasing number of college and university courses. In this section we look at general trends in e-learning as a delivery mechanism.

Once synonymous with distance learning, e-learning has quickly evolved to include not only courses that are taught primarily online and over a distance, but also those that include traditional, “building-based” courses that have been enhanced with electronic elements. These “hybrid” courses are offered by 80 percent of U.S. institutions, according to a report from the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research.4 However, the number of such courses offered is still only a small percentage of all courses offered.

Not surprisingly, there has been a parallel growth in the number of institutions using course management systems to manage hybrid courses’ electronic elements. They have moved swiftly from scattered implementations that support a few online classes to enterprise-wide services that support and extend the entire curriculum and related institutional services. Course management systems such as WebCT and Blackboard allow for the creation of a virtual classroom where faculty and students can interact and post curriculum-related material.

University of Phoenix, The Netherlands—Graduation MBA 2003 More than 170,000 students are currently enrolled at the 134 campuses and learning centers of the University of Phoenix, making it the largest private institution in the United States. www.universityofphoenix.com

E-learning in the university5

Universities have had a difficult time making distance education cost-effective and pedagogically effective because they usually tried to deliver traditional courses via a nontraditional medium. As Christensen points out in “Disruption in Education”6 the failure of this sort of online learning was that, essentially, it delivered a course to consumers who experienced it as a lesser and unsatisfactory version of a campus-based course. Newer models of nonclassroom-based education do not try to duplicate the classroom environment but instead embrace technology as a way to reach students.

The University of Phoenix was one of the first institutions to use the Internet to deliver course material at a time when other providers were shipping physical books. Founded in 1976, it was one of the first accredited universities to provide college degrees via the Internet to students who would not be able to attend classes on a physical campus, for reasons of time, geography and preference.

Another more recent entrant into the “disruptive online learning” space is Universitas 21 (U21), a consortium of international universities offering postgraduate online courses. The first degree program is an MBA. “It is estimated that the e-learning market in the Asia Pacific region will reach US$400 million by 2005. That’s two years from now. Depending on living standards, fees vary across countries. So an Indian pays US$11,000, while a Singaporean US$13,000 […] Dr. Mukesh Aghi, CEO of Universitas 21 Global, said: ‘There are roughly 35 million students who are unable to get that education and that number will grow to 100 million in 10 to 15 years.’ The institution said it would not mimic a traditional brick and mortar university and so there won’t be any video-conferencing. While doing assignments, students can access articles, journals and periodicals in the online library. But they won’t be able to gain access to the libraries of participating universities.”7 Students will, however, be able to access content provided by Thomson Learning, through Thomson’s proprietary learning management system.

Creating, managing and delivering content in an e-learning environment requires the conscious and planned collaboration of several sectors of a university’s community. Faculty, IT staff, administration staff and librarians all have roles and responsibilities in content management; however, these sectors have generally worked relatively autonomously from one another. Cooperation and collaboration become crucial.

It is not only the organizational elements of a university that must work together to deliver content successfully and effectively to students. Learning materials themselves must, in a sense, collaborate. In the past, if a history professor used the Shakespeare play Titus Andronicus to illustrate a particular point about warfare, she did not take the classroom material—the learning object—created by her colleague the English professor on the same play and repurpose it for her needs. In a pedagogical world supported by an enterprise-wide course management system, this becomes possible, and perhaps, desirable. These learning objects need to be managed just as the books in the library do.

Learning objects

Learning objects8

Learning objects are the basic electronic building blocks for e-learning. They are sharable, fine-grained materials that can be recombined and reused in different course offerings. In this sense, learning objects are “multicultural.” In an ideal world, learning objects can be used over and over, and can be combined with other learning objects to make new ones.

Learning object repositories are emerging at the campus level and in wider settings. For example, CAREO (Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects—www.careo.org/) is a project supported by the provincial government education department, Alberta Learning, and CANARIE (Canada’s advanced Internet development organization) that has as its primary goal the creation of a searchable, Web-based collection of multidisciplinary teaching materials for educators across the province and beyond.

Learning object life cycle diagram 9

E-learning in the workplace

E-learning is also the term used to describe corporate or work-based e-learning. In 2001, estimated worldwide revenues for 2004 for corporate e-learning were just over US$23 billion dollars, up from less than $2 billion at year-end in 1999.10 Companies purchase e-learning for workers for many of the same reasons that individuals take university courses online: travel time is reduced, infrastructure costs are low, delivery is platform independent and learning anywhere and anytime is enabled.

E-learning is big business. In the September 1, 2003 issue of Fortune, the 100 Fastest Growing Companies are profiled. Number 4 and number 6 are e-learning companies: Career Education (revenue: $849.3 million) and Corinthian Colleges ($472.9 million). Both offer postsecondary courses to a combined total of over 100,000 students on more than 150 campuses.

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