Reading: eLearning and the Future of Distance Education
While searching for articles and papers on the return on investment on eLearning in Higher Education I came across the work or Ormond Simpson. Simpson has made many of his papers and book chapters available on his website, and this one – E-Learning and the Future of Distance Education – was especially interesting to me.
“The paper explores the economic concepts of ‘return on investment’, ‘willing to pay’, ‘resale value of an education’ and ‘investment risk’ as they apply to distance education. In particular it will suggest that distance education, both as it stands today and in terms of current trends towards e-learning, may be either too inaccessible or too risky an investment for most potential students, and that distance education will fail to reach its potential unless it can increase its availability in the market and its rate of student success.”
Have a read for yourself and think, as I did, as to whether we are, or should be, addressing the learners pedagogic or financial needs? In Higher Education and especially when considering Masters-level distance learning, the students are more likely to be mature and have a better understanding of the financial implication to one or two years of further full- or part-time study (and be able to fund it).
But that doesn’t help the Institution decide, plan, and implement a course for distance learning – time and effort does not always match the outcome, and there is no certainty that you will get the numbers sign up for the course. You could argue that the first year the course is offered may be the best for student numbers as it’s new and exciting, and the marketing has sufficient drive for the course to fill a gap. Or the second or third year may be better as the marketing and word of mouth will take experience and successes into the marketplace and grow: do you plan for short-term success in the first or second year or plan for the long haul and possibly have low numbers in the hope these will grow? I’m glad I’m not required to make that decision!
But even in these days of £9,000 a year for undergraduate study are we tapping the market as much as we could? Yes there are plenty of examples of fully-online undergraduate courses but how many of these are being filled with recent school-leavers and how many places are filled by mature students coming back to study for personal or professional qualifications?
I fear it is the latter … I wrote about this back in 2010 “As the cost goes up, will the students go online?” as the Government announced the plan to raise student tuition fees. I expected a rush for Universities to take stock and produce a wealth of online distance learning courses. I was wrong. But was I wrong in expecting it, or have the Universities missed a trick and there is still a gaping void in the education market? Are students better suited to finding work and studying in their spare time (or even getting sponsorship and release from their employers)?
What do you think: is the market ripe for online course (for credit and qualifications)? Recent news shows that some US Universities are investigating whether to offer for-credit MOOCs for a fraction of the cost of the campus version. Again, is this the future?
Simpson, O. (2013) E-Learning and the Future of Distance Education, in Distance and E-Learning in Transition (eds U. Bernath, A. Szücs, A. Tait and M. Vidal), John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ USA. doi: 10.1002/9781118557686.ch8
Image Source: Pantallas by Olga Diez (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Hello David, many thanks for sharing this article. As I’m about to embark on writing an distance learning MA course your insights have really made me look closely at my underlying beliefs and assumptions. Simpson’s point about the Willingness To Pay factor with regard to the return on investment of an HE qualification is of particular interest, particularly as our university focuses on the creative arts.
The Franklin quote regarding ‘whose benefits and whose costs’ really resonates at the moment as there seems to be a tendency for universities to put forward new courses purely to get ‘bums on seats’. Perhaps if more attention was paid to the benefits and costs for the student of taking a particular degree the landscape of available courses – both on and offline – would begin to reflect their needs and aspirations more accurately.
Hey David! Thanks for such a nice post I truly agree with all your points. The future of Distance Education is very bright as e-learning industry getting a huge response for the past few hears.
Regards,
Alice
I focus mainly on the corporate training sector and they have been aggressively re-engineering their training programs because of the ROI e-learning and distance learning. I’ve had clients that have implemented blended (e.g. elearning, distance learning and traditional classroom) training programs and have been able to cut their training budgets in half while training twice as many people.
The academic sector is much more structured, regulated and resistant to change, but the economics of elearning and distance learning are too big to ignore.
At the university level, I believe we’re at the beginning of a fundamental transformation in the way universities teach students. The future will hold a much more blended approach which should lower future tuition costs.